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Becoming-animal is a trap for humans
Deleuze and Guattari in Madagascar
pp. 142-162
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).
Publication details
Published in:
Roffe Jon, Stark Hannah (2015) Deleuze and the non/human. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Pages: 142-162
Full citation:
Laurie Timothy (2015) „Becoming-animal is a trap for humans: Deleuze and Guattari in Madagascar“, In: Roffe & Stark (eds.), Deleuze and the non/human, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 142–162.