Agamben is a contemporary Italian philosopher with some deep thoughts about animals, humans, and our relationships to language.
In The Open, Agamben goes against the grain of our traditional ways of thinking about humans, animals and language. Instead of forming a firm dividing line between man and beasts, the idea of language as a human-only skill is all smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that human beings are actually animals too and that animals do in fact have language.