Continental Philosophy Review 36: 139153, 2003. 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. ?

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When is a Deleuzian becoming?

TODD MAY
Department 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. Most of that writing, especially in feminist criticism, has drawn from the later collaborations with Guattari. However, the concept of a becoming arises earlier and appears more consistently across the trajectory of Deleuzes work than the discussion of specific becomings might lead one to believe. In this paper, I trace the concept of becoming in Deleuzes work, and specifically in the earlier works. By doing so, I hope to shed some light on the specific becomings that are the focus of the collaborative work with Guattari, and to deepen an understanding of the concept in general.

What I would like to do here is to situate the concept of becoming in Gilles Deleuzes thought, not with reference to a particular work or a particular becoming, but instead with reference to its trajectory in his work, and particularly his early work. Why might one want to do such a thing? There has been much discussion of Deleuzes work, particularly in recent years, and in some circles, notably but not exclusively in some areas of feminism, the concept of becoming, and in particular becoming-woman, has received some notice.1 However, it has not been generally noticed how deep the concept of becoming runs in Deleuzes corpus. It does not just appear in the works with Guattari, but instead resonates from the beginning to the end of his work. Grasping that resonance will help deepen an understanding of the concept and of the role Deleuze means it to play. But why focus on the concept of becoming? Why not focus on schizophrenia, or lines of flight, or being-as-difference, which are seemingly the pivots around which his work revolves? If we look over the scope of Deleuzes 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 can also be seen, from the right angle, to contain in germ the entirety of his philosophical perspective. This containment Deleuze might say this implication is easy to miss if one focuses solely on the later works, and especially on the collaborations with Felix Guattari. But if we return to the earlier works, especially Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, we can reconstruct the richness of Deleuzes concept of becoming, and see more

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clearly the philosophical strides that his use of the term in the later works makes. What I propose to do is this. I will start by spending a moment on what Deleuze takes philosophy in general and philosophical concepts in particular to be about. The reason for this is that the role that concepts play for him is linked 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 concept. 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, among them the tenth of the thousand plateaus, in order to see how the concept of becoming functions. Although many readers of Deleuze are at least broadly familiar with his view of philosophy as laid out in What is Philosophy? it is worth recalling it at the outset of any discussion of a Deleuzian concept. This is because what Deleuze is doing when he does philosophy, and creates concepts, is so different from what most philosophers do, that without his metaphilosophy in hand, it is easy to become disoriented. For Deleuze (and Guattari), then, philosophy is not a matter of description or explanation. Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine its success or failure.2 Philosophy is, in a word, practical and normative. It is a practice whose point is not that of getting the right take on things but of making a contribution to our living. Specifically, that contribution is made in the areas of the interesting, the remarkable and the important. It may seem as though the ideas of the interesting and the remarkable have more in common with each other than either does with the important. This is because the interesting and the remarkable are bound up with novelty and difference, whereas the important is not. While this may be true in general, that distinction is insignificant for Deleuze, since he thinks it is of central philosophical importance both to recognize and to create novelty and difference. The history of philosophy and of philosophical activity has been tied too closely to a project of promoting identity and sameness and of marginalizing difference. The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the repressors role. . . . Philosophy is shot through with the project of becoming the official language of a Pure 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 loose from 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, and the important? According to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy does that simply by doing philosophy. And what is it to do philosophy? To create concepts on planes of immanence. Philosophy is a constructivism, and constructivism has two qualitatively different aspects: the creation of concepts and the laying out of a plane (WP, pp. 3536).4 Understanding what a concept is and what a plane is will allow us to understand what it is to do philosophy, and how it is that philosophy embraces the interesting, the remarkable, and the important. In addition, it will allow us to return to the concept of becoming with the appropriate background, having in hand both what it is for something to 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 features of concepts: relatedness to other concepts, internal consistency, and condensation of its internal components (WP, pp. 1921). Let me take these in reverse 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 terms are defined by their differences from one another, we can think of these differences not merely as oppositions but as positive differences, as pre-conceptual differences that are constitutive of the content of the terms. These differences are pre-conceptual components of the terms they constitute; they are intensities. The role of concepts is to condense these intensities together in a particular way, to make them circulate after a particular fashion. In condensing intensities, concepts bring them together into a certain kind of unity. When separate intensities come together as components of a concept, they lose their character as separate intensities and merge into the unity of the concept. For example, in the concept of the other person, the possible world does not exist outside the face that expresses it, although it is distinguished from it as expressed and expression; and the face in turn is the vicinity of the words 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 other linguistic units in the Saussurean view of language. Concepts are not formed and 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 create a concept out of nothing, but out of a context of concepts which (a) forms the soil from which a new concept emerges and (b) is the foil with and against which 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 own system of interconceptual relatedness. This latter system occurs on the plane of immanence. The plane of immanence is related to its concepts in somewhat the same way as concepts are related to intensities. It draws them together into a whole out of which arises a philosophical perspective. To take Derridas philosophy as an example, the concepts of differance,5 pharmakon, archi-trace, woman, truth, hymen, etc. that he creates are not isolated from one another. They refer to one another and together form a systematic whole within which Derridas philosophical perspective becomes articulated. It is the plane that secures conceptual linkages with ever increasing connections, and it is the concepts that secure the populating of the plane on an always renewed and variable curve (WP, p. 37). This does not mean that the plane of immanence is merely the system of those concepts; rather, it is the difference itself (see below) out of which the concepts are formed and on which they are articulated. Why is the plane one of immanence? The importance of immanence will become clearer with the discussion of the concept of becoming, but it should be clear at this point that the concepts that populate a philosophical plane are not reflections of a world that transcends them but constituents of a perspective that creates a world. Concepts refer, not to transcendent objects, but to themselves and to other objects along the plane of immanence. The concept is defined by its consistency, its endoconsistency and exoconsistency, but it has no reference: it is self-referential; it posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created (WP, p. 22). I hasten to add here, to avoid charges of idealism being leveled against Deleuze, that immanence does not entail that philosophical positions do not have a bearing upon the world, or that one cannot see the world by means of a philosophical perspective. Rather, the point of a philosophical perspective is not to tell us what the world is like that is the point of science but to create a perspective through which the world takes on a new significance. The task of philosophy when it creates concepts, entities, is always to extract an event from 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 of creating concepts, is not to tell us the truth, to limn the world as Quine would have 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 to related concepts, we should be able to see and to live in a fresh way, a way that might not have been available to us without the concept. Lets 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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Deleuzes earliest suggestions regarding becoming appear in Nietzsche and Philosophy, in a discussion of Heraclitus. Heraclitus has two thoughts which are like ciphers: according to one there is no being, everything is a becoming; according to the other, being is the being of becoming. Deleuze explicates these thoughts this way: . . .there is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity; neither multiplicity nor becoming are appearances or illusions. But neither are there multiple or eternal realities which would be, in turn, like essences beyond appearance. Multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, essential transformation and constant symptom of unity. Multiplicity is the affirmation of unity; becoming is the affirmation of being.6 In this passage, Deleuze presents four ideas which remain at the heart of his articulation of becoming that becoming is the final reality (there is no being beyond becoming); that becoming is aligned with multiplicity (. . . nothing beyond multiplicity); that becoming, although the final reality, is not a transcendent reality (neither are there . . . realities..beyond appearance); and that becoming is the affirmation of being. The first idea is that becoming is the final reality. Traditionally, philosophers, particularly philosophers of a metaphysical bent, have sought something stable as the bedrock of philosophical reflection. Platos Good, Descartes God (or is it his I?), Kants transcendental unity of apperception, Hegels Absolute are all examples of concepts where philosophical reflection seeks to come to rest in a stable unity. Deleuzes term being refers at least in the first of the two Heraclitean thoughts he is developing to these stable unities. And he rejects the traditional philosophical commitment to them. However, this rejection is not a straightforward one. He substitutes another concept becoming which in one sense must occupy the role that being used to play and in another sense must play a very different role. The reason for the former is that becoming is, as being was, that reality behind which there is no other reality. The reason for the latter is that he is clearly rejecting the philosophical use to which that final reality has been put. The way in which becoming occupies the place of being is given in the second idea in the passage we are discussing; the way in which it subverts it is given in both the second and third ideas. The affinity of becoming and multiplicity is developed in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. It leads directly into some of the most important and difficult thoughts in Deleuzian ontology, and would take an entire book to explicate adequately. I can here only present Deleuzes ontology 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 in the later works when he utilizes the concept. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze uses the concept of being, but here in accordance with the second of the Heraclitean thoughts, that being is the being of becoming. Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs; it is said of difference itself.7 It is difference, then, that we need to understand in order to understand becoming. For Deleuze, difference difference in itself is not to be defined in terms of the same. We characteristically define difference negatively, as the not-sameness of two or more entities. There are, of course, many ways notsameness can occur. Not-sameness can be not identical; the two items are twins, but they occupy different positions on the space-time continuum. Not-sameness can be not the same ontological status; a model and its copy are not the same in this way. Not-sameness can be not the same qualities, species, values, people, place. What all these and other not-samenesses share is that they begin by positing subsisting entities, and derive difference by means of negating the sameness of the entities. What Deleuze wants is not a derivative difference, but difference in itself, a difference that he believes is the source not only of the derivative difference but of the sameness on the basis of which derivative difference is derived. One might want to object at this point, even before the discussion of difference in itself begins, that Deleuze has not even motivated the idea that there is such a thing as difference in itself, especially one that is in any way grounding for identity. What is his objection to deriving difference from identity in the way traditional philosophy has? Deleuzes response here is actually threefold. First, there are problems with making identity founding. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze points out that basing difference (and repetition) on identity fails even to ask the question of whether there is such a thing as difference (or repetition) beyond identity. Moreover, founding difference on identity leads either to an infinite regress or a circle; the founding identities must find their ground in other identities, etc. (DR, p. 13). Deleuze makes a similar point in The Logic of Sense, where he says that signification (the grounding of linguistic meaning in stable linguistic identities) leads to an infinite regress in the sense that a proposition follows from other propositions only given that yet other propositions are true; and those other proposition are true only given that still other propositions are true. . . . Moreover, if one tries to ground signification in other aspects of language denotation or manifestation one winds up circling among them.8 Second, and related to this, there are aspects of our world that can be better accounted 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, there are events that arise not on the basis of a given identity evolving under the right conditions into another given identity, but of something more chaotic evolving under the right conditions into a given identity. If we see difference as grounding identity, these scientific findings are more easily understood.9 The third response to the objection is that in seeking to articulate a concept of difference in itself, Deleuze is engaging in the project of philosophy, as we saw 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 new and different perspective. Thus, to follow Deleuzes discussion of difference is not so much to substitute a more adequate philosophical approach for a less adequate 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 else it is, it is not given to us in the form of identity. This means that an encounter with it must occur, not by means of the stable identities given to us in consciousness, but beneath or within those identities. Difference in itself is founding for identity but does not appear as such (as difference in itself) within those identities. It is not phenomenologically accessible. Thus, a search for difference in itself must abandon the project of investigating directly the givens of experience and turn toward a more hidden realm. Deleuze discovers that realm in the nature of time. Deleuzes treatment of time borrows heavily from the work of Henri Bergson.10 For Bergson, time is conceived mistakenly when it is thought of as a series of passing instants. Rather, we should think of time as a whole, as a pure duration, in which each instant has its place. When time is conceived as a whole, each of its instants is internally related to every other instant. The past is connected to the present (and the future), but not connected as something that is no longer exists to something that does exist (or will). How could something that does not exist be connected to something that does, except through memory, which already presupposes an analysis of time? Rather, the past exists in the present, but in a different way from the way the present exists.11 To signify this different way of existing, Deleuze uses the term virtual as opposed to the actual existence of the present. (More on the virtual and 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 each of which also contains the whole of time. Following Bergson, Deleuze pictures this past as a cone, where the cones point is the present with the past enlarging 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 single individual. Rather, it is an ontological matter that lives itself through individuals psychologically. Deleuze summarizes the moments of this time: There is only one time (monism), although there is an infinity of actual fluxes (generalized pluralism), that necessarily participates in the same virtual whole (limited pluralism) (B, p. 82). The content of the past, which exists virtually in the present, is difference in itself. It is not difficult to see why, for Deleuze at least, this must be so. If the content of the past were to consist in certain identities, then their nature as identities would have to be modeled on some original form from which they would draw their character as identities. (An insult in the past would be so in virtue of displaying insultness, which would imply an insultness apart from the specific insult in question the Platonic move.) These original forms would not themselves be in time, since the contents in time would be copies of 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 nontime that forms the model for times content. These moves identities as copies modeled on an original, existence doubled in a founding transcendent reality are central to the type of philosophy Deleuze is trying to overcome. They form the basis for stabilizing reality so that stranger and more compromising adventures do not take place. They are Platos Forms, Descartes God, Kants transcendental I. Thus the content of time, since it cannot come in the form of identities or samenesses, must be difference. Moreover, that difference is not a difference that occurs negatively as a not-sameness or not-identity, 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 the past, every moment repeats this difference in itself, even while stable identities are being produced within it. What does this discussion of difference and time have to do with becoming and its affinity with multiplicity? Everything. First, if we think of being in the first Heraclitean sense, as opposed to becoming, then the above summary shows how, for Deleuze, there is no being that can serve as the stable model or unity founding what exists. There is only the unfolding of difference in time. Difference lies beneath and within the passing identities to which it gives rise. Being in the first Heraclitean sense stands for everything which plays the role of a stabilizing identity. Deleuzes analysis of difference and time undercuts that role. Second, if we equate multiplicity and difference and Deleuzes 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. In the second Heraclitean sense of being, becoming is the being of being. It is what occupies the place that is occupied in traditional philosophies by being in the first Heraclitean sense, although that place now plays a different role, one of instability and play rather than stability and sameness. Deleuze indicates as much in Difference and Repetition, when, in the course of a discussion of how simulacra always threaten to disrupt the stability of Platonic models, he says: Among the most extraordinary pages in Plato, demonstrating the antiPlatonism at the heart of Platonism, are those which suggest that the different, the dissimilar, the unequal in short, becoming may well be not merely defects which affect copies like a ransom paid for their secondary character or a counterpart to their resemblance, but rather models themselves, terrifying models of the pseudos in which unfolds the power of the false.12 At this point, it should be clear why the question I have posed here is not what is a becoming? but when is a becoming? Although in some sense I have given a preliminary characterization of becoming as the unfolding of difference in time, to think of a becoming as a what threatens to reduce it to the stability of an identity. That is precisely the kind of move Deleuze is trying to avoid. Being as difference is a virtually existent pure duration whose unfolding we can call becoming, but only on the understanding that the difference which becomes is not specific something or set of somethings, but the chaos which produces all somethings. We have spent the last several pages considering the second idea articulated in the passage on Heraclitus. In doing so, the basis has been laid for an articulation of the third idea: that there is nothing beyond appearance, no transcendent reality. It might seem, at first glance, that since becoming occupies the role allotted to being in traditional philosophy, that becoming might possess the transcendent status that being possesses in many traditional philosophies. However, for Deleuze both difference and becoming are immanent to our reality. They do not lie elsewhere, but here. Deleuze writes of his position, which he calls transcendental empiricism, Empiricism truly becomes transcendental . . . only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference, and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity (DR, pp. 5657). The difference that produces qualitative diversity the different 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 and its difference within it, as a constitutive moment, rather than existing separately. Deleuze marks this immanence with his use of the term virtual to describe differences mode of existing. The virtual is not the possible. The possible is that which does not exist but might; it is modeled on the real, parasitic upon it, but is not real. It is the real minus existence. If I think of a fence that I want to build, a white picket fence, that fence is possible, although not real. (One might say that it is a real thought; fair enough, but its only a possible fence.) In contrast, the virtual is real, it exists (sometimes Deleuze uses the term subsists), but has a wholely different character from that which we consciously experience, which Deleuze calls the actual. The virtual is opposed not to the 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 transcendent reality (one that is merely possible in terms of our own reality) to its realization, 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 the first; Spinozas God as the substance which expresses itself in its modes and attributes is an example of the second.14 We can now see more clearly how becoming, although in some sense occupying the place of being, also plays a very different role. In discussing the second idea from the passage on Heraclitus, I pointed out that becoming contrasts with being in its founding instability and play. Now we can see as well that that instability and play is not given to us from outside our own reality but is constitutive of that reality. It works from the inside, producing reality from within reality, rather than creating it from elsewhere. The fourth idea in the passage on Heraclitus is that becoming is the affirmation of being. Here again, we need to take the term being in the second Heraclitean sense, not as a matter of stable identities but as a matter of whatever 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 reducible to the identities, the actualities, that present themselves to us.15 We have arrived at an understanding of the concept of becoming as it appears in Deleuzes philosophy before the collaborative works with Guattari. It is a concept that brings together difference in itself, time, and virtuality. It is a concept by means of which one jettisons traditional philosophys search for stable identities and allows oneself to see things by means of instability, play, and ceaseless creativity. Before discussing becoming in Deleuzes later work with Guattari, let me pause 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 one who creates concepts on a plane of immanence in order to embrace or promote or create the remarkable, the interesting, and the important. The creation of the concept of becoming fulfills this role. First, it is a concept: it brings together the preconceptual singularities or intensities of difference in itself into a (partial) whole that articulates in a specific way these singularities or intensities. It occurs on a plane of immanence that is also populated by other concepts to which it is related virtuality, difference in itself, etc. And it promotes a way of seeing reality that diverges from the traditional view, and, in the form of specific becomings that will be discussed briefly below, opens onto other ways of seeing, thinking, and acting in the world. In turning to the collaborative works, we may notice a difference in the way the term becoming is used. My discussion so far has focussed on becoming simpliciter, whereas in the later works there are mostly various becomings of specific types: becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible. Part of the reason for this seeming difference has been the focus of my own articulation. In fact, the earlier works do refer to specific becomings: becoming-mad, for instance, appears in both Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. However, the specific becomings of these works are grounded in the general concept of becoming, with all of the conceptual implications I have been discussing. This is also true, although less obviously, of the collaborative works with Guattari. Although I do not want to discuss specific becomings in detail, I do want to say enough about them to cite the continuity between becomings and the concept of becoming. The most important point of connection is that specific becomings affirm the nature of becoming. They are affirmations in the sense that they call us back to the becoming of difference as the fundamental non-ground of specific identities. In order to see how this is so, I want to focus on a specific aspect of becoming, becoming-minor. The concept of a minority, and thus becoming-minor is a complex one, since the term minority invites a misunderstanding. Minorities, as Deleuze and Guattari use the term, are not specific groups of people. Rather, they are fluid movements of creativity that subvert the dominant, i.e., majoritarian, identities our current arrangements bestow upon us. When we say majority, we are referring not to a greater relative quantity but to the determination of a state 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, not the reverse.16 Minority, in turn, implies a subversion of the domination of the majority by a creation that explodes it from within. Kafkas literature is, in

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Deleuze and Guattaris eyes, a minority literature. It undercuts the dominant literature in an act of creation that points to new arrangements unacknowledged by the majority.17 All becomings are, for Deleuze and Guattari, becomings-minor. Becoming-Jewish, becoming-woman, etc., therefore imply two simultaneous movements, one by which a term (the subject) is withdrawn from the majority, and another 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 identities the majorities are dissolved in creative acts in which more fluid identities are created, but only as the by-products of the process itself. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes (ATP, p. 238). Or, as Deleuze and Guattari write of Kafka: There is no longer anything but movements, vibrations, thresholds in a deserted matter: animals, mice, dogs, apes, cockroaches are distinguished only by this or that threshold, this or that vibration, by the particular underground tunnel in the rhizome or the burrow. Because these tunnels are underground intensities (K, p. 13). In becoming-minority, becomings return us to the unfolding of difference in time. What becomings undermine are stable identities, those fixed terms given to us by the majority culture as the framework within which our world is to be understood and acted upon. In undermining stable identities, becomings do 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 important process.) Rather, they return us to process itself, to the temporal unfolding of difference in itself, that difference which is always betrayed when it is, as it is inevitably, frozen into stable identities. Becomings, in short, are moments of becoming. This is not to imply that all becomings are the same. They are not. If we have followed Deleuze (and Guattari) this far, we will recognize that since all becoming is the unfolding of difference, there is no necessary sameness to any two becomings. What all becomings share is not the specific character of their creative acts, but the return to difference, difference in itself. What Deleuze says in a different context of Nietzsches eternal return is equally true of becomings: It is not the same which returns, it is not the similar which returns; 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 other words, of the Dissimilar (DR, pp. 300301).

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This is why there are different becomings, even though all becomings are species of the genus becoming. There are becomings-woman, becomingsanimal, becomings-imperceptible, becomings-Jewish. But no becomingsman, becomings-white, or becomings-American. And, as Deleuze says, all becomings start with becoming-woman and in the end move toward becoming-imperceptible. If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment, with the becomings-animal that link up with it next, what are they all rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-imperceptible (ATP, p. 279). Becoming-woman is the subversion of perhaps our most fixed stable identity: 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 man also becomes- or can become-woman (ATP, pp. 275276). We start there, and end up with becoming-imperceptible, which is nothing other than the return to difference in itself, to a difference without identity. One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping in between things and growing in the midst of things. One has combined everything: the indefinite article, the infinitive-becoming, and the proper name to which one is reduced. Saturate, eliminate, put everything in (ATP, p. 280). A necessarily communicating world: a world of difference, anonymous and productive, beneath and within the perceptible world of identities. To arrive at this world is to affirm difference. To conclude, then, the concept of becoming and of becomings are rooted in a philosophical perspective whose goal is to overturn philosophys traditional dogmatic image of thought and to open up new pathways down which thinking and living can travel. These concepts do not ask of us our epistemic consent; indeed they ask nothing of us. Rather, they are offerings, offerings of ways to think, and ultimately to act, in a world that oppresses us with its identities. If they work and for Deleuze, the ultimate criterion for the success of a concept is that it works it will not be because we believe in them but because they move us in the direction of possibilities that had before been beyond our ken. Otherwise put, if the concepts of becoming and of becomings work, it will be because they expose us to the interesting, the remarkable, and the important.

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1. Among feminist discussion of becoming, and especially becoming-woman, see Alice Jardine, Woman in Limbo: Deleuze and his Br(others), SubStance p. 13/34 (1984), pp. 4659; and Judith Butler, The Life and Death Struggle of Desire: Hegel and Contemporary Theory, in Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). These treatments are more critical. For a sympathetic feminist reading of Deleuze in general, but also of the concept of becoming, 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. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 82. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjaam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 13. 4. There is a third aspect of philosophy for Deleuze and Guattari, that of conceptual personae. I will neglect that aspect here since it is not crucial to the understanding of the concept 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 Husserls Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973], p. 130). However, this denial seems 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. 2324. 7. Difference and Repetition (hereafter, DR), trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 36. 8. The Logic of Sense (hereafter, LS), trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 1217. 9. I discuss this issue at length in Deleuze, Difference, and Science, in Continental Philosophy and Science, ed. Gary Gutting (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming). 10. For a fuller treatment of Deleuzes conception of time and its relation to difference, see my Gilles Deleuze and the Politics of Time, Man and World 29 (3) (1996), pp. 293304. Deleuzes own treatment is given in Bergsonism (hereafter, B), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Press, 1988). 11. My use of the term exist and existence is different from Deleuzes. He often reserves the term existence for what is actualized or differentiated as opposed to what is virtual or differentiated. In The Logic of Sense, for instance, he writes, The highest term is not Being, but Something (aliquid), insofar as it subsumes being and non-being, existence and inherence (LS, p. 7). I choose this divergence from Deleuzian terminology because I believe that those already versed in Deleuzes thought will have no difficulty in following the change, and those not so versed will understand matters more easily by my jettisoning a distinction between existence and the real. 12. DR, p. 128, emphasis added. For Deleuze, To reverse Platonism is first and foremost to remove essences and to substitute events in their place, as jets of singularities (LS, p. 53). For more on Deleuzes anti-Platonism, see Plato and the Simulacrum, in LS, pp. 263266. 13. This is the source of Deleuzes claim that what he provides are not conditions of possibility but conditions of reality. See, for example, Bergsonism: We go beyond experi-

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14. 15.

16. 17.

ence, toward the conditions of experience (but these are not, in the Kantian manner, the conditions of all possible experience: They are the conditions of real experience) (p. 23). For more on Deleuzes view of Spinoza, see his Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990). The relationship between becoming and affirmation can be seen in Deleuzes treatment of the eternal return in Nietzsche and Philosophy. There he treats the eternal return as the return of difference rather than of the same, and thus links affirmation of the eternal return and an embrace of a philosophy that privileges difference. A Thousand Plateaus (hereafter, ATP), trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987), p. 291. 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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