Sunday cat break: Is the other hell? February 3, 2008

(With apologies to Sartre!) 

 This Sunday Cat Break addresses deep and important concerns about deceit, duplication and replacement, which can be found in continental philosophy.  However, it does so indirectly, by exploring how these anxieties worked themselves out in a variety of non-traditional communities.  We will look at both genre duplication, where a narrative is reconfigure by different agents, and at individual duplication, where the actor finds her own identity is challenged.

We can start by asking about the duplication of an actor within a genre:  For example:

Suggesting a cat might care might exploit these ideas would be to miss out on the evolutionary place of the independent cat.  Still, a copying can occur even if unintentional while, on a different level as we refocus our attention from the question of genre duplication to fact of individual replacement, deceit and duplication can be a fascinating challenge:

Finding oneself to be beautiful, one may even seek out the duplicate: 

Or use it for one’s own ends:

Taking a page from our felines’ books, we may be able to start to appreciate the variety of responses available to us.

NOTE:  as a long term care taker for cats, particularly hyper oriental cats, I see no sign of  the distress of a feline genuinely feeling threatened.  Cats can act as though they have a sense  of performance, play and irony.   And perhaps they do.   If so, these are very good examples.