Following the Rats: Becoming-Animal in Deleuze and Guattari

Undeniably, globalization defines the epoch in which we are living. As the word suggests, this means that the earth has been enclosed within a globe. And this means that all the ways out have been closed, so that one species—the human—is able to dominate all other species.¹ What justifies this—what gives us the right to dominate the animals? The answer is well known: humans believe they have the right to dominate the animals because humans believe that they possess a special kind of subjectivity. The concept of subjectivity that we think we possess has its conceptual origins in Descartes's "cogito," but the concept of the "I think" develops into the Kantian idea of autonomy. The Kantian idea of autonomy means, of course, that I am self-ruling; I give the moral law to myself, unlike the animals upon whom nature imposes its laws. But in order to give the law to myself, I must tell it to myself. Kantian autonomy therefore is based on auto-affection.² What makes me, as a human, autonomous is my supposed ability to hear myself speak at the very moment I speak. Because the voice seems to be purely immediate and mine, I hear myself speak in pure presence. This supposed pure self-presence gives humans a dignity that far surpasses that of animals. It justifies the human right to domination.

But, Derrida has shown in Voice and Phenomenon³ that auto-affection is never pure self-presence (chapter 6). And Deleuze in Difference and Repetition has shown that when Kant introduces receptivity into the self, this puts a crack in the self (116-117/84).⁴ These arguments show that human auto-affection is really and always hetero-affection; that within thought there is something that cannot be thought and yet demands to be thought. These arguments against the purity of auto-affection cannot be reversed or ignored. As we quickly see, they provide us with the means to criticize our current times (QPh 104/108), the times in which all living things are enclosed in a globe for human use, the times in which a kind of war is being waged against animal life. What must we do to stop (or at least slow down) this war, what must we do to bring about some change in the collective human relation to animals? To put this as dramatically as possible, we must stop being human. But such a dramatic claim means that we must undermine human auto-affection; indeed, we must enlarge the concept of auto-affection.⁵ In thought, in my interior monologue, when I hear myself speak, I also inseparably do not hear myself (Cinema 2 239/184). What do I hear if not my "self"? I hear the other voices of the animals. When I hear myself speak, I also inseparably hear the gnashing of the teeth of an animal in the agony of death. The voice of the animal is in me, and thereby I undergo the ways that animals change or become. We have gone from auto-affection to becoming, hence the title of this essay. We could even say that we have gone from Derrida's thought to that of Deleuze and Guattari.

We shall return to Derrida's thought at the end, and, as we shall see, the intersection of Derrida's thought with that of Deleuze provides us with a double strategy in regard to the collective human relation to animals. But, primarily in what follows, we shall focus on the concept of becoming that Deleuze and Guattari develop in the Tenth Plateau of A Thousand Plateaus. Plateau Ten is the longest and most complicated chapter in the book—97 pages in the original French edition. In what follows I will lay out a kind of plan for becomings in general, identifying the agent, the condition, the positive definition of, and the motive for becoming (aging, desubjectification, minority, and affects). Like Levinas,⁶ Deleuze and Guattari recognize the power that aging has to unmake the molar form of the subject, making the person susceptible...