Helene Cixous's Other Animal: The Half-Sunken Dog

Hélène Cixous has extensively written about cats, her real cats, and on the cat's figure as the privileged other of the subject. This article focuses on another animal, the dog called "Fips," a significant character in Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, and in an earlier and shorter text, "Stigmata, or Job the Dog." It also takes into account "Mon chien à trois pattes" ("My Three-legged Dog," in Le Jour où je n'étais pas là), a text entwined with Clarice Lispector's "The Crime of the Mathematics Professor." These texts are the best examples of what Jacques Derrida called "la pensée de l'animal," a "poetical" and "prophetic" way not only to think about animality and humanity, but also to begin to consider the world differently.