rhizomes 11/12

fall 2005/spring 2006

Pink Vectors of Deleuze: Queer Theory and Inhumanism

Jeffrey J. Cohen and Todd R. Ramlow

I owe you lot nothing, nothing more than you owe me. I don't need to join you in your ghettoes, because
I've got my own ... We have to counter people who think 'I'm this, I'm that' ... by thinking in strange, fluid,
unusual terms: I don't know what I am ... no gay can ever definitively say 'I'm gay.' It's not a question of
being this or that sort of human, but of becoming inhuman.[1]

[1] The evidence for the queerness of Gilles Deleuze is scant. He collaborated passionately with Flix
Guattari, radical psychoanalyst and activist for the rights of gays and lesbians. He shared his work and
interpenetrated ideas with Michel Foucault, the founding figure of contemporary queer theory. Yet the
philosopher spent his life happily married to his wife, Fanny. They raised two children in what looks to us like
the predictable structure of a bourgeois family. He was not even an especially spiffy dresser.

[2] Yet we find in Gilles Deleuze's work a provocative reconceptualization of subjecthood and desire, a
becoming-queer lucidly evident when he refused the lonely authority of a single voice and hybridized with
Guattari and Claire Parnet through writing. This essay explores the trajectories of the queer-in-motion of
queer studies and of Deleuze. His greatest challenge to queer theory is something that seems almost
recidivist in his work: his animism, his belief that the entire world constitutes a non-anthropomorphic,
infinitely connective machinery of desire. There is a capaciousness to Deleuze and Guattari's exuberant
conception of sexuality, a boundary-breaking that cannot be reduced to the merely human frame within
which queer theory has sometimes allowed its ambit to be circumscribed. [2] We will therefore speak of
Deleuze's inhumanism. Throughout his philosophical opus assemblages proliferate by means of which the
human disaggregates, scattered across a molecular field of animals, objects, intensities in ceaseless
movement. Even in his death, we find, Deleuze refused the weary categories of the merely human and
sought some path that might lead away from the sedimentation(s) of decline, sickness, redemption. As the
philosopher of middles Deleuze rejected determinative endings, especially when they were used to fix in
place and thereby devalue what had been a vagrant and affirmative life.

[3] Like one of his favorite classical philosophers, Lucretius, Deleuze discerned in the cosmos movements of
desire that intermingle our bodies, our intensities, our particles with the tropisms of the vegetal world, the
ardor of stars, the passions of animals, a grand and molecular vitalism. At the farthest side of this process of
radical dispersion might lurk death: in Lucretius's case, a ghastly demise borne of plague. To invoke
mortality in a discussion of the queer is, we realize, to risk the pernicious linking of the queer to the
fatal. [3] This heteronormative conjoining of queer sexuality to morbidity (especially post-AIDS)
conceptualizes death as an individualized, judicial event. The queer trajectories we'll follow dismantle the
notion of identity that buttresses such a conception, and will (in those famous words of Antonin Artaud that
Deleuze loved so much) "have done with the judgment of God," [4] will attempt not to reinscribe mortality
back into some reductive system of justice or tragedy. Deleuzian inhumanism opens up the queer to spaces
that suddenly cease to stand as final resting places filled only by silence.

Pink Paint

The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its
becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its
rupture, its own line of flight. (ATP 11)
[4] The becoming-world of the Pink Panther might also be understood, in an appropriately deleuzian manner,
as the becoming-world of the queer, the becoming-pink of the Panthers and the becoming-panther of the
"pinks." Not the Pink Panther originally cited by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, the Blake
Edwards-spawned series of fumbling detective movies starring Peter Sellers, bookended by the animated
antics of a queer cat. Rather, the Pink Panthers as imagined and produced by the unruly queers of the
1990s. Fed up with homophobic violence in New York and San Francisco, activists coming out of ACT-UP and
Queer Nation organized neighborhood watch patrols in the pink ghettoes they'd fought so hard for in order
to "take back the streets." The Pink Panthers spread rhizomatically to other metropolitan centers. Multiple
becomings, multiple queerings. The Pink Panthers "imitated" nothing, "reproduced" nothing, although the
groups did assemble and deploy tactics and identity particles connecting to a variety of minoritarian and
urban-based political projects.

[5] The Pink Panthers represent one instantiation of what Deleuze and Guattari call the war machine, an
assemblage produced in/through/from multiple connections across "smooth space" and time. [5] The war
machine proliferates speeds, affects and desiring relations/productions to constitute a line of flight away
from the State Apparatus at the same time that it takes that apparatus as object of attack: "It is always the
assemblage that constitutes the weapons system" (ATP 399). But the attack and the violence are always
secondary. The war machine functions primarily by producing new relationships among bodies, objects and
groups in excess of institutional authority or control. The Pink Panthers, as war-machine assembled out of
and within multiple minoritarian social and political movements, created novel coalitions and affects across
identitarian boundaries that could react, sometimes violently, to institutional violence against queers. The
Guardian Angels. The Pink Panthers. The Black Panthers. Black Power. Brown Power. Pink Pride. "Black is
Beautiful." "Take Back the Night." "Take Back the Streets." "Out of the Closets and into the Streets." Multiple
becomings-minoritarian of queer politics. But for all the paramilitary connotations, including fabulous pink
berets, we must not mistake the Pink Panther war machine as a simple extension of patriarchal militarism
and the American military-industrial complex. As D&G point out, we must not conceive of this war machine
within the logic of the State and institutional power, for "it seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to
be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere" (ATP, 352). This pink war machine
comes out of minoritarian politics, rhizomatics, assemblages, and becomings; otherwise it would be just
another army.

[6] Perhaps we rove too far afield. It's unavoidable for a pack of Pink Panthers. This restless roaming is,
moreover, precisely one of the vectors of queer theory, as well as of D&G, whose vagrancy propelled their
projects. The pack, the multiplicity (maybe even what Judith Butler has called "collective
disidentifications" [6]), molecular identities and rhizomatic desires, the lines of flight away from, around and
back into, through and in excess of molar, institutional, sedimented politics, desire and identity: these
deleuzoguattarian formulations have been and continue to be some of the primary goals of queer theory.
Queer theory has been invaluable to our engagements with Deleuze and Guattari, just as D&G have been
integral to our own queer flights and queer theorizings, even when they might seem most absent from both.
A return to some of the foundational texts of queer theory will show that, just as our return to D&G's Pink
Panther was conditioned by queer theory, queer theory is and always has been deleuzoguattarian. [7]

[7] Inextricable from politics and activism, early formulations of queer theory insisted that the definition and
status of "queer" must never be finalized, circumscribed, or unitarily representative. [8] As a critical insight,
methodological tool and style of being, queer calls attention to the domination of norms in order to
undermine and open up. It does not seek to institute some new norm large enough to accommodate
itself. [9] Judith Butler has remarked that "if the term 'queer' is to be a site of collective contestation, the
point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which
is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage
and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes." [10] Similarly, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
asserts that "queer is a continuing moment, movement, motiverecurrent, eddying, troublant . . . The
immemorial current that queer represents is antiseparatist as it is antiassimilationist. Keenly, it is relational,
and strange." [11] And in his introduction to the anthology Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner describes
queer theory as "the project of elaborating, in ways that cannot be predicted in advance, this question:
What do queers want?" [12] Not what are queers, or who is queer and under what conditions, but what do
queers want, which is in no way necessarily stable or universal. This is why Warner keeps the question open,
and asserts that the contingent answer to this can never "be predicted in advance." This open-endedness is
further propelled by Warner's claim that "heteronormativity can be overcome only by actively imagining a
necessarily and desirably queer world." [13] That active imagination is, of course, ongoing and ever
changing. It is, in deleuzoguattarian terms, a line of flight that marks a becoming-queer of the world and a
becoming-world of the queer.

[8] These permutations of queer theory share at least an assertion of the non-teleological, non-unitary
status of "queer," and in doing so directly echo many of Deleuze and Guattari's elaborations on "becoming."
Deployed against, through, outside of majoritarian, molar aggregates, becomings are minoritarian, micro-
political projects. Aleatory and ever-changing, becomings are always in excess of the normativizing
processes of the State Apparatus, heteronormative Family, dualist Philosophy, Oedipalized Sexuality.
Becomings imagine and put into practice new ways of moving through the world, new alliances and
connections across fields of difference. They proceed by production/generation rather than mimesis or
assimilation: "A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an
imitation, or, at the limit, an identification" (ATP 237). A becoming is infection, alliance, intermingling like
with unlike and erupting along trajectories no map can draw in advance.

[9] If becomings are not mimetic or assimilational, neither are they the arboreal product of heteronormative
descent. Rather than a (con)descension, they are a con-dissension. Becomings are productive and
connective: "Finally, becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation.
Becoming produces nothing by filiation; all filiation is imaginary. Becoming is always of a different order than
filiation. It concerns alliance" (ATP, 238). Or contagion. Institutions like marriage that render humans
predictable create descent; alliance unites the wasp to the orchid in an orgy of desire that brings sexuality
very far away from genitality. A man and a woman and a child might partake of evolution, genealogy,
filiation; a man and a woman and whip and a bridle that compose a "circuit of intensities," or a woman and
a dog who share a love not framed by the supposed limitations of either species, embark upon a
becoming. [14] Like the queer of queer theory, becomings are associational, never fully foreclosed and
always on the move. Becomings have neither origin nor destination; like the queer, they are neither filial nor
teleological. They do not confer identitymolar, sedimented, unitarybut produce an entity cobbled from
disparate, provisionally allied parts, a relation of affects and speeds. Thus, becomings and their haecceities
(thisnesses, herenesses, radical individuations) are always middles, never destinations. [15] This idea of
middle without terminus also underwrites much that queer theory can attain, in theory and practice.

[10] One of the urgent needs of queer theory today, a need for which Deleuze and Guattari are
indispensable, is to challenge the very norms and limits of the "human." Especially in a cultural climate
where categories like the severely disabled limn the boundaries of humanity, a category built upon
normalizing and exclusion. Our becoming-queer, becoming-world and becoming-Pink Panther (among other
becomings) precisely depends upon our becoming-inhuman.

Inhuman Butler

[11] In her recent book Undoing Gender, Judith Butler offers an extensive rearticulation of the limits of the
human as currently constituted. [16] Her work ably demonstrates recent trends in queer theory to which
Deleuze and Guattari are well suited. Even if, as she herself asserts, Butler is at best problematically
deleuzian, she also admits that her work has been influenced by Deleuze. She writes that "every year [she]
receive[s] several essays and comments from people who insist that [she is] Deleuzian" (UG 198). Butler's
reluctance to embrace the deleuzian descriptor comes from her anxiety that there is "no recognition of the
negative in his work, and I feared that he was proposing a manic defense against negativity." [17] Yet even
here Butler is becoming deleuzoguattarian. Akin to her own notion of what we might call a potentially
subversive disloyal repetition, becoming isn't mimetic. [18] She is not "being," or reproducing, or
regurgitating Deleuze and Guattari, but allying with them with a difference. Deleuze and Guattari are part of
Butler's own queer assemblage, her war machine and line of flight. [19]

[12] In the first chapter of Undoing Gender, entitled "Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,"
Butler engages in an elaborate dis-and-re-articulation of the limits of human subjectivity, and how, why, and
what determines the very status of "the human." Butler begins with some brief excursus on the condition of
subjectivity as intersubjective. She says, as the title of her chapter alludes, that to be a subject we are
always already that subject for another, so that the very basis of subjectivity is that we are somehow always
constituted as/by being "beside oneself": "In a sense, to be a body is to be given over to others even as a
body is, emphatically, 'one's own,' that over which we must claim rights of autonomy," even if/as this
autonomy if never finalized or monolithic. [20] The intersubjective status of subjectivity leads Butler into a
number of observations and assertions that align rather neatly with D&G's notions of becoming, of the pack
and multiplicity.

[13] The intersubjective status of the body and subjectivity fundamentally challenges the unitary,
transcendental signifier/subject of phallogocentrism, and demands a critical engagement with our being
ourselves for others, our being "beside ourselves":

The particular sociality that belongs to bodily life, to sexual life, and to becoming gendered (which is always,
to a certain extent, becoming gendered for others) establishes a field of ethical enmeshment with others and
a sense of disorientation for the first-person, that is, the perspective of the ego. As bodies, we are always
for something more than, and other than, ourselves. (UG, 25)

Throughout this chapter and throughout Undoing Gender more generally, Butler deploys the term
"becoming" in ways that are directly resonant of D&G. Her "becoming gendered for others" suggests a
process formed of alliances with and through others, a process not collapsible to either side of a self/other
binary, a process always in motion, changing (performatively) in multiple contexts. More radically, the pack
or multiplicity establishes the very ground of possibility for politics and agency: "Multiplicity is not the death
of agency, but its very condition. We misconstrue where action comes from if we fail to understand how
multiple forces interact and produce the very dynamism of life" (UG 194). For Deleuze and Guattari, of
course, the pack/multiplicity is the very condition of minoritarian micro-politics and is propelled by multiple
and simultaneous becomings.

[14] For Butler, multiple becomings for others provide a possible reorganization of the norms that sort and
give order to "natural" life: "As a consequence of being in the mode of becoming, and in always living with
the constitutive possibility of becoming otherwise, the body is that which can occupy the norm in myriad
ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as
open to transformation" (UG 217). Here again, as we can suddenly see retroactively in Gender
Trouble and Bodies that Matter, Butler's notion of becomings is tied to "citational" play that is neither a
falsely conscious mimesis, nor secondary copy, but something else entirely, the difference that makes all the
difference: "One surely cites norms that already exist, but these norms can be significantly deterritorialized
through the citation" (UG 218). And earlier in Bodies That Matter: "[I]t seems to me that one writes into a
field of writing that is invariably and promisingly larger and less masterable than the one over which one
maintains a provisional authority, and that the unanticipated reappropriations of a given work in areas for
which is was never consciously intended are some of the most useful" (19). It seems Butler has been
deleuzoguattarian for much longer than we might have imagined. [21]

[15] Through these becomings for others and citational play Butler suggests that we might begin to
dismantle the organizational binary human/non-human that currently oppresses those who find themselves
on the wrong side of the viable and the valuable. Butler sets the stage for this possibility by recalling the
poststructuralist principle of the (negatively) dialectical relationship between the norm and the deviant: "It is
the inhuman, the beyond the human, the less than human, the border that secures the human in its
ostensible reality" (UG 218). What Butler aims at is nothing short of the destruction of originary, disciplinary,
violent, and continual reproductions of a limitedphallogocentric, heteronormative, able-bodied, dominantly
racedcategory called human: "We must learn to live and to embrace the destruction and rearticulation of
the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world, not knowing in advance what
precise form our humanness does and will take" (UG35). This, it seems to us, is precisely what Deleuze and
Guattari have aimed at all along: not the death of the author, but the death of the human.

[16] These rearticulations often proceed by way of fantasy, of imagination and creativity put into practice,
given material existence in and through our individual and multiple bodies. Fantasy, imagination, becomings
all move "us beyond what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility," the multiple possible
becomings of the war machine (UG 28):

These practices of instituting new modes of reality take place in part through the scene of embodiment,
where the body is not understood as a static and accomplished fact, but as an aging process, a mode of
becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm (UG 28).

This inability of the body to remain a "static and accomplished fact" is seen most brutally in the culmination
of the "aging process," in the inescapable fact that no body endures forever. [22] This has been a major
insight and avenue of critical engagement for disability studies, and we will merely draw attention here to
the fact that the multiple alliances available and desirable between D&G and queer theory extend to and
include disability studies in our ongoing disaggregation of what constitutes viable and valuable human
embodiment.

[17] Given that the inhuman opens the body to all kinds of positive possibility, to numerous invitations for
reinvention and becoming, what are we to make of the fact that beyond the limits of the human also dwells
mortality, the blunt fact that even an identity which we might desireas Pink Panther, as philosopher, as
personwill not forever endure? Deleuze, like the queer, moves us beyond humanism. What happens when
we move so far along this trajectory that we encounter that limit where subjectivity fades and the body
literally ceases to be?

Inhuman Deleuze

[18] Plutarch wrote a famously influential book called The Lives of the Noble Romans. This text transformed
into educational narratives the biographies of classical celebrities like Cicero and Brutus, extracting from
their lives a parade of instructive virtues for his audience to emulate. People read this book for centuries,
and found in its arts of living a model for the care of their own selves. It would be interesting to write a
modern companion to Plutarch's Lives called The Deaths of the Famous French Philosophers. It would be full
of gunshots (Guy Debord), a death in front of a pastry truck (Barthes), strangulation (Althusser), and a
jump from a Paris window (Gilles Deleuze). No doubt such a book would be accused of sensationalism.
Death is not supposed to be gazed at for long, especially when it occurs outside the sanitary confines of the
hospital and old age. Suicide is especially problematic, because it potentially brings will into play against an
event that is supposed to be unwilled. Death is supposed to arrive from an exterior, unknowable, even
mystical realm. We die when our time has come; we are not supposed to hasten death's arrivalevent and
body are, in this case, forbidden to form an alliance. Unlike Plutarch's Lives, most deaths cannot furnish
models for forming good subjects. To gaze at death is to be indulgent, morbid, to fetishize the negative, to
glamorize suffering, to be naively romantic: the condemnations are so ready to hand that they are easily
multiplied. We understand why death is so difficult to meditate upon: we live, after all, in a culture in which
too many people have been consigned to the abject, have had their lives labeled "unlivable," have forcefully
had their existence terminated. Yet we also live in a society that is death-phobic in the extreme, hiding the
end of life away in sanitized and isolated spaces that prevent its penetration into life. Can death be thought
in terms that do not arrive pre-judged and already dismissed? Can death be rendered an affirmative event,
igniting a becoming?
[19] At the end of a lifetime committed to rethinking in relentlessly affirmative terms how desire envitalizes
the cosmos, how "each individual is an infinite multiplicity" (ATP 254), Gilles Deleuze committed suicide. This
undeniable terminus, whenever invoked, will have a teleological resonance, as if it were a final statement;
anything that can be said in its wake smacks of funeral oration. Yet we have stressed repeatedly in this
essay Deleuze's scorn for teleology. Beginnings and endings are two points that capture a trajectory of
becoming and entrap it within a diminishing closed circuit, as if the world were a small place, as if an
infinite intermezzo were inconceivable. What does one do with the fact of Deleuze's death? Did his demise
erect a blockage that placed a final and diminished end to the proliferations that his life had catalyzed? Or
did Deleuze's leap sustain that middleness against the definitive and reductive contours of a medicalized,
moralized, pathologized terminus?

[20] In 1977 a strange little book was published in Paris. Dialogues had been "commissioned as a
conventional book of interviews" (xi), in which Claire Parnet, a former student of Deleuze, would ask
questions and the philosopher would respond. Both participants agreed, however, that such an exchange of
queries and answers would force an unhealthy order on the shaggy multiplicity of Deleuze's thought. The
book is composed of four chapters, each of which is broken into two sections. In chapter one, the first
section is signed by Deleuze, the second by Parnet. In order to "undo dualisms" and avoid dialectic
(Dialogues 35), all subsequent chapters are still divided into two sections, but they remain unsigned. Parnet
writes: "Each chapter would remain divided in two, [but] there would no longer be any reason to sign each
part, since it is between the two anonymous parts that the conversation would take place, and the AND
Flix, AND Fanny, AND you, AND all those of whom we speak, AND me, would appear as so many distorted
images in running water" (Dialogues 35). Not quite the death of the author, but certainly his
transubstantiation, his unity scattered across a dispersed and lively expanse.

[21] Dialogues is a book of middles. It was composed between the publication of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia I, that great, polemical attack against the psychoanalytic conception of desire as
fundamental lack, and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II. These books, co-authored by
Deleuze and Guattari, promulgated a schizoanalysis of subjectivity and culture so innovative that we who
live in its aftermath are still scrambling to make sense of it. If Deleuze was so much against endpoints and
origins, it seems to us best to seek him in the intermezzo of Dialogues, a book in which his voice vanishes in
dialogue with another voice in between the multiplicities of voice that are Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand
Plateaus. These three works, with their compound authorship, are everything Deleuze claimed to be about,
even when he wrote alone. [23]

[22] At the beginning of Dialogues Deleuze states flatly, "Most of the time, when someone asks me a
question, even one which relates to me, I see that, strictly, I don't have anything to say" (1). Likewise, in a
piece variously published in English as "I Have Nothing to Admit" and "Letter to a Harsh Critic," Deleuze
declares "There is nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret." [24] We know we won't
get any straightforward answers from such an obstinate figure, especially not about what his own passing
might signify, but at least we see a way of formulating the problem. Let's invoke a famous invocation of
Spinoza:

We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they
can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy
the body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in
composing a more powerful body. (ATP 257)

Deleuze, like his friend and fellow social activist Foucault, was not interested in ontology. [25] He does not
speak of substances, of essences, of stable or fixed meanings. The deleuzian world is a cosmos in constant
motion, a place of virtuality and possibility, where the primary question one asks is not "What is it?" but
rather "What can it do?" "What is it?" prefigures an answer by invoking a system, and Deleuze is the
philosopher of nontotalization, of open and fragmentednomadicspace. The passage reveals as well what
Stephen J. Arnott has aptly called "the Spinozist-Nietzschean-Deleuzian zest for life." [26]
An Art That Takes a Lifetime

[23] We would like to apply the deleuzian "What can it do?" to Deleuze's own death, surely the limit case not
only of his philosophy, but of the human itself. What are its affects, its vectors, its possibilities, and how do
they form an assemblage with other bodies, other forces that might, in their own way, change the world?
How might his death be read, or become, otherwise than the limits of humanist discourse, which could only
see in his suicide a final, tragic, individual signification? And is to seek alternative significance/signification in
Deleuze's death merely to fetishize suicide (or might it, to return momentarily to Spinoza-Hegel-Levinas-
Butler, transform the negative into something else)? Was Deleuze's death necessarily a human, all too
human surrender to despair, or can his death serve as a potentially creative, constructive event acta last
and affirmative rejection of the normativethat renders such a query beside the point?

[24] First, the facts of his death. Deleuze had always been a heavy smoker, and his seminar room was
famous for the narcotic haze that lingered in its atmosphere. Although he had a lung removed because of
cancer, the disease spread throughout his pulmonary system. In the last months of his life he underwent a
tracheotomy, and lost the power of speech. Silent and dependent upon machines to breathe, he spent his
final days confined to his Paris apartment. On Saturday, November 4, 1995, he arose from his sickbed and
hurled himself out the window, four floors to the pavement. He was widely mourned in France, although his
funeral was, unlike that of many other famous Parisian intellectuals, strictly private. He was seventy years
old.

[25] Reaction to Deleuze's death was swift, especially on the electronic discussion list devoted to his
work. [27]Many of the responses disseminated about the event were personal, and quite touching. Much like
Deleuze's own writing, they were also both provocative and poetic. Greg Seigworth described the leap
through the window as "a final relay ... in that instantaneous switch of theory into practice" (7 Nov 1995).
Steven Perella noted that he had been unable to find both "life" and "death" in the index to A Thousand
Plateaus, appropriate enough for this "philosopher of all exteriority" (5 Nov 1995). Charles Stivale wrote of a
mixed reaction to the news that amounted to a sad kind of joy ("this is the way he wanted to go"). He
quoted a paragraph by Deleuze on Foucault, a passage that culminates in the suddenly prophetic words "You
may be heading for death, suicide, but ... suicide then becomes an art that it takes a lifetime to learn" (5
Nov 1995). More acerbically, Douglas Edric wrote "Deleuze jumped out of a window and it must have been
horrible and wonderful, or perhaps the most banal footnote in all of history ... Point final, if you really want
to know. The rest is up to you, take your own responsibility damn it, write your own brilliant obituary if it's
that important to you" (8 Nov 1995).

[26] The official media, meanwhile, was full of the predictable summations of Deleuze's life and works. In
the French papers a parade of famous intellectuals offered pompous estimations of his importance, situating
him within a history of philosophy that he disliked so much that he wrote several books about it. [28] In the
United States, the New York Times spoke of his conservative family, his rebelliousness, his subversive
charismathe usual progress narrative (7 Nov 1995, D21). The Associated Press disseminated an obituary
that remarked: "He [was] a familiar figure in the city's bohemian Latin Quarter, his trademark felt hat
cocked at a rakish angle" (5 Nov 1995). [29] These are the kinds of elegies that Deleuze would have raged
against. In "Letter to a Harsh Critic," he complained that Michel Cressole had singled out his "long and
untrimmed nails" and "worker's vest" as affectations that he had adopted in order to grant himself an
absolute particularity, like Greta Garbo in her sunglasses (Negotiations 5). [30] The danger of a
memorialization that focuses upon a "felt hat cocked at a rakish angle" is that a self-autonomous, self-
authorizing, humanist subject will be reinstated as the closing movement to a life spent insisting upon the
reductive violence of this construct. Deleuze observed that "We are always pinned against the wall of
dominant significations, we are always sunk in the hole of our subjectivity ... A wall on which are inscribed
all the objective determinations which fix us, put us into a grille, identify us and make us recognized ... Our
societies need to produce the face" (Dialogues 45). How appropriate, then, that Greta Garbo, his unwitting
Hollywood counterpart, should have been called "the Face."
[27] This visage, this faciality as privileged marker of "humanness," is the very thing that Deleuze insisted
one must lose. He argued that "One has to lose one's identity, one's face ... One has to disappear, to
become unknown" (Dialogues 45). [31] For him this process of self-negation was primarily conducted
through writing: "One only writes through love, all writing is a love-letter: the literature-Real. One should
only die through love, and not a tragic death. One should only write through this death" (Dialogues 51).
Love, writing, and death (not "tragic death," but a death that signifies otherwise) meld here into a difficult
composite. The act of writing maps a trajectory that curves away from personal life, so that the
particularizations of biography lose their explanatory functions: "It may be that a writer has delicate
health ... He is nonetheless ... a sort of great Alive ... Writing carries out the conjunction, the transmutation
of fluxes, through which life escapes from the resentment of persons, societies, and reigns" (Dialogues 50).
If suicide takes a lifetime to learn, then it is a kind of correspondence course in which the letters bear the
self unsentimentally away with them, into a "great Alive," a great but affirmative unknown.

[28] Deleuze and Guattari wrote at length of the function of minor literatures, of the necessity of entering
into one's native tongue as if a foreigner, of the creative power of self-disaggregation: "It is not a question
of speaking a language as if one was a foreigner, it is a question of being a foreigner in one's own language"
(Dialogues 59). So affirmative is this theory of multitudinous identity that Flix Guattari chose these words
as his epitaph, visible now on his grave at Pre-Lachaise: Il n'y a pas de manque dans l'absence. L'absence
est une presence en moi ["There is no lack in absence. Absence is a presence in me."] Guattari's tombstone
is an act meant to rob what is supposed to be the ultimate terminus of its definitiveness by refusing to
emplace that ending within conventional, humanist terms. This difference in worldviewwhere absence itself
becomes presence, where death is forgotten because desire is so much more compellingcan also be
glimpsed in the fact that, whereas Foucault could write in Discipline and Punish that the body was under
torture a site for the enactment of a thousand deaths, Deleuze would affirm that the body is traversed by a
thousand tiny sexes.

[29] We are used to being told by psychoanalysis that desire is produced through a primal lack, that if desire
is related to pleasure, it is only by means of something called "enjoyment"a phenomenon that always
seems rooted in the obscene. Deleuze could not stand this kind of moralizing, this reinscription of Original
Sin and the fallen nature of humanity through the priests of psychoanalysis: "By taking the path that it has,
psychoanalysis is reviving an age-old tendency to humble us, to demean us, to make us feel guilty" (Anti-
Oedipus 50). Desire, he argued, is immanent: "Desire and its object are one and the same thing ... The
objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself" (Anti-Oedipus 26-7). Desire is not the same as libido,
and may or may not involve sexuality. Sublimation has no place in Deleuze's work, because there is no
primacy of an erotic drive to transform. Desire might best be glossed as an innate movement toward
connection. The world of desire is molecular, with small assemblages constantly bumping into each other,
conjoining and forming bigger assemblages, falling apart and moving toward other combinations. Bodiless
desire, universal vitalism. Again, "The question imposed by desire is not 'What does it mean?' but rather
'How does it work?' How do these machines, these desiring-machines, workyours and mine? ... It
represents nothing, but it produces" (Anti-Oedipus 109). Desire is inescapable, it is everywhere, and it is
constantly being forced into the molar or statistical identities that comprise the realm of the social. Desire, if
it is anything at all besides this relentless movement toward multiplicitous connection, is queer.[32] In such
a realm, where the human is simply beside the point, death barely seems possible.

De Fenestra

[30] Deleuze observed that the writers and philosophers to whom he'd always found an attraction were "of
frail constitution," so that their bodies battled death even as they were "shot through with an
insurmountable life" (Dialogues, 15). Among these figures was the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius, who in
lively Latin verse described the underlying dynamism of the cosmos, a vitalism that eroded distinctions
among the human, the animal, the elemental. Yet Lucretius's work ends in a horrifying description of the
bodily putrefaction caused by an outbreak of plague. Deleuze once fantasized that he might write "a
memorandum to the Academy of the Moral Sciences to show that Lucretius' book cannot end with the
description of the plague, and that it is an invention, a falsification of the Christians who wanted to show
that a maleficent thinker must end in terror and anguish" (15). Lucretius envisioned in his De rerum
natura (On the Nature of Things) an atomistic world humming with life, a world of motion and connectivity
uncannily like the molecular, machinic deleuzoguattarian universe. The Lucretian cosmos held no fear of
death, since death was part of the constant motion of the world. The third book of On the Nature of
Things is even entitled "The Folly of the Fear of Death." And still the poem ends with a disturbing description
of the victims of the Athenian plague, who lose first of all their ability to speak:

Their throats,
Black on the inside, sweated oozy blood;
And the walled pathway of the voice of man
Was clogged with ulcers; and the very tongue
The mind's interpreter, would trickle gore,
Weakened by torments, tardy, rough to touch. [33]

It's a ghastly conclusion to a long affirmation of life, the kind of moralizing "Look what it all comes down to
anyway" that reduces death to that punctuation mark beyond which there is no signifying. It is against this
teleological reading of Lucretius that Deleuze positions himself, arguing that so definitive an ending could
only be a later interpolation. And it is against this desire to blunt affirmative vitalism through tales of "the
judgment of God" that Deleuze positions his own plague-struck body, similarly robbed of voice and
"weakened by torments." He ended his life with a fall, an arc that somehow sought an escape from a
teleology of the fleshfrom its medicalization, its Christianization, its reduction into morality. Deleuze leapt
from the window in order to write with his own body that memorandum about Lucretius, to show that
maleficent thinkers do not end in the "terror and anguish" of deathbed conversions. Through a suicidal
alliance the potentiality of at least two lives, two bodies was unleashed. In a passage that has nothing to do
with Lucretius Deleuze once wrote, "It is not easy to be a free man, to flee the plague ... He may be ill, he
may himself die; he knows that death is neither the goal nor the end, but that, on the contrary, it is a case
of passing his life on to someone else" (Dialogues 62). And so, queerly, in this memorandum Deleuze passed
his life on, and the challenge now is to ally ourselves with its refusal of reduction.

[31] The truth of Deleuze's inhumanism can be glimpsed in a trajectory of becoming that was his life, his
death, whatever is beyond that death. It is a fall that keeps on moving, all middle, not a leap toward some
determinative end, pavement. A century becomes Deleuzian (as Foucault famously put it) only by losing
him, and continuing to lose him. Freud described two outcomes for grieving: mourning (successful
incorporation of the lost object) or melancholia (a non-integration, a constitutive lack). Neither reaction
suffices. Both reside under the sign of Oedipusand if Nietzsche was the anti-Christ, Deleuze was the anti-
Oedipus. To take the deleuzian inhuman seriously mandates an embrace of the philosopher in flight: never
to stop becoming-Deleuze ("A line of becoming has only a middle"), never stop approaching Deleuze
("Becoming-revolutionary remains indifferent to questions of a future and a past"), never stop touching his
fall, even to the point of forming a dangerous (dare we say queer) alliance with it. [34] Our ongoing and
queer alliance with Deleuze is that we continually partake of his defenestration and what it might "do," to
our understandings of the human, of viable and valuable lives. If we must, in order to become-Deleuze,
always lose him (the molar, "moralized," aggregate), we are continually throwing him and ourselves (our
preconstituted norms, bodily integrities, desires to reduce and convert and moralize) out the window and
into the middle of that line of flight.

[32] As an additional apparatus of this assemblage/alliance, one that might illustrate the necessary
becoming-deleuzian of queer theory and the becoming-queer of the world, we would offer the complicating
vector of the suicide of David Reimer. [35] Reimer was the boy born Bruce, whose penis was burned off in a
botched circumcision and who was subsequently raised a girl, Brenda, and subject to ongoing psychiatric
and surgical sex/gender reconstructions throughout her childhood. Brenda struggled socially, physically and
psychically as a child, until the time in her teens when she was informed of the conditions of her birth, after
which she decided to resume her life as a boy, and chose the name David for himself. David continued to
undergo psychiatric and medical procedures to "return" him to his "natural" sex/gender, got married to a
woman, and adopted her children. Things were never so easy for Bruce/Brenda/David, however, and after
subjecting himself to the competing and contradictory sexed/gendered norms imposed upon him violently
and variously throughout his life, he finally found that he could live under none of these fully, easily,
"normally." In May of 2004 David Reimer committed suicide. Judith Butler remarks on Reimer's death: "It is
difficult to know what, in the end, made his life unlivable or why this life was one he felt was time to end. It
seems clear, however, that there was always a question posed for him, and by him, whether life in his
gender would be survivable" (UG 74). Survivable not only for David, but for us, those of us who live in
abeyance and obeisance to the normal. What is also clear from the case of David Reimer is, as Butler
observes, that the multiple narratives surrounding David interrogate "the limits of the conceivably human"
(64), just as Deleuze's death, as we have suggested earlier, constitutes a similar limit case. These limit
cases however are not limitations (to "truth," signification, the Real, etc), but rather the thresholds of new
becomings. David's refusal to live (and his recognition of the impossibility of living) within any of the
preconceived and delimiting categories of the sexed/gendered human as they are currently constituted, and
Deleuze's refusal to submit to the final signification of a "tragic" or "moralizing" or "noble" death, demand
that we throw our very normative ideas of the human out the window to see what they might become. This,
it seems to us, is precisely what queer theory must be about today, and which might be effectuated by the
deployment of a deleuzoguattarian inhumanism and the multiplicitous becomings-queer of the world.

Endnotes

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995) 11.

[2] We realize that we are speaking in somewhat unnuanced terms here to make our point, and admit that
because of limitations of space this essay is painted with a rather broad brush. We emphasize from the start
that the project of queering the queer is not unique to deleuzians, but has accompanied queer theory from
its instigation - as the work of Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Eve Sedgwick, Michael Warner, and
many others makes evident.

[3] On the poisonous affiliation of queer desire and the morbidly tragic, see especially Judith Butler, "Sexual
Inversions," Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press), 344-61, esp. 346, Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" October 43 (Winter 1987),
197-222, and Ellis Hanson, "Undead," Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New
York: Routledge, 1991) 324-40.

[4] "To Have Done with the Judgment of God" was Artaud's last major work before his death. Originally
commissioned for French Radio in 1947, it was an anti-American and anti-Catholic diatribe that was
ultimately censored from radio play. It wasn't aired publicly until thirty years later, and was first published in
America by Boston's Black Sparrow Press in 1975.

[5] For Deleuze and Guattari's most concentrated elaboration of the war machine see "1227: Treatise on
NomadologyThe War Machine," and for their discussion of "smooth space" see "1440: The Smooth and the
Striated" in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 351-423 and 474-500.

[6] See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993) 4,
as well as Jos Esteban Muoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of
Politics (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1999).
[7] Compare Michael O'Rourke's similar comments about the Derrideanness of queer theory: "Like a ghostly
figure Derrida haunts Queer Theory, always just beyond and outside it, his work being the condition of
possibility for it. That is to say, queer theory is always already Derridean (and that Derrida is always
already queer)" ("Queer Theory's Loss and the work of Mourning Jacques Derrida," Rhizomes 10 (May 2005)
5).

[8] Despite some distancing of queer theory from queer politics, especially in its formative stage, it is our
understanding and experience that the theory and practice/politics are intimately, promiscuously bound
together. See Teresa de Lauretis, "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities. An Introduction," differences:
A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3 (Summer 1991), in which de Lauretis makes the claim that the
"queer theory" she is elaborating is divorced from the "queer activism" of which she "was unaware at the
time" (v).

[9] As Judith Butler points out, though, to be radically outside of the norm is impossible. The norm, in its
very status as such and a product of statistical variability incorporates all that would seem outside of it; only
thus is a "norm" established. See Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), Chapter 2, "Gender
Regulations", esp. 41-51. What we are getting at here is rather the normative functioning of the norm and
the processes of assimilation and social/political quietude.

[10] Butler, Bodies that Matter, 228.

[11] See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993), xii.

[12] See Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: U
Minnesota P, 1993), vii.

[13] Warner, xvi. Several other texts that seem to us to deploy (whether wittingly or not) a specifically
deleuzoguattarian molecular politics in the elaboration of queer theory are: Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay
Hagiography (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), in which David Halperin makes the claims that "[q]ueer is by
definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to
which is necessarily refers. It is an identity without essence" (62), and that queer "marks the site of gay
becoming" (79). For Robert McRuer in The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the
Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (New York: New York UP, 1997), "queer" is "a critical perversion
that continuously forges unexpected alliances and gives voice to identities our heteronormative culture
would like to, but cannot, silence" (5), and that "at its best, the concept is unruly and undermines attempts
at fixation or containment" (22). Furthermore, McRuer's most recent work brings queer theory and disability
studies together and productively engages in a "queering" and "cripping" of both. See "Compulsory Able-
Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence," Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, eds. Sharon L.
Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002), 88-99, and "Crip
Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability Studies," PMLA 120.2 (March
2005): 586-592. Similarly, Carrie Sandahl engages in a kind of deleuzian transformation of queer/crip theory
in "Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer? Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo
Autobiographical Performance" GLQ 9.1-2 (2003): 25-56. Finally, Cindy Patton has remarked, in "Stealth
Bombers of Desire: The Globalization of 'Alterity' in Emerging Democracies" (Queer Globalizations:
Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, Eds. Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalansan IV [New
York: New York UP, 2002]), that "'[q]ueer,' if it is to have any utility, is best understood, not as a model of
identity and practice that can be imitated or molded to a local setting, but as evidence of a kind of
unstoppable alterity" (210).

[14] On the equus eroticus in D&G see ATP 155-56 and Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity
Machines (Minnesota: University of Minnesota press, 2004) 41-44. On dogs and interspecies desire, see
Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press, 2003).

[15] We should not confuse the haecceity with individualism, that disciplinary norm and ideal of the
Enlightenment and humanism. "A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is
always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome" (ATP 263).

[16] Indeed, Butler's rearticulation of the limits of the human is protracted throughout her most recent
work. In addition to Undoing Gender are her considerations of deterritorialization in Excitable Speech: A
Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997) and of the Levinasian "face"/faciality in Precarious
Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004) in which the "face" becomes a figure of
intersubjectivity; these are terms that have distinctly deleuzian resonance, as we shall specifically discuss in
relation to Undoing Gender.

[17] See Butler, UG, 198. Butler's main resistance to D&G is her dedication to the negativity of
Spinoza's Ethics (On the Improvement of Understanding, The Ethics, Correspondence [Trans. R. H. M.
Elwes; New York: Dover, 1955]) and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Trans. A. V. Miller; Oxford: Oxford UP,
1977), as the former'sconatus and latter's master/slave dialectic "signals" for her "a form of vitalism that
persists even in despair" (235). More specifically, "Spinoza's insistence that the desire for life can be found
nascent in the emotions of despair led to the more dramatic Hegelian claim that 'tarrying with the negative'
can produce a conversion of the negative into being, that something affirmative can actually come of the
experiences of individual and collective devastation even in their indisputable irreversibility" (236). It is
questionable to us that Deleuze and Guattari do not also engage in the production of affirmative ways of
being that are themselves produced out of systems of despair and devastation, or perhaps two other "d"
words, dominion and delimitation. Additionally, aren't both Spinoza's and Hegel's transformations of despair
about the production of something positive (a new/different way of being) out of the negative/negativity?

[18] See particularly the chapters "Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion" and
"Critically Queer" in Bodies that Matter.

[19] Much of this alliance, voluntary or otherwise, may derive from a formative engagement that Deleuze
and Butler share with Bergson, a philosopher from whom they each derived several of their shared terms
(includingbecoming).

[20] Butler, UG, 20. Butler's assertions here too are intimately connected to her understanding and embrace
of the "negativity" of Spinozan and Hegelian dialectics (see above fn. 17) and the intersubjectivity of
Levinas' "face" (see above fn. 16).

[21] Reconsider also Butler's assertion in BTM: "Indeed, some have argued that a rethinking of 'nature' as a
set of dynamic interrelations suits both feminism and ecological aims (and has for some produced an
otherwise unlikely alliance with the work of Gilles Deleuze)" (4); as "unlikely" as Butler's own unanticipated
and unacknowledged alliance with Deleuze in her various becomings in Undoing Gender and elsewhere.

[22] Similarly, in the field of disability studies many scholars have undertaken the dismantling of the myth of
the normal body, in particular Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, in Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical
Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), offers the neologism
"normate" to describe the dominant ideological construction of the "normal" body. Additionally, in Enforcing
Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body (London: Verso, 1995) Lennard Davis discusses some of the
many elisions and negotiations normate culture must make in order to efface and erase the troubling
presence of disability within the social.
[23] Cf. the opening words of ATP: "The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was
several, there was already quite a crowd" (3). Deleuze elsewhere describes this process of interpenetration
as love: "And then there was my meeting with Flix Guattari, the way we understood and complemented,
depersonalized and singularized -- in short, loved -- one another" (Negotiations 7).

[24] We quote from the version reprinted in Negotiations 3-12, quotation at 8.

[25] Deleuze's relationship with Foucault was complicated, and the myth that they had some kind of falling
out has often gotten in the way of understanding their continued, mutual intellectual indebtedness. See
Deleuze's book Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), which stresses that even
though towards the end of Foucault's life they went a long time without seeing each other Foucault was
nonetheless insistently present.

[26] Stephen J. Arnott, "Solipsism and the Possibility of Community in Deleuze's Ethics," Stephen J. Arnott,
"Solipsism and the Possibility of Community in Deleuze's Ethics," Contretemps 2 (2001) 111. 2 (2001) 111.

[27] deleuze-guattari@lists.village.virginia.edu

[28] Deleuze had been schooled in traditional philosophy. As Brian Massumi writes in his "Translator's
Foreword" to ATP, "the titles of his early books read like a Who's Who of philosophical giants" (ix-x).
Constantin V. Boundas makes observations about Deleuze's "rather orthodox ... molar, segmented line" of a
philosophical career in ways that resonate with our opening depiction of his familial life in "Gilles Deleuze
(1925-1995)" Man and World29 (1996): 233-34.

[29] For reaction to Deleuze's death in the French media see Andr Pierre Colombat's perceptive "November
4, 1995: Deleuze's Death as an Event," Man and World 29 (1996): 235-49. Colombat's essay browses the
proliferation of memorial writing in the wake of Deleuze's suicide to activate some of the potentials we
likewise explore.

[30] See also Nick Millett's mischievous reading of the Cressole-Deleuze interchange in "The Trick of
Singularity,"Theory, Culture & Society 14 (1997): 51-66.

[31] Deleuze's reconceptualization of subjectivity and identity, especially in its relation to the ethical
formation of community, is admirably explored by Stephen J. Arnott in "Solipsism and the Possibility of
Community in Deleuze's Ethics."

[32] As evidence that even the most mainstream of GLBTQ activism is finally, after a long detour through
the last ten years, starting to realize the limitations of a normalizing and delimiting political project, Kai
Wright observes that "[t]hese days, rather than challenging the idea of sexual normality of any sort, we
merely want to tweak its definition so that we're considered appropriate too," and implicitly calls for a more
multiplicitous conception of desire and sexuality ("More Sex, Please," Out [April 2005], 56+).

[33] Titus Lucretius Carus, The Nature of Things, Book VI part IV. This translation by William Ellery Leonard
is available online at http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/l/lucretius/l94o/index.html.

[34] Through a different methodology Michael O'Rourke eloquently makes a consonant argument about
Derrida and queer theory in "Queer Theory's Loss," especially 25-39. See also Jacques Derrida's own words
on the death of Deleuze, words that like ours here stress the saut sur place and encounter with the Event
that was always a part of Deleuze's work: "I'll Have to Wander All Alone" (trans. David Kammerman and
available at http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/1/derrida1.html).
[35] For an admittedly sensationalistic account of Reimer's life, as politically specious as it is illuminating,
see John Colapinto's As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised a Girl (New York: Perennial, 2001). Also
relevant here is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's rumination over the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri and the
message it might bear in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) 307-8.