Deleuze and Guattari by Kenneth Surin;

Author:Kenneth Surin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

12

What Is Becoming-Animal? The Politics of Deleuze and Guattari’s “Strange Notion”

We believe in the existence of very special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human.

Deleuze and Guattari, TP, p. 237

The concept of “becoming-animal,” used by Deleuze and Guattari, is much less controversial than their related concept of “becoming-woman,” but its character and status as a philosopheme is just as puzzling to many, even those who are well-disposed to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari. “Becoming-animal” is part of a constellation of terms—“becoming-molecular,” “becoming-imperceptible,” “becoming-revolutionary,” “becoming minor”—used by Deleuze and Guattari to designate the situation of being analytically, as opposed to numerically, in the minority. Hence, while “becoming-molecular” is analytically minoritarian, its opposite is the already majoritarian “being molar”; “becoming-imperceptible” is counterpoised to the analytically majoritarian “being rendered visible by the regimes of the State”; “becoming-revolutionary” is pitted against the State’s desire to leave things fundamentally unchanged; and “becoming minor” is opposed by all the majoritarian orders. Where Deleuze and Guattari are concerned “everyone has to ‘become-woman’, even women” (TP, p. 292). Correlatively, “everyone has to ‘become-animal’, even animals.” But what can possibly be meant by this?

As we just saw, Deleuze and Guattari view the status of animals and women, et alia, as being analytically minoritarian, so that women, even if they were in, say, in an American college sorority, would belong to the analytically minoritarian (the “majority” being constitutively “male, white, bourgeois, and Christian”). This essay will deal with three issues: (i) animals, while they may be male, are hardly “white, bourgeois, and Christian,” so in what sense are they analytically minoritarian?; (ii) for Deleuze and Guattari, it is clearly the human identification with the animal that is the issue (Freud’s wolf-man, Kafka’s beetle-man Gregor Samsa, among others), but what is their theorization of this “deviant” identification? (or is “identification” the right way to go about theorizing the connectivities between animal and human); and (iii) a crucial consideration is their theory of the minority, which is based not on a concept of difference and otherness (this being the core of American identity theory), but on the category of the Same (“I want everything to be the Same as me,” as opposed to the very different logic of desire involved in the theory of difference; that is, “I must abject you because you can never have anything in common with me”).

In what sense are animals analytically minoritarian? Our ingrained propensity is to privilege the human over the nonhuman, to make the human the supreme constitutive norm. As long as this propensity goes unchallenged our species identity will never be called into question, and the prospect of a new earth and a new people, the sine qua non of the earth’s decisive liberation, will be kept at bay. To quote Deleuze and Guattari:

To think is to experiment, but experimentation is always that which is in the process of coming about—the new, remarkable, and interesting …. The new, the interesting, are the actual. The

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