POEMS OF THE ANIMAL55“found among those whose signatories are first and foremost poets and
prophets.”^6 I take this to mean that writers interested in the sentience,
subjectivity, or being of animals recognize that (until recently) this
interest necessarily excluded one from the central philosophical project.
More to the point, it also suggests the ability of poetry to foster and
reflect a kind of negative capability toward animals and to explore this
strange state of being both other and same, to be a category with and
without meaning.^7
While there are many types within the category of the animal (the
subject of the next chapter), in this chapter I am interested in the broad-
est of these abstractions, the category of the animal itself. While for Carl
Linnaeus animals formed one of two kingdoms of life (the other being
plants), animals are now defined by the biological sciences as a subgroup
of the domain of Eukarya, or those living beings with nucleated cells,
which includes the kingdoms of plants and fungi but excludes Bacteria
and Archaea (single-celled creatures with no nuclei). Of course, as mem-
bers of the animal kingdom humans are a part of this domain, though
as Tim Ingold argues, many of our contradictory attitudes toward non-
human creatures stem from our “propensity to switch back and forth
between two quite different approaches to the definition of animality:
as a kingdom, including humans; and as a state or condition, opposed
to humanity.”^8 As scientists discover more kinds of life on the planet, the
animal kingdom has actually become more confined, a smaller part of
the living stuff of the world. Nonetheless, the folk notion of what the ani-
mal is has actually not changed that much. We still think of animals as
living creatures distinguished from other organic entities by their abil-
ity to move and thus by their actual or apparent sentience. Aristotle, like
Linnaeus, recognized invertebrates like insects and mollusks as a kind
of animal and developed a hierarchy of classification based upon the
perceived complexity of the creature. Not surprisingly, those animals
that most concern us, whom we normally think of as exemplifying
the category, are mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and common
insects. Those animals that matter most, those we give the most consid-
eration, are those we can easily observe and are thus large enough to see
without optical aids. They are animals we admire and fear, live with,