- THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY209
Derrida critiques the notion of the individual as a psychoanalytic idea of “ideal ego,”
and therefore as human, as opposed to an awareness of “the divisibility, multiplicity,
or difference of forces in a living being, whatever it may be. It is enough to admit that
there is no finite living being, human or nonhuman, that wouldn’t be structured
by this differential of forces between which a tension, if not a contradiction, cannot
not locate or be located in different instances, apparatuses, if you will, one resist-
ing others, one repressing or suppressing others, or trying to put forward or make
prevail... the reason/right of the strongest” (59).
- There are of course many thinkers who do pay considerable attention to the status of
the individual animal and think of it as a valuable moral category, animal rights the-
orists Tom Regan and Peter Singer foremost among them. The relatively recent rise
of critical animal studies is in part a response to the absence of moral urgency in
animal studies more broadly. As the founders of the Institute for Critical Animal
Studies have put it, the new movement “has emerged as a necessary and vital alter-
native to the insularity, detachment, hypocrisy, and profound limitations of main-
stream animal studies that vaporizes their flesh and blood realities to reduce them
to reified signs, symbols, images, words on a page, or protagonists in a historical
drama, and thereby utterly fail to confront them not as ‘texts’ but as sentient beings.”
Steve Best et al., “Introducing Critical Animal Studies, 2007,” http: //www .critical
animalstudies .org. Some animal-oriented literary criticism has also been attentive
to the status of the individual animal. Marian Scholtmeijer’s book Animal Victims
in Modern Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) is one of the first of
these and still one of the best. While acknowledging the profound limitations of
human understanding and representation of the animal, she also makes a case for
why and how it matters that fiction has tried to “articulate the vital inner experience
of animals” (89).
- Jonathan Burt, “Review of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal,” Society and
Animals 13, no. 2 (2005): 168.
- Haraway, When Species Meet, 32.
- “Jubilate Agno” was written between 1758 and 1763, while Smart was confined in an
asylum for the insane, and consists of four fragments totaling 1177 lines of poetry.
Owing in part to its strangeness, it was not published until 1953. The section on Jeoffry
comprises just seventy-three lines of fragment B. All quotations from the poem are
taken from The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, vol. 1, Jubilate Agno, ed. Karina
Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). See also Rebecca Price Larkin, “Christopher
Smart’s Sacramental Cat,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11, no. 3 (1969):
1191–96. She argues that the whole poem might be thought of as linking the human
and animal at many levels; the title itself means to “rejoice in the lamb,” and animals
figure throughout the entire work.
- See Matthew Calarco, “Identity, Difference, Indistinction,” CR: The New Centennial
Review 11, no. 2 (2012): 41–60. Calarco argues that extending notions of similarity
between humans and nonhumans is always bound up with anthropocentrism,
necessarily involving the extension of human abilities and characteristics to some
