Self-Portrait from a Cat’s Eye-View: Sympoetic Humanimal Bondings in Alaine Polcz’s Memoir

Alaine Polcz’s memoir Macskaregény (Catnovel, 2000) fits in the series of her confessional, philosophical, autobiographically inspired writings which all break taboos by narrating “unspeakable” traumas – experiences of passing, loss, and grief – from a specifically female perspective. The seventy-three-year-old author attempts to revive her past by recollecting fragments of memories related to cats, flashbacks of her feline encounters. Combining personal self-reflection and thanatological insights with a peculiar mixture of ruthless honesty, scientific curiosity, and melancholic self-irony, she explores the embodied cognition of our mortality through reconsidering human-animal relationships. During the meeting of a woman and a cat, “two worlds cross each other's thresholds:” with a Derridean epiphany, the recognition of the otherness of the self-same as reflected in the cat's eyes leads to ethical insights concerning interspecies connectedness and the common fate of all living beings condemned to mortality by their very existence. An in-depth analysis of sympoietic connections invites us to realize the necropolitical stakes of the human right for grievable lives.

Keywords: thanatology, self-writing, humanimal ethics, human-animal relations, sympoietic solidarity, the grievability of lives, trauma therapy, necropolitics