Come, beautiful puss, press close to my loving heart;
Retract your claws,
Let me gaze into your crystal-metallic eyes.
Rather more surprising is that Deleuze has also been pictured with a moggie on his lap (name unknown). Because although Deleuze wrote extensively about becoming-animal he was not a big pet lover. Indeed, he once said that anyone displaying affection towards a four-legged friend is a fool.
Perhaps it was his daughter, Émilie, who persuaded him to get a cat, thus enabling her father to discover that, despite having been domesticated for thousands of years, cats are not as oedipalised as he feared; that, unlike dogs, they fully retain their sovereignty and otherness (you can never really know a cat - the idea of familiarity is a piece of human conceit).
David Wood writes: "Each cat is a singular being - a pulsing centre of the universe - with this colour eyes, this length and density of fur, this palate of preferences, habits and dispositions." They might let you stroke them, but you can never really touch them; they might let you look into their eyes, but they remain creatures who escape our gaze.
As Montaigne famously mused, when it comes to the question of people and cats, who is ultimately playing with whom?
In other words, cats have the ability to make us doubt our own superiority and to question the privileged position in the world we have accorded ourselves as a species. Dogs make men feel like kings, but cats expose our nakedness and vulnerability - as Derrida discovered when his cat wandered into the bathroom one morning.
Perhaps this is why so many people fear and hate cats, believing like the famous 18th-century French naturalist and ailurophobe Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon that they possess an innate malice and a perverse disposition. I'm not saying this is mistaken; rather, I'm saying this - in addition to their uncanniness and supple beauty - is precisely what makes cats so fascinating and admirable.
See: David Wood, 'If a cat could talk', essay in the digital magazine Aeon (24 July 2013): click here.
Readers interested in Derrida's naked encounter with his cat should see: The Animal That Therefore I Am, (Fordham University Press, 2008).
Note: the lines beneath the photos of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault with their cats are translated from Baudelaire's poem Le chat. Click here to read the original verse in full online.
Readers interested in Derrida's naked encounter with his cat should see: The Animal That Therefore I Am, (Fordham University Press, 2008).
Note: the lines beneath the photos of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault with their cats are translated from Baudelaire's poem Le chat. Click here to read the original verse in full online.
'Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.' — Mark Twain
ReplyDeleteAnother French naturalist, the 19C positivist Hipployte Taine, confessed he had studied many philosophers and many cats, but asserted 'the wisdom of cats is infinitely superior', while Aldous Huxley advised, 'if you want to write - keep cats!' The problem with them, as the comedienne Paula Poundstone hilariously put it, is that they get the exact same look on their fabulous faces whether they're looking at an axe murderer or a moth. (Though some might also see this, as I suspect the Ancient Egyptians did, as precisely the source of their superhuman mystery.)
Either way, the message is clear - felis catus is man's humblingly wise (and deliciously disquieting) muse.
Interested readers of a Bronte-esque/feline disposition may also care to refer to Emily Bronte's 1842 essay, 'le Chat' (link below), in which she argues instead that the cat is a kind of transhuman creature, possessing - strangely enough and unlike the ever-faithful and companionable dog - 'more human feelings than any other being', while delighting in disguise, self-interest and misanthropic artfulness.
ReplyDeleteBehind the cat's deceitful gentleness, however, lies a heart of primordial animal gold. While s/he may affect wickedness through a kind of unimaginable feline-genetic memory of human evil, Bronte affirms, 'the cat was not wicked in Paradise'.
http://kleurrijkbrontesisters.blogspot.ie/2010/07/title-cat-author-emily-bronte.html