'Desire is human--or, more exactly, "humanizing," "anthropogenetic-- only provided that it is directed toward another Desire and an other Desire.''The man who desires a thing humanly acts not so much to possess the thing as to make another recognize his right... to that thing, to make another recognize him as owner of the thing.'
'Man will risk his biological life to satisfy his nonbiological Desire. And Hegel says that the being that is incapable of putting his life in danger in order to attain ends that are not immediately vital--i.e. the being that cannot risk its life in a fight for Recognition, in a fight for pure prestige--is not a truly human being.'
'"The definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called" also means the definitive disappearance of human Discourse (Logos) in the strict sense. Animals of the species Homo sapiens would react by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals or sign "language" of bees. What would disappear, then, is not only Philosophy or the search for discursive Wisdom, but also that Wisdom itself. For in these post historical animals, there would no longer be any "[discursive] understanding of the World and of self."'
'To remain human, Man must remain a "Subject opposed to the Object," even if "Action negating the given and Error" disappears. This means that, while henceforth speaking in an adequate fashion of everything that is given to him, post-historical Man must continue to detatch "form" from "content," doing so no longer in order actively to transform the latter, but so that he may oppose himself as a pure "form" to himself and to others taken as "content" of any sort.' [Heidegger would say that, to remain human, post-historical Man must become the preserver of the "clearing", the process that allows him to detach "form" from "content", "beings" from "being"--he must become the preserver of the Word Virus.]
(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)
