Entre Nous

Here is an intriguing passage from (the early) Agamben, which I hope to look at later. In the meantime, comments welcome:

Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary, they are always and totally language. In them la voix sacree de la terre ingénue (the sacred voice of the unknowing earth) – which Mallarme, hearing the chirp of a cricket, sets against the human voice as une and non-decompose (one and indivisible) – knows no breaks or interruptions. Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits his single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language

Possible points of reference: Blanchot on Mallarme (discussed here) & Rilke. The dream of a poetry that is no more than a cry, unmediated expression, that hasn't passed through the opacity of a foreign symbolic medium. Mandelstam: 'We have dark black earth inside us' - the desire to hear this 'earth' directly in the poetic voice. The desire to hear the spontaneous music of the soul, without the 'interference' of a pre-existing symbolic system.