Animals embody a Utopian unexchangeability that children instinctively love.

Evidence

The relation of children to animals depends entirely on the fact that Utopia goes disguised in the creatures whom Marx even begrudged the surplus value they contribute as workers. In existing without any purpose recognizable to men, animals hold out, as if for expression, their own names, utterly impossible to exchange. This make them so beloved of children, their contemplation so blissful. I am a rhinoceros, signifies the shape of the rhinoceros. Fairy-tales and operettas know such images, and the ridiculous question of the woman: how do we know that Orion is really called Orion, rises to the stars. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 253

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that animals ‘hold out their own names, utterly impossible to exchange’ — a breathtaking line — refigures naming and being against the commodity form; the Orion aside and ‘I am a rhinoceros’ deliver a koan-like close.
• XREF: Echoes Adorno’s famous notes on animals elsewhere (‘the glance of the animal’) and resonates with Derrida’s later ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’; the name/being identification also recalls Benjamin on naming language. — connects to: Raising a child requires governing an existence at once animal-like and human. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1518; Infantile wishes in Proust are the purest archetype of the Utopian impulse — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 292; Artistic categories for Bloch become modes of Utopian realization at the ontological level — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 290
• CANDY: ‘I am a rhinoceros, signifies the shape of the rhinoceros’ is a one-line philosophic joke — that animals exemplify their own names, their being beyond exchange — that is delightfully light to share.

Broader Connections

• Raising a child requires governing an existence at once animal-like and human. #expands (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1518