18INTRODUCTIONnationality, and race. The speaker of Hughes’s poem also clearly relies
on preconceived notions of kind in watching the jaguar, as indeed we
all do when regarding animals. We come to the poem, as we come to
any individual animal, filled with ideas of kinds or types—of genre
and species. Costello believes that we respond to poetry very differently
than to philosophical prose, and she refers to kinds of animal poems,
suggesting an unspecified system of grouping poems according to how
they reflect the animal. So too in regarding animals, we may think of
them as examples of a type within a taxonomic system, as biologists do,
or as individual beings, as many people do with their pets. The human-
animal distinction that Derrida and Coetzee wish to deconstruct, that
many proanimal thinkers and writers decry, is also fundamentally a
matter of taxonomy and category.
The problem of taxonomy, the relationship between the individual
and the category or categories it belongs to, is central to the study of
animals, and to animal studies, as it has been for cultural and discourse
studies, modernism, and philosophy in general. It is a form of the
ancient problem of the one and the many. What is the one? What is truly
indivisible? Presented with examples of the one, of any entity conceived
as unique and indivisible, human inquiry has tended to dissolve these
examples of seeming distinctness into the multiple and contingent.
Every thing is in fact many things. Deconstruction is a late twentieth-
century form of this impulse to break apart categories that are taken to
be essences. On the other hand, philosophy, particularly natural philoso-
phy, also likes to categorize and discover examples of unity in apparent
disunity. Recognizing patterns, seeing individual examples as part of
some larger group, is a particularly powerful kind of knowledge. A rock,
or tree, or bird can appear meaningless until we give it a name that iden-
tifies its kind (not just a bird but a gull, not just a gull but a herring gull,
and not just a herring gull but the one banded two years ago in Prov-
incetown). These categories can also appear to be a part of the physical
world, both in the sense that we have evolved to create taxonomies of
the natural world and that life itself depends on the ability of any living
individual to recognize members of categories: of the opposite sex, of
the same species, of dangerous species, of food, and so on.^37