From The Animal Side (2007; translated 2011) by Jean-Christophe Bailly, p. 14-15:

"And yet, sometimes a silent animal looks up at us and silently looks through us."
[-- Rilke, from the eighth of the Duino Elegies]

[...]

The world of gazes is the world is signifiance ["the term signifiance refers to the semiotic modalities and processes of making and conveying meanings" (p. 80)], that is, of a possible, open, still indeterminate meaning. For the percussive impact of difference that is produced by discourse, the gaze substitutes a sort of dispersal: the unformulated is its element, its watery origin. The gaze gazes, and the unformulated is, in it, the pathway of thought, or at least of a thinking that is not uttered, not articulated, but that takes place and sees itself, holds itself in this purely strange and strangely limitless place which is the surface of the eye.

Thus it is even among humans, who compensate, however, through discourse for this lack of determinacy and of articulation. But among animals, the absence of language means there is no compensation for the lack, and this is why their gaze is so disarming when it settles on us, which happens, as Rilke's line says, sweetly and soberly. In the face of that which is and can only be for us neither question nor response, we experience the feeling of being in the presence of an unknown force, at once supplicating and calm, that in effect traverses us. This force may not need to be named, but where it is exercised it is as though we were in the presence of a different form of thought, a thought that could only have ahead of it, and overwhelmingly, the pensive path.

This pensivity on the part of animals, in which some have been willing to see only stupor, is in any case made manifest in a thousand different ways, according to species, individuals, and circumstances. It seems to me that certain people have seen this, have approached it, and that others, who may have glimpsed it, have turned away at once. There are important and serious divisions here.

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