The soul between human and animal – what does it mean to live with an animal? In a narrative-philosophical essay, Volkmar Mühleis explores the familiar and the unfamiliar aspects of living with his cat, partly as a response to Jacques Derrida’s essay The Animal That Therefore I Am. De anima – the title says it all: On the one hand, the book tells the story of a cat’s life, looking back on its brief yet intense existence; on the other, it traces a philosophical arc from Aristotle to Derrida, reflecting on the meanings of our coexistence with animals. In Aristotle’s treatise De anima, all living beings are said to possess a sense of perception—plants orient themselves toward light and shadow, warmth and cold; animals use it to explore their surroundings; humans reflect upon it. Derrida thoroughly deconstructed metaphysics, and the legacy of phenomenology lies somewhere in between. Mühleis navigates these dimensions with his reflections on the subject, contrasting them with concrete experiences, drawing from them as he writes—exploratory, poetic, and multi-layered. The focus here is less on the animal’s acquisition of language—as in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann or Franz Kafka—than on the withdrawal from verbal communication in favor of physical presence and perception. Never being able to figure out the cat’s ways is a fundamental aspect of its behavior; it suddenly sits silently beside you and watches the human goings-on. Shaping our shared world—a task as elusive as it is accessible—leaves its mark on us, making its absence all the more painful. In mourning its loss, our own, fundamental connection becomes evident.
published in 2026 by Passagen Verlag, Vienna
88 pages cost 12 EUR
