Derrida's Cat

"My cat, the cat that looks at me in my bedroom or bathroom, this cat that is perhaps not “my cat” or “my pussycat,” does not appear here to represent, like an ambassador, the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race …

If I say ‘it is a real cat’ that sees me naked, this is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity. When it responds in its name (whatever ‘respond’ means, and that will be our question), it doesn’t do so as the exemplar of a species called ‘cat,’ even less so of an ‘animal’ genus or kingdom.

It is true that I identify it as a male or female cat. But even before that identification, it comes to me as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, into this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized.

And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential disappearance. Mine also, and that disappearance, from this moment to that, fort/da [here/there, present/absent], is announced each time that, with or without nakedness, one of us leaves the room.” (9)

Jaques Derrida. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. Translated by David Wills.  New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

This passage is from a section of the book where Derrida is engaging “Genesis,” specifically Adam’s naming of the animals and the shame Adam and Eve feel because of their nakedness, and where Derrida is interrogating Heidegger’s account of “being-with” or alongside other creatures.

I had misplaced the book and been looking for it for a couple of days. I was sitting and scanning a bookshelf for it yet again when my dog Islay suddenly ran up, sat down beside me, looked me in the eye, and ran off. When I looked up again, the book was the first thing I saw, far from where I'd previously been searching.

Comments

[Liz Eckhart]

What I love about this quote is that it's not about petting the cat or the cat as pet, but about how the cat defines a space and questions (refuses to request) a name. It's a brilliant furthering of two favorite cat quotes, Eliot's "The naming of cats is a difficult matter," and my "a house without a cat is just a building."