Emotional Territories and Engagement: A Look at the Encounter and the Human-Animal Relationship in «Le Lion» by Joseph Kessel

Abstract

Through Le Lion (Gallimard, 1958), Joseph Kessel paints a fascinating fresco, where the skin and blood of men mingle with those of animals. Through the study of selected excerpts, we will analyze the means of encounter and communication between man and animal. We will see how literature and language, through the power of words and their effects, manage to engage the sensitivity of the reader - here a privileged witness - and to provoke the encounter with the animal-other, inscribing at the same time man and beast in common territories with signifying functions. The human-animal border is no longer thought of as a gap or a split, but as a passage, a plastic territory that becomes a dynamic and dynamizing function of a positive encounter, where identity is born from otherness and from a rediscovered dialogue with this other that resembles us so much and yet always escapes us.