39 1 Delpech-Ramey
39 1 Delpech-Ramey
39 1 Delpech-Ramey
Becoming-Sorcerer
Becoming, for Deleuze and Guattari, is neither the immanent mode
of existence ultimately transcended by the Platonic Ideas in which they
participate, nor is it the form of oppositional mediation in which Hegel
saw the reason of history’s ruse. “Becomings,” generally written in the
agrammatical plural, are the multiplicity of experiential states in which
lines are blurred between human consciousness and animal awareness,
between biopsychic life and the nature of matter itself. What the authors
have in mind, in general, are processes of transformation that issue in
strange, uncanny, or even fantastic hybrids: the stuff of fictions, and sci-
ence fictions, that tell of inconceivable life forms, the “eldritch feralities”
of H.P. Lovecraft’s lore. But becomings abound also at the interstices of
speciation and phylogenetic variation, even when such mutants exists only
in rumors of werewolves, the legends of vampires, tales of she-wolves
and ape-men. For Deleuze and Guattari, becomings accrue at the van-
ishing point where history and legend meet, at the twilit horizon where
monstrosities of fiction reveal dynamics that translate the most profound
facts of biopsychic life.
In becomings, borders between the sexes and the species, groups
and individuals, matter and mind grow indiscernible, imperceptible. Yet
such becomings are not vague, and involve definite thresholds. Deleuze
and Guattari in fact identify a series of thresholds in becoming: becoming-
woman, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-intense. As
one can observe in the ordering of this series, the movement of becoming
is quite specific: it is a movement away from the stereotypically “male”
ego, fixated on its isolated body, paranoid about its fragile identity, us-
ing its reason to defend itself against the world, toward the more supple
and supine flesh and less dualistic mind of “woman,” further toward the
instinctual immanence of the animal, into an inhabitation of the depths of
vibrational and energetic patterns verging on the white noise of chaos. In
literature and anthropology, reports abound of sorcerers who are capable
of traversing and operating upon this line of increasing intensity through
which the human being ecstatically finds itself capable of powers and
affects outside the normal range.4
Although becoming seems to involve the recuperation of atavistic
traits, Deleuze and Guattari call becomings “involutions” rather than
regressions, and claim that such involution is always creative (A Thousand
Plateaus, 238). What “becomes” is not an archaic form, but a new dyna-
mism. But this dynamism is not a power that belongs to an individual.
It is inherently relational. Becoming forms new lines between at least
two series (of sexes, species, people groups, packs of animals). These
anomalous lines are composed when “blocks” of affects and percepts are
distributed so as to create passages or thresholds across which such affects
are shared: wolf-man and spider-woman are not so much the hideous
protagonists of fiction as they are figures of inconceivable yet very real
modes of communication and activity involving imperceptible yet effec-
tive modes of life. The elusiveness of the identity and the individuality
of such modes-in-becoming are crucial. What matters most, perhaps, in
becoming, is that affects and percepts are not attributes of determinate
subjects, but transversal traits that pass beneath assignable identities.
This is why Deleuze and Guattari say that becoming is its own subject, or
rather a subjectivizing or desubjectivizing power (ibid., 240). Becoming is
an event, an unnatural participation (ibid.) that is not at all imaginary, even
if the entities involved are not in any ordinary sense real.
Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the
absence of a term that would be the animal become. The becoming-
animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being
becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if
that something other the animal becomes is not. This is the point to
clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also
that it has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in
another becoming of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms
a block, with the first. This is the principle according to which there
is a reality specific to becoming (the Bergsonian idea of a coexistence
of very different durations,” superior to “ours,” all of them in com-
munication). (ibid., 238)
When Deleuze and Guattari grant to the mind (and the body) the
ability to access these hidden recesses of cosmic composition, they draw
upon the Bergsonian definition of the human as a unique contraction of
a multiplicity of cosmic potentials. For Bergson, mind is primarily intu-
ition, and only secondarily calculation or rationalization.5 For Bergson,
rationality is not as basic to human progress as is the affective range
upon which reason draws. In Bergson’s view, it is the human ability to
contract a multiplicity of affects that enables the mind to recapitulate the
constitutive elements of the cosmic whole in new and unforeseeable ways.
Cognition is thus only a particularly controlled form of a frenzy that would
otherwise be the overwhelming presence of the infinite reserve of creative
potential, the Whole of the past virtually present to each passing moment.
Society is “rational,” for Bergson, in the sense that it is built upon a par-
ticular selection from the virtual whole. It is selection that is the poetic or
religious act of institution.6 Whereas authority figures in society enforce
the particular contraction that society is, mystics, for Bergson, expand
the aperture of human awareness in order to enter into communication
with other levels of duration--states in which the energies of the virtual
whole can be given new shape. As Deleuze summarizes it in Bergsonism,
It could be said that in man, and only in man, the actual becomes ad-
equate to the virtual. It could be said that man is capable of rediscover-
ing all the levels, all the degrees of expansion [détente] and contraction
that coexist in the virtual Whole. As if he were capable of all the frenzies
and brought about in himself successively everything that, elsewhere,
can only be embodied in different species. Even in his dreams he
rediscovers or prepares matter. And durations that are inferior to him
are still internal to him. Man therefore creates a differentiation that is
valid for the Whole, and he alone traces out an open direction that is
able to express a whole that is itself open. Whereas the other directions
are closed and go round in circles . . . man is capable of scrambling the
planes, of going beyond his own plane as his own condition, in order
finally to express naturing Nature. (106)
“classical episteme,” its secret dream (71-76). By the 19th century mathesis
has gone underground or “esoteric” in search of connections “off” the
representable table of knowledge. Mathesis in the Romantic era becomes
constituted through symbolic rather than classificatory signs.
Deleuze’s essay, “Mathesis, Science, and Philosophy,” appeared in
1946 as an introduction to Jean Malfatti de Montereggio’s, La Mathèse, ou
anarchie et hiérarchie de la science.13 For Malfatti, a famous doctor as well as
esotericist, mathesis is the Romantic and vitalist culmination of medical
science. Mathesis represents not so much an encyclopedia as a mode of
intensified knowledge through which humanity can at once know and
heal itself. Malfatti presents mathesis as the reconciliation, necessary to
the schizoid modern mind, of the mathematical and metaphysical, or,
in a word, science and religion. Deleuze’s own gloss on mathesis is that
it is a kind of knowledge that, unlike either science or philosophy, does
not so much represent knowledge as it attempts to initiate the adept into
the life of knowledge. This is achieved through the internalization of an
elaborate symbolism such as the one Malfatti constructed using the Hindu
pantheon and numerology to represent fundamental cosmic dynamics.
Deleuze writes,
Unlike explanation, the symbol is the identity, the encounter, of the
sensible object and the object of thought. The sensible object is called
symbol, and the object of thought, losing all scientific signification, is
a hieroglyph or a cipher. In their identity, they form the concept. The
symbol is its extension, the hieroglyph its comprehension. Whereupon
the word “initiated” takes on its full sense: According to Malfatti, the
mysterious character of mathesis is not directed against the profane
in an exclusive, mystical sense, but simply indicates the necessity of
grasping the concept in a minimum of time, and that physical incarna-
tions take place in the smallest possible space—unity within diversity,
general life within particular life. At the limit, we could even say that
the notion of the initiate is rationalized to the extreme. If vocation
defines itself through the creation of a sensible object as the result of a
knowledge, then mathesis qua living art of medicine is the vocation par
excellence, the vocation of vocations, since it transforms knowledge itself
into a sensible object. Thus we shall see mathesis insist upon the cor-
respondences between material and spiritual creation. (“Mathesis,” 151)
simply to unpack those intuitions. But Deleuze also notes that for Malfatti,
initiation is not elite but popular, since the significance of initiation lies, as
Deleuze puts it, in the importance of transmitting knowledge “in the mini-
mum of time.” As a doctor, Malfatti would have known the importance
of speed in the application of remedies. Occult knowledge, for Malfatti,
was nothing if it could not intensify and accelerate human healing. But
in order to achieve this speed, mathesis reverses the procedure of science.
A symbolism attempts not to explain the object through concepts, but to
see concepts as incarnate in objects. In a word, mathesis enables vision.
To facilitate vision, mathesis seeks to establish what symbols there are.
But rather than the prize of elites, mathesis is proposed as the
knowledge of everyday life. To quote “Mathesis, Science and Philosophy’:
. . . to believe that mathesis is merely a mystical lore, inaccessible and
superhuman, would be a complete mistake. This is the first misunder-
standing of the word “initiated” to be avoided. For mathesis deploys
itself at the level of life, of living man: it is first and foremost a thinking
of incarnation and of individuality. Essentially, mathesis would be the
exact description of human nature. (143)
The people to come will not arrive, however, through debate, com-
promise, or litigations that would establish protective limits between
groups and share power among competing interests. For Deleuze and
Guattari, genuine multiplicities will be founded only through creative
forms of becoming that develop across groups and interests, and the po-
litical will expressed will be inseparable from an open-ended becoming.
The only question, as they put it, is whether a becoming reaches the point
at which desire can be sustained as expression--the disjunctive inclusion
of new life forms in the present.
What I have tried to argue here is that it is Deleuze’s interest in
sorcery, as explored with Guattari, that finally gives the details of how
this extraordinarily “cosmic” vision of human solidarity has, at least oc-
casionally, been put into practice. For the sorcerer models what it is—in
all its danger and exhilaration, potential for healing and capacity for
destruction—to become anomalous in the precise sense of an-omalie: on
the cutting edge of the unknown, the infinite. What Deleuze’s early essay
declares is that such becoming-anomalous is not rare but universal, insofar
as we are each related directly to an infinity of forces of which we are all
composed, if only unconsciously aware. Sorcery shows us how those have
fared who have had the ordeal of access to the plane of composition that
diagrams the forces crossing our nature with that of others. The politi-
cal question is not how to limit, contain, or govern sorcerers, but how to
activate the power of sorcery that crosses each of us. We do not yet know,
as Spinoza taught, what such an anomaly—at once multiple and singular,
individual and universal—might yet be able to do. If Deleuze and Guat-
tari are right to point us to sorcery as a “way out” of the present that is
also profoundly a way into genuine solidarity and communication, then
Adorno’s condemnation of occultism can be read as concealing as much
as it reveals about our situation.17 For if to indulge in the fantasy of occult
powers is to abandon the hope of gaining real power against the present
age of capitalism and administration, at the very least we must recognize
that capitalism itself seems to be the one form of sorcery we all tacitly
believe in, and the increase of capital thus the only remaining criteria for
what counts as a genuine becoming.18 Perhaps the occultists, with their
recognition of “higher powers,” are the genuine realists, after all.
Rowan University
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott.
London: Verso: 2005.
Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, South Bend: Notre Dame, 1977.
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Tomlinson and Habberjam. New York: Zone, 1990.
-----. Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974). New York: Semiotext(e), 2003.
-----. Gilles Deleuze, “Mathesis, Science, and Philosophy,” Collapse III (Falmouth: Urba-
nomic, 2007).
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Hurley, Seem, and Lane, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 1983.
-----. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987.
-----. What is Philosophy? Trans. Tomlinson and Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York:
Random House, 1970.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.
Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Lovecraft, H. P. H.P. Lovecraft: Tales. Ed. Peter Straub. New York: Library of America, 2005.
Notes
Deleuze and Guattari call schizoanalysis: an analysis not of the neuroses and psychoses
of subjects, but of the “schizzes” or fragments of decoded desire organized in a given
social field. Schizoanalysis involves “the destruction of the expressive pseudo forms
of the unconscious, and the discovery of desire’s unconscious investments of the social
field. It is from this point of view that we must consider many primitive cures: they
are schizoanalysis in action” (Anti-Oedipus. p. 167).
5. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, (Trans. Tomlinson and Habberjam, New York: Zone Books,
1988), pp. 13-35.
6. Bergson suggests that it is, paradoxically, the extraordinary powers of the individual
mystic that grounds the possibility of collective life, since it is the mystic that founds
society with “the unanswerable word” in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion , p. 295.
7. Here Deleuze and Guattari follow Duvignaud, who in L’anomie: Hérésie et Subversion
(Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1973) had hypothesized that “anomalies” are accounted for in
archaic cultures not as degradations or distortions of myth (or even in multiple versions
of myth) but in tales. Tales of lands far away or times lost to memory escape the annals
of history, but also subverting the certainty of the mythic order, since myth is always
meant to assign powers to legitimate lines of familial descent (as in the genealogical
myths of Hesiod, Homer, the Mahabharata, etc.).
8. There is a great deal of controversy around the status of Castenada’s narratives. It is
not at all clear whether his books are records of trips taken to Northern Mexico or are,
on the other hand, fictions spun from visionary experiences that did not involve those
travels or even the mysterious Don Juan. For an excellent contemporary discussion of
the complexities, see <http://www.realitysandwich.com/shamans_and_charlatans_as-
sessing_castanedas_legacy> and <http://www.realitysandwich.com/burning_down_
halls_academia_with_castaneda039s_knowledge>
9. See Michael Taussig, Shamanism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
10. See Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London:
Verso, 2005).
11. Newton’s writings on alchemy, for instance, far outnumber his works on physics.
12. Allison Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995).
13. The text was published by Editions Griffon d’Or in 1946 with Deleuze’s introduction.
“Mathesis, Science, and Philosophy” was republished in Collapse III (Falmouth: Urba-
nomic, 2007).
14. <http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/history/news-events/malfatti.php>
15. Collapse III (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007), pp. 26-28.
16. Deleuze’s early work, such as his 1956-1957 hypokhâgne lecture course at Lycée Louis le
Grand, Qu’est-ce que fonder? [What is Grounding?] as well as Empiricism and Subjectivity
shows a consistent attention to this theme. See http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/
texte.php?cle=218&groupe=Conf%E9rences&langue=1
17. It is arguable that Adorno, while critical of contemporary occultism, considered authentic
and archaic magic as itself an ensign of a genuine relation to reality. While magic was
“bloody untruth” (as he puts it in Dialectic of Enlightenment), it nevertheless was not that
fantasy of wish-fulfillment to which it was reduced by Freud. As I have tried to show
in “Lost Magic: The Hidden Radiance of Negative Dialectics” (forthcoming, Radical
Philosophy Review, 2010), there are a number of aspects of the practice “constellation” in
Negative Dialectics that seem to identify parallel if not outright homologous structures
in primitive magical thinking and negative dialectics. This uncanny resonance has to
do, I argue, with what Mauss identified in magic as an inherently experimental, ever-
shifting, and open-ended relationship between magical desires, methods, and materials,
a relationship that is never one of the direct imposition of will upon inert matter any
less than conceptual thought ever captures or directly conveys the truth of reality in
negative dialectics.
18. For this line of thinking on capitalism and globalization see Isabel Stengers and Phillipe
Pignarre, La Sorcellerie capitaliste (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).