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Articles

The Bataillean-Freudian Cat

Ansu Louis employs Freud & Bataille to solve the mystery of human-cat bonding.

“The cat is the only animal to have succeeded in domesticating man.”
– Marcel Mauss

Although ‘Time spent with cats is never wasted’ is a quote that social media popularly ascribes to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), no one can trace this statement back to any documented source. In any case, one would perhaps more easily identify Freud as a dog person. He was really fond of the dogs he came to own from the 1920s, after he had purchased an Alsatian Shepherd named Wolf for his daughter Anna.

British shorthair cat Public Domain 2018

Cats & the Economy of Expenditure

Although Freud being a cat lover remains mere conjecture, I want to draw on a few of his psychoanalytic concepts, supplementing them with a theoretical notion borrowed from Georges Bataille (1897-1962), to develop a strand of thought concerning what could strike one as the mystery of the human-cat relationship.

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