2083. POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE- James Dickey, The Whole Motion: Collected Poems (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press, 1992), 273–75. - Paul Muldoon, Poems, 1968–1998 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 22.
4. THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY - Les Murray, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 407–8.
- Tom Regan argues that “to be the subject-of-a-life is to be an individual whose life is
characterized by... beliefs and desires[,] perception, memory, and a sense of the
future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of plea-
sure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pur-
suit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual
welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them.” Regan, The
Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 243. - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 240, 244. - Ibid., 239.
- In another example of the broad resistance to thinking about the individuality of
animals, Aaron Gross argues in his introduction to Animals and the Human Imagi-
nation that “the challenge of animal studies and of this volume is to think anew and
in an interdisciplinary manner about the kind of being that members of the species
Homo sapiens are and the kind of being represented by every other species.” Think-
ing about the animal, according to Gross, is always a way of thinking about the
human, and always too at the level of the species rather than the individual. Yet he
also argues that animal studies challenges us “to rethink our identity in the most
radical sense by refusing to assume from the outset the usual categories of thought.”
Gross, “Introduction and Overview,” in Animals and the Human Imagination, ed.
Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 3. - The tension between seeing animals as individuals and as groups is reproduced in
ideologies having to do with the human. It is also reproduced by debates about
the mechanisms of evolution, where interestingly the dominant view is that natural
selection operates on individual animals rather than on groups. See Stephen Pinker,
“The False Allure of Group Selection,” Edge, June 18, 2012, https: //www .edge .org. - Ja c qu e s D e r r id a , The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans.
David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 9. For an explicit and
forceful critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming animal, see Donna
Haraway’s When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008),
26–29. - Derrida explicitly tackles the topic of Deleuze’s insistence that animals cannot have
individuality in his transcribed lecture “The Transcendental ‘Stupidity’ (‘Betise’) of
Man and the Becoming-Animal According to Deleuze,” in Derrida, Deleuze, Psycho-
analysis, ed. Gabriele Schwab (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 35–60.