"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)
