The Missing Animal

A cat looks at us. We begin with a common animal, one that even a city dweller, not particularly fond of animals, might know. Like our aunt's cat, or the neighbours’ dog. When we step into its house, the cat might come to greet us, brushing its tail against our legs; or it may ignore us, resting in its preferred spot, its armchair, or under a bed. Either way, the cat's life will proceed. That is because the cat's life is different than ours, often so different to be beyond our imagination – yet a life nonetheless. This is the point: it is an unimaginable life. It cannot be imagined because an abyss separates it from ours. The cat, sure enough, eats, sleeps, plays, has sexual appetites, dreams (perhaps), and finally dies – just like us, and like any other living being. But these similarities are too generic, and cannot help us imagine what living a cat's life might really mean.

The problem is not simply that the cat incarnates a unique point of view on the world (Nagel 1974), for that is obvious, and the same separation of standpoints obtains between different human beings. In fact, what assurance can we have that the person next to us feels exactly what we are feeling? The cat effectively represents a completely different way of living, of perceiving and of thinking than that of the human (Cimatti 2002a). This book explores this absolute difference – a radical difference that has only rarely, in the history of philosophy and of science, been thoroughly thought through. This difference – and now we begin to understand the difficulty of properly articulating the problem – does not simply highlight a divergence between the cat's world and the human world. This framing of the problem, which is the traditional way of looking at things, presupposes two categories: on the one hand the human, on the other the animal, each time exemplified by a different species – in this case, the cat. Now, the problem is that the cat, like the human, does not exist. There is no cat, there is only this cat, this particular living body.