[3] Tobias Menely suggests that "Derrida is straining after something that is unusually difficult for him to conceptualize", namely the question of pathos that binds the human and nonhuman animal.

Menely, in his analysis of Derrida's argument, positions Derrida in a tradition of thinkers that include Thomas More and Jeremy Bentham who, according to Menely, elide the question of the ways in which suffering might be equivocal between species and instead turn to "creaturely passion" for an account of animal ontology.

Most notably, Derrida talks about the animality of the letter in Writing and Difference (1967), Heidegger's pronouncement on the animal being "poor in world" in Of Spirit (1989) and, in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy entitled "Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject" (1989), Derrida discusses the ethics of eating meat.

Jean-Luc Godard's 2014 experimental essay film Goodbye to Language (Adieu au Langage) quotes from The Animal That Therefore I Am several times.

[6] In an early scene from Michael Mann's 2015 action thriller Blackhat, The Animal That Therefore I Am can be seen on the prison-cell bookshelf of protagonist Nicholas Hathaway, a convicted hacker played by Chris Hemsworth.