“What is ‘living with the animal’? What is ‘cohabiting’ with the animal? That is the question of mitgehen and mitexistieren. The animal can mitgehen with is in the house; a cat, for example, which is often said to be a narcissistic animal, can inhabit the same place as us, it can ‘go with us,’ ‘walk with us,’ it can be ‘with us’ in the house, live ‘with us,’ but ‘it doesn’t exist with us’ in the house.” —Jacques Derrida, “I don’t know why we are doing this” from The Animal That Therefore I Am

Here, I think Derrida taps into the line of reasoning that leads to the justification of human violence and brutality against animals. Although we are aware of animals as tangible, visible, and present (to an extent), we are susceptible to an ancient and perpetuated notion of the animal as nonexistent in a “human” context.

I believe this connects with a Cartesian perception of the human as “above” her world, as transcendent, as utterly separate from his environment. While the animal is believed to be immanently connected with nature and the natural world, the human is graced with the privilege of extracting from that world. Paradoxically, however, the human can justify brutal means of extraction by virtue of Darwinian logic. In other words, we have the right to slaughter to excess because it is the “natural” way of things.

In other words, the animal cannot “be” in the same way that the human can be, because it is imprisoned by its status as an element of the natural environment. Nevertheless, the human’s self-proclaimed transcendence can be validated by Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory.