Taking off from Jacques Derrida’s essay-poem “Che cos’è la poesia?”, in which the poematic is metaphorized as a hedgehog, the chapter offers an initial exposition of metaphor’s potential for literarity and of the relationship between actual and figurative animals. The criticism against metaphor within animal studies is analyzed in relation to the metaphysics of presence pervading much of Western philosophy and to the Aristotelean notion of metaphor as a substitutional trope. Putting Paul Ricœur’s interactive metaphor theory into dialogue with deconstruction, the chapter instead proposes an understanding of metaphor as spectral.