THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY123individual deaths. Packs themselves are comprised of many single
bodies.^6
On the one hand, resistance to seeing animals as individual is a con-
sequence of historic anthropocentrism that understands animals as
part of a vast and inferior collective that exists on the planet only to
serve human needs. On the other hand, within animal studies, as
Deleuze and Guattari show, this resistance is also the result of project-
ing onto the conception of the animal contemporary ideological debates
about the value of the community as opposed to that of the individual.
Turning the animal into a symbol of collectivity is fundamentally
anthropocentric. As Jacques Derrida and animal rights philosophers
have argued, moral concern for the animal itself must include a regard
for the single animal. Thus, implicitly rebutting Deleuze and Guat-
tari, Derrida begins his seminal essay “The Animal That Therefore I
Am” by describing how he becomes aware of his pet cat “as this irre-
placeable living being that one day enters my space, enters this place
where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can
ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an exis-
tence that refuses to be conceptualized.”^7 For all the questions and eli-
sions that Derrida’s essay reveals and dwells upon, he focuses here on a
moment of presence, the certainty of the being of the individual ani-
mal, his companion.^8 The creature simultaneously forces itself on his
awareness and begins Derrida’s meditation on the vexed boundary
lines between human and animal as categories of thought. While pet
ownership may well be a bourgeois indulgence, it is nonetheless true
that it is frequently through companion animals that we begin to fully
ponder the nature of individual nonhuman animal lives, as is true of
Derrida too. We recognize their agency, their will and desires. We
grieve their deaths. Unless we believe that the process of domesticat-
ing pets produces animal self-consciousness and a biologically different
kind of animal, it seems imperative for us to see the individuality of
those animals we are most familiar with not as extraordinary but as evi-
dence of individual agency widespread in the animal world. Whether
we pay attention to the individual animal at the beginning, middle, or