Becoming-Animal Is a Trap for Humans: Deleuze and Guattari in Madagascar

Abstract

If you were introducing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980) to a seven-year-old who found Anti-Oedipus (1972) boring, you might say that the sequel has more animals. Deleuze and Guattari make only few, scathing references to pets, but they do make frequent mention of horses (81 times, to be exact), as well as ticks, birds, rats, Moby Dick and groups marked by animal names: leopard-men, crocodile-men, and — borrowing from Sigmund Freud — the Wolf Man and his wolf packs. Unlike Guattari’s later publication, The Three Ecologies (Guattari 2005 [1989]), A Thousand Plateaus does not advance any arguments about contemporary environmental issues or the treatment of nonhuman animals. There are no demands for the recognition, recovery, or recuperation of Nature, and the book continues to extend the formulas outlined in Anti-Oedipus : ‘Nature=Industry, Nature=History’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004 [1972]: 26). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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