The saturnine dog in Dürer's engraving Melencolia I is an antecedent to the dogwoman narrator in A Room of One's Own (1929), I have argued (Goldman 2007). Situating a dog at the scene of scholarship and creativity, both works test the boundaries between human and animal. I argue that Woolf 's signifying dog follows Dürer's dog and also follows other accounts of Dürer's dog. Following here means both following chronologically—coming after—but also following the example of—the figure or pattern of—that is following sufficiently enough to recognize Dürer's dog as an allegorical antecedent but also departing from it, refiguring, or resignifying it. (Goldman 2010). Furthermore, Woolf 's dog–woman narrator, suspended between human and animal, anticipates Jacques Derrida, naked before the pitiless gaze of his domestic cat, and asking: “Who am I, therefore? Who is it that I am (following)?”—punning on the French “je suis”—I am and I follow (Derrida). Is the human something that is the animal or something that follows or even supercedes the animal?

Derrida identifies an “abyssal rupture [which] doesn't describe two edges” (emphasis added) between Human and Animal. He claims: “beyond the edge of the so–called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘The Animal’ or ‘Animal Life’ there is already […] a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead […] among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death” (Derrida 30). For Derrida, anyone who claims the distinct edge between Human and Animal,