Devenir-animal
The *becoming-animal* isn’t the imitation of an animal or identification with it: it’s entering a zone of proximity with particles, speeds, affects that belong to the animal without actually becoming it. It’s a molecular process, an alliance rather than a filiation, a contagion rather than a resemblance—a block of becoming in which two terms transform each other without either remaining what it was.
Devenir, c'est, à partir des formes qu'on a, du sujet qu'on est, des organes qu'on possède ou des fonctions qu'on remplit, extraire des particules, entre lesquelles on instaure des rapports de mouvement et de repos, de vitesse et de lenteur, les plus proches de ce qu'on est en train de devenir, et par lesquels on devient.
The title of the platter is dated—1730—referencing the werewolves still summoned by eighteenth-century sorcery. Deleuze and Guattari begin here not for ethnography but for a philosophical question: what is a relation to the animal that is neither metaphor nor imitation?
Classical natural history conceived of animals through resemblance—series or structures of analogy. Evolutionism conceived of life through filiation—descent and kinship. Becoming-animal is neither. It does not borrow the animal’s distinctive traits to transpose them onto man (metaphor). Nor does it trace back to a common ancestor (genealogy). It proceeds through alliance and contagion: entering into a neighborhood of particles, speeds, affects that circulate between heterogeneous bodies and transform them in passing. The film [Willard] (1972), which they analyze at the outset, shows Willard not “with” his rats but in the process of becoming-rat: not through costume or the desire to be a rodent, but because something passes between them—a block of alliance and contagion that undoes the Oedipal and professional coordinates of the character.
What characterizes becoming-animal is the pack rather than the individual. One does not become the wolf; one enters into a lupine swarming, a multiplicity of movements and intensities. The lone wolf would already be a reterritorialization—the domesticated animal, the archetypal animal, the animal of the individual dream. The pack, however, is molecular: it resists all subjectivation, all assignment of a stable self.
To be distinguished from metaphor and totemism. Metaphor keeps the two terms separate (man is like a wolf) and transforms nothing. Totemism establishes a structural correspondence between human and animal series—an analogy of proportionality, not a real neighborhood. Becoming-animal does not resemble, does not correspond: it passes between, it creates a block in which the two terms deterritorialize together. It is not man imitating the animal, nor the animal symbolizing man—it is a zone of proximity where the particles of one and the other become indiscernible, for the duration of the passage.