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This section characterizes drawing as the opening of form, which can be envisioned in two ways: opening in the sense of a beginning, departure, origin, dispatch, impetus, or sketching out, and opening in the sense of an availability or inherent capacity. In the first sense, drawing evokes more the gesture of drawing than the traced figure. In the second, drawing implies that the figure is essentially incomplete. Also included in this section is a “Sketchbook” of quotations on art from Yves Bonnefoy, Éliane Escoubas, Antonio Saura, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Jean-Christophe Bailly.

In the first chapter, Nancy addresses concepts of communism, community, and the common, outlining the significance of each of these terms and distinguishing his approach from other attempts to define the relation between these terms. Following a proposal to rethink community in terms of “number” by Jean-Christophe Bailly, the chapter approaches community in terms of “number” or “the numerous.” It is this term that allows one to understand community as a plurality rather than as commonality. The chapter outlines the circumstances in which Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community was written as a response Nancy’s essay “The Inoperative Community.” It also addresses how Blanchot’s response already invited further reflection on his exchange with Nancy, which is then taken up in The Disavowed Community.

La Caille returned to France via Mauritius and Reunion. He was received with acclaim at the Academy, where he gave several lectures on his Cape experiences. He published a map of the Cape which remained the standard for over half a century. He became involved in controversies with Euler and later with Le Monnier. His most famous student was the chemist Lavoisier, who acknowledged the usefulness of La Caille's rigorous approach. He strongly influenced Lalande. Towards the end of his life, his friends included Clairaut, Bouguer and his correspondents Bradley and Tobias Mayer of Gottingen. He observed Comet Halley on its return and gave it its name. He died of an illness which was believed to have been contracted at the Cape.

In this essay, Glen A. Mazis descends deeply into Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am and The Beast and the Sovereign, writing after Derrida but also with and beyond Derrida. In this task, Mazis is aided by Jean-Christophe Bailly and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the second half of his essay, Mazis takes up Derrida's discourse on the wolf as a traditional figure of human rapacity, and pushes beyond that discourse to engage with the history of human predation on the wolf. That horrific history, for Mazis, is emblematic of a systematic misrecognition that has turned the animal world into a world that humans no longer know how to inhabit or even to see.

Gras’s Bovines/A Cow’s Life is a contemplative documentary reflection on a herd of Charolais cows, offering up delayed, wandering images of bovine life. The film invites particular links to be drawn between the ‘pure optical and sound situations’ of the Deleuzian time-image and the account of animal art and expressive territory given by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?. Building also on Bailly’s notion of pensivity, while expanding this account beyond its privileging of the gaze (through attention to bovine sounds in the film), this chapter allows for further development of dynamics of worlding traced in previous chapters. Yet it also suggests that Bovines allows us to probe the possible limitations of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. In risking a privileging of what Hallward calls, in his critique of Deleuze, ‘virtual creatings’ over ‘actual creatures’, the film’s time-images might be seen as aestheticising political paralysis over political action, favouring a celebration of biovitality over a critique of biopolitics. While Bovines’s pastoral setting and lingering, durational aesthetic thus stage a set of ambivalences and contradictions, the film also points to the limitations, as well as the ongoing possibilities, of a Deleuzo-Guattarian engagement with cinema’s animal worlds.

The question of animal suffering, and of forms of vulnerability through which animal and human lives are differentially exposed, runs through the films explored in this book, from the reflections on ‘enduring’ and death-in-life states in Bestiaire and The Turin Horse, to the scenes of slaughter in Leviathan and the powerlessness explored by Bovines. In all of the films in this study, there appear to be two different concepts of life at stake: the ‘bare life’ produced by biopolitical regimes and the worlds that unfurl, and make meaning, beyond this. This corresponds to the two different orders of power traced throughout this study, following Deleuze (particularly in his readings of Spinoza and Foucault) – power as domination (pouvoir) and power as potential (puissance), understood as being in a relation of continual exchange. Bestiaire, Bovines and The Turin Horse offer a subtle diagnosis of our biopolitical present and its seemingly relentless ‘subjection of the animal’ (Derrida). Yet these films also hold out the promise of something else, gesturing to possible lines of light and political futures, in which our relations with animal worlds – both onscreen and off – might be reconfigured otherwise.

This chapter describes how Sand compensated for the anonymity that history confers on ordinary people—particularly her mother. Sand relates an event that ostensibly occurred when Lafayette announced before the Commune the king's return to Paris following the Champs de Mars massacre in October 1789. Selected by local plebeian dignitaries, fifteen-year-old Sophie Delaborde was dressed in white, powdered, crowned with roses, and given a wreath of flowers to present to Citizens Bailly and LaFayette. Upon receiving the wreath from Sophie, Lafayette is said to have addressed her: “My dear child, these flowers suit your face more than mine.” In the crush of the crowd that formed to watch this historic event, Sophie was separated from her mother, Marie Anne Cloquard, and little sister, Lucie, but was eventually “escorted by a band of patriots.” She rejoined her family “in their poor little abode” at the end of the evening.

Harry Bailly, the landlord of the Tabard in Southwark, is the only Canterbury pilgrim besides Chaucer himself who can with certainty be identified with an actual historical figure. For Chaucer’s contemporaries, Harry Bailly must have been identifiable with the real innkeeper and local office-holder of the same name. Chaucer himself was clearly well acquainted with Southwark and the Tabard and may even have lodged at times at the inn. Nevertheless, although the Host in the ‘General Prologue’ must in some degree reflect a real-life model, he and his wife Goodeliefe (the significance of whose name is identified here) are also used for Chaucer’s own literary ends, being employed for comic purposes in the links between the later tales.