Today I went to class. We talked about Hansen, Wolfe, and Derrida. Tonight I'm practicing music with a band. I'm in a relatively good mood. Here's a picture of my cat:
"No, no, my cat, the cat that looks at me in my bedroom or in the bathroom, this cat that is perhaps not "my cat" or "my pussycat," does not appear here as representative, or ambassador, carrying the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race, from La Fontaine to Tieck (author of Puss in Boots), from Baudelaire to Rilke, Buber and many others. If I say "it is a real cat" that sees me naked, it 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 realm. It is true that I identify it as a male or female cat." Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am
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ReplyDelete"No, no, my cat, the cat that looks at me in my bedroom or in the
ReplyDeletebathroom, this cat that is perhaps not "my cat" or "my pussycat," does
not appear here as representative, or ambassador, carrying the immense
symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the
feline race, from La Fontaine to Tieck (author of Puss in Boots), from
Baudelaire to Rilke, Buber and many others. If I say "it is a real cat" that sees me naked, it 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 realm. It is true that I identify it as a male or female cat." Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am
Thank you for making even my most banal post a theoretical reflection, Scott. :)
ReplyDeleteI really love that text, too.