54POEMS OF THE ANIMALallegorical, as not about animals at all, we insist on a kind of abyss
between vehicle and tenor. So too in thinking of the animal as strictly
other, we insist on a gulf between animal and human. We have always
known, however, that the category of the animal both excludes and
includes the human, that “man is the animal that must recognize itself as
human to be human,” as Giorgio Agamben has put it.^3 Indeed, Agamben
and Jacques Derrida have both argued that the construction of the cate-
gory of the animal as exclusionary—that is, a definition of the human as
distinct from the animal—has been at the center of the (failed) project
to create philosophical discourse. We can see this desire to separate
humanity from the animal everywhere; it is at once our collective fall,
as Paul Shepard and others have suggested, and a central tenet of Judeo-
Christian theology.^4 If humans are made in God’s image (an early and
powerful instance of anthropomorphism), the abyss between animals
and humans is the absence of divinity or the irretrievable distance from
it. Insisting on the category of the animal as other, as that natural phe-
nomenon from which we as a kind of supernatural phenomenon are
fundamentally different, reveals the category of the animal as primary.
Yet Derrida argues for our concurrent ability to dissolve category, in
part by imagining new categories. There are “only two types of dis-
course, two positions of knowledge... regarding the animal.... In the
first place there are those texts signed by people who have no doubt seen
observed, analyzed, reflected on the animal, but who have never been
seen by the animal. Their gaze has never intersected with that of an ani-
mal directed at them.... They neither wanted nor had the capacity to
draw any systematic consequence from the fact that an animal could,
facing them, look at them, clothed or naked, and in a word, without a
word, address them.”^5 This first category of discourse about the animal
necessarily sees the animal as other and will not recognize the face of
the animal as a face, as presenting some sense of individual being that
we can recognize as meriting moral standing. Allowing oneself to be
seen by an animal, as Derrida describes himself doing in his essay, is to
regard the act of being regarded and can allow one to recognize some-
thing of the subjectivity, distinctness, and essence of the other living
being. This “other category of discourse,” Derrida suggests, is largely