Deleuze and Queer Theory

Chapter 8 Unnatural Alliances Patricia MacCormack Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use as a key example of becomings becoming-animal. Becoming-animal involves both a repudiation of the individual for the multiple and the human as the zenith of evolution for a traversal or involution across the speciesist plane of consistency. Deleuze and Guattari delineate the Oedipal animal, the pack animal and the demonic hybridisation of animal, human and imperceptible becomings. Various commentators have critiqued and celebrated Deleuze and Guattari’s call to becoming-woman. In his taxonomy of living things Aristotle places women at the intersection of animal and human, so becoming-animal as interstices raises urgent feminist issues as well as addressing animal rights and alterity through becoming-animal. This chapter will invoke questions such as ‘how do we negotiate becoming- animal beyond metaphor?’, ‘what risks and which ethics are fore- grounded that make becoming-animal an important political project?’ and, most importantly, because becoming-animal is a queer trajectory of desire, ‘how does the humanimal desire?’ Anthropomorphism can go either up or down, humanising either the deity or animals, but if the vertical distance is closed in any way, i.e. between God and humans or humans and animals, many are disconcerted. (Adams 1995: 180) For on the one hand, the relationships between animals are the object not only of science but also of dreams, symbolism, art and poetry, practice and practical use. And on the other hand, the relationships between animals are bound up with the relations between man and animal, man and woman, man and child, man and elements, man and the physical and microphysical universe. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 235) The above premise by Deleuze and Guattari invokes a paradigm which is resonant with many key concerns in poststructural philosophy. Jacques Unnatural Alliances 135 Derrida’s demarcation of isomorphism elucidates the phantasy of the binary or opposite as not a relation between two but as a subjugation of all others by a dominant one. Deleuze and Guattari critique taxonomy as not made up of a series of opposites but all alterity as fallen man. One could be tempted to say that this alone aligns the subjugated terms – animal, woman, children and so forth – as necessarily sympathetic to each others’ conditions through various mechanisms of power, oppres- sion and resistance. This concept has been suggested by many animal rights activists, feminists, children’s rights activists and queer theorists. In other areas theories of the posthuman suggest that there is no longer a category of human, or, more precisely, the category of human was always the mythical zenith of an equally mythical arboreal structure which systematised human subjectivity through religious, metaphysical and evolutionary discourses. Instead of God making man, secular scien- tists now make their own possibility of dominance through discourses that demarcate the hu-Man as a hermeneutic and given ‘natural’ phe- nomenon. While many feminists, particularly Luce Irigaray, see the bifur- cation between man and woman as the most obvious and deterministic binary, I would argue that that which divides man from animal encom- passes a far wider colonisation of life through discourse. As feminists struggle with the conundrum of how to define ourselves without reifying or essentialising the female, all other entities drop away. Animal entities, more correctly non-human animals, in their almost infinite varieties, pose a far greater challenge to thought, be it through activism, philosophy or science. Closing the chasm between the human and the animal is like closing the gap between discourse and non-discourse, between thought and the unthinkable but nonetheless necessary, and between our own relationships with our human selves as what Guattari calls an ecosophy. Deleuze and Guattari emphasise that ‘between the two there is threshold and fiber, symbiosis or passage between heterogeneities’ (1987: 250), not relation but production. Despite the problems of unspeech or unthought in the face of pure alterity ‘becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 238). While non-human animals cannot negotiate through human discourse, they each (not each species but each animal) emit powers, haeccities, singularities of force with which we and they can enter into a relation. How does this relate to queer theory? Deleuze is emphatic that desire circulates in this heterogeneous assemblage, in this kind of symbiosis . Of course this kind of desire will include power arrangement . 136 Patricia MacCormack Power arrangements would surface wherever re-territorializations, even abstract ones, would take place . Power arrangements would therefore be a component of assemblages and yet these assemblages would also include points of deterritorialization. In short, power arrangements would not assemble or constitute anything but rather assemblages of desire would disseminate power formations. (Deleuze 2000: 250–1) Desire is inherent in all power formations, from the Church’s desire for man’s own self-realisation through God to science’s desire for the power to naturalise self at the expense and explicitly through mechanisms of objectification and analysis of all others. The human is its own desire for itself. Desiring a relation with the power(s) of an irreducible other alters dominant power structures through desire, creating what Deleuze and Guattari call an ‘unnatural alliance’. ‘It is not sufficient to liberate ourselves from sexuality; it is also necessary to liberate ourselves from the notion of sexuality itself’ (Foucault 2000: 245). Liberation from the notion of human liberates us from humanist transcendental metaphysics and the powers it expresses. Memories of a Hybrid Dualistically constructed society territorialises every system, every structure and every mode of existence. This sets up all entities as analogies of proportion or series – a is not b – and relations of proportionality or structure – as a is to b so c is to d. In hybrid theory as a queer theory the most important part of these analogous relations are not the terms but the gaps between the terms. Hybrids present an encounter of self as more- than-one. Hybrids frequently take the form of two entities involuted or collapsed into one form or event. Hybrids challenge the belief in unity, phyla and absolute differentiation of elements, species, things and sub- jects. Hybrids are not all alike, however. While the hybrid is more-than- one – usually a mix of two – the relation of two can vary greatly depending on its function, its spatio-temporal incarnation and its appre- hension by its own self and others. The following section will explore some encounters between gender hybrids, animal hybrids and sexual hybrids as both evidence of reifying symbols of human culture and as potential becomings. Hybrids are frequently encountered as ‘monsters’. Rosi Braidotti explains [monsters] represent the in between, the mixed, the ambivalent as implied in the ancient Greek root of the word monsters, teras, which means both hor- rible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration. (Braidotti 1994: 77) Unnatural Alliances 137 Thus beyond the monster as a hybrid entity, the response to and relation with the monster is hybrid. Monsters stereotypically are reviled as nature’s mistakes, and physical deformity is frequently associated with mental or moral turpitude. The collapse of sexual perversion and ani- malised human hybrid offspring is seen everywhere from myth to modern popular apocrypha. The union between Leda and her swan lover resulted in the beautiful but destructive twins Clytaemnestra and Helen. Pasiphae’s love for a bull produced Phaedra, whose incestuous desires resulted in the death of her stepson. The so-called ‘elephant man’ Joseph Merrick, wolf children and other victims of congenital deformities have the malformations which cause their bodies to deviate from the ‘human’ named after animals. The archetype animal is analogy rather than threshold encounter. As an arbitrary example, religious icons such as the Egyptian baboon who worships the sun or the knowledgeable Ibis whose beak reflects the arc of the moon, both incarnated as the god Thoth, represent wisdom. Of course, these early examples are hijacked and fetishised in modern culture; their original use and relation to society remain enigmatic. The strong eagle and the triumphant lion are some examples of recent and current nationalist symbols of superiority. Zoophiles are not becoming animal but are going steady with their Oedipal animal boyfriends and girlfriends. The Oedipal puppy baby no longer knows its own dogginess and is forced into a becoming-human. Similarly Donna Haraway warns against the Oedipalisation of dogs as surrogate children. However, in The Companion Species Manifesto she simultaneously claims the dog-human relation is a hybrid one, but nonetheless the dog term is a trained one, thus the dog is becoming- human. ‘In reality the animal captured by man is deterritorialised by human force’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1981: 100). In terms of animal rights ‘the deterritorialized animal force in turn precipitates and intensi- fies the deterritorialization of the deterritorializing human force’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1981: 100). Speciesist language relies inherently on the use of animal euphemisms to explain uniquely human oppressive or offensive behaviour – behaving ‘like’ an animal, being a ‘fat pig’ or ‘stupid cow’ relegates those whose behaviour is seemingly monstrous to a hybrid state. All these examples of hybridity are symbolic, but the qualities the animals symbolise are entirely human creations established through rigidly human paradigms and perceptions, colonising animals not only with certain qualities but only allowing animals to exist within the single human system of reality and perception. Symbolic animal hybrids represent the animal as colonised by human phantasmatic investments of qualities and images. 138 Patricia MacCormack The Minotaur is not half man-half bull and the stupid cow is not a human whose stupidity is ‘like’ a cow.

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