Volkmar Mühleis presents his book “De anima” (Passagen Verlag)

“De anima – The Soul Between Man and Animal” – what does it mean to live with an animal? In a narrative-philosophical essay, Volkmar Mühleis explores the familiarities and strangenesses of living with his cat, also in response to Jacques Derrida's treatise “The Animal That Therefore I Am.” De anima' – the title says it all: on the one hand, it tells the biography of a cat, looking back on its short, intense life; on the other hand, it spans the philosophical arc from Aristotle to Derrida, reflecting on the meanings of our coexistence with animals. In Aristotle's work ‘De anima’, all living beings are said to have a sense of perception – plants orient themselves according to light and shadow, heat and cold, animals use it to explore their surroundings, humans think about it. Metaphysics was thoroughly deconstructed by Derrida, and in between lies the legacy of phenomenology. Mühleis moves within these dimensions with his reflections on the subject, contrasting them with concrete experiences, drawing from them as well as writing about them, probing, poetic, multi-layered. The focus here is less on the animalistic becoming verbal—as in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann or Franz Kafka—and more on the withdrawal of linguistic communication in favor of physical presence and perception. Never letting the cat out of the bag is a fundamental trait of its behavior; it suddenly sits silently next to you and watches the human goings-on. As elusive as it is approachable, helping to shape the shared world leaves traces in humans that make its absence all the more painful. In mourning its loss, one's own creaturely connection becomes apparent.