Continental Philosophy Review 36: 139153, 2003.

2003 Kluwer AcademicWHEN

Publishers.
IS A Printed in the Netherlands.
DELEUZIAN BECOMING? 139

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 specifi-
cally 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 be-
coming, but instead with reference to its trajectory in his work, and particu-
larly his early work. Why might one want to do such a thing? There has 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 becom-
ing 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 schizophre-
nia, 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 philo-
sophical 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
140 TODD MAY

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 con-
cept. Then I will discuss the notion of becoming in the earlier works. There,
it will become clear why I have asked the question when is a becoming?
rather than what is a becoming? Finally, I will turn to the later works, 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 differ-
ent from what most philosophers do, that without his metaphilosophy in
hand, it is easy to become disoriented. For Deleuze (and Guattari), then, phi-
losophy 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 interest-
ing, 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 differ-
ence. 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. . . . Phi-
losophy 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.
 WHEN IS A DELEUZIAN BECOMING? 141
How is philosophy to align itself with the interesting, the remarkable, and
the important? According to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy does that sim-
ply 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 lay-
ing 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 conden-
sation of its internal components (WP, pp. 1921). Let me take these in re-
verse order. For Deleuze and Guattari, a concept is composed of components,
which they call intensities or singularities. These intensities are, of course,
pre-conceptual, since they form concepts rather than being formed by them.
A relevant example of an intensity is offered by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense.
If we consider language in a Saussurean terms, in which its components terms
are defined by their differences from one another, we can think of these dif-
ferences not merely as oppositions but as positive differences, as pre-con-
ceptual differences that are constitutive of the content of the terms. 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 cre-
ate 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
142 TODD MAY

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 re-
fer 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 perspec-
tive 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.
 WHEN IS A DELEUZIAN BECOMING? 143
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; nei-

ther multiplicity nor becoming are appearances or illusions. But neither are
there multiple or eternal realities which would be, in turn, like essences be-
yond appearance. Multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, essential
transformation and constant symptom of unity. Multiplicity is the affirma-
tion of unity; becoming is the affirmation of being.6

In this passage, Deleuze presents four ideas which remain at the heart of his
articulation of becoming that becoming is the final reality (there is no be-
ing beyond becoming); that becoming is aligned with multiplicity (. . . noth-
ing beyond multiplicity); that becoming, although the final reality, is not 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, philoso-
phers, particularly philosophers of a metaphysical bent, have sought some-
thing stable as the bedrock of philosophical reflection. Platos Good, Descartes
God (or is it his I?), Kants transcendental unity of apperception, Hegels Ab-
solute 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 uni-
ties. And he rejects the traditional philosophical commitment to them. How-
ever, this rejection is not a straightforward one. He substitutes another concept
becoming which in one sense must occupy the role that being used 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 philo-
sophical use to which that final reality has been put. The way in which be-
coming occupies the place of being is given in the second idea in the 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 ontol-
ogy enough to highlight the central aspects of the concept of becoming, those
144 TODD MAY

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 it-
self.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 not-
sameness can occur. Not-sameness can be not identical; the two items are twins,
but they occupy different positions on the space-time continuum. Not-same-
ness can be not the same ontological status; a model and its copy are not the
same in this way. Not-sameness can be not the same qualities, species, val-
ues, people, place. What all these and other not-samenesses share is that they
begin by positing subsisting entities, and derive difference by means of ne-
gating 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 dif-
ference 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 ground-
ing for identity. What is his objection to deriving difference from identity in
the way traditional philosophy has? Deleuzes response here is actually three-
fold. 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 dif-
ference (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 in-
finite 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
 WHEN IS A DELEUZIAN BECOMING? 145
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 con-
sciousness, but beneath or within those identities. Difference in itself is found-
ing for identity but does not appear as such (as difference in itself) within those
identities. It is not phenomenologically accessible. Thus, a search for differ-
ence 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 some-
thing 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 ex-
ists.11 To signify this different way of existing, Deleuze uses the term vir-
tual as opposed to the actual existence of the present. (More on the 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 pic-
tures 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-
146 TODD MAY

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 individu-
als psychologically. Deleuze summarizes the moments of this time: There is
only one time (monism), although there is an infinity of actual fluxes (gener-
alized pluralism), that necessarily participates in the same virtual whole (lim-
ited pluralism) (B, p. 82).
The content of the past, which exists virtually in the present, is 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 non-
time 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 compromis-
ing 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 differ-
ence is not a difference that occurs negatively as a not-sameness or not-iden-
tity, since identities and sameness do not exist in the pure duration of time.
So it must be difference in itself. And since every moment contains all of the
past, every moment repeats this difference in itself, even while stable identi-
ties are being produced within it.
What does this discussion of difference and time have to do with becom-
ing and its affinity with multiplicity? Everything. First, if we think of being
in the first Heraclitean sense, as opposed to becoming, then the above sum-
mary shows how, for Deleuze, there is no being that can serve as the stable
model or unity founding what exists. There is only the unfolding of differ-
ence 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
 WHEN IS A DELEUZIAN BECOMING? 147
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 indi-
cates as much in Difference and Repetition, when, in the course of a discus-
sion of how simulacra always threaten to disrupt the stability of Platonic
models, he says:

Among the most extraordinary pages in Plato, demonstrating the anti-

Platonism at the heart of Platonism, are those which suggest that the dif-
ferent, the dissimilar, the unequal in short, becoming may well be not
merely defects which affect copies like a ransom paid for their secondary
character or a counterpart to their resemblance, but rather models them-
selves, 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 differ-
ence 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 unfold-
ing 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 articu-
lated 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 tran-
scendent reality. It might seem, at first glance, that since becoming occupies
the role allotted to being in traditional philosophy, that becoming might pos-
sess the transcendent status that being possesses in many traditional philoso-
phies. However, for Deleuze both difference and becoming are immanent to
our reality. They do not lie elsewhere, but here. Deleuze writes of his posi-
tion, 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 dif-
ference, and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity
(DR, pp. 5657). The difference that produces qualitative diversity the dif-
ferent stable identities of conscious experience lies within the sensible, within
148 TODD MAY

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 sepa-
rately.
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 sub-
sists), 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 tran-
scendent 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 oc-
cupying 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 con-
trasts 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 affir-
mation 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 what-
ever it is that founds those identities. If becoming is the affirmation of being,
it is the affirmation of difference in itself, of a pure difference that is not re-
ducible to the identities, the actualities, that present themselves to us.15
We have arrived at an understanding of the concept of becoming as it ap-
pears in 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-
 WHEN IS A DELEUZIAN BECOMING? 149
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 pro-
mote or create the remarkable, the interesting, and the important. The crea-
tion of the concept of becoming fulfills this role. First, it is a concept: it 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 pro-
motes 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: becom-
ing-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, identi-
ties 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
150 TODD MAY

Deleuze and Guattaris eyes, a minority literature. It undercuts the dominant

literature in an act of creation that points to new arrangements unacknowl-
edged by the majority.17
All becomings are, for Deleuze and Guattari, becomings-minor. Becom-
ing-Jewish, becoming-woman, etc., therefore imply two simultaneous move-
ments, one by which a term (the subject) is withdrawn from the majority, 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 iden-
tities the majorities are dissolved in creative acts in which more fluid iden-
tities are created, but only as the by-products of the process itself. What 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 un-
derground 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 im-
portant process.) Rather, they return us to process itself, to the temporal un-
folding of difference in itself, that difference which is always betrayed 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 re-
turns; rather, the Same is the returning of that which returns, in other words,
of the Different; the similar is the returning of that which returns, in other
words, of the Dissimilar (DR, pp. 300301).
 WHEN IS A DELEUZIAN BECOMING? 151
This is why there are different becomings, even though all becomings are
species of the genus becoming. There are becomings-woman, becomings-
animal, becomings-imperceptible, becomings-Jewish. But no becomings-
man, becomings-white, or becomings-American. And, as Deleuze says, all
becomings start with becoming-woman and in the end move toward becom-
ing-imperceptible. If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular seg-
ment, with the becomings-animal that link up with it next, what are they 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, be-
cause one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slip-
ping in between things and growing in the midst of things. One has combined
everything: the indefinite article, the infinitive-becoming, and the 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 tradi-
tional 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 suc-
cess 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.
152 TODD MAY

Notes

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 Con-
temporary Theory, in Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century
France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). These treatments are more criti-
cal. For a sympathetic feminist reading of Deleuze in general, but also of the concept 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 perso-
nae. I will neglect that aspect here since it is not crucial to the understanding of the con-
cept of becoming.
5. Derrida, of course, says that Differance is neither a word nor a concept (Difference,
in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on 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 Phi-
losophy 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 vir-
tual 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, ex-
istence 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 possi-
bility but conditions of reality. See, for example, Bergsonism: We go beyond experi-
 WHEN IS A DELEUZIAN BECOMING? 153
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).
14. For more on Deleuzes view of Spinoza, see his Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza,
trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990).
15. The relationship between becoming and affirmation can be seen in 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.
16. A Thousand Plateaus (hereafter, ATP), trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press 1987), p. 291.
17. See, of course, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (hereafter, K), trans. Dana Polan
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), esp. Ch. 3.
154 TODD MAY