At No Useless Leniency, a compelling summary of a Leopoldo Lugones short story ‘Yzur’ that explores the deep connections between the ability to use speech and the condition of being subordinated through labor. Certainly there are echoes here of Aristotle’s conception of politics as necessarily bound up with logos (speech-reason). Also intriguing is the part when the narrator
thinks man had persecuted these creatures [monkeys], enslaving them in the ancient past, until they decided “to break all advanced connections with the enemy” [by refusing to use language]. “Thus, their act of mortal dignity: to take sanctuary, as an ultimate measure of salvation, in the darkness of their animality.”
Overlaps, it seems, with Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of becoming-animal…
Path to the Possible 