Ailurophilia: On Baudelaire's Erotic Fascination with Cats

Théophile Steinlen's 1896 design for the famous 
Parisian nightspot Le Chat Noir

Poets, like witches and philosophers, love cats and many have written odes to their mysterious companions, including Rilke, who imagines himself suspended like a prehistoric fly in the golden amber of his cat's eyeball.* However, it's Baudelaire who is perhaps most famous for his obsessive love of cats.**

And it's Baudelaire who best understands not only their Satanic-nocturnal nature, but also their undeniable eroticism, equating the feline with the feminine (and vice versa) until it becomes impossible to know at times if he's writing about his favourite pet or his favourite mistress.

Either way, both seem to promise those things he valued most: poetic truth and sensual pleasure; the former being something that develops out of the fleshy materiality of the latter, rather than pre-existing as some kind of disembodied ideal.      

Here's one of Baudelaire's cat poems that hopefully illustrates what I've been attempting to say, followed by my own attempt at a translation into English that invariably loses something in the process, but which, hopefully, adds something that isn't found in other translations ...

Le Chat

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d'agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s'enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.


The Cat

Come not with claws, beautiful cat,
As you leap into my affection;
Allow me to plunge into your eyes
Of metallic crystal.

When my fingers gently stroke along
Your head and supple spine,
My hand thrills with the pleasure
Of touching your body electric.

I sense the same spirit as in Her: her gaze
Like yours, dear creature, is one of cold
Intensity, piercing like a banderilla.

And, from head to toe,
A subtle yet dangerous perfume,
Envelops her dark skin.


Notes

* See Rilke, 'Black Cat' in Duino Elegies (1923): click here to read online. 

** If memory serves me correctly, Baudelaire devoted no fewer than three poems to cats in Les Fleurs du mal (1857) and they make appearances in many of his other poems too. As might be expected, therefore, the theme of Baudelaire's cats has proved a popular - and fertile - one amongst literary critics and theorists (Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss famously co-authoring a structuralist reading in 1960, for example).

To read an online edition of Les Fleurs du mal provided by Project Gutenberg, click here. 

Alternatively, visit fleursdumal.org - a site dedicated to Baudelaire and his work that not only contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, but a selection of English translations (for those, like me, whose French isn't very good). 

For another post on the love of cats, click here.  

Cat and Mauss (Reflections on the Notion of the Gift)

SA: The Gift (2019)

The Cat - not my cat, as, contrary to what she seems to think (and despite the amount of time she spends sitting in the garden or walking freely about the house), I'm not her owner or ultimately responsible for her wellbeing - has finally discovered her hunting instinct and got into the habit of bringing me the fruits of her deadly pursuits; i.e. the sorry-looking corpses of little birds and small mammals (the picture above is this morning's offering). 

This feline form of gifting reminds one of the work of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss ... 

II.

Mauss was, at one time, the go-to-guy for those interested in a socio-anthropological perspective on questions to do with magic, sacrifice, and symbolic exchange in different cultures around the world. His short 1925 text entitled The Gift* was influential for many other thinkers, including Lévi-Strauss, Bataille, Baudrillard, and Derrida, who were all interested in notions of reciprocity in one form or another.** 

Whilst Mauss's essay focuses on how the exchange of objects between individuals and groups helps build relationships within human society, I think at least some of his arguments can be applied to what is happening with me and the Cat. I give her shelter and tins of Purina Gourmet Gold and she reciprocates with scratches, bites, fleas, the occasional friendly gesture, and now dead rodents deposited and displayed on the lawn.   

I don't know if she's genuinely sharing her kills with me as an act of kindness, or simply trying to tell me something about her tastes - is it, for example, a demand for greater freshness? Whatever it's meaning, it suddenly seems very important to her and even if rather inconvenient for me, I like the idea of an interspecies exchange across that gulf of being that divides us.

That said, I'm not entirely sure I see this ritualistic game in wholly positive terms; there seems to be at least an element of challenge or provocation on her part - something a bit potlatchy.

Further, I'm not sure we can simply turn a blind eye to the fact that her gifts have in fact been tortured and killed, which is ethically problematic to say the least. But then on the other hand (or paw), all culture is founded on cruelty and it would be foolish to expect a moggie to subscribe to moral humanism.  

Notes

* Mauss's original text was entitled Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques and was published in L'Année Sociologique in 1925. The essay was later republished in French in 1950 and first translated into English in 1954 by Ian Cunnison (this translation is now in the public domain so can be found online: click here).  

A more recent translation, by W. D. Halls, was published by Routledge in 1990 and an expanded edition of The Gift, trans. Jane I. Guyer was published by HAU Books (and distributed by the University of Chicago Press) in 2016: click here for more details.

** See, for example, the following works by the authors mentioned here:

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker, (Routledge, 1987).

Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley, (Zone Books, 1988).

Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, (Sage Publications, 1993).

Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (University of Chicago Press, 1992).