"The practice of keeping animals, regardless of their usefulness, the keeping . . to be precise . . of pets, is a modern innovation, and, on the social scale on which it exists today, is unique. It is part of that universal but personal withdrawal into the private small family unit that is such a distinguishing feature of consumer societies." *

Jacques Derrida (The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)) claims that the only difference between an animal and a human being is in our perception of our own nudity. It is in being seen (and in particular being seen naked) by his cat that Derrida claims to experience self-consciousness and shame. The eyes of his cat, he suggests, his own I’s first mirror, reflecting the naked truth of the autobiographical ,,I,,. **

His pet allows him to see something of the otherness of all non-human animals.  The animal offers Derrida access to a philosophy and self-knowledge that is neither abstract nor self-centred, but embodied in and intimately related to another. In many ways as an alternative to Descartes’s “I think therefore I am” Derrida proposes the formulation: “The animal looks at us, and we are naked in front of it. And perhaps thinking begins here.”***

*BERGER, John: About Looking /Mirar/ O pohledu, 1992 ** DERRIDA, Jacques:L’Animal que donc je suis, 2006*** BAKER, Steve: The Postmodern Animal, 2000