Žižek's cat

I recently sat down [in my dreams] to discuss my latest novel with Jennifer Byrne.

This is an excerpt from the transcript. 

JB: It seems to me that there's a common theme in your memoir and your most recent novel, Žižek's cat, about the tension between home as a place of nurturing - a refuge from the world - and home as a stifling influence - somewhere that you want to escape from to seek adventure and excitement in the wider world.

DJ: Really? Where did you get that idea from? 

JB: Well....you're a writer and the main character in your novel is a writer and it just seemed like there was this idea of home as a place where the writer goes to work but then finds themselves isolated from the world and the kind of stimulus they need to be truly creative. So, there is this tension between the need for refuge - in order to write - and the need to escape refuge to pursue adventure, to have something to write about. 

DJ: That's a very interesting idea, and I think it's a good point, but the tension in my novel, that I was most consciously aware of, was all about the cat. I saw the film, The Hunger Games, and I kept thinking about catness....what is it about a cat that makes it a cat, y'know? Then, the tension comes in with the anti-catness. The tension between catness and anti-catness makes the cat qua cat really worth exploring and writing about.

JB: So, that was why you called the book Žižek's cat? But why Žižek? Why his cat? Why not someone else's cat? 

DJ: Well, it's partly an allusion to the kind of dialectic that Žižek is so preoccupied by...Ernaldo - the cat - embodies that dialectic in reverse...Instead of moving through the stages of thesis and antithesis to synthesis, Ernaldo devolves from a state of synthesis into the antithesis of a cat, which is a writer.....but of course, that only makes sense within the context of the story. 

Also, it's not his cat in the sense that he owns it as a pet. It's just a very Žižekian cat. Žižek doesn't like cats. He once said in an interview, 'Cats are lazy, evil, exploitative, dogs are faithful, they work hard, so if I were to be in government, I would tax having a cat, tax it really heavy.'

JB: What inspired the idea of the cat being the antithesis of the writer?

DJ: Have you ever seen a cat write? Has there ever been a writer who was a cat? So, that's where I got that idea from.