Phoevos the Cat: A Life

Φοίβος ο Γάτος: Μια Ζωή 

(July 2021 - Nov 2026)

 

 

I. 

 

Phoevos le Chat est mort aujourd'hui ... 

 

And I'm going to miss him.

 

 

II.

 

I wasn't there when Maria found him: just a couple of months old, abandoned on the streets of Athens and living in the engine of an old car, covered in grease and fleas.  

 

But I was there with him at the end, when the vet - who, coincidentally, was also from the Greek capital - intravenously administered a dose of phenytoin and pentobarbital [1]. 

 

Phoevos may have only had a short life but, for me, it was one rich in feline immanence ...

 

 

III. 

 

I'm aware that this phrase will irritate those philosophers who are suspicious of the idea that there are different styles of being. 

 

Those, for example, who view immanence through a strictly ontological lens and insist on the Univocity of Being (i.e., the fact that being speaks with one voice and is the same in all things). 

 

For such thinkers, the crucial point is that cats and people are equally expressions of immanence; there is no fundamental difference in the nature of their being, only in the manner in which that being is modified. 

 

For me, however, it's the latter point that most interests; the fact that there exist different entities displaying different shapes, speeds, and folds in the fabric of reality. 

 

In other words, styles of being - a concept which, along with feline immanence, I intend to carry on using even at the risk of being thought a phenomenologist or a poet simply searching for an evocative turn of phrase while grieving for Phoevos.      

 

 

IV. 

 

Cats very much live immersed in their own world and the immediate present. Some people think they can see spirits, but in my experience it's more often a spider that has caught their attention. 

 

Deleuze says that observers often experience an intense love and care for a dying person - even when it's such an irredeemable wrong 'un as Dickens's Rogue Riderhood [2]. I'm not entirely convinced of that. 

 

But I do know that seeing Phoevos first in terrible pain [3] and then heavily sedated in those moments before the fatal injection, was profoundly moving.  

 

 

V. 

 

Is it wrong to think philosophy at a time like this; a little too cold and abstract? 

 

I don't believe so. 

 

In fact, philosophy only really makes sense at a time like this by making some kind of sense of death. 

 

Deleuze's late text that I've been referring to here - 'Immanence: A Life' (1995) - provides a beautifully clever and comforting way to view the death not just of a person, but a cat too. 

 

Phoevos's individual life may have ended, but he has returned to what Deleuze describes as the transcendental field of existence (or plane of immanence). 

 

And of course, his life as a pure event unfolding in time and space can never be undone or erased (Nietzsche toys with the idea that it may even recur eternally).  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] The latter drug, pentobarbital, produces anaesthesia and rapid unconsciousness; the former drug, phenytoin, causes reduced central nervous system function and cardiovascular collapse. This drug combination, favoured by vets, causes a quick and painless death for animals that are suffering and cannot be medically treated. 

 

[2] Roger 'Rogue' Riderhood is a character in Our Mutual Friend (Chapman and Hall, 1865), Dickens's fourteenth and final completed novel. Deleuze references the character in the last text he published before his suicide on 4 November 1995. It can be found in Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Semiotext(e), 2006), pp. 384-389. 

      For Deleuze, the fact that even a shit like Riderhood can trigger compassion from the townspeople when on the brink of death following a boating accident on the Thames, illustrates the allure of a life once it is stripped of its individual history. In other words, impersonal vitality matters more at last than what kind of character Riderhood may have been. As soon as it's clear that he's going to live and recover and go back to being his old self, the people quickly lose all sympathy. 

      The scene can be found in Book 3, Chapter 3 of Our Mutual Friend (made available online as an eBook by Project Gutenberg). 

 

[3] At 3am this morning Phoevos suffered what is called a saddle thrombus (or feline aortic thromboembolism); a life-threatening medical emergency that happens when a blood clot forms in the heart, travels down the main artery, and gets stuck right where it branches off to supply blood to the hind legs. 

      The vet advised that euthanasia was the kindest and medically most sensible option for Phoevos. I would like to take this opportunity to thank him and his team who, suddenly tasked with caring for my feline friend, displayed "an urgency, respect, and even love" for a dying cat's "least sign of life". As a result, Phoevos, in the depths of his agony, got to feel "something soft and sweet penetrate his soul". 

      Lines quoted from Deleuze, 'Immanence: A Life', Two Regimes of Madness ... p. 386.     

 

 

Phoevos produced one of the most amusing and interesting guest posts on Torpedo the Ark. See: 'In the Beginning Was the Word, But That Word Was Not a Meaningless Miaow' (18 Sept 2025).