Deleuze for the Desperate #8: becoming-animal

Discusses the main examples in A Thousand Plateaus and generalizes from them to discuss how we can become-animal. Appropriately, a Siamese cat was recorded on the sound track by accident (or was it) at about 18:30.

[shadowbody]

Thank you for this Deleuze series. I thoroughly enjoy it. I use Deleuze to help inspire my dance theater research and creation.

[minahuston]

I have no background in phisophy whatsoever and I have been researching the concept of humanistic-animalistic oppositions in various cultures just to take a break from my bachelor in Japanese, and your website and youtube channel are hidden treasures for people like me. thank you for taking your time to educate us all.

[ageofbumfires]

This is hands down the best video series on ATP available. Cheers to opening up lines of flight for those who find it.

[ezquerzelaya]

Watching this video was such a beautiful experience

[KeawaleeWarutkomain]

Bumped into your channel incidentally while researching the movement-image, thank you so much for taking your time doing this. All the resources on your website are also well organized. I hope you are doing well :)

[pfflam]

Beautiful. I especially like the moment the train pauses with a dog in a yard on a hill in the center frame

[jessevulink]

Very interesting topic, thanks for sharing Dave!

[JoshMastel]

your series, with the footage you add, reminds me of 'sans soleil'. lovely combination of ideas and localities.

[ZebraStandards]

I'm coming at this without any grasp of Deluze or becoming in the technical sense it's being used in here. But based on this discussion I get the sense that "becoming animal" means something like a mode of expansion towards some aspect of the lived environment, or some sociologically rich, networked assemblage of material reality (a heccaeity), such that that "particle" is animal. What this becoming seems to mean is not a full isomorphic transformation which reproduces animal identity, but a form of involvement which merges networks of sense and behavior, producing new forms and relationships; whether these come to a sympathetic relationship with the animal unit of this network that's driving this expansion or some other more antagonistic or violent relationship or mode of understanding. This seems to me to be an approach towards animal existence which drives change; becoming as such rather than becoming something, even if this becoming as such is informed by the relationship to specific life forms in specific relationship networks or clusters of sense and activity.

Reminds me of my train journey to Plymouth.

[VioletDeliriums]

I am looking for your citation to Bergson in his quote about music. Can you help me find it?

[n.covercharge]

revisiting this and relating it to Herzog's Grizzly Man and the becoming-bear of Kleist.

[SEREPTIE]

Thank you, as always. Maybe you have something on the war machine in the works?

[vl]

thank you so much for this! I'm currently revising for my English BA, and the moby dick example really helped me get the concept of becoming. Also helped that Looe is one of my favourite places!

[DelfosAnimation]

Actually you pronounced Castaneda right the first time. Thanks a lot for these videos

[sillycuts]

Becoming child is in someways about uncoupling the child (as the child is subject, we are all child)from the Oedipal dynamic . About how an individual may create a BWO, as children are most subject to social rules of control.

[lukehall]

Thanks for producing these.

Q4U:
Is it not actually about intensively involving one's "self" in the traits of animals? After the manner of animositic warriors and their totem animals. I think becoming-animal is the only way to understand the natural/virtual reality that underlies all cultural/actual animal symbolism.

The idea of human beings becoming animal is all over ancient literature, for example, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Apulieus' Golden Ass—but I think at the deepest level, becoming animal is based on a real and actual equivalence of animals and personalities——for example, Aesop's fables were clearly produced through a kind of transcendental empiricism. Becoming animal involves an expansion of certain drives together with a contraction of others.

There is a praxis of becoming animal, and it is called either shamanism or astral magic. And it is dangerous.

Another example: think of the Viking berserkers, who involuted themselves with animality before a battle. Their ferocity led to the legend of the werewolf, which only later became a bourgeois symbol for "psychosis."

BTW, beautiful analysis of Moby Dick—ultimate allegory for the insanity and megalomania of the American Empire.

Have a great life.

[DaveHarrisreDeleuze]

Hi folks, I've just noticed I got the transcript link wrong on thhis video. It should be I can't find my own website!!

[christinabartonart]

Hiya, the transcript link no longer seems to be working :(

[pedrova]

thanks for this. For those interested in the subject, I think some reading on Conrad Lorentz, NikoTimbergen (ethologists); Jakob von Uexküll (philosopher, biologist) ("A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans ") ; or the more "recent" ideas from Frans de Waal can be very useful to grasp the idea