2009 Haraway Contra Deleuze Guattari-libre

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42 Communication, Politics & Culture 42.1 (2009)

HARAWAY CONTRA DELEUZE & GUATTARI THE QUESTION OF THE ANIMALS

Linda Williams

Abstract

This article is essentially a brief reflection on time in the context ofDonna 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 tohuman-animal relations is considered as indicative of wider fissuresin contemporary critical theory that have failed to respond to the global crisis of the sixth earth extinction event. Yet there are also points ofconfluence in their respective positions that provide the potential fora more coherent politics of eco-critique.

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

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The ‘question of the animal’ Derrida contended, can no longer be seen asa ‘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 signfor 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 aquestion of the animals, and of the place of the human in that question.Further to Derrida’s recognition of animal heterogeneity, a central focusof this article is Haraway’s reflection on her personal relationship withan individual Australian sheepdog, recounted in her most recent bookWhen Species Meet (2008), which is considered insofar as it is a relation-ship that addresses the vast differences in the lives of animals, as againstthe ’animal’ as such, and the precarious status of those differences on aglobal 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 inthe wild animal pack, in this article is considered in relation to the needfor a recognition of the quotidian conditions of urban life, including the



The Question of the Animals 43

common relations with individual dogs or cats, because in the long runit 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 theanimals’, a question, so to speak, of all animals, and their relation to thehuman.

Since both the viability of wild animal packs and the human conceptof animals as multiple differences appear to me to be in a state of globalcrisis, this article is also essentially a brief reflection on time in relation tothe contemporary cultural and critical field. Based on the historiography

of the longue durée, it takes as its premises the view that an interdependentrelation 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 worldare accorded a sense of agency in human history. Moreover, while non-human animals are recognised as our most immediate form of contactwith the non-human world in the Darwinian historicisation of nature,historiographies based on an acknowledgement of our interdependencewith 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 togeological strata, to ice cores, fossils, and the genetic codes which havehitherto 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 atleast on historical analyses that resist dualist separations of mind andmatter, and it is from such a position that I want to consider Haraway’smost recent work on companion species, in particular her critique ofthe Deleuzean notion of ‘becoming animal’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987). Furthermore, Iwant to measure this recent discussion against the massive global shift inspecies extinction, a global shift that needs to be pictured alongside othercomparable events in the deep-time history of the earth.

Earth systems science has pointed to five major extinction events inwhat we are inclined to call pre-history. Meteorites colliding with theearth 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, resultedin massive extinctions of marine animals. The most recent event took

place approximately 65 million years ago, and led to the extinction ofaround two-thirds of all creatures of that era, including the dinosaurs.While extensive time frames such as these are clearly difficult to imaginein relation to human temporal values, for the purposes of this argument




it is nonetheless crucial to recognise that after each of these five globalextinction 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 theenvironment to the extent that the IUCN, or the International Union forthe 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 oneof the familiar unintended consequences of human social development,though we have never before confronted such accelerated consequenceson a global scale (Broswimmer 2001).

It is the recent contraction and intensification of temporal changein global bio-diversity that provides the context for this reconsiderationof Haraway and the work of Deleuze and Guattari, since their work onhuman-animal relations is connected to the question of significant insta-

bility in the contemporary global condition. That is to say, in relationto histories on the human scale, it is by no means an exaggeration todescribe 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 andfrequently cited.2 Yet the apparent critical division in their work, recently

highlighted by Haraway, represents a recent reconfiguration of a deepercritical division between the positions taken in eco-critique: such as thedeep-ecologists’ suspicion of the humanist project (which bears a looseconnection to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming animal’) and the call tohuman compassion characteristic of animal rights activism, (closer toHaraway’s position in the recognition of the human responsibilities inhuman-animal relations).3 Such divisions do not augur well for a con-solidated political response to either the role of domesticated species inecological 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 essentiallyfounded on questions of degree in measuring the relations of interde-pendence between the human and the non-human world, along withdiffering perspectives on the most effective means to develop aware-ness of such processes of interdependence. Moreover, just below thesurface of the dispute there are also a range of possibilities suggested byquestions 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 disputethat recurs, sometimes with remarkable enmity, between animal rightsactivists and deep ecologists. In a country such as Australia for example,with its relatively recent history of colonisation, such disputes are fre-




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 animalsthat have become feral, while welcomed by many environmentalists,is rigorously opposed by animal rights activists. For the animal rightsactivists, the capacity of animals to suffer, and the consequent moralimperative to limit or prevent this to whatever extent possible, appliesas 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 manyenvironmentalists on the other hand, there can be no place in the fragile

indigenous biosphere for the feral creatures of European colonialism ifvulnerable native species have any chance of survival, and hence thereis a post-colonial ethical imperative to restore and preserve what wehave come close to destroying.

The politics of nature underpinning Haraway’s dispute with Deleuzeand Guattari then, though apparently ‘merely’ theoretical, are in factindicative of deeper conflicts that arise in the everyday context of practi-cal ecological governance. Yet a closer scrutiny of the dispute also revealscommon ground in their positions that calls for renewed emphasis if weare 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 ofour relationships with familiar companion species such as dogs. Thusshe empasises the importance of acknowledging the historical role of thedog in shaping human groups or reconfiguring human subjectivity, andeven, at least in passing, the potential of canine companion animals toprovide a conduit of connection with other non-human species. Beyondthat, however, her recognition of the diversity of species that may beregarded 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 acutepoint 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 thewild, of an anti-Heideggerian ‘becoming animal’, and Nietzschean leapacross the abyss of modernity to the visceral authenticity of a self in aperpetual process of becoming. The radical reconfiguration of subjectiv-ity, the untamed human, is not a scenario likely to hold much sway overthe idea of the animal amongst the ‘masses’ of late modernity, though itis precisely the dominant figurations of other species in popular culture

that will ultimately determine their fate. And Haraway, at least, does notdemur from a populist perspective, though in places she reveals a senseof intimacy with the animal that is closer to Deleuze and Guattari thanshe appears to recognise.




Haraway was first known as a highly regarded feminist theorist, andhistorian and philosopher of science.4 Since the early nineties she has

retained that reputation, and has also become much more widely knownfor ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991). In this work Haraway articulated anessentially tripartite model of the cyborg, which emphasised an erosionof the barriers between the human body, the animal body, and prosthetictechnology. Several years later however, Haraway conceded that thismodel had been selectively reconstructed by many of her readers as anunreflective 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 topublish The Companion Species Manifesto in 2003, a slim volume in whichcompanion species and their roles in human societies, such as the ancienthuman-canine relationship, were seen as keys to wider ecological ques-tions. Hence, for example, Haraway shows how the introduction of GreatPyrenees 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 thetaxonomical boundaries identifying companionable species, as opposedto 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 suchare demeaned if treated as surrogate children (2003, p. 33). On the otherhand, they are to be treated differently to other human adults. Perhapsit is not going too far to say that, for Haraway, along with rights, dogsalso have responsibilities, since Haraway clearly admires the work ofanimal trainer Vicki Hearne for example, an open opponent of animalrights activists who advocated mutual discipline as a guide to successful

human-animal relations (Hearne 1986). For Hearne, it is animal trainingas such that enables dogs to understand humans well which, as Harawayquite accurately points out, has been crucial to their survival in a worlddominated 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 theprimary relationship with wolves for example in the last ice age, from atleast 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, cattleand 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 agrariansocieties flourished. This was significantly augmented with the huge mil-




itary advantages arising from the domestication of horses around 3,000BCE, 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 thelongue durée of human history, however, human-animal relations areclearly 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 workof Juliet Clutton-Brock (1989, 1999) has provided a substantial body ofscholarship on the zooarcheological basis of this relationship. Others

such as Stephen Budiansky (1999) take more unorthodox positions, suchas Budiansky’s claim that animal domestication is far from an exploita-tive selection purely advantageous to humans, and is rather a highlysuccessful evolutionary strategy of mutual benefit to both humans andanimals. By this logic, however, the fate of other species less amenable tohumans, such as the rat for example, which has developed a highly suc-cessful parasitical relationship with humans, would be less advantagedthan a bull, castrated, de-horned and led by an iron ring cut through itsmuzzle. Conversely, it is difficult to imagine the evolutionary advantagein 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 instrumentsof the human will to the mastery of nature, despite their considerablesuffering in human hands, are the creatures most likely to survive.

Haraway’s most recent work is replete with the acknowledgement ofthe 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, Harawayis conscious of the phylogenetic legacies of the animal in the present, just as Deleuze, influenced by the seventeenth-century works of Leibnizand the contemporary writing of Michel Serres, sees glimpses of ancienttime folding and unfolding in complex, non-linear configurations in con-temporary time and space (Deleuze 2004). Moreover, both Haraway andDeleuze and Guattari refute a transcendent realm of the divine beyondearthly time and space, in favour of the immanence of creativity rootedin matter.

Yet it is important to recognise that Haraway’s eye is also firmly

focused on the commonplace familiarity of contemporary urban life, andthere is little doubt that her Australian sheepdog Cayenne Pepper is thestar 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’.




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 wildmarine mammals equipped with video cameras, or even dog-breedingwebsites as gateways for amateur genealogists to understand the needfor bio-diversity and species at risk. Conspicuously absent, however, isa 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 ofrealising.

Presumably aimed at the general reader, an aim worthy of respectin the context of eco-critique, the book is illustrated with unequivocally

lame cartoons, and is generally old-fashioned American, or folksy andhomely in style despite the odd, rather limited readings of contemporaryart, and the unexpected, alarming admission of pleasure she gets fromher dog’s tongue kisses. This last refers to a level of intimacy certainlycloser to the Deleuzean ideal of ‘becoming animal’ than the aspirations ofsuburban dog owners. Nonetheless, Haraway is the great defender of thequotidian necessity of human-animal relations, and there is a great dealto recommend this and her insistence that cross-disciplinary human-ani-mal studies are an important new field of academic research. Harawayhas been a consistent advocate for the need to respect the otherness of

animals, which at first makes her antipathy to Deleuze and Guattari’srejection of the anthropomorphic sentiments of pet-keeping all the moredifficult 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 anelderly woman who honours and cherishes it. Lawrence’s becom-ing-tortoise has nothing to do with a sentimental or domesticrelation…but the objection is raised against Lawrence ‘Your tor-toises are not real!’ and he answers: ‘Possibly, but my becomingis…even and especially if you have no way of judging it, becauseyou 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 writesis to be celebrated, little pet house dogs are relegated to a metaphor forthe bathetic picture of nature constructed by the regressive minds ofcommonplace bourgeois domesticity.




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 aboutanimals, and horror at the ordinariness of flesh, here covered bythe alibi of an anti-Oedipal and anti-capitalist project. It took somenerve 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 animalrelation has the capacity to alert us to an awareness of alterity, and inthis regard she approves of Derrida’s reflections on non-human other-ness and shared human-animal responsiveness when he writes of hiscompanion 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 wascoeval with a general raising of the threshold of intolerance towards vio-lence shown to other animals, or at least insofar as that violence remainedvisible (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 ofDeleuze and Guattari’s rejection of modern social relations as completelyalienated from non-human animals, and a capitalist form of subjectivitythat remains utterly insensible to the non-human world on which it isdependent. The dumb subject who, for Deleuze and Guattari appearsto represent ‘the masses’, for Haraway is a subject that communicatesquite regularly with non-human alterity, if only in daily conversations

with the family pet. What really gives vehemence to her rejection of theDeleuzean 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 thewolf pack as the transformative mythological figuration that representsthe 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 keenobserver 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 theirword when they reject, as they put it, ‘individual animals, family pets,




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 sedentaryregimes of the hearth: the small world of women and children, alongwith their general contempt for the common relations of everyday lifefrom which Nietzsche too was hardly immune.

Yet it also seems to me that Haraway has not seen certain points ofconfluence between her own views and those of Deleuze and Guattari,especially in her own resistances to the model of the family pet as a pettysubstitute 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 fora creative shift from the anthropocentric spatio-temporal world, into abecoming conscious, and a becoming active in human relations with a non-human world conceived as a perpetual process of interaction, flux andcommunication.

Apart from Deleuze and Guattari’s meditation on the vast sedimen-tary shifts in geology and the biosemiotics of organic life in the thirdchapter of A Thousand Plateaus, the chapter on ‘Becoming Animal’ basi-cally cites three major forms of human-animal relations. The first is thefamiliar 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 thanthose Deleuze and Guattari regard as so limited by domestic or familialrelations. Their second form, on which Haraway does not comment, isfound in the group of animals we ascribe with significant attributes: thatis, 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 humanand 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 andanimal. Yet this always implies an immense sacrifice on the part of thehuman, which is required in order to traverse the chasm of ontologicaldifference. The human, according to Zarathustra, a figure whose shadowrecurs in the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, is an unstable historicalfiguration:

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a ropeacross an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way.A dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stop-ping (Nietzsche 1885, p. 126).




And it is necessary to speak to the animals, or to recognise the animal inman before setting out on the quest for knowledge:

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: whatcan 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 reasonto go under and be a sacrifice, but who sacrifice themselves forthe 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, isthe wolf pack Haraway claims is mystified and distorted in ‘BecomingAnimal’.

So our relations with animals, according to Deleuze and Guattari,are most clearly evident in three ways: our relationships with pets; inthe 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 humansacrifice have powerful legacies in many cultures, and even the sacrificeof 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 whichdraws commentary from Haraway. And it is important to recognisethat 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 thatDeleuze and Guattari actually conclude by attempting to combine thethree 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 ashow 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, eventhe 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, ormultiplicity grade an animal contains…School, bands, herds, arenot inferior social forms; they are affects and powers, involutionsthat 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 addressas a dimension imbued with potential forms of confluence with many




of her own insights on human-animal relations. Moreover, for Deleuzeand 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 thesezones span the spatio-temporal life of the earth. They have always beenglobal, and as such, have significant implications for the contemporaryprocesses of globalisation.

Essentially, it seems to me that Deleuze and Guattari’s project isimportant 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 becomeincreasingly opaque, Deleuze and Guattari’s question of their accessibil-ity pivots on the question of the human capacity to recognise itself asone territoriality within a global field of environmental complexity andpotentiality.

It is as if Deleuze and Guattari position themselves as best they canfrom the outside, beyond the hearth, looking towards us in ever-increas-ing zones of anthropocentric abstraction, a position from which theywrite poetically of deep-time earth histories, of our biosemiotic originsand our biosemiotic zones of proximity. Haraway, conversely, situates

knowledge from the inside, from the human hearth, and speaks about ourmeeting with alterity in the intense familial relations between human anddog, occasionally looking out towards the species that have not sharedthat history. As we have seen, these two positions have much in commonwith the focus on geo-politics amongst deep ecologists, and the focus onour relations with animals as individual agents found in animal rightsactivists. They are positions that have a direct bearing on practical issuesof ecological governance, so any common ground must be seen as a fertilemeans of building towards a more coherent politics of eco-critique.

Both Haraway and Deleuze and Guattari understand how humansubjectivity is formed by the deep genealogies of the earth, and yet thereis a theoretical point of divergence between them that reveals a fatefulintransigence 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 pivotalpoint, 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 ‘poorin 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




human. This article has attempted an enquiry that moves away from asingular notion of the less than human, towards the heterogeneity of the

non-human world and ‘the question of the animals’, and to reflect onthat question in response to the sixth major earth extinction event. Whichis 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 reductivesingularity 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 thefield of eco-critique: see, for example, Val Plumwood (2002). Deleuze andGuattari are frequently cited in the work of animal studies scholars in theUK 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 acknowledgesDerrida’s awareness that ‘Capability (play) and incapability (suffering) areboth all about mortality and finitude’ shared by human and non-humananimals (2008, p. 311: n. 27) (emphasis in original). She is less impressed,however, by the way Derrida is embarrassed to stand naked before thegaze of his little cat.

6 Brian Massumi, Deleuze’s translator, notes that proximity is his translationof 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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Documents

2009 Haraway Contra Deleuze Guattari-libre