This essay aims to examine the problematic when we see animals through “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe and The Animal That Therefore I Am by Jacques Derrida, and the possibility to overcome it. There are two ways of seeing the animals. One is through a figure of some animal as shown in The Black Cat. In this novel, the narrator sees a cat named Pluto who loves him, but ironically, he abruptly seizes the cat and cuts one of its eyes from its socket for no “real” reason. The other is to see a cat watching him standing before it naked, as in Derrida’s writing. Here, the I exposed to the gaze of the cat feels shameful, which involves the question of why the I feels so. Derrida’s question leads to ask whether one can speak of and see the animal from the vantage of the animal, from the vantage of the animal before evil and all ills.
For Derrida, the moment that he feels shameful before the gaze of his cat in his nakedness is the one when he feels the absolute alterity of animals. The shame, then, could be said to be a condition that suspends the violence of the human animals’ gaze on the non-human animals, their authority over the animals. Through the nakedness under the gaze of an animal, through the passivity of being naked, Derrida problematizes the name of the animal, for it has continuously covered each animal’s singularity. According to Derrida, “the animal” is just a word, an appellation that men have instituted for their exclusive right and the authority to give a name to another living creature. As an alternative for this appellation, he suggests a portmanteau neologism, “animot”, which is made by combining “animal” and “word.” This word is suggested to invoke us the existence of “living creatures” whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of animality, and the referential experience of the thing as such that contributes to enforce the boundary between man and animal.
Derrida resists any generalization of animals that is already hardened through traditions of religion, myth, philosophy, literature, and science. The problem of these traditions is in making stronger and more imperturbable the boundary between man and animal. It prevents us from seeing an animal or a cat in its singularity, as the other, and at the same time as a neighbor. So, through the passion of shame, he tries to change such a trend to take the genocide of animals for granted. In “The Black Cat”, two cats are gradually unified into one figure, “the” black cat, under the narrator’s gaze, but the shame in Derrida’s gaze makes him obliged to see the limit of the humanity. Shame shakes the stableness of human animal’s gaze on other animals and turns question about animals from “Can they be able to～” into “Can they be not able to～” or “Can they suffer?” Through this turn of question, the ethics of the possibility of impossibility can be open up to animals.