De Anima - Die Seele zwischen Mensch und Tier

In the organizer's words:

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?
live with an animal? In a narrative-philosophical essay, Volkmar Mühleis traces the familiarities and strangenesses of being together with his cat, in response to Jacques Derrida's treatise 'The animal that I am'.
'De anima' - the title says it all: on the one hand, the biography of a cat is told, looking back on its short, intense life, and on the other, the philosophical arc from Aristotle to Derrida is spanned, reflecting on the meanings of our interaction with animals. In Aristotle's work 'De anima', all living beings are attributed the sense of touch - plants orient themselves towards light and shadow, heat and cold, animals use it to explore their surroundings, humans think about it. Metaphysics was thoroughly deconstructed by Derrida, with the legacy of phenomenology in between. Mühleis moves in these dimensions with his reflections on the subject, contrasting them with concrete experiences, drawing from them as well as writing, probing, poetic, multi-sensory. The focus is less on the linguistic development of the animalistic - as in E.T.A. Hoffmann or Franz Kafka - than on the withdrawal of linguistic communication in favor of physical presence and perception. Never catching the cat's eye is a basic feature of its behavior; it suddenly sits silently next to you and watches the human goings-on. Helping to shape the shared world in a way that is as intangible as it is approachable leaves traces in people that make their absence all the more painful. In the mourning for her loss, our own creaturely bond is revealed.