No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This essay is an attempt to elucidate the concept of "becoming-animal" that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari develop in a number of their writings. Basically "becoming-animal" is a movement in which a subject no longer occupies a realm of stability but rather is folded into a nomadic mode of existence in which one is always an anomaly, that is, inaccessible to any form of definition. It is a movement from body to flesh, where the one is a figure of unity and strength, while the other is in an interminable state of disarticulation or disfigurement, as in many of Francis Bacon's paintings of faceless heads. It is not animal metamorphosis but an achievement of non-identity, which for Deleuze and Guattari is the condition of freedom (for animals as well as for the rest of us, whoever we are).

What is it to be seen (naked) by one's cat? In "L'animal que donc je suis " (2006), the fi rst of several lectures that he presented at a conference on the "autobiographical animal," Jacques Derrida tells of his discomfort when, emerging from his shower one day, he found himself being looked at by his cat. Th e experience leads him, by way of refl ections on the question of the animal, to what is arguably the question of his philosophy: Who am I? It is not so much that Derrida wants to answer this question as to be free of it. His task here is to determine the sense of itwhere it leads, for example, when it comes to the nature of the diff erence between himself and his cat. Unlike animal rights activists (and unlike philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond, who have recently addressed this issue), Derrida does not want to erase this diff erence but wants to multiply it in order (among other things) to affi rm the absolute alterity or singularity of his cat, which cannot be subsumed by any category (such as the animal). His cat is an Other in a way that no human being (supposing there to be such a thing, which Derrida is not prepared to grant) could ever be. And here is where "the question who?" leads as well, namely, to a path of escape from absorption into any identity-machine. As Derrida puts it in A Taste for the Secret: Who am I when I am not one of you? In a hospitable world one would be free not to answer.