The book questions the representations, debates and arguments supported by the authors of the 17th century about the relationship between men and beasts, also called "brutes" at that time. No animal ethics appears in their writings, but this absence cannot be related to the mere expression of irrational prejudices.

Against a simplistic view of Louis Althusser's and Michel Foucault’s anti-Hegelianism during the 1960s, the book goes through the early works of these philosophers to shed a light on the importance of Hegel for the elaboration of their problematic. the book aims to explain how they elaborated their thought by an immanent critique of Hegelianism.

For more than sixty years, Deligny has built a body of work around children on the fringes. A work that inextricably links theory and practice, opportunities and attempts, writing and cinema. By a thought of both the immutable and the circumstantial; by a look that turns out – in an unusual sense – to be deeply and differently political.