- animal character = metaphor = language -

1. In Essay on the Origins of Languages, Rousseau maintains that language itself began with metaphor. Citing Rousseau, John Berger claims that it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal... If the first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relation between man and animal was metaphoric. 

Walter Benjamin attempts to resolve the rudiments of language with mankind‘s powerful drive to act mimetically, to make oneself similar and thus develop the gift to see and produce similarities. He insists on the importance of onomatopoeia as the imitative behaviour leading to the formation of language: every word and the whole of language... is onomatopoeic. From the Latin roots 'onoma' meaning 'to name' and 'poein' meaning 'to make', onomatopoeia sounds copy and imitate but at the same time signify and codify.

In order to become human, men act like animals, eat what animals eat, and say what animals say only now with words. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

2. Darwinian theory of evolution is also nothing more than a metaphor - animal metaphor, the projection of economic theories onto the animals. "It is remarkable... how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his own English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’, and the Malthusian struggle for existence. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes." (Karl Marx)

3. "Language is a virus" is a strange metaphor (is it really a metaphor?), introduced by William Burroughs, that ventures into biochemistry and lies outside the stock of common conceptual metaphors that speakers of English are expected to know. It is odd to think of language as a communicable disease, yet we have no difficulty doing so because we possess a conceptual instrument that provides us with the requisite imaginative capacity.

What is shocking here is not unconventionality of this metaphor, but the task put in front of the reader: to make equation between the simplest organism and most advanced cultural achievement. 

Metaphoric relation of man towards animals is less offensive than other hegemonic human activities pointed at them. However, if all the things, concepts and living beings are equal, we must fight against any metaphor. This means also, that in order to fight for equality of all things, we must fight against the language itself.