122THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRYDick is symbolic not of the individual but of the “anomalous,” which
is “neither an individual nor a species; it has only affects, it has neither
familiar or subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant characteris-
tics.”^3 However, the novel contradicts their narrative in other important
ways: Ahab doesn’t become whale but does become monomaniacal and
tyrannical (subjugating the rest of his crew) in his attempt to enact ven-
geance on the single animal whom he thinks bears malevolence toward
him. Moby Dick is Ahab’s singular opposite—a whale with a clearly
identifiable will and intent, who is more plausibly understood as acting to
protect his brethren. The whale’s agency ultimately defies Ahab’s desire
for vengeance.
For all their insistence on multiplicity, Deleuze and Guattari remain
bound to rather essentialist notions of the categories of human and ani-
mal. “What would a lone wolf be? Or a whale, a louse, a rat, a fly?... The
wolf is not fundamentally a characteristic or a certain number of char-
acteristics; it is a wolfing.... What we are saying is that every animal is
fundamentally a band, a pack. That it has pack modes, rather than char-
acteristics, even if further distinctions within these modes are called
for. It is at this point that the human being encounters the animal.
We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multi-
plicity.”^4 It is telling that the animal remains for them an abstraction,
made more specific only by referring to species. I have been suggesting
throughout the book, and will examine more carefully in this chapter,
that to see an animal as an individual is anomalous within the domi-
nant discourse about the animal. Deleuze and Guattari show how pow-
erful the resistance to the notion of the individual being is within certain
strains of animal studies, which tends to see valorization of the individ-
ual as a symptom of bourgeois sentimentality.^5 To recognize and give
ontological and moral status to a single animal does not require fetishiz-
ing or humanizing the animal, or insisting on a pure or ideal condition
of autonomy. It does not presuppose hierarchy. First and foremost, it
involves noting that whenever we see another creature, we see an indi-
vidual animal with its own “headlong life.” There are, in fact, lone wolves,
and we know, for instance, that elephants and chimpanzees mourn