Patricia MacCormack - Deleuze and the Demonological Text

A/V#9.01 2009 Spring http://www.actualvirtualjournal.com/2... ‘In Becoming…’ Deleuze and Guattari invoke and encourage in our becomings active evocation of demons and monsters. Much has been written on the dilemma of launching a becoming. If, by its nature, becoming is non-narrative, the notion of a beginning is problematic. Similarly feminists have maligned the fetishization of ‘woman’ in becomings, and increasingly animal rights anti-speciesists (well, me at least) have emphasised that becoming animal both homogenises all that falls away from the human and defaults our becomings to animal, which risks being no different, albeit in reverse, to the Oedipalisation of the family dog. In order to catalyse becomings they urge us to be demonologists and sorcerers. As sorcerers our invoked entities toward becomings are confabulations of hybrids and monsters, inter-species, both imagined and actualised through techniques of alterity and ‘packing’. Far from being literary or metaphoric references these monstrous entities – werewolves, vampires, Lovecraftian ancient-ones – facilitate becomings that demand an imagination far more complex and larval than that which negotiates the categories of woman and animal. Demonological becomings require both the creation of an entity which itself has already emerged through unheard of becomings, and an unnatural alliance with an abstract constellation of intensities that, due to their imagined nature, are already imperceptible though no less affective. This paper will explore packs of werewolves, legions or demons and Deleuze and Guattari’s (albeit brief) invocation of Lovecraft, not simply through ‘representations’ (in film and literature) but also, as sorcerers, through the ethics of and accountability for our invoked teratological offspring with which we enter into becomings, infinite and imperceptible before they emerge. Patricia MacCormack is Senior Lecturer in English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has published extensively in the areas of the visceral dimension of cinema, corporeality, the post-human, queer theory, feminism, ethics and continental philosophy. Her particular interests lie in the work of Guattari, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, Blanchot, Irigaray, Rancière and Serres. Recent work on perversion, masochism, body modification, non-human rights, polysexuality and the ethics of becomings have appeared in Body and Society, Women: A Cultural Review, Thirdspace, Rhizomes, Queering the Non/Human and Theory Culture and Society. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Ashgate 2008) and the co-editor with Ian Buchanan of The Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008). She is currently writing a book on post-human ethics.