ABSTRACT
I first employed the concept of the bestiary in relation to classic psychoanalytic texts (Genosko, 1993). My goal was to reveal the ‘moral’ tales – the pillars and remarkable caninophilia of the Freudian bestiary – told by the reproduction of animals found therein, as well as in the professional and domestic lives of analysts such as Freud, Ernest Jones, and Marie Bonaparte (Genosko, 1994). I later suggested, somewhat schematically, that the psycho-and schizoanalytic bestiaries of Freud and Guattari overlap on the matter of how they do things with horses and porcupines (Genosko, 1996). From the very beginning, however, I was inspired by the extraordinarily insightful and provocative plateau 2 (‘One or Several Wolves’) of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987), on Freud’s case of the Wolf-Man. It seemed to me that they showed for the first time how productive the close scrutiny of the animal life of a text could be. Subsequently, scenes of animal reproduction became for me a way of reading Deleuze and Guattari’s own writings; a way, then, of tracking their arguments across the plateaux by means of signs left by the animals of their own theoretical bestiary.
