HARAWAY CONTRA DELEUZE & GUATTARI

THE QUESTION OF THE ANIMALS

Linda Williams

Abstract

This article is essentially a brief reflection on time in the context of

Donna Haraway’s recent work When Species Meet (2008), and in partic-
ular her rejection of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming ani-
mal’ in their A Thousand Plateaus—Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987).
The exception Haraway takes to Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to
human-animal relations is considered as indicative of wider fissures
in contemporary critical theory that have failed to respond to the glo-
bal crisis of the sixth earth extinction event. Yet there are also points of
confluence in their respective positions that provide the potential for
a more coherent politics of eco-critique.

Keywords Animals, philosophy, eco-critique, climate change,

extinction

~
The ‘question of the animal’ Derrida contended, can no longer be seen as
a ‘singularity’, or the question of a singular bestial other to what is prop-
erly human (2008). Derrida’s compelling account of the inherent logo-
centric violence in the sweeping singularity of the term ‘animal’ as a sign
for all that is essentially sub-human, has required a critical reconfigura-
tion of the term ‘animal’, so that animal differences should be recognised
as a heterogeneous multiplicity.1 The question, then, should be put as a
question of the animals, and of the place of the human in that question.
Further to Derrida’s recognition of animal heterogeneity, a central focus
of this article is Haraway’s reflection on her personal relationship with
an individual Australian sheepdog, recounted in her most recent book
When Species Meet (2008), which is considered insofar as it is a relation-
ship that addresses the vast differences in the lives of animals, as against
the ’animal’ as such, and the precarious status of those differences on a
global scale.
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming animal’ on the other
hand, a romantically conceived ‘primordial’ call for a human reconnec-
tion with difference through the authentic becoming of animal plurality in
the wild animal pack, in this article is considered in relation to the need
for a recognition of the quotidian conditions of urban life, including the

42 Communication, Politics & Culture 42.1 (2009)

The Question of the Animals 43

common relations with individual dogs or cats, because in the long run
it is precisely those urban conditions that will determine the viability of
the wilderness, and the wild pack itself.
So Haraway’s focus on one animal, and Deleuze and Guattari’s focus
on the animal pack, will be measured against the general ‘question of the
animals’, a question, so to speak, of all animals, and their relation to the
human.
Since both the viability of wild animal packs and the human concept
of animals as multiple differences appear to me to be in a state of global
crisis, this article is also essentially a brief reflection on time in relation to
the contemporary cultural and critical field. Based on the historiography
of the longue durée, it takes as its premises the view that an interdependent
relation with the non-human world is a necessary, and ultimately, suffi-
cient condition for the human historical process. On this view of human/
non-human interdependence, temporal shifts in the non-human world
are accorded a sense of agency in human history. Moreover, while non-
human animals are recognised as our most immediate form of contact
with the non-human world in the Darwinian historicisation of nature,
historiographies based on an acknowledgement of our interdependence
with the non-human world also involve a consideration of the environ-
mental context as a whole. Thus such long-term histories may include
reflections on the deep-time stories told by palaeological approaches to
geological strata, to ice cores, fossils, and the genetic codes which have
hitherto been regarded as largely irrelevant to the analysis of contem-
porary cultures. Archaeological, or phylogenetic approaches to contem-
porary social relations draw on an essentially materialist ontology, or at
least on historical analyses that resist dualist separations of mind and
matter, and it is from such a position that I want to consider Haraway’s
most recent work on companion species, in particular her critique of
the Deleuzean notion of ‘becoming animal’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987). Furthermore, I
want to measure this recent discussion against the massive global shift in
species extinction, a global shift that needs to be pictured alongside other
comparable events in the deep-time history of the earth.
Earth systems science has pointed to five major extinction events in
what we are inclined to call pre-history. Meteorites colliding with the
earth caused such major global events, along with massive volcanic erup-
tions changing climatic conditions, and other shifts in climate change.
The first event, which occurred around 440 million years ago, resulted
in massive extinctions of marine animals. The most recent event took
place approximately 65 million years ago, and led to the extinction of
around two-thirds of all creatures of that era, including the dinosaurs.
While extensive time frames such as these are clearly difficult to imagine
in relation to human temporal values, for the purposes of this argument
44 Communication, Politics & Culture 42.1 (2009)

it is nonetheless crucial to recognise that after each of these five global

extinction events, it took millions of years for bio-diversity to redevelop.
We are now entering a period of the sixth global extinction event,
though this time it is largely androgenic causes that have altered the
environment to the extent that the IUCN, or the International Union for
the Conservation of Nature, estimates that extinction rates are now 1,000–
11,000 times higher than they have been for the last 60 million years (Bail-
lie et al. 2004). Ecocide, as many palaeontologists have recognised, is one
of the familiar unintended consequences of human social development,
though we have never before confronted such accelerated consequences
on a global scale (Broswimmer 2001).
It is the recent contraction and intensification of temporal change
in global bio-diversity that provides the context for this reconsideration
of Haraway and the work of Deleuze and Guattari, since their work on
human-animal relations is connected to the question of significant insta-
bility in the contemporary global condition. That is to say, in relation
to histories on the human scale, it is by no means an exaggeration to
describe human-animal relations to be in a state of historically unprec-
edented crisis. In the burgeoning international academic field of human-
animal studies, Haraway and Deleuze/ Guattari are highly regarded and
frequently cited.2 Yet the apparent critical division in their work, recently
highlighted by Haraway, represents a recent reconfiguration of a deeper
critical division between the positions taken in eco-critique: such as the
deep-ecologists’ suspicion of the humanist project (which bears a loose
connection to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming animal’) and the call to
human compassion characteristic of animal rights activism, (closer to
Haraway’s position in the recognition of the human responsibilities in
human-animal relations).3 Such divisions do not augur well for a con-
solidated political response to either the role of domesticated species in
ecological governance, or the urgent requirement for a global constitu-
ency responsive to the rapid erosion of species diversity.
Haraway’s critical dispute with Deleuze and Guattari is essentially
founded on questions of degree in measuring the relations of interde-
pendence between the human and the non-human world, along with
differing perspectives on the most effective means to develop aware-
ness of such processes of interdependence. Moreover, just below the
surface of the dispute there are also a range of possibilities suggested by
questions of post-humanism, or perhaps more accurately post-anthro-
pocentrism. Furthermore, the rhetoric involved in Haraway’s rejec-
tion of Deleuze and Guattari’s response to the question of the animal
suggests the inchoate presence of another critical and political dispute
that recurs, sometimes with remarkable enmity, between animal rights
activists and deep ecologists. In a country such as Australia for example,
with its relatively recent history of colonisation, such disputes are fre-
The Question of the Animals 45

quently central to the highly contested politics of ecological governance.

Hence measures such as the protection of vulnerable native species by
the deliberate culling and intended eradication of post-colonial animals
that have become feral, while welcomed by many environmentalists,
is rigorously opposed by animal rights activists. For the animal rights
activists, the capacity of animals to suffer, and the consequent moral
imperative to limit or prevent this to whatever extent possible, applies
as much to Australian post-colonial ‘feral’ animals such as horses, don-
keys, pigs and buffalo as it does to native species, or for that matter,
to other types of post-colonial animals such as dogs or cats. For many
environmentalists on the other hand, there can be no place in the fragile
indigenous biosphere for the feral creatures of European colonialism if
vulnerable native species have any chance of survival, and hence there
is a post-colonial ethical imperative to restore and preserve what we
have come close to destroying.
The politics of nature underpinning Haraway’s dispute with Deleuze
and Guattari then, though apparently ‘merely’ theoretical, are in fact
indicative of deeper conflicts that arise in the everyday context of practi-
cal ecological governance. Yet a closer scrutiny of the dispute also reveals
common ground in their positions that calls for renewed emphasis if we
are to develop a more effective general theory of eco-critique.
On the one hand, in her most recent work in When Species Meet (2008),
Haraway speaks for the pressing need to recognise the importance of
our relationships with familiar companion species such as dogs. Thus
she empasises the importance of acknowledging the historical role of the
dog in shaping human groups or reconfiguring human subjectivity, and
even, at least in passing, the potential of canine companion animals to
provide a conduit of connection with other non-human species. Beyond
that, however, her recognition of the diversity of species that may be
regarded as companions to the human is very thin, and the rapid expo-
nential rise in loss of species on a global scale, arguably the most acute
point of crisis ‘when species meet’, is barely acknowledged.
Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, writing in 1987 when the
ecological crisis was less widely understood, speak for the call of the
wild, of an anti-Heideggerian ‘becoming animal’, and Nietzschean leap
across the abyss of modernity to the visceral authenticity of a self in a
perpetual process of becoming. The radical reconfiguration of subjectiv-
ity, the untamed human, is not a scenario likely to hold much sway over
the idea of the animal amongst the ‘masses’ of late modernity, though it
is precisely the dominant figurations of other species in popular culture
that will ultimately determine their fate. And Haraway, at least, does not
demur from a populist perspective, though in places she reveals a sense
of intimacy with the animal that is closer to Deleuze and Guattari than
she appears to recognise.
46 Communication, Politics & Culture 42.1 (2009)

Haraway was first known as a highly regarded feminist theorist, and

historian and philosopher of science.4 Since the early nineties she has
retained that reputation, and has also become much more widely known
for ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991). In this work Haraway articulated an
essentially tripartite model of the cyborg, which emphasised an erosion
of the barriers between the human body, the animal body, and prosthetic
technology. Several years later however, Haraway conceded that this
model had been selectively reconstructed by many of her readers as an
unreflective celebration of a technologically enhanced prosthetic subjec-
tivity (2004). Perhaps it was this selective misconception of her work,
that effectively marginalised the animal dimension to human subjectiv-
ity by favouring high-tech prosthetic subjectivity, that prompted her to
publish The Companion Species Manifesto in 2003, a slim volume in which
companion species and their roles in human societies, such as the ancient
human-canine relationship, were seen as keys to wider ecological ques-
tions. Hence, for example, Haraway shows how the introduction of Great
Pyrenees livestock guardian dogs as companion species on farms in Cal-
ifornia and Europe has enabled the reintroduction of keystone preda-
tors such as wolves or bears, thus extending grassroots notions of the
taxonomical boundaries identifying companionable species, as opposed
to those regarded as threats or vermin, and hence legitimate targets for
extermination.
Dogs are central to Haraway’s sense of the human place in the
world; they are part of the human family, they have rights, and as such
are demeaned if treated as surrogate children (2003, p. 33). On the other
hand, they are to be treated differently to other human adults. Perhaps
it is not going too far to say that, for Haraway, along with rights, dogs
also have responsibilities, since Haraway clearly admires the work of
animal trainer Vicki Hearne for example, an open opponent of animal
rights activists who advocated mutual discipline as a guide to successful
human-animal relations (Hearne 1986). For Hearne, it is animal training
as such that enables dogs to understand humans well which, as Haraway
quite accurately points out, has been crucial to their survival in a world
dominated by human values.
Though Haraway or Hearne do not say so, this same principle of dis-
ciplined understanding could apply to all species that have been domes-
ticated and have been indispensable to human history and the develop-
ment of human subjectivity. The early domestication of animals from the
primary relationship with wolves for example in the last ice age, from at
least 20,000 BCE, and hence to dogs, from at least 12,000 BCE, has been
crucial to human history. From the domestication of sheep, goats, cattle
and pigs for food and clothing from 9,000–7,000 BCE, and the oxen and
buffalo used as draught animals from around 4,000 BCE, early agrarian
societies flourished. This was significantly augmented with the huge mil-
The Question of the Animals 47

itary advantages arising from the domestication of horses around 3,000

BCE, along with camels, silk moths and the ass, and the apparent domes-
tication of the cat, guardian of the grain-stores, around the same time.
These companion species, and a few others domesticated more recently,
are among the least remarked agents of the process of civilisation. In the
longue durée of human history, however, human-animal relations are
clearly constitutive of human subjectivity.
There are various positions taken on the extent to which the domes-
tication of species has been a mutually beneficial arrangement. The work
of Juliet Clutton-Brock (1989, 1999) has provided a substantial body of
scholarship on the zooarcheological basis of this relationship. Others
such as Stephen Budiansky (1999) take more unorthodox positions, such
as Budiansky’s claim that animal domestication is far from an exploita-
tive selection purely advantageous to humans, and is rather a highly
successful evolutionary strategy of mutual benefit to both humans and
animals. By this logic, however, the fate of other species less amenable to
humans, such as the rat for example, which has developed a highly suc-
cessful parasitical relationship with humans, would be less advantaged
than a bull, castrated, de-horned and led by an iron ring cut through its
muzzle. Conversely, it is difficult to imagine the evolutionary advantage
in the degraded instrumentalisation of sentient animals in factory farms,
since symbiosis requires at least some measure of mutual benefit.
Nonetheless, despite Budiansky’s assertion of mutual benefit, with
the possible exception of certain carnivores such as the dog, or the cat,
along with symbiotic parasites, the species most suitable as instruments
of the human will to the mastery of nature, despite their considerable
suffering in human hands, are the creatures most likely to survive.
Haraway’s most recent work is replete with the acknowledgement of
the crucial contemporary role of animals and its deep historical legacies,
and her temporal and historiographical models are, in this sense, not too
far removed from those of Deleuze and Guattari. That is to say, Haraway
is conscious of the phylogenetic legacies of the animal in the present,
just as Deleuze, influenced by the seventeenth-century works of Leibniz
and the contemporary writing of Michel Serres, sees glimpses of ancient
time folding and unfolding in complex, non-linear configurations in con-
temporary time and space (Deleuze 2004). Moreover, both Haraway and
Deleuze and Guattari refute a transcendent realm of the divine beyond
earthly time and space, in favour of the immanence of creativity rooted
in matter.
Yet it is important to recognise that Haraway’s eye is also firmly
focused on the commonplace familiarity of contemporary urban life, and
there is little doubt that her Australian sheepdog Cayenne Pepper is the
star of the book, to the extent that Haraway compares the dog with affec-
tion (if also with a troubling lack of irony) to a ‘Klingon Warrior Princess’.
48 Communication, Politics & Culture 42.1 (2009)

Other stories of human-animal relations are also discussed in the text,

such as the story of the devalued and utterly debased lives of chickens
in delocalised meat industries, popular entertainment provided by wild
marine mammals equipped with video cameras, or even dog-breeding
websites as gateways for amateur genealogists to understand the need
for bio-diversity and species at risk. Conspicuously absent, however, is
a sense of the crisis at the points ‘where species meet’ on a global scale,
and of the almost overwhelming potential for loss we are on the brink of
realising.
Presumably aimed at the general reader, an aim worthy of respect
in the context of eco-critique, the book is illustrated with unequivocally
lame cartoons, and is generally old-fashioned American, or folksy and
homely in style despite the odd, rather limited readings of contemporary
art, and the unexpected, alarming admission of pleasure she gets from
her dog’s tongue kisses. This last refers to a level of intimacy certainly
closer to the Deleuzean ideal of ‘becoming animal’ than the aspirations of
suburban dog owners. Nonetheless, Haraway is the great defender of the
quotidian necessity of human-animal relations, and there is a great deal
to recommend this and her insistence that cross-disciplinary human-ani-
mal studies are an important new field of academic research. Haraway
has been a consistent advocate for the need to respect the otherness of
animals, which at first makes her antipathy to Deleuze and Guattari’s
rejection of the anthropomorphic sentiments of pet-keeping all the more
difficult to understand.
Haraway cites Deleuze and Guattari’s reflection on the Oedipal ani-
mal of patrilineal capitalist relations in the chapter ‘Becoming Animal’
as good reason to regard Deleuze and Guattari as the enemy of the crea-
tive possibilities that arise when species meet. In choosing to align them-
selves with the romantic literary vitalism of Melville, or D.H Lawrence,
for example, Deleuze and Guattari wrote of their distaste for the domes-
tication of both animal and human:
Ahab’s Moby Dick is not like the little cat or dog owned by an
elderly woman who honours and cherishes it. Lawrence’s becom-
ing-tortoise has nothing to do with a sentimental or domestic
relation…but the objection is raised against Lawrence ‘Your tor-
toises are not real!’ and he answers: ‘Possibly, but my becoming
is…even and especially if you have no way of judging it, because
you are just little house dogs’ (Deleuze & Guattari (1987, p. 244)
cited in Haraway 2008, p. 30).
And thus for Deleuze and Guattari, while the unfettered literary creativ-
ity of Lawrence’s imaginative ‘becoming’ the tortoise of which he writes
is to be celebrated, little pet house dogs are relegated to a metaphor for
the bathetic picture of nature constructed by the regressive minds of
commonplace bourgeois domesticity.
The Question of the Animals 49

But this infuriates Haraway, who remarks:

The old, female, small, dog- and cat- loving; these are who and
what must be vomited out by those who will become-animal.
Despite the keen competition, I am not sure I can find in philoso-
phy a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging, incuriosity about
animals, and horror at the ordinariness of flesh, here covered by
the alibi of an anti-Oedipal and anti-capitalist project. It took some
nerve for Deleuze and Guattari to write about becoming woman
just a few pages later. It is almost enough to make me go out and
buy a toy poodle for my next agility dog (2008, p. 30).
Haraway is certainly aware that despite the possibly ineluctable human
tendency toward anthropomorphism, any human/non-human animal
relation has the capacity to alert us to an awareness of alterity, and in
this regard she approves of Derrida’s reflections on non-human other-
ness and shared human-animal responsiveness when he writes of his
companion cat.5
Further, I would maintain that there is substantial evidence to sug-
gest that the rise of companion animals as part of the Western family was
coeval with a general raising of the threshold of intolerance towards vio-
lence shown to other animals, or at least insofar as that violence remained
visible (Williams 2006). So Haraway’s sense that the development of
mutual respect between human and dog was constitutive, at least in part,
of the gradual development of a more extensive social respect for ani-
mal alterity is well grounded. And this gives substance to her critique of
Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of modern social relations as completely
alienated from non-human animals, and a capitalist form of subjectivity
that remains utterly insensible to the non-human world on which it is
dependent. The dumb subject who, for Deleuze and Guattari appears
to represent ‘the masses’, for Haraway is a subject that communicates
quite regularly with non-human alterity, if only in daily conversations
with the family pet. What really gives vehemence to her rejection of the
Deleuzean concept of ‘becoming animal’, however, is not only its incho-
ate Nietzschean romanticism and full-blown contempt for the world of
bourgeois domesticity, but also Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the
wolf pack as the transformative mythological figuration that represents
the political transgression of the genealogies of humanism and capital-
ism. In Deleuze’ and Guattari’s phrase, the wolf pack offers a deterritori-
alisation of existing power relations.
But Haraway knows the lore of the wolf pack well enough; as a keen
observer of its alpha animals and its fierce hierarchies and deep loyalties,
she recognises certain similarities between canine and human groups.
Since for Haraway the legacy of the wolf is important in our own time,
she is angered when she takes Deleuze and Guattari literally at their
word when they reject, as they put it, ‘individual animals, family pets,
50 Communication, Politics & Culture 42.1 (2009)

sentimental Oedipal animals each with its own petty history’. Moreover,
in my view, Haraway is justified in detecting nuances of the boys-own
Tarzan fantasies in the Deleuzean derision of the apparently sedentary
regimes of the hearth: the small world of women and children, along
with their general contempt for the common relations of everyday life
from which Nietzsche too was hardly immune.
Yet it also seems to me that Haraway has not seen certain points of
confluence between her own views and those of Deleuze and Guattari,
especially in her own resistances to the model of the family pet as a petty
substitute for meaningful relations with other humans, and her insist-
ent respect for animal difference. More significantly, Haraway does not
respond well to the more general Deleuzean project of a poetic call for
a creative shift from the anthropocentric spatio-temporal world, into a
becoming conscious, and a becoming active in human relations with a non-
human world conceived as a perpetual process of interaction, flux and
communication.
Apart from Deleuze and Guattari’s meditation on the vast sedimen-
tary shifts in geology and the biosemiotics of organic life in the third
chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, the chapter on ‘Becoming Animal’ basi-
cally cites three major forms of human-animal relations. The first is the
familiar form of the pet that Deleuze and Guattari regard with con-
tempt, a view with which as we have seen Haraway takes exception,
yet there are also two further kinds of relations with animals other than
those Deleuze and Guattari regard as so limited by domestic or familial
relations. Their second form, on which Haraway does not comment, is
found in the group of animals we ascribe with significant attributes: that
is, either within their structural qualities as genus, or their mythic, arche-
typal qualities. Animal mythologies are certainly highly complex figura-
tions casting a range of speculative thought and feeling across the spaces
between the human and non-human worlds. A process which in one
way or another always alludes to the interdependencies of the human
and non-human, if only at the level of imaginative affects.
In certain cultural figurations such as the classical figure of Orpheus,
St Francis in his sermon to the birds, or in Nietzsche’s figure of Zarathus-
tra, a magically lucid form of dialogue takes place between human and
animal. Yet this always implies an immense sacrifice on the part of the
human, which is required in order to traverse the chasm of ontological
difference. The human, according to Zarathustra, a figure whose shadow
recurs in the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, is an unstable historical
figuration:
Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope
across an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way.
A dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stop-
ping (Nietzsche 1885, p. 126).
The Question of the Animals 51

And it is necessary to speak to the animals, or to recognise the animal in

man before setting out on the quest for knowledge:
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what
can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.
I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under,
for they are those who cross over.
I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason
to go under and be a sacrifice, but who sacrifice themselves for
the earth, that the earth may some day become the overman’s
(Nietzsche 1885, p. 127) (emphasis in original).
Deleuze and Guattari’s third group are described as ‘pack, or affect ani-
mals that form a multiplicity, a becoming’, and this, as we have seen, is
the wolf pack Haraway claims is mystified and distorted in ‘Becoming
Animal’.
So our relations with animals, according to Deleuze and Guattari,
are most clearly evident in three ways: our relationships with pets; in
the magical dialogues we have had with animals that, as we have seen,
often bear nuances of mythologies of human sacrifice; and in the poten-
tial of our becoming part of the primordial pack. Mythologies of human
sacrifice have powerful legacies in many cultures, and even the sacrifice
of some dearly held anthropocentric values is a potent enough idea to
remain central to contemporary social movements such as deep ecol-
ogy, but this is not an idea Deleuze and Guattari develop, or one which
draws commentary from Haraway. And it is important to recognise
that Deleuze and Guattari offer three models of human-animal relations,
rather than the two to which Haraway takes exception.
Given Deleuze and Guattari’s undisguised contempt for pet keeping,
and Haraway’s insight into its misogynistic nuances, it is surprising that
Deleuze and Guattari actually conclude by attempting to combine the
three models into one. They do, after all ask ‘cannot any animal be treated
in all three ways?’, and then follow this question with examples such as
how even non-domesticated species such as cheetahs, or semi-domesti-
cated animals like elephants, can be treated as pets, or, as they put it, as
‘my little beast’. Conversely, say Deleuze and Guattari, ‘even the cat, even
the dog, can be treated in the mode of the pack, or swarm’. Thus,
Any animal is or can be a pack, but to varying degrees of voca-
tion that make it easier or harder to discover the multiplicity, or
multiplicity grade an animal contains…School, bands, herds, are
not inferior social forms; they are affects and powers, involutions
that grip every animal in a becoming just as powerful as that of
the human being with the animal (1987, p. 241).
It is this dimension of their work, the affects and powers of animals
as ‘(not inferior) social forms’ (my italics) that Haraway does not address
as a dimension imbued with potential forms of confluence with many
52 Communication, Politics & Culture 42.1 (2009)

of her own insights on human-animal relations. Moreover, for Deleuze

and Guattari, ‘becoming animal’ is not about imitating the animal, but
becoming aware of its proximity, or rather as they put it, a becoming
that indicates as rigorously as possible a zone of proximity (1987, p. 273)
(emphasis added),6 and there can be little doubt that for Deleuze these
zones span the spatio-temporal life of the earth. They have always been
global, and as such, have significant implications for the contemporary
processes of globalisation.
Essentially, it seems to me that Deleuze and Guattari’s project is
important for the ways in which it makes visible the very zones of prox-
imity we are rapidly losing the ability to recognise. In the contempo-
rary context of mass species extinction however, as these zones become
increasingly opaque, Deleuze and Guattari’s question of their accessibil-
ity pivots on the question of the human capacity to recognise itself as
one territoriality within a global field of environmental complexity and
potentiality.
It is as if Deleuze and Guattari position themselves as best they can
from the outside, beyond the hearth, looking towards us in ever-increas-
ing zones of anthropocentric abstraction, a position from which they
write poetically of deep-time earth histories, of our biosemiotic origins
and our biosemiotic zones of proximity. Haraway, conversely, situates
knowledge from the inside, from the human hearth, and speaks about our
meeting with alterity in the intense familial relations between human and
dog, occasionally looking out towards the species that have not shared
that history. As we have seen, these two positions have much in common
with the focus on geo-politics amongst deep ecologists, and the focus on
our relations with animals as individual agents found in animal rights
activists. They are positions that have a direct bearing on practical issues
of ecological governance, so any common ground must be seen as a fertile
means of building towards a more coherent politics of eco-critique.
Both Haraway and Deleuze and Guattari understand how human
subjectivity is formed by the deep genealogies of the earth, and yet there
is a theoretical point of divergence between them that reveals a fateful
intransigence in reading what in Deleuzean terms is a particular becom-
ing intense in the foldings and unfoldings of time, an occlusion in human
becoming in the context of the sixth earth extinction event.
On the time scale of natural history, extinction events are not unprec-
edented; but on a human temporal scale we have approached a pivotal
point, not only in the Malthusian curve of human population expansion,
but in the recognition of a new form of becoming that we might take from
Heidegger’s (1962) notion of the animal as a condition of lack and onto-
logical impoverishment. For Heidegger it was the animal that was ‘poor
in world’, a view founded on ‘the question of the animal’ as a singu-
lar term for all those sentient beings that might be regarded as less than
The Question of the Animals 53

human. This article has attempted an enquiry that moves away from a
singular notion of the less than human, towards the heterogeneity of the
non-human world and ‘the question of the animals’, and to reflect on
that question in response to the sixth major earth extinction event. Which
is to say, at a time when we are now slowly coming to the ironic realisa-
tion that it is the human animal that is becoming poor in world.

Notes
1
Derrida (2008, pp. 32–3) sees the logocentric violence in the reductive
singularity of the ‘question of the animal’ as entirely characteristic of the
Western philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Heidegger.
2
References to Haraway are widespread in animal studies texts, such as the
book of essays edited by Carey Wolfe (2003) where Deleuze and Guattari’s
‘Becoming Animal’ is also cited. Haraway’s work is also respected in the
field of eco-critique: see, for example, Val Plumwood (2002). Deleuze and
Guattari are frequently cited in the work of animal studies scholars in the
UK such as Steve Baker (2000) and Jonathan Burt (2006).
3
For an account of these two movements see Barbara Noske (2004).
4
See for example Haraway (1988, 1989).
5
In When Species Meet Haraway discusses Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore
I Am (first published in French in 1999, first published in English in 2002)
before her criticism of Deleuze and Gauttari. Haraway acknowledges
Derrida’s awareness that ‘Capability (play) and incapability (suffering) are
both all about mortality and finitude’ shared by human and non-human
animals (2008, p. 311: n. 27) (emphasis in original). She is less impressed,
however, by the way Derrida is embarrassed to stand naked before the
gaze of his little cat.
6
Brian Massumi, Deleuze’s translator, notes that proximity is his translation
of Deleuze’s voisinage, a word drawn from set theory, for which the cor-
responding term in English is ‘neighbourhood’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987,
p. 542, n. 55).

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