Animals in human discourse are always projected metaphors, never themselves

Evidence

Certainly, one makes them speak, and with all means, some more innocent than others. They spoke the moral discourse of man in fables. They supported structural discourse in the theory of totemism. Every day they deliver their “objective” - anatomical, physiological, genetic - message in laboratories. They served in turns as metaphors for virtue and vice, as an energetic and ecological model, as a mechanical and formal model in bionics, as a phantasmatic register for the unconscious and, lastly, as a model for the absolute deterritorialization of desire in Deleuze’s “becoming-animal” (paradoxical: to take the animal as a model of deterritorialization when he is the territorial being par excellence). — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 448

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Jameson’s argument that intellectual systems project their own frameworks onto objects; also echoes the poststructuralist critique of representation that Baudrillard extends to the animal as a discursive construction. — connects to: Language preserves fossilized worldviews within its living metaphors — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1599; Man defines himself as human by contrast with animal irrationality

Broader Connections

• Man defines himself as human by contrast with animal irrationality #exemplifies (0.85)
• Language preserves fossilized worldviews within its living metaphors #expands (0.78) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1599