In philosophy and rhetorical studies, self-knowledge inscribes the absolutely indivisible line that separates “the human” from “the animal.” Autodeixis, the self-reflexive power of the I, is the condition both for language acquisition and for reason; it names an exceptional sort of auto–affection in which a being demonstrates the capacity to step back from itself enough to recognize itself and so to refer to itself as itself. What I propose in this article, however, is that autodeixis involves not a specifically human (...) power to disclose an ontological as such but the extrahuman operations of an allegorical as if. The presumption of self-knowledge is not an innate quality of “the human” but the already relational condition for any living being that must repeat itself to be itself. A kind of preoriginary rhetoricity, I argue, is the very condition for the singularity and functioning of any living being. (shrink)