'This volume charts a new course in animal studies that re-examines Jacques Derrida's enduring thought on the visualization of the animal in his seminal Cerisy Conference from 1997, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Building new proximities with the animal in and through - and at times in spite of - the visual apparatus, Seeing Animals after Derrida investigates how the recent turn in animal studies toward new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology prompts a renewed engagement with Derrida's animal philosophy. In taking up the matter of Derrida's treatment of animality for the current epoch, the contributors to this book each present a case for new philosophical approaches and aesthetic paradigms that challenge the ocularcentrism of Western culture.' (Publication abstract)
Contents indexed selectively.
"The Loaded Cat" offers a renewed and careful analysis of Derrida's encounter with his cat as a philosophical problem: an Oedipal riddle punctuated by castration anxiety, human-animal hybridity (the Sphinx), and the imprecisions of language. The cat, according to Brooks's interpretation of Derrida's lecture, is "loaded" with linguistic signifiers and literary allusions, making it difficult for us to truly see the cat not as a figure or metaphor but as a real animal being, "loaded with herself, her suffering, the weight and intensity of her own existence." ' (Introduction xvi)
