139WHEN IS A DELEUZIAN BECOMING?

Continental Philosophy Review 36: 139–153, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

When is a Deleuzian becoming?

TODD MAYDepartment of Philosophy, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-0528, USA(E-mail: mayt@clemson.edu)

Abstract. Much has been written recently about the Deleuzian concept of becoming. Mostof that writing, especially in feminist criticism, has drawn from the later collaborations withGuattari. However, the concept of a becoming arises earlier and appears more consistentlyacross the trajectory of Deleuze’s work than the discussion of specific becomings might leadone to believe. In this paper, I trace the concept of becoming in Deleuze’s work, and specifi-cally in the earlier works. By doing so, I hope to shed some light on the specific becomingsthat are the focus of the collaborative work with Guattari, and to deepen an understanding ofthe concept in general.

What I would like to do here is to situate the concept of becoming in GillesDeleuze’s thought, not with reference to a particular work or a particular be-coming, but instead with reference to its trajectory in his work, and particu-larly his early work. Why might one want to do such a thing? There has beenmuch discussion of Deleuze’s work, particularly in recent years, and in somecircles, notably but not exclusively in some areas of feminism, the concept ofbecoming, and in particular becoming-woman, has received some notice.1

However, it has not been generally noticed how deep the concept of becom-ing runs in Deleuze’s corpus. It does not just appear in the works with Guattari,but instead resonates from the beginning to the end of his work. Grasping thatresonance will help deepen an understanding of the concept and of the roleDeleuze means it to play.

But why focus on the concept of becoming? Why not focus on schizophre-nia, or lines of flight, or being-as-difference, which are seemingly the pivotsaround which his work revolves? If we look over the scope of Deleuze’s work,we see that the concept of becoming is not only a central Deleuzian concept– one that has been part of his corpus since his book on Nietzsche – it canalso be seen, from the right angle, to contain in germ the entirety of his philo-sophical perspective. This containment – Deleuze might say this “implication”– is easy to miss if one focuses solely on the later works, and especially onthe collaborations with Felix Guattari. But if we return to the earlier works,especially Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, we canreconstruct the richness of Deleuze’s concept of “becoming,” and see more

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clearly the philosophical strides that his use of the term in the later worksmakes.

What I propose to do is this. I will start by spending a moment on whatDeleuze takes philosophy in general and philosophical concepts in particularto be about. The reason for this is that the role that concepts play for him islinked to his general – and idiosyncratic – view of what philosophy is about,so it is worth considering it, even if briefly, before turning to a particular con-cept. Then I will discuss the notion of becoming in the earlier works. There,it will become clear why I have asked the question “when is a becoming?”rather than “what is a becoming?” Finally, I will turn to the later works, amongthem the tenth of the thousand plateaus, in order to see how the concept ofbecoming functions.

Although many readers of Deleuze are at least broadly familiar with hisview of philosophy as laid out in What is Philosophy? it is worth recalling itat the outset of any discussion of a Deleuzian concept. This is because whatDeleuze is doing when he does philosophy, and creates concepts, is so differ-ent from what most philosophers do, that without his “metaphilosophy” inhand, it is easy to become disoriented. For Deleuze (and Guattari), then, phi-losophy is not a matter of description or explanation. “Philosophy does notconsist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories likeInteresting, Remarkable, or Important that determine its success or failure.”2

Philosophy is, in a word, practical and normative. It is a practice whose pointis not that of getting the right take on things but of making a contribution toour living. Specifically, that contribution is made in the areas of the interest-ing, the remarkable and the important.

It may seem as though the ideas of the interesting and the remarkable havemore in common with each other than either does with the important. This isbecause the interesting and the remarkable are bound up with novelty anddifference, whereas the important is not. While this may be true in general,that distinction is insignificant for Deleuze, since he thinks it is of centralphilosophical importance both to recognize and to create novelty and differ-ence. The history of philosophy and of philosophical activity has been tied tooclosely to a project of promoting identity and sameness and of marginalizingdifference. “The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power inphilosophy, and even in thought. It has played the repressor’s role. . . . Phi-losophy is shot through with the project of becoming the official language of aPure State. The exercise of thought thus conforms to the goals of the real State,to the dominant meanings and to the requirements of the established order.”3

Thus, if philosophy is to do anything of real importance, it will have to cut loosefrom its history and align itself with the interesting and the remarkable.

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How is philosophy to align itself with the interesting, the remarkable, andthe important? According to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy does that sim-ply by doing philosophy. And what is it to do philosophy? To create conceptson planes of immanence. “Philosophy is a constructivism, and constructivismhas two qualitatively different aspects: the creation of concepts and the lay-ing out of a plane” (WP, pp. 35–36).4 Understanding what a concept is andwhat a plane is will allow us to understand what it is to do philosophy, andhow it is that philosophy embraces the interesting, the remarkable, and theimportant. In addition, it will allow us to return to the concept of becomingwith the appropriate background, having in hand both what it is for somethingto be a Deleuzian concept and what it is he is trying to do by creating them.

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari isolate three central featuresof concepts: relatedness to other concepts, internal consistency, and conden-sation of its internal components (WP, pp. 19–21). Let me take these in re-verse order. For Deleuze and Guattari, a concept is composed of components,which they call “intensities” or “singularities.” These intensities are, of course,pre-conceptual, since they form concepts rather than being formed by them.A relevant example of an intensity is offered by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense.If we consider language in a Saussurean terms, in which its components termsare defined by their differences from one another, we can think of these dif-ferences not merely as oppositions but as positive differences, as pre-con-ceptual differences that are constitutive of the content of the terms. Thesedifferences are pre-conceptual components of the terms they constitute; theyare intensities. The role of concepts is to condense these intensities togetherin a particular way, to make them circulate after a particular fashion.

In condensing intensities, concepts bring them together into a certain kindof unity. When separate intensities come together as components of a concept,they lose their character as separate intensities and merge into the unity of theconcept. “For example, in the concept of the other person, the possible worlddoes not exist outside the face that expresses it, although it is distinguishedfrom it as expressed and expression; and the face in turn is the vicinity of thewords for which it is already the megaphone” (WP, p. 19).

Finally, at the level of concepts rather than their pre-conceptual components,concepts are related to other concepts just as linguistic units are related to otherlinguistic units in the Saussurean view of language. Concepts are not formedand do not exist on their own. They are part of a system, and in two senses.First, new concepts are molded from already existing ones. One does not cre-ate a concept out of nothing, but out of a context of concepts which (a) formsthe soil from which a new concept emerges and (b) is the foil with and againstwhich the new concept takes its significance. Second, in the formation of a

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philosophical perspective, the concepts of that perspective form their ownsystem of interconceptual relatedness. This latter system occurs on the planeof immanence.

The plane of immanence is related to its concepts in somewhat the sameway as concepts are related to intensities. It draws them together into a wholeout of which arises a philosophical perspective. To take Derrida’s philosophyas an example, the concepts of differance,5 pharmakon, archi-trace, woman,truth, hymen, etc. that he creates are not isolated from one another. They re-fer to one another and together form a systematic whole within which Derrida’sphilosophical perspective becomes articulated. “It is the plane that securesconceptual linkages with ever increasing connections, and it is the conceptsthat secure the populating of the plane on an always renewed and variablecurve” (WP, p. 37). This does not mean that the plane of immanence is merelythe system of those concepts; rather, it is the difference itself (see below) outof which the concepts are formed and on which they are articulated.

Why is the plane one of “immanence”? The importance of immanence willbecome clearer with the discussion of the concept of becoming, but it shouldbe clear at this point that the concepts that populate a philosophical plane arenot reflections of a world that transcends them but constituents of a perspec-tive that creates a world. Concepts refer, not to transcendent objects, but tothemselves and to other objects along the plane of immanence. “The conceptis defined by its consistency, its endoconsistency and exoconsistency, but ithas no reference: it is self-referential; it posits itself and its object at the sametime as it is created” (WP, p. 22).

I hasten to add here, to avoid charges of idealism being leveled againstDeleuze, that immanence does not entail that philosophical positions do nothave a bearing upon the world, or that one cannot see the world by means ofa philosophical perspective. Rather, the point of a philosophical perspectiveis not to tell us what the world is like – that is the point of science – but tocreate a perspective through which the world takes on a new significance. “Thetask of philosophy when it creates concepts, entities, is always to extract an eventfrom things and beings, always to give them a new event: space, time, matter,thought, the possible as events” (WP, p. 33). Thus, philosophy, the practice ofcreating concepts, is not to tell us the truth, to limn the world as Quine wouldhave it, but to engage us in the interesting, the remarkable, and the important.

So it is with the concept of becoming. With it, and with its references torelated concepts, we should be able to see and to live in a fresh way, a waythat might not have been available to us without the concept. Let’s turn, then,to the concept of becoming, in order to see how it works, to what it refers,and what perspective it takes part in creating.

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Deleuze’s earliest suggestions regarding becoming appear in Nietzsche andPhilosophy, in a discussion of Heraclitus. “Heraclitus has two thoughts whichare like ciphers: according to one there is no being, everything is a becoming;according to the other, being is the being of becoming.” Deleuze explicatesthese thoughts this way:

. . .there is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity; nei-ther multiplicity nor becoming are appearances or illusions. But neither arethere multiple or eternal realities which would be, in turn, like essences be-yond appearance. Multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, essentialtransformation and constant symptom of unity. Multiplicity is the affirma-tion of unity; becoming is the affirmation of being.6

In this passage, Deleuze presents four ideas which remain at the heart of hisarticulation of becoming – that becoming is the final reality (“there is no be-ing beyond becoming”); that becoming is aligned with multiplicity (“. . . noth-ing beyond multiplicity”); that becoming, although the final reality, is not atranscendent reality (“neither are there . . . realities..beyond appearance”); andthat “becoming is the affirmation of being.”

The first idea is that becoming is the final reality. Traditionally, philoso-phers, particularly philosophers of a metaphysical bent, have sought some-thing stable as the bedrock of philosophical reflection. Plato’s Good, Descartes’God (or is it his I?), Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, Hegel’s Ab-solute are all examples of concepts where philosophical reflection seeks tocome to rest in a stable unity. Deleuze’s term “being” refers – at least in thefirst of the two Heraclitean thoughts he is developing – to these stable uni-ties. And he rejects the traditional philosophical commitment to them. How-ever, this rejection is not a straightforward one. He substitutes another concept– ”becoming” – which in one sense must occupy the role that being used toplay and in another sense must play a very different role. The reason for theformer is that becoming is, as being was, that reality behind which there is noother reality. The reason for the latter is that he is clearly rejecting the philo-sophical use to which that final reality has been put. The way in which be-coming occupies the place of being is given in the second idea in the passagewe are discussing; the way in which it subverts it is given in both the secondand third ideas.

The affinity of becoming and multiplicity is developed in Difference andRepetition and The Logic of Sense. It leads directly into some of the mostimportant and difficult thoughts in Deleuzian ontology, and would take anentire book to explicate adequately. I can here only present Deleuze’s ontol-ogy enough to highlight the central aspects of the concept of becoming, those

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aspects which will offer a deeper understanding of what Deleuze is up to inthe later works when he utilizes the concept.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze uses the concept of being, but herein accordance with the second of the Heraclitean thoughts, that being is thebeing of becoming. “Being is said in a single and same sense of everything ofwhich it is said, but that of which it is said differs; it is said of difference it-self.”7 It is difference, then, that we need to understand in order to understandbecoming. For Deleuze, difference – difference in itself – is not to be definedin terms of the same. We characteristically define difference negatively, as thenot-sameness of two or more entities. There are, of course, many ways not-sameness can occur. Not-sameness can be not identical; the two items are twins,but they occupy different positions on the space-time continuum. Not-same-ness can be not the same ontological status; a model and its copy are not thesame in this way. Not-sameness can be not the same qualities, species, val-ues, people, place. What all these and other not-samenesses share is that theybegin by positing subsisting entities, and derive difference by means of ne-gating the sameness of the entities. What Deleuze wants is not a derivativedifference, but difference in itself, a difference that he believes is the sourcenot only of the derivative difference but of the sameness on the basis of whichderivative difference is derived.

One might want to object at this point, even before the discussion of dif-ference in itself begins, that Deleuze has not even motivated the idea that thereis such a thing as difference in itself, especially one that is in any way ground-ing for identity. What is his objection to deriving difference from identity inthe way traditional philosophy has? Deleuze’s response here is actually three-fold. First, there are problems with making identity founding. In Differenceand Repetition, Deleuze points out that basing difference (and repetition) onidentity fails even to ask the question of whether there is such a thing as dif-ference (or repetition) beyond identity. Moreover, founding difference onidentity leads either to an infinite regress or a circle; the founding identitiesmust find their ground in other identities, etc. (DR, p. 13). Deleuze makes asimilar point in The Logic of Sense, where he says that signification (thegrounding of linguistic meaning in stable linguistic identities) leads to an in-finite regress in the sense that a proposition follows from other propositionsonly given that yet other propositions are true; and those other propositionare true only given that still other propositions are true. . . . Moreover, if onetries to ground signification in other aspects of language – denotation ormanifestation – one winds up circling among them.8

Second, and related to this, there are aspects of our world that can be betteraccounted for if difference is seen as founding identity rather than the other

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way around. For example, in science, and particularly in chaos theory, thereare events that arise not on the basis of a given identity evolving under theright conditions into another given identity, but of something more chaoticevolving under the right conditions into a given identity. If we see differenceas grounding identity, these scientific findings are more easily understood.9

The third response to the objection is that in seeking to articulate a conceptof difference in itself, Deleuze is engaging in the project of philosophy, as wesaw it delineated above. He is resisting the traditional philosophical approach– what he calls in Difference and Repetition “the dogmatic image of thought”– and trying to create concepts along a plane of immanence that offers a newand different perspective. Thus, to follow Deleuze’s discussion of differenceis not so much to substitute a more adequate philosophical approach for a lessadequate one. It is to follow thought down another, more adventurous, path:the path of concept-creation.

Turning then to difference in itself, we recognize at once that whatever elseit is, it is not given to us in the form of identity. This means that an encounterwith it must occur, not by means of the stable identities given to us in con-sciousness, but beneath or within those identities. Difference in itself is found-ing for identity but does not appear as such (as difference in itself) within thoseidentities. It is not phenomenologically accessible. Thus, a search for differ-ence in itself must abandon the project of investigating directly the givens ofexperience and turn toward a more hidden realm. Deleuze discovers that realmin the nature of time.

Deleuze’s treatment of time borrows heavily from the work of HenriBergson.10 For Bergson, time is conceived mistakenly when it is thought ofas a series of passing instants. Rather, we should think of time as a whole, asa pure duration, in which each instant has its place. When time is conceivedas a whole, each of its instants is internally related to every other instant. Thepast is connected to the present (and the future), but not connected as some-thing that is no longer exists to something that does exist (or will). How couldsomething that does not exist be connected to something that does, exceptthrough memory, which already presupposes an analysis of time? Rather, thepast exists in the present, but in a different way from the way the present ex-ists.11 To signify this different way of existing, Deleuze uses the term “vir-tual” as opposed to the “actual” existence of the present. (More on the virtualand the actual below.) Moreover, the past, as well as existing in the present,also trails behind it in the form of past moments that were once present – eachof which also contains the whole of time. Following Bergson, Deleuze pic-tures this past as a cone, where the cone’s point is the present with the pastenlarging itself behind it. At each cross-sectional slice of the cone – includ-

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ing its point in the present – the entirety of the past exists, but in more or less“contracted” state.

On this view, time is not a psychological matter that belongs to a singleindividual. Rather, it is an ontological matter that lives itself through individu-als psychologically. Deleuze summarizes the moments of this time: “There isonly one time (monism), although there is an infinity of actual fluxes (gener-alized pluralism), that necessarily participates in the same virtual whole (lim-ited pluralism)” (B, p. 82).

The content of the past, which exists virtually in the present, is differencein itself. It is not difficult to see why, for Deleuze at least, this must be so. Ifthe content of the past were to consist in certain identities, then their nature asidentities would have to be modeled on some original form from which theywould draw their character as identities. (An insult in the past would be so invirtue of displaying “insultness,” which would imply an “insultness” apartfrom the specific insult in question – the Platonic move.) These original formswould not themselves be in time, since the contents in time would be copiesof them; rather, they would be the model for the content of what is in time.This would imply that the content of time is doubled in a transcendent non-time that forms the model for time’s content. These moves – identities as copiesmodeled on an original, existence doubled in a founding transcendent reality– are central to the type of philosophy Deleuze is trying to overcome. Theyform the basis for stabilizing reality so that “stranger and more compromis-ing adventures” do not take place. They are Plato’s Forms, Descartes’ God,Kant’s transcendental I. Thus the content of time, since it cannot come in theform of identities or samenesses, must be difference. Moreover, that differ-ence is not a difference that occurs negatively as a not-sameness or not-iden-tity, since identities and sameness do not exist in the pure duration of time.So it must be difference in itself. And since every moment contains all of thepast, every moment repeats this difference in itself, even while stable identi-ties are being produced within it.

What does this discussion of difference and time have to do with becom-ing and its affinity with multiplicity? Everything. First, if we think of beingin the first Heraclitean sense, as opposed to becoming, then the above sum-mary shows how, for Deleuze, there is no being that can serve as the stablemodel or unity founding what exists. There is only the unfolding of differ-ence in time. Difference lies beneath and within the passing identities to whichit gives rise. Being in the first Heraclitean sense stands for everything whichplays the role of a stabilizing identity. Deleuze’s analysis of difference andtime undercuts that role. Second, if we equate multiplicity and difference –and Deleuze’s texts do so constantly – then we can say that what exists is the

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unfolding of difference or multiplicity. What shall we call this unfolding?Becoming. Becoming is the unfolding of difference in time and as time. Inthe second Heraclitean sense of being, becoming is the being of being. It iswhat occupies the place that is occupied in traditional philosophies by beingin the first Heraclitean sense, although that place now plays a different role,one of instability and play rather than stability and sameness. Deleuze indi-cates as much in Difference and Repetition, when, in the course of a discus-sion of how simulacra always threaten to disrupt the stability of Platonicmodels, he says:

Among the most extraordinary pages in Plato, demonstrating the anti-Platonism at the heart of Platonism, are those which suggest that the dif-ferent, the dissimilar, the unequal – in short, becoming – may well be notmerely defects which affect copies like a ransom paid for their secondarycharacter or a counterpart to their resemblance, but rather models them-selves, terrifying models of the pseudos in which unfolds the power of thefalse.12

At this point, it should be clear why the question I have posed here is not “whatis a becoming?” but “when is a becoming?” Although in some sense I havegiven a preliminary characterization of becoming as the unfolding of differ-ence in time, to think of a becoming as a what threatens to reduce it to thestability of an identity. That is precisely the kind of move Deleuze is trying toavoid. Being as difference is a virtually existent pure duration whose unfold-ing we can call becoming, but only on the understanding that the differencewhich becomes is not specific something or set of somethings, but the chaoswhich produces all somethings.

We have spent the last several pages considering the second idea articu-lated in the passage on Heraclitus. In doing so, the basis has been laid for anarticulation of the third idea: that there is nothing beyond appearance, no tran-scendent reality. It might seem, at first glance, that since becoming occupiesthe role allotted to being in traditional philosophy, that becoming might pos-sess the transcendent status that being possesses in many traditional philoso-phies. However, for Deleuze both difference and becoming are immanent toour reality. They do not lie elsewhere, but here. Deleuze writes of his posi-tion, which he calls “transcendental empiricism,” “Empiricism truly becomestranscendental . . . only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that whichcan only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential dif-ference, and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity”(DR, pp. 56–57). The difference that produces qualitative diversity – the dif-ferent stable identities of conscious experience – lies within the sensible, within

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appearance, not outside of it. This is because the present carries the past andits difference within it, as a constitutive moment, rather than existing sepa-rately.

Deleuze marks this immanence with his use of the term “virtual” to describedifference’s mode of existing. The virtual is not the possible. The possible isthat which does not exist but might; it is modeled on the real, parasitic uponit, but is not real. It is the real minus existence. If I think of a fence that I wantto build, a white picket fence, that fence is possible, although not real. (Onemight say that it is a real thought; fair enough, but it’s only a possible fence.)In contrast, the virtual is real, it exists (sometimes Deleuze uses the term “sub-sists”), but has a wholely different character from that which we consciouslyexperience, which Deleuze calls the “actual.” “The virtual is opposed not tothe real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real insofar as it is virtual” (DR,p. 208). The movement of becoming, then, is not a movement from a tran-scendent reality (one that is merely possible in terms of our own reality) to itsrealization, but a movement from the virtual to its actualization.13 Descartes’God as creator and sustainer of the earth and its beings is an example of thefirst; Spinoza’s God as the substance which expresses itself in its modes andattributes is an example of the second.14

We can now see more clearly how becoming, although in some sense oc-cupying the place of being, also plays a very different role. In discussing thesecond idea from the passage on Heraclitus, I pointed out that becoming con-trasts with being in its founding instability and play. Now we can see as wellthat that instability and play is not given to us from outside our own realitybut is constitutive of that reality. It works from the inside, producing realityfrom within reality, rather than creating it from elsewhere.

The fourth idea in the passage on Heraclitus is that “becoming is the affir-mation of being.” Here again, we need to take the term “being” in the secondHeraclitean sense, not as a matter of stable identities but as a matter of what-ever it is that founds those identities. If becoming is the affirmation of being,it is the affirmation of difference in itself, of a pure difference that is not re-ducible to the identities, the actualities, that present themselves to us.15

We have arrived at an understanding of the concept of becoming as it ap-pears in Deleuze’s philosophy before the collaborative works with Guattari.It is a concept that brings together difference in itself, time, and virtuality. Itis a concept by means of which one jettisons traditional philosophy’s searchfor stable identities and allows oneself to see things by means of instability,play, and ceaseless creativity.

Before discussing becoming in Deleuze’s later work with Guattari, let mepause a moment over how the concept becoming fulfills the role of philoso-

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phy in a Deleuzian sense. Recall that the philosopher, for Deleuze, is the onewho creates concepts on a plane of immanence in order to embrace or pro-mote or create the remarkable, the interesting, and the important. The crea-tion of the concept of becoming fulfills this role. First, it is a concept: it bringstogether the preconceptual singularities or intensities of difference in itselfinto a (partial) whole that articulates in a specific way these singularities orintensities. It occurs on a plane of immanence that is also populated by otherconcepts to which it is related – virtuality, difference in itself, etc. And it pro-motes a way of seeing reality that diverges from the traditional view, and, inthe form of specific becomings that will be discussed briefly below, opens ontoother ways of seeing, thinking, and acting in the world.

In turning to the collaborative works, we may notice a difference in the waythe term “becoming” is used. My discussion so far has focussed on becomingsimpliciter, whereas in the later works there are mostly various becomings ofspecific types: becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible.Part of the reason for this seeming difference has been the focus of my ownarticulation. In fact, the earlier works do refer to specific becomings: becom-ing-mad, for instance, appears in both Difference and Repetition and The Logicof Sense. However, the specific becomings of these works are grounded in thegeneral concept of becoming, with all of the conceptual implications I havebeen discussing.

This is also true, although less obviously, of the collaborative works withGuattari. Although I do not want to discuss specific becomings in detail, I dowant to say enough about them to cite the continuity between becomings andthe concept of becoming.

The most important point of connection is that specific becomings affirmthe nature of becoming. They are affirmations in the sense that they call usback to the becoming of difference as the fundamental non-ground of specificidentities. In order to see how this is so, I want to focus on a specific aspect ofbecoming, becoming-minor.

The concept of a minority, and thus becoming-minor is a complex one, sincethe term “minority” invites a misunderstanding. Minorities, as Deleuze andGuattari use the term, are not specific groups of people. Rather, they are fluidmovements of creativity that subvert the dominant, i.e., majoritarian, identi-ties our current arrangements bestow upon us. “When we say majority, weare referring not to a greater relative quantity but to the determination of astate or standard in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the smallest,can be said to be minoritarian. . .Majority implies a state of domination, notthe reverse.”16 Minority, in turn, implies a subversion of the domination of themajority by a creation that explodes it from within. Kafka’s literature is, in

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Deleuze and Guattari’s eyes, a minority literature. It undercuts the dominantliterature in an act of creation that points to new arrangements unacknowl-edged by the majority.17

All becomings are, for Deleuze and Guattari, becomings-minor. “Becom-ing-Jewish, becoming-woman, etc., therefore imply two simultaneous move-ments, one by which a term (the subject) is withdrawn from the majority, andanother by which a term (the medium or agent) rises up from the minority”(ATP, p. 291). To become is to be part of a process by which the stable iden-tities – the majorities – are dissolved in creative acts in which more fluid “iden-tities” are created, but only as the by-products of the process itself. “What isreal is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixedterms through which that which becomes passes” (ATP, p. 238). Or, as Deleuzeand Guattari write of Kafka:

There is no longer anything but movements, vibrations, thresholds in adeserted matter: animals, mice, dogs, apes, cockroaches are distinguishedonly by this or that threshold, this or that vibration, by the particular un-derground tunnel in the rhizome or the burrow. Because these tunnels areunderground intensities (K, p. 13).

In becoming-minority, becomings return us to the unfolding of difference intime. What becomings undermine are stable identities, those “fixed terms”given to us by the majority culture as the framework within which our worldis to be understood and acted upon. In undermining stable identities, becomingsdo not substitute other stable identities or fixed terms for the abandoned ones.(Or, more accurately, the identities they posit are by-products of a more im-portant process.) Rather, they return us to process itself, to the temporal un-folding of difference in itself, that difference which is always betrayed whenit is, as it is inevitably, frozen into stable identities. Becomings, in short, aremoments of becoming.

This is not to imply that all becomings are the same. They are not. If wehave followed Deleuze (and Guattari) this far, we will recognize that since allbecoming is the unfolding of difference, there is no necessary sameness to anytwo becomings. What all becomings share is not the specific character of theircreative acts, but the return to difference, difference in itself. What Deleuzesays in a different context of Nietzsche’s eternal return is equally true ofbecomings: “It is not the same which returns, it is not the similar which re-turns; rather, the Same is the returning of that which returns, – in other words,of the Different; the similar is the returning of that which returns, – in otherwords, of the Dissimilar” (DR, pp. 300–301).

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This is why there are different becomings, even though all becomings arespecies of the genus becoming. There are becomings-woman, becomings-animal, becomings-imperceptible, becomings-Jewish. But no becomings-man, becomings-white, or becomings-American. And, as Deleuze says, allbecomings start with becoming-woman and in the end move toward becom-ing-imperceptible. “If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular seg-ment, with the becomings-animal that link up with it next, what are they allrushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-imperceptible” (ATP, p.279). Becoming-woman is the subversion of perhaps our most fixed stableidentity: our sexual roles. Even women must start with becoming-woman.“[T]he woman as a molar entity has to become-woman in order that the manalso becomes- or can become-woman” (ATP, pp. 275–276). We start there,and end up with becoming-imperceptible, which is nothing other than thereturn to difference in itself, to a difference without identity.

One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything, intoa becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, be-cause one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slip-ping in between things and growing in the midst of things. One has combined“everything”: the indefinite article, the infinitive-becoming, and the propername to which one is reduced. Saturate, eliminate, put everything in (ATP,p. 280).

A necessarily communicating world: a world of difference, anonymous andproductive, beneath and within the perceptible world of identities. To arriveat this world is to affirm difference.

To conclude, then, the concept of becoming and of becomings are rootedin a philosophical perspective whose goal is to overturn philosophy’s tradi-tional “dogmatic image of thought” and to open up new pathways down whichthinking and living can travel. These concepts do not ask of us our epistemicconsent; indeed they ask nothing of us. Rather, they are offerings, offeringsof ways to think, and ultimately to act, in a world that oppresses us with itsidentities. If they work – and for Deleuze, the ultimate criterion for the suc-cess of a concept is that it works – it will not be because we believe in thembut because they move us in the direction of possibilities that had before beenbeyond our ken. Otherwise put, if the concepts of becoming and of becomingswork, it will be because they expose us to the interesting, the remarkable, andthe important.

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Notes

1. Among feminist discussion of becoming, and especially becoming-woman, see AliceJardine, “Woman in Limbo: Deleuze and his Br(others),” SubStance p. 13/3–4 (1984),pp. 46–59; and Judith Butler, “The Life and Death Struggle of Desire: Hegel and Con-temporary Theory,” in Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth CenturyFrance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). These treatments are more criti-cal. For a sympathetic feminist reading of Deleuze in general, but also of the concept ofbecoming, see Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (hereafter, WP), trans. HughTomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 82.

3. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and BarbaraHabberjaam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 13.

4. There is a third aspect of philosophy for Deleuze and Guattari, that of conceptual perso-nae. I will neglect that aspect here since it is not crucial to the understanding of the con-cept of becoming.

5. Derrida, of course, says that “Differance is neither a word nor a concept” (“Difference,”in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. DavidAllison [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973], p. 130). However, this denialseems to refer to a more traditional idea of concepts, not a Deleuzian one.

6. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press,1983), pp. 23–24.

7. Difference and Repetition (hereafter, DR), trans. Paul Patton (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1994), p. 36.

8. The Logic of Sense (hereafter, LS), trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. ConstantinBoundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 12–17.

9. I discuss this issue at length in “Deleuze, Difference, and Science,” in Continental Phi-losophy and Science, ed. Gary Gutting (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming).

10. For a fuller treatment of Deleuze’s conception of time and its relation to difference, seemy “Gilles Deleuze and the Politics of Time,” Man and World 29 (3) (1996), pp. 293–304.Deleuze’s own treatment is given in Bergsonism (hereafter, B), trans. Hugh Tomlinson andBarbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Press, 1988).

11. My use of the term “exist” and “existence” is different from Deleuze’s. He often reservesthe term “existence” for what is actualized or differentiated as opposed to what is vir-tual or differentiated. In The Logic of Sense, for instance, he writes, “The highest termis not Being, but Something (aliquid), insofar as it subsumes being and non-being, ex-istence and inherence” (LS, p. 7). I choose this divergence from Deleuzian terminologybecause I believe that those already versed in Deleuze’s thought will have no difficultyin following the change, and those not so versed will understand matters more easily bymy jettisoning a distinction between existence and the real.

12. DR, p. 128, emphasis added. For Deleuze, “To reverse Platonism is first and foremost toremove essences and to substitute events in their place, as jets of singularities” (LS, p.53). For more on Deleuze’s anti-Platonism, see “Plato and the Simulacrum,” in LS, pp.263–266.

13. This is the source of Deleuze’s claim that what he provides are not conditions of possi-bility but conditions of reality. See, for example, Bergsonism: “We go beyond experi-

153WHEN IS A DELEUZIAN BECOMING?

ence, toward the conditions of experience (but these are not, in the Kantian manner, theconditions of all possible experience: They are the conditions of real experience)” (p.23).

14. For more on Deleuze’s view of Spinoza, see his Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza,trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990).

15. The relationship between becoming and affirmation can be seen in Deleuze’s treatmentof the eternal return in Nietzsche and Philosophy. There he treats the eternal return asthe return of difference rather than of the same, and thus links affirmation of the eternalreturn and an embrace of a philosophy that privileges difference.

16. A Thousand Plateaus (hereafter, ATP), trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press 1987), p. 291.

17. See, of course, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (hereafter, K), trans. Dana Polan(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), esp. Ch. 3.

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