Human PIC

1NC
We affirm the 1AC without their defense of humanity
Notions of humanity calcify into strict hierarchies of value that make violence
inevitable and necessary
Chen 12 Mel Y. Chen, professor of linguistics and women’s studies at UC Berkeley, Animacies:
Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke U Press, pg. 10

Furthermore, political interest stokes public alarm toward “toxins.” We must therefore understand the
ways in which toxicity has been so enthusiastically taken up during times of economic instability and
panic about transnational flow. Animacies demonstrates that interests in toxicity are particularly (if
sometimes stealthily) raced and queered. Indeed, toxins participate vividly in the racial mattering of
locations, human and nonhuman bodies, living and inert entities, and events such as disease threats.
This book aims to offer ways of mapping and diagnosing the mutual imbrications of race, sexuality,
ability, environ¬ment, and sovereign concern. In addition, animal and science studies have offered tools
through which we can rethink the significance of molecular, cellular, animal, vegetable, or nonhuman
life.22 Animacies not only takes into account the broadening field of nonhuman life as a proper object,
but even more sensitively, the animateness or inanimateness of entities that are considered either
“live” or “dead.” Considering differential animacies becomes a particularly critical matter when “life”
versus “death” binary oppositions fail to capture the affectively embodied ways that racializations of
specific groups are differentially rendered. Sianne Ngai explores the affective meanings of the term
animatedness, focusing on its manifestation as a property of Asianness and of blackness: “the affective
state of being ‘animated’ seems to imply the most basic or minimal of all affective conditions: that of
being, in one way or another, ‘moved.’ But, as we press harder on the affective meanings of
animatedness, we shall see how the seemingly neutral state of ‘being moved’ becomes twisted into the
image of the overemotional racialized subject.”23 Animacy has consequences for both able-bodiedness
and ability, especially since a consideration of “inanimate life” imbues the discourses around
environmental illness and toxicity. For instance, the constant interabsorption of animate and inanimate
bodies in the case of airborne pollution must account for the physical nonintegrity of individual bodies
and the merging of forms of “life” and “nonlife.” This book seeks to trouble this binary of life and
nonlife as it offers a different way to conceive of relationality and intersubjective exchange. I detail an
animacy that is in indirect conversation with historical vitalisms as well as Bennett’s “vital materiality.”24
Yet this book focuses critically on an interest in the animal that hides in animacy, particularly in the
interest of its attachment to things like sex, race, class, and dirt. That is, my purpose is not to reinvest
certain materialities with life, but to remap live and dead zones away from those very terms,
leveraging animacy toward a consideration of affect in its queered and raced formations. Throughout
the book, my core sense of “queer” refers, as might be expected, to exceptions to the conventional
ordering of sex, reproduction, and intimacy, though it at times also refers to animacy’s veering-away
from dominant ontologies and the normativities they promulgate. That is, I suggest that queering is
immanent to animate transgressions, violating proper intimacies (including between humans and
nonhuman things). For the purposes of this book, I define affect without necessary restriction, that is, I
include the notion that affect is something not necessarily corporeal and that it potentially engages
many bodies at once, rather than (only) being contained as an emotion within a single body. Affect
inheres in the capacity to affect and be affected. Yet I am also interested in the relatively subjective,
individually held “emotion” or “feeling.” While I prioritize the former, I also attend to the latter (with
cautions about its true possessibility) precisely because, in the case of environmental illness or multiple
chemical sensitivity, the entry of an exterior object not only influences the further affectivity of an
intoxicated human body, but “emotions” that body: it lends it particular emotions or feelings as against
others. I take my cue from Sara Ahmed’s notion of “affective economies,” in which specific emo¬tions
play roles in binding subjects and objects. She writes, “emotions involve subjects and objects, but
without residing positively within them. Indeed, emotions may seem like a force of residence as an
effect of a certain history, a history that may operate by concealing its own traces.”25 The traces I
examine in this book are those of animate hierarchies. If affect includes affectivity — how one body
affects another— then affect, in this book, becomes a study of the governmentality of animate
hierarchies, an examination of how acts seem to operate with, or against, the order of things (to
appropriate Foucault’s phrasing for different purposes).26 Queer theory, building upon feminism’s
critique of gender difference, has been at the forefront of recalibrating many categories of difference,
and it has further rewritten how we understand affect, especially with regard to trauma, death,
mourning, shame, loss, impossibility, and intimacy (not least because of the impact of the hiv/ aids
crisis); key thinkers here include Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Ber- lant, Heather Love, and Lee Edelman,
among others.27 As will be dem¬onstrated, these are all terms that intersect in productive ways with
animacy.

Reclaiming humanity allows for value determinations and requires an outside

Weheliye 14 Alexander G. Weheliye, professor of African American studies at Northwestern University, Habeas Viscus, Pg.
82

We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world,
and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it
cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership. Writing about the
connections between transgender politics and other forms of identity- based activism that respond to
structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and
equality based on a narrow legal framework (especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate
crime laws) not only hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable
populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “distribution of
life chances.”22 If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will
lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form
of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchical differ-
ences between full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the
“successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate
the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly
criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated,
etc.).23 To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view
that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide,
Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and so on, and that it
continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in
the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia Oparah suggests counteracting the “racialized
(trans)gender entrapment” within the prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long
history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to “foreground the ways in which often overlooked African diasporic cultural
and political legacies inform and undergird anti- prison work,” while also
providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively
centered on reforming the law.24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the
“‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence,” which redefines “the insistence of government
agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and nonprofiteers that the ex-
istence of trans people is impossible.”25 A relational maroon abolitionism beholden to the practices of
black radicalism and that arises from the incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man
serves as one example of how putatively abject modes of being need not be redeployed within
hegemonic frameworks but can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated
assemblages in movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are
administered.
2NC
Tricks
 Solves K affs
Only by deconstructing notions of humanity can we resolve hierarchical dualisms
Ramey 10 Joshua Delpech-Ramey, becoming-sorcerer af. “Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of Sorcery’”
SubStance, Volume 39, Number 1, 2010. Pgs. 12-20. PWoods.

Becoming, for Deleuze and Guattari, is neither the immanent mode of existence ultimately transcended by the
Platonic Ideas in which they participate, nor is it the form of oppositional mediation in which Hegel saw the reason of history’s
ruse. “Becomings,” generally written in the agrammatical plural, are the multiplicity of experiential states in which
lines are blurred between human consciousness and animal awareness, between biopsychic life and the
nature of matter itself. What the authors have in mind, in general, are processes of transformation that issue in strange, uncanny, or
even fantastic hybrids: the stuff of fictions, and science fictions, that tell of inconceivable life forms, the “eldritch feralities” of H.P. Lovecraft’s
lore. But becomings abound also at the interstices of speciation and phylogenetic variation, even when such mutants exists only in rumors of
werewolves, the legends of vampires, tales of she-wolves and ape-men. For Deleuze and Guattari, becomings accrue at the
vanishing point where history and legend meet, at the twilit horizon where monstrosities of fiction
reveal dynamics that translate the most profound facts of biopsychic life. In becomings, borders
between the sexes and the species, groups and individuals, matter and mind grow indiscernible,
imperceptible. Yet such becomings are not vague, and involve definite thresholds. Deleuze and Guattari in fact identify a series of
thresholds in becoming: becoming woman, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-intense. As one can observe in the ordering of
this series, the movement of becoming is quite specific: it is a movement away from the stereotypically “male” ego,
fixated on its isolated body, paranoid about its fragile identity, using its reason to defend itself against
the world, toward the more supple and supine flesh and less dualistic mind of “woman,” further toward the
instinctual immanence of the animal, into an inhabitation of the depths of vibrational and energetic patterns
verging on the white noise of chaos. In literature and anthropology, reports abound of sorcerers who are capable of
traversing and operating upon this line of increasing intensity through which the human being
ecstatically finds itself capable of powers and affects outside the normal range. Although becoming seems to
involve the recuperation of atavistic traits, Deleuze and Guattari call becomings “involutions” rather than regressions, and
claim that such involution is always creative (A Thousand Plateaus, 238). What “becomes” is not an archaic form, but a new
dynamism. But this dynamism is not a power that belongs to an individual. It is inherently relational.
Becoming forms new lines between at least two series (of sexes, species, people groups, packs of animals). These
anomalous lines are composed when “blocks” of affects and percepts are distributed so as to create passages or
thresholds across which such affects are shared: wolf-man and spider-woman are not so much the
hideous protagonists of fiction as they are figures of inconceivable yet very real modes of
communication and activity involving imperceptible yet effective modes of life . The elusiveness of the identity and
the individuality of such modes-in-becoming are crucial. What matters most, perhaps, in becoming, is that affects and percepts are
not attributes of determinate subjects, but transversal traits that pass beneath assignable identities. This
is why Deleuze and Guattari say that becoming is its own subject, or rather a subjectivizing or desubjectivizing power (ibid., 240).
Becoming is an event, an unnatural participation (ibid.) that is not at all imaginary, even if the entities involved are not in any
ordinary sense real. Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal
become. The becoming animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the
animal is real, even if that something other the animal becomes is not. This is the point to clarify: that a becoming
lacks a subject
distinct from itself; but also that it has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another
becoming of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the first . This is the principle
according to which there is a reality specific to becoming (the Bergsonian idea of a coexistence of very different durations,” superior to “ours,”
all of them in communication). (ibid., 238) What becoming reveals is ultimately a secret unity in nature, one that is
discovered not through concrete analogies (comparisons of life forms or behavioral patterns), but at an abstract compositional level. At this
level of abstraction—accessed not by detached observation, but through initiatory ordeals—the bodies
and minds, organs and organisms of discrete individuals are not static or final terms in an evolutionary
series, but are the incarnation of vibrational or wave states--vectors that intersect as pure materials that
enter into various combinations, forming a given organ and assuming a given function depending on their degree of speed or
slowness. Speed and slowness, movement and rest, tardiness and rapidity subordinate not only the forms of structure but also the types of
development . . . there
is a pure plane of immanence, univocality, composition, upon which everything is
given, upon which unformed elements and materials dance . . . a single abstract Animal for all the
assemblages that effectuate it. (ibid., 255). When Deleuze and Guattari grant to the mind (and the body) the ability to access these
hidden recesses of cosmic composition, they draw upon the Bergsonian definition of the human as a unique contraction of a multiplicity of
cosmic potentials. For Bergson, mindis primarily intuition, and only secondarily calculation or rationalization. For
Bergson, rationality is not as basic to human progress as is the affective range upon which reason draws . In
Bergson’s view, it is the human ability to contract a multiplicity of affects that enables the mind to
recapitulate the constitutive elements of the cosmic whole in new and unforeseeable ways. Cognition is thus
only a particularly controlled form of a frenzy that would otherwise be the overwhelming presence of the infinite reserve of creative potential,
the Whole of the past virtually present to each passing moment. Society is “rational,” for Bergson, in the sense that it is built upon a
particular selection from the virtual whole. It is selection that is the poetic or religious act of institution. Whereas authority figures in
society enforce the particular contraction that society is, mystics, for Bergson, expand the aperture of human
awareness in order to enter into communication with other levels of duration--states in which the
energies of the virtual whole can be given new shape. As Deleuze summarizes it in Bergsonism, It could be said that in man,
and only in man, the actual becomes adequate to the virtual. It could be said that man is capable of rediscovering all the levels, all the degrees
of expansion [détente] and contraction that coexist in the virtual Whole. As if he were capable of all the frenzies and brought about in himself
successively everything that, elsewhere, can only be embodied in different species. Even in his dreams he rediscovers or prepares matter. And
durations that are inferior to him are still internal to him. Man therefore creates a differentiation that is valid for the Whole, and he alone
traces out an open direction that is able to express a whole that is itself open. Whereas the other directions are closed and go round in
circles . . . man is capable of scrambling the planes, of going beyond his own plane as his own condition, in order finally to express naturing
Nature. (106) What Deleuze and Guattari see in the
sorcerer is a particularly condensed ability to “go beyond” the
normal plane of development. This sense of coming from beyond, or from a time out of mind, accounts
in part for why we hear of the power of sorcery in tales. A tale is neither history nor myth . Tales are stories
of the anomalous, of what is said to occur long ago and far away: too archaic (and arcane) for history, too foreign to be integrated into a
cosmogonic pantheon or totemic classification. Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, an-omalie in French is used to refer to the
“abnormal” or that which goes against the rules, when in fact the word is derived from a Greek noun that designates the
coarse, the rough, the unequal. While the abnormal indicates divergent characteristics within a group, the
anomalous is the cutting edge, the edge of “deterritorialization” of the group itself. What is anomalous
is not that which is outside of the group or divergent within it, but that individual who forms a porous
border between the group and its Outside. Ahab’s inhuman zeal is derived from his secret alliance with
the exceptional whale--the extreme case of whale, Moby-Dick, who seems to have crossed the threshold between animal and all-too-
human motives, just as Ahab has become monstrous and inhuman in his pursuit. Somewhere “between sacrifice and series, totem institution
and structure,” between the imaginary and the symbolic, lies sorcery, captured neither in myth nor in history, but in legends, in tales of power.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari mention only one sorcerer by name, and that one is the subject of a tale: Don Juan, master (real
or imaginary) of Carlos Castaneda.8 Writers in general are called sorcerers because they write not for but before or in the presence of the
animal. “Writers are sorcerers,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “because they experience the animal as the only population before whom they are
What is important about the relation between writers of fiction
responsible in principle” (A Thousand Plateaus, 240).
and animals is not that writers sympathize with animals or identify with them. It is not as if writers
attempt to advocate for, let alone represent the interests of the animal kingdom. What matters is that
the fascination animals exert on certain writers serves to establish a ritual or ceremonial ground on
which occult exchanges of affect take place. The exchanges are “occult” because although it is clear that
an exchange is taking place, it is not clear what is being exchanged, or even when or why. The German
Romantic Hofmannsthal becomes fascinated by a pack of dying rats, and the disturbance or disruption this produces in his soul forms an
“interstice” through which this “people” are given voice—not that Hofmannsthal speaks for the rats, but his fascination with the rats sends him,
as a writer, into a becoming-rat that simultaneously directs the rats into a nameless and yet distinct becoming-other, a becoming-written of the
rat in which, as Hofmannsthal put it, the “soul of the animal bares its teeth at monstrous fate” (ibid., 240). At
the center of sorcery,
and of writing-as-sorcery, are fascinations in which one is overwhelmed by or possessed of certain
affects: Ahab’s obsession with the white whale, H.P. Lovecraft’s doomed heroes who travel in search of the nameless Thing; Castaneda’s bid
for power. These fascinations do not reflect merely human affects of love, joy, rage, or sorrow, but express
intensities or vibrational oscillations that expose, within affects and their intensification, an uncanny
interconnection or “Interkingdom” (ibid., 242) where all organisms are composed by the same fundamental
forces. Sorcerers have affinities for animals and packs of animals because a sorcerer’s power inheres in
the relations that are possible for her to activate between herself and the animals. What is important is
not that the sorcerer identifies with a snake or a crow, but that in the process of relating to those
animals, the sorcerer is able to activate powers in herself that would otherwise be blocked by the
fixations of the self upon the self. “For the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the power of the pack that
throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel” (ibid.). The knowledge that such affects produce is a peculiar sort of knowledge. It is
knowledge of what Deleuze and Guattari identify with operations on a cosmic plane of consistency, a plane where
forms intersect and enter into zones of indiscernability with one another. Knowledge of such a plane is inseparable from
actions taken on that plane. In the composition of a Southern Italian folk dance, the Tarantella, such knowledge is embodied in the movements
of those who have been bitten by spiders. The dancers convulse and writhe in spider-like fashion in order to cure themselves (through
perspiration) of the spider’s bite. What is formed in the dance is a hybrid, a virtual entity that is neither human nor spider, but a composition-
in-convulsion, an impossible crossbreed, a hybrid whose identity and reality is virtual. Sorcerers both result from and produce such “unnatural
participations”: wolf-men, spider-women. These hybrids are sterile (ibid., 241). They do not reproduce, but spread through catastrophes and
epidemics, through contagions such as “dancing mania,” a phenomenon in medieval Europe in which large groups danced and writhed
Sorcerers invite
uncontrollably until exhausted (probably caused by eating rye infected with Clavicepsis purpurea, a psychoactive fungus).
and attempt to use such states because it is here, with all the attendant risks and dangers, that genuine
knowledge of nature is found: “unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature” (ibid.
241). Sorcery involves packs or bands (ibid., 239). Such groups as hunting societies, secret societies, and mercenary groups, are
formed around affects that are too intense to be integrated into families or states. The pack or band
haunts the woods, roams the borders, lives between villages (ibid., 246). Likewise, groups of sorcerers are always
at the borders, the fringes, and on the frontier. They do not enter society through contracts or through
filiations, but through infection or “contagion,” as when the alliance of two different families results in the production of
werewolves or vampires. Deleuze and Guattari here cite the work of Edward Leach, who had demonstrated that “the sorcerer belongs first of
all to a group united to the group over which he or she exercises influence only by alliance: thus in a matrilineal group we look to the father’s
side for the sorcerer or the witch” (ibid.). As Deleuze and Guattari already explored in Anti-Oedipus, the precursor to A Thousand Plateaus,
there is a great deal of tension between filiations and alliance as types of social bonds. Filiation, through
blood, seems to have a concrete basis. But alliance through pact is abstract: it has its basis in contract
or agreement—it is not obligation or connection transmitted through blood, but agreement “bound” through words or signs or gestures.
The power that such tokens have is mysterious, elusive, evasive, “fetishistic,” which is why sorcery often appears when alliances are formed .
The sorcerer is constantly accused of deception or sedition, of betraying the interests of society, the
family or the state. And there is always an attempt by society to corral or break the sorcerer, to re-
integrate her and confine her to a social role (as shaman, medicine-man, etc.) “in order to break them, reduce them to
relations of totemic or symbolic correspondence” (ibid., 247-248). [Continued on page 20] Occult knowledge for Deleuze is intuitive
knowledge of the individuating forces of life. This knowledge is “democratic” not in the sense that it
would be the subject of public discussion, but that it would symbolize the elemental forces or affects
that are the animating principles of those debates. Mathesis, in other words, would be knowledge of what
constitutes the possibility of human collectivity. Thus initiation is “deployed at the level of life, of living man.” The paradox is
this: the knowledge most essential to human life is not available on the basis of explanation, but rather is incarnate in a series of symbols to
which the possibility of explanation attests. Mathesis does not eliminate the need for scientific explanation, which uses
symbols to express natural laws, or philosophical explanation, which uses symbols to articulate logical and metaphysical concepts. But
mathesis, as a hermetic discipline, refers
to the fundamental elements of nature itself, such that those elements,
as symbols, immediately impart a power to act for the sake of life. Mathesis is not a private quest for
initiation, but a search for the conceptual rudiments that might make it possible to forge new social
institutions. Deleuze’s interest in mathesis, as Robin Mackay puts it, is in a principle that can guide and ground the creation of new social
rituals and new forms of cohesion and collectivity, of “integration.”15 And as Deleuze puts it in another early essay, “the question is no longer
about transcendence, but rather about integration; the problem of society […] is not a problem of limitation, but
rather a problem of integration […] to integrate sympathies” (Desert Islands, 19-21). Deleuze is explicitly interested in
mathesis to the extent to which it can energize a specific political project: the formation of new social institutions. What connects
Deleuze’s vision of mathesis to the politics of sorcery? By way of analogy: the sorcerer’s knowledge is
to the pack or tribe what the mathesis is to society.16 This knowledge of life is a simultaneous
apprehension and invention of alignments, connections, and ramifications of human sympathies. It is
the knowledge of how to prolong and sustain individual powers in collective processes. Knowledge of
such powers is a knowledge of how to recreate existing institutions. For Deleuze, such transformation
occurs not by directly overthrowing an establishment, but by creating hybrids or “monstrous”
formations within pre-established forms of exchange and already visible forms of power. When Deleuze talks
about a “way out,” he is not talking about an escape from politics, but rather a release point at which the energies
coagulated in a given set of relations can exceed the limits of their possible meaning, taking on a new
direction in order to deepen symbiotic and synthetic possibilities. The people to come will not arrive,
however, through debate, compromise, or litigations that would establish protective limits between
groups and share power among competing interests. For Deleuze and Guattari, genuine multiplicities will be
founded only through creative forms of becoming that develop across groups and interests, and the
political will expressed will be inseparable from an open-ended becoming. The only question, as they put it, is
whether a becoming reaches the point at which desire can be sustained as expression--the disjunctive inclusion of new life forms in the present.
 Death K net benefit
Make no mistake, our subjectivities don’t exist in isolation – even this debate is only
possible as a result of the deaths of others – refusing the construct of humanity allows
us to make an ethical encounter with the ultimate alterity of death
Ansell-Pearson 8 Keith Ansell Pearson, Specialist in Modern European Philosophy. I serve on the editorial boards of,
among others, Cosmos and History, Deleuze Studies, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, and Nietzsche-Studien. “Spectropoiesis and
Rhizomatics: Learning to Live with Death and Demons”. Pgs. 9-25. PWoods.

Derrida points out that to construe a philosophy as a philosophy of life is an all too easy or simple affair
simply because it is in danger of neglecting the other of life, namely death and the dead . So much so that for
Derrida absolute life would be absolute evil, the life that is fully present (1994: 175). Learning to live life is not
something that can be taught by oneself but only through the intermediation provided by the other,
death, at the edge of life, at the internal or external border, speaking of a 'heterodidactics' that is situated between life and death,
where this 'between' does not denote a simple genealogy requiring movement along a series of points from an arche to a telos (from birth to
death). Nietzsche spoke enigmatically of justice as a 'panoramic power' which transcends this and that individual, as the highest representative
of life, but a life that is fully implicated in death. Is
it this kind of justice that Derrida is appealing to when he speaks of
the life that lives beyond present life, its actual being-there?: 'not toward death but toward a living-on ,
namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in advance comes to
disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present as well as of any effectivity. There is then some spirit. Spirits. And one must reckon
with them' (Derrida 1994: xx). Repetition needs to be freed from the material or physical model of a merely 'brute repetition' that Deleuze
holds it gets trapped in with Freud's positing of the death-drive and which posits a straightforward desire to regress, or involute, to an earlier,
inorganic state of things. While the pleasure principle would be limited to a psychological principle that of the 'beyond' of the pleasure principle
would be linked to a transcendental principle (not of life, but germinal life, the life and death that live on): 'If repetition makes us ill, it also heals
us; if it enchains and destroys us, it also frees us, testifying in both cases to its "demonic" power' (Deleuze1968: 30; 1994: 19). This move is not
Freud's for whom the 'daemonic power' which assails and runs ahead of neurotics like a 'malignant fate' is always to be identified and stratified
in terms of a recognisable fate, a fate that is 'for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile influences' (Freud
1991: 292). Psychoanalysis can only domesticate the demonic by placing it in the confines of regression
therapy. There is something that haunts the present life, life as presence. For Deleuze this is repetition:
not as regression but as originary difference, announcing not the return of the repressed (the past) but
the evil spirits of the alien future; or rather, the time of Aion as opposed to the time of Chronos. This is
the time of the Event (the time of eternal return). Events are not living presents but infinitives that involve a
'becoming' which in dividing itself infinitely in past and future eludes the grasp of the present. The time
of events is the ghostly (virtual) time of 'incorporeal effects', effects which result from the actions and
passions of bodies but which live in excess of them. The eternal return is not the time of individuals or persons but only of
'pure events' in 'which the instant, displaced over the line, goes on dividing into already past and yet to
come' (Deleuze 1969: 206-7; 1990: 176). What makes the encounter with eternal return demonic is not the
feeling of being subject to an evil fate beyond one's control or comprehension, becoming little more
than the victim of the repressed; rather it is the fact that in its repetition the action is transformed into
the event, in which the body is confronted with the chance to learn to communicate with ghosts and
spectres of life. What is being willed in the willing of eternal repetition - in which repetition becomes the very object of willing (not mere
self-destruction as in the death-drive) - is the field of forces and intensities that the self finds itself fortuitously implicated in. The eternal return
turns the repetition of intensities and singularities (the mobile individuating factors which exceed the constraints of the self and live on or
beyond) into the object of the highest affirmation. There is no genealogical origin or phallic birth since the only genesis is a hetero-genesis and
the only production a spectropoiesis. An
encounter with the demonic raises, of course, the question of what it
means for philosophy to communicate with death. Freud refers to a work of anthropology by Kleinpaul in which the belief in
spirits found in the remnants of civilized races is said to expose a fear of the dead among the living because the dead continue to enjoy the
primeval lust for murder (the lust Freud affirms in working through the 'disillusionment of war' in his 1915 essay), seeking to drag the living
onto their train. The dead are, in actuality, living dead who live death, they are vampyres conceived as 'evil spirits' who
seek to rob the living of life (Freud 1990: 115). It is as if such an insight anticipates Freud's later preoccupation with the train of death that
always leads to the same place, a regression to the inorganic that characterises the death-drive as precisely a drive towards death as a final
entropic destination: 'the aim of all living is death'. But here we encounter the essential paradox: which life is it that the so-called evil spirits
Could it be the absolute life, the life that thinks it can dispense with death and its
seek to deprive the living of?
filthy lessons (decomposition, degeneration)? Death no longer exists for we have buried the dead once
and for all, the dead are without witnesses, no survivors remain to testify against the living. Derrida
poses the question of the event precisely as a question of the ghost, seeking to comprehend the
effectivity of that which is without body, as virtual and insubstantial as a simulacrum. Indeed, for
Derrida a thinking of the spectral is one that takes into account 'an irreducible virtuality ...virtual space, virtual
object, synthetic image, spectral simulacrum, teletechnological differance, idealiterability, trace beyond presence and absence, and so forth...'
A state of affairs is haunted by the event (a ghost of time), which makes it possible to speak of
(1994: 190).
a logic of haunting that is not simply larger than an ontology of Being but rather denotes that which
implicates life in its other as the repetition of death. Whether this haunting entails, deconstructively, a renegotiation with
genealogy (a genealogical deconstruction and a deconstruction of the genealogical schema) or, more destructively, a burning of the
genealogical tree, will not be decided upon here (just as Nietzsche's own project of 'on' or 'towards' a genealogy of morals does not decide
upon it once and for all but leaves the matter open for the future, and as the future). We simply need note that it is not only a question of our
taking up of an inheritance which subjects genealogy to a heteronomous and heterogeneous determination; rather, the hereditary can be
shown to enjoy an originary heterogeneity. This is what Deleuze means when he says that our
only inheritance is the crack itself
(the paradox of a transmission which transmits only itself). The event becomes what it is because it 'lives on'. It robs
time of the present, indeed, of presence. There remains, however, a future for heredity simply because what is inherited in any
passing on is the future. The 'germen' is the crack and nothing but the crack. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze develops a new conception of
transcendental philosophy by approaching the transcendental as a topological field not inhabited by the 'I', the cogito or the synthetic unity of
apperception, but populated by pre-individual singularities, what he calls a 'Dionysian sense-producing machine' (Deleuze 1969: 130-1; 1990:
107). It is this 'surface topology' made up of populations and preindividual singularities which constitutes the 'real transcendental field'.
Singularities refer to 'ideal events' (ideal in the sense that they exist or endure beyond their specific
individual manifestations and significations), such as bottlenecks, knots, points of fusion, processes of condensation,
crystallisation, and boiling. The error of attempts to define the transcendental with consciousness is that they get constructed in the image of
Deleuze makes a
that which they are supposed to ground, running the risk of simply reduplicating the empirical (see ibid.: 128; 105).
move in the direction of a non-human universe, giving primacy in the becomings of life to what he will
later call with Guattari transversal modes of communication. In The Logic of Sense, for example the subject is
transmuted into a free, anonymous, nomadic singularity which 'traverses' humans, plants, and animals
by being dependent neither on the matter of the particular individuations nor on the forms of their
personality. This transversality, says Deleuze, constitutes the universe of Nietzsche's 'overman'. In later work
this tranversal field is identified as the plane of immanence, which, starting with Descartes and running from Kant to
Husserl, gets treated as a field of consciousness: 'Immanence is supposed to be immanent to a pure consciousness, to a thinking subject'
(Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 47-8; 1994: 46). For Deleuze, however, immanence
is only immanent to itself, that is, to a
plane populated by anonymous matter in continuous variation. Deleuze explores the existence of animal
becomings that are said to both traverse human beings and affect both animals and humans alike.
Animal becomings, it must be insisted upon, do not entail representation or imitation, simply because
the becoming is situated on the molecular level of affect between particles of heterogeneous bodies,
and not on the molar level of species and genus with its concentration on organs and their functions. It
is for this reason that a becoming is said to produce only itself: 'What is real is...the block of becoming, not the
supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 291; 1988: 238, 'Memories of a Bergsonian').
These becomings cannot be said to be evolutions if evolution is taken to be synonymous with descent and filiation. Becomings involve the
coming into play of an order different than filiation, such as novel alliances found in symbiotic complexes: 'If evolution includes any veritable
becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation' (ibid.).
Deleuze and Guattari adopt a model of 'creative involution' by disassociating involution from regression (the move towards less differentiation)
and equating it with the establishment of nonlinear
blocks of becoming. This is what they call 'neoevolutionism' in
which animal becomings involve the movement of populations: '...the animal is defined not by
characteristics (specific, generic, etc.) but by populations that vary from milieu to milieu or within the
same milieu; movement occurs not only or not primarily, by filiative productions but also by transversal
communications between heterogeneous populations' (ibid.: 292; 239). Every animal becoming partakes of
the anomalous (Moby-Dick, Josephine the Mouse Singer, the Wolf-Man). The anomalous is a 'phenomenon of bordering'
(1980: 299; 1988: 245), and it is within its terms of reference (a multiplicity, a population) that we can think in a novel manner the nature of
The anomalous resists schemas of classification, it has something of the 'unnameable'
demons and monsters.4
and the 'monstrous' about it - one could call it 'the Outsider', the 'nameless horror', or 'viroid life' (for
further insight see Lovecraft 1993 & 1994). Conceived in its most important sense, biophilosophically, the anomalous cannot be said to be
It has to do with the movement of a multiplicity and of populations, definable
either an individual or a species.
neither by their elements nor by their centres of unification, but solely and strictly in terms of the
number of dimensions and variations they enjoy. The desire to be a demon is a desire not to be One but
more than one, even less than one. No more One (see Derrida on an-other democracy beyond the One, 1997; compare
Lawrence on Whitman and democracy, 1977, 171ff.: 'God save me, I feel like creeping down a rabbit-hole, to get away from all these
automobiles rushing down the ONE IDENTITY track to the goal of ALLNESS').Sorcerers occupy an anomalous position within
their social field, dwelling at the edge of fields or woods, at the borderline between villages, and
operating 'between' life and death. Their relation to the anomalous is not one of filiation but of alliance,
establishing a pact with evil spirits: 'The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous'
(Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 301; 1988: 246). The politics of this sorcery involve assemblages (couplings and copulations)
that assume the form neither of the family nor those of the State and religion: 'Instead they express
minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of
recognized institutions...' (ibid.: 302; 247). If the animal becomings take the form of a great 'temptation', of monsters that are aroused
in the imagination as a demonic influence, this is because 'it is accompanied...by a rupture with the central institutions
that have established themselves or seek to become established' (ibid.). Evil spirits ensure that nature
overcomes itself by evolving contra itself through modes of involution, breaking out of the ossification
and rigidification of organismic life, and heralding the germinal life of the nonorganic: 'it is not the mechanical which is opposed to
the organic: it is the vital as potent pre-organic germinality (puissante germinalite pre-organique), common to the animate and the inanimate,
to a matter which raises itself to the point of life, and to a life which spreads itself through all matter' (Deleuze 1983: 76; 1986: 51). Nonorganic
life invokes a non-psychological life of the spirit, a life that does not simply 'belong' to either nature or to organic
individuality since it is the ungrounding of both, the flowers of evil which adorn the crowned an-archy.
Demons are demonic precisely because they exist without determinate function or fixed form. Where gods
have fixed attributes, properties, functions, territories and codes, concerned to oversee and regulate boundaries, demons jump across
intervals of space and time, and betray existing codes and territories. This is why Deleuze argues that it is a poor recipe
for producing monsters merely to 'accumulate heteroclite determinations or to over-determine the animal'. Rather, the more successful and
subversive task lies in raising up the ground and dissolving the form (Deleuze 1968: 44; 1994: 28-9). Of course, this involves betrayal,
most notably, betraying the 'fixed powers which try to hold us back, the established powers of the earth '
(Deleuze 1977: 53; 1987: 40). Deleuze and Guattari will go so far as to claim that the becomings of philosophy and science are unthinkable
without recourse to an appreciation of the role played by demons in all thought-experimentation. The demon is to be construed not as a God-
like figure, a trickster, who assumes the role of the total observer able to calculate the past and the future from a given state of affairs (in the
The demon invoked here denotes not simply something that exceeds
manner of the demon invented by Laplace).
our reasoning capacities but rather a common kind of 'necessary intercessors' playing the role of
inventive subjects of enunciation, such as the philosophical friend and rival, the idiot, the overman, etc. The demons of science - of
Maxwell, of Heisenberg, and so on - function as 'partial observers' and play the role of a molecular perception and affection, in which
knowledge becomes a perspectivism. This is not the perspectivism of a banal scientific relativism in which truth is said to be always relative to a
subject. There is not a relativity of truth (the anthropocentric naivete par excellence), but only 'a truth of the relative'.
It is worth quoting Deleuze and Guattari at some length on this point: ...the role of a partial observer is to perceive and to experience, although
these perceptions and affections are not those of a man, in the currently accepted sense, but belong to the things studied. Man feels the effect
of them nonetheless (what mathematician does not feel the experience the effect of a section, an ablation, or an addition), but he obtains this
effect only from the ideal observer that he himself has installed like a golem in the system of reference. These partial observers belong to the
neighborhood of the singularities of a curve, of a physical system, of a living organism. Even animism, when it multiplies little immanent souls in
organs and functions, is not so far removed from biological science as it is said to be, on condition that these immanent souls are withdrawn
from any active or efficient role so as to become solely sources of molecular perception and affection. In this way, bodies are populated by an
infinity of little monads (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 124; 1994: 130). Critchley's recent book, which inevitably given the pedagogic task it
undertakes to perform, gives due consideration to commonly accepted, if ultimately platitudinous, propositions regarding nihilism and
modernity: 'To accept the diagnosis of modernity in terms of nihilism is to accept the ubiquity of the finite. That is, if God is bracketed out as
the possible source of a response to the question of the meaning of life, then the response to that question must be sought within life,
conceived as a finite temporal stretch between birth and death. So, under nihilistic conditions of modernity, the question of the meaning of life
becomes a matter of finding meaning to human finitude' (1997: 24-5). But, we must ask: are life and death able to live and
die when stratified within the confines of the 'ubiquity of the finite'? Certainly, the banal placement of
life in terms of a 'temporal stretch between birth and death' reveals little insight into the phenomenon
of repetition, in which life gets caught up in a spectropoiesis, whether this poiesis be the event of the
over-life that lives beyond bodies and organisms, but also through them, as in Deleuze, or the spectres of life in
Derrida such as automata, machines, ghosts, beasts, the nameless Thing. In both cases one is dealing with a germinal life that haunts
finite organisms and bodies, and overturns dramatically the meaning of finitude, speaking of a machinic
surplus value (which is how both Deleuze and Derrida read Marx on capital). Spirits do not simply leave nature; rather, they animate
nonorganic and germinal life, inventing and reinventing themselves as evil spirits who burn nature in flames of
metamorphosis, rediscovering the infinite in the spirit of evil. Even though he invokes spectres and speaks of the 'event of death' (in this
analysis the event is too casually conflated with a 'state of affairs') - which means for him 'the event of our death' - Critchley is thus left with
very little almost nothing, mourning the impossibility of a 'phenomenology of death' because, we are told, death is a 'state of affairs'
about which we can find neither 'adequate intention' nor 'intuitive fulfilment', meaning that death is
'radically resistant to the order of respresentation' (ibid.). Hence the conclusion is reached that 'the ultimate meaning of
human finitude is that we cannot find meaningful fulfilment for the finite. In this specific sense, death is meaningless and the work
of mourning is infinite' (ibid.). The achievement of Very Little...Almost Nothing is to raise the stakes of a post-Nietzschean encounter
with death, showing the need to cultivate atheism and skepticism in terms of a philosophical ethos. However, although Critchley desires to
effect a movement beyond the phenomenology of death - the 'ungraspable facticity of dying' is said, with the aid of Blanchot and Levinas, to
establish 'an opening onto a metaphenomenological alterity' that cannot be made reducible to the power of the will or Dasein (there can be no
Subject of death) - for me this staging of the question of death remains caught within the confines of organismic life, the life of the 'I' and the
self. For Critchley the
'recognition of meaninglessness' as something one can achieve leads to a 'deeper
recognition of the profound limitedness of the human condition...' (ibid.: 27) He goes on to critique the illusions of
suicide, locating in its alleged fantasy the 'virile leap into the void', and aiming to show the ridiculous character of a wanting to die, but one may
want to ask about the phallic virility concealed in the idea of achieving and working towards one's very own recognition of meaninglessness (on
the rational and courageous character of suicide see Hume's essay on the subject, 1965). The real difference between us, however, is over the
question of affirmation. For him death cannot be laid hold of and be made to work as the basis for an affirmation of life since it belongs to an
ungraspable finitude. But if death
is ungraspable it is not because of human finitude and the limitedness of la condition humaine, but
because it belongs to the event. In other words, it does not belong to me (Je or Moi), not even 'my' death. It is precisely
because death does not belong (to the Subject) and cannot be owned (by the One) that it offers the
basis for an affirmation. It is the 'event' of death which is not being thought in this instructive but inexcessive attempt to
move beyond phenomenology.
A2
 Human good
Assuming the human is a critical point of agency ignores the potential inherent to
becoming-animal – turns the aff
Ramey 12, Joshua. The hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and spiritual ordeal. Duke University Press, 2012.
64-70

The notion that, when it comes to transformative practice, it is more spiritually profound and
philosophically decisive to look to the animals, or to look to an immanence luring us toward animality,
has a long history, and has been profoundly disturbing to any orthodoxy that posits the dignity of the human
essence as a primary manifestation of, or at least central analogy with, the divine essence. Giorgio Agamben,
however, has recently discovered that in a certain thirteenth-century Hebrew bible kept in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, there is an illus
tration of the elect in glory feasting on the bodies of the Leviathan and the Behemoth, but with a strange detail. The saints in glory have the
heads of animals.81 From an orthodox perspective, this illumination is a picture of the eschaton, in which the reconciliation of creation with
itself is promised-beast with beast and beast with human essence. At
the end of time can we safely envisage ourselves as
fully "contaminated" by our animality. But the challenge of Bruno, like that of Ba taille, Nietzsche, and
Deleuze, is the challenge of conceptualizing an immanent sense of such a theriomorphic eschaton . It is a
challenge to think divine animality as a dimension not of the hereafter but of the here and now. What
exactly is this ferality that for so many rogues and heretics corresponds to belief in this world? In A
Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari envisage animal faith as a form of sorcery, an operative capacity
attendant on the powers of the psychic mutation and physical rarefaction of which sorcerers are known
to be capable.82 Deleuze and Guattari's argument, in line with Bruno's affirmation of magia, is that
sorcery is not an outlying phenomenon, but a model of what all human life might be, beyond the
entrapments of the traditional human essence. For Deleuze, sorcerers are able to disorganize the
body creatively to avoid the confines of the human organism, confines Deleuze explicitly equates,
following Antonin Artaud, to the "judgments of God" CA TP, 150).83 Like Deleuze, Bruno holds that genuine
thought and action involve a decisive break with the human condition. It is ultimately the antiexperimental
char acter of Christology that Bruno disdains, insofar as it has been used by ecclesiastical authority to keep
humanity enchained to sterile tradition and rote repetition. Bruno was apparently so disturbed by the consequences of
faith in Christ (as he understood it) that, in the Expulsion, he insinuates that the inability of modern civilization to firmly establish itself against
barba rism was an effect of the doctrine of incarnation, with its elevation of "holy asininity" or "learned ignorance" to the epistemological
throne of grace. Perhaps from our perspective, 400 years of colonialism, imperi alism, and "nation building" later, we can only view Minerva's
alterna tive to "the folly of the cross," which she calls "Industry, Military Train ing, and Military Art," with grim irony. The
secular age has
not lived up to Bruno's expectations. Indeed, the substitution of nation-state for church has not been
the improvement Bruno hoped it would be, as evidenced by current attempts to rethink secularism
without its complicity in the debacles of colonialism and capitalism.84 But the fracture that would divorce modern
political economy, founded on abstract reason, from anything resembling the wisdom of natural philosophy, contem plation, and magic was not
yet, in Bruno's era, a clear fault line. Bruno, like Pico before him and Tommaso Campanella after him, maintained a utopian hope in the
possibility of political and religious authority structures that would be grounded in a complex vision ofrationality en compassing the best of
both an informed faith and a magical reason - a more difficult but profoundly utopian theological politics. In opposition to Pico, Bruno
developed a view of magical sympathies that set the possibility of personal, social, and cosmic
transformation neither in the intermediate status of humanity nor in the central medi ating role of
Christ, but in the fecundity of matter itself: "Forms do not exist without matter, in which they are
generated and corrupted, and out of whose bosom they spring and into which they are taken back. Hence,
matter, which always remains fecund and the same, must have as the fundamental prerogative of
being the only substantial principle; as that which is, and forever remains, and the forms together are
to be taken merely as varied dispositions of matter, which come and go, cease and renew themselves,
so that none have value as principle."85 In essence Bruno is claiming here that form, as a principle of the actual, is
insubstantial by contrast with the fecundity of matter. Bruno here anticipates Deleuze's own teaching,
according to which actual quanti ties and qualities merely explicate what is implicit in intensive quanti ties.
Extensions and qualities are subordinate to the intensive series of singularities whose existence they
incarnate (DR, 247). In one passage (among many) that seem to be an elaboration of a vision Bruno only partially realized, Deleuze
writes that "qualities and extensities, forms and matters, species and parts are not primary; they are
imprisoned in individuals as though in a crystal. Moreover, the entire world may be read, as though in a
crystal ball, in the moving depths of individuating differences or differences in intensity " (DR, 247). For
Deleuze, as for Bruno, there is an intensive continuum that, while subject to the contingencies of
physical, chemical, geological, and historical change, forms the "differentials," or ideal relations, to
which all such change attests. Deleuze sees the alternations, bifurcations, and imbrications of material
transformation in terms of series of virtual or ideal relations that are incarnate in such changes,
effected by them, but irreducible to spatiotemporal locations. It often seems as if Bruno is attempting, with his theory
of the superiority of matter to form, to conceive of what Deleuze will theorize in terms of the explication of
intensive quantities in the extensive.86 Bruno continues, This is why we find philosophers who, having pondered thoroughly
the essence of natural forms, such as one may see in Aristotle and his kind, have finally concluded that they are only
accidents and peculiarities of matter, so that, according to them, it is to matter that we must accord the
privilege of being act and perfection, and not to the things of which we can truly say that they are
neither substance nor nature, but relative to the substance and nature-that is to say , in their opinion,
matter, which for them is a necessary, eternal and divine principle , as it is to Avicebron, the Moor, who calls it "God
who is in everything."87 Bruno's claim here, which is in some respects an anticipation of Deleuze's thought, is that discrete, actual
composites of matter and form should not be conceived of as real individuals. It is matter itself that is
"act and perfection." For Bruno, individuation takes place within an infinite universe and on the basis of
an infinitely fecund matter, one that functions as what Deleuze will call an intensive spatium or virtual
depth (DR, 246).88 Bruno's view is an attempt to revise the Aristotelian doctrine of sub stance. In Aristotle's
theory of individuation, what makes up a corporeal (sublunary) individual is a particular unity of
matter and form. Form is that by virtue of which an individual (primary substance) is known as the
individual it is, and is known to belong to a species (secondary substance). Individual horses are
members of the species by virtue of the presence of the form of horse in particular matter. Yet for Aristotle,
matter does not in any unproblematic sense exist without form. Every discernible individual is always already a
matter-form composite. This is so much so that matter by itself is an almost-nothing, prope nihil . Yet
Aristotle also claims that matter is a principle of individuation, or that in virtue of which one horse is different from another.89 How can this be,
since for Aristotle matter is passive, the receiver of form, and all knowledge is knowledge of form? Matter
cannot be
comprehended except through a kind of extreme abstraction. The specific difference mat ter makes can
only be dimly espied through the interstices of analogical relations that distinguish proximate individuals
(matter-form compos ites). The differences the material cause makes can only be discovered by
comparison, and never known in themselves. But Bruno contends that Aristotle's doctrine of form is incoherent.
Individual substances are subject to decay, destruction, and death. To this extent, individual
substances are not self-subsistent entities. Individuals pass into and out of existence . Recognizing this
problem, Aris totle had distinguished between primary substances, such as individual horses or oak trees, and secondary substances, the class
or species to which horses and trees belong. Aristotle did this in order to account for the fact that particular entities appear and disappear while
the form individuals take continues to exist. Bruno argues that Aristotle cannot coherently call primary substances "substances," because
according to the Categories substance is the opposite of accident, and
all particular individuals have accidental properties
(location in space, skin color, hitches in their gaits).90 Insofar as matter represents the accidental
aspects of an individual, individual substance is likewise accidental. If a form is "impugned" by
accidental properties, then in some sense the forms (of species) cannot be eternal. What is the
warrant for thinking of forms as essences of eternal species, given that all substantial individuals
perish? Aristotle argued that to account for knowledge it is necessary to sup pose the existence of forms that can be abstracted from matter.
It is precisely this idea of knowledge as abstraction that Bruno sought to overcome. Early in his career, Bruno had abandoned Aristotle's
doctrine of substance for a Democritean or Epicurean atomism that held that form is a mere effluence or accidental disposition ofmatter. But
Bruno rejected this line of thought in Cause, Principle, and Unity, when he concluded that matter could not individuate itself, which in his
earlier view it would have to do.91 Bruno's mature view of individuation is of a "double contraction," involving two
types of substance: form, which is the power to make, and matter, which is the power to be made . For Bruno both
of these principles represent eternal potentials. By form Bruno means the "world soul" in its primary manifestation as
"mind." The world soul is the universal principle, immanent to the universe itself, by virtue of which
individuals are endowed with form. Yet the world soul itself is not limited by the entities that are
individuated on the basis of its principle. Bruno thus has a conception of primary sub stances that involves no accident, since the
forms of individuals are a perpetual donation from a world soul that, while fully immanent to and animating individuals, nevertheless
remains unaffected by their generation and destruction. Whether or not it is ultimately coherent (or more coherent than
Aristotle's view), this notion of world soul has much in common with Deleuze's conception of virtual intensive quan tities that govern
individuation by implicative and serial complication, and are irreducible
to actual transformations. For Bruno, individual
entities are generated, transformed, and perish within the world soul, but the world soul is not itself
generated, transformed, or in danger of extinction. In this way, the world soul in Bruno might seem to be a disguised return
to Aristotle's notion of second ary substances. But secondary substances (such as the species horse) exist for Aristotle only in an analogical
sense as compared with the pri mary substance, the actual matter-form composite that is an individual horse. For Bruno, the
world soul
does not contract into a finite individual, but is an infinite principle contracted "in infinite matter ." The
world soul manifests as perishing individuals, but does not perish. In this way the Aristotelian secondary
substance, whose eternal or stable nature derives from an abstract character is reconceived by Bruno as the real expressive
power of a world soul identified with a perpetual process of individuation. In this sense, Bruno thinks of the world
soul as the immanent cause of the existence of the universe, the formal principle of universal sub stance, a cause fully immanent to its effects.
As Leo Catana points out, for Bruno, as for Spinoza, "God"
should not be conceived as the first cause or the
transcendent principle of the universe, but as the infinite, animate universe itself. 92 "God" is simply the
name of the one infinite reality composed of world soul and matter (what Deleuze, following Bergson,
refers to as the Open Whole or One-All).93 In this view, it is no longer necessary to conceive of God as incorporeal. For Bruno,
the infinite universe itself is the sole substantial individual, a material and infinitely reshaping power .
Matter in this view is not nonbeing, but is in form the way a point is in a line, not as cause but as
"beginning" or "principle." In this way Bruno calls matter "divine." Matter gives being to form as an
eternal principle of composition. However, Bruno also imputes individuating power to the world soul. This view might seem
inconsistent, since Bruno calls matter the power to be formed and the World Soul the power to form, such that one must be active and the
other passive.95 Yet Bruno insists that both powers are active and contribute equally to individuation: the
World Soul as first cause,
and matter as perpetual beginning or immanent principle of form, like the way matter and form always
emerge as coimplicated in the composition ofmusic. The World Soul contains an indefinite variety of
possible forms, but it is due to the power of matter that certain forms attain a determined existence .
That is to say, a temporary individual "unity" is due to the infinite power of mater materia to unify or
hold form in existence. Thus Bruno describes individuals in the universe as "contractions" of matter and the World Soul. As Dicsono,
the pedant character in Cause, Principle, and Unity puts it, "this form [World Soul] is defined and de termined by matter, since, on the one
hand, possessing in itselfthe fac ulty of constituting the particulars of innumerable species, it happens to restrict itself in order to constitute an
individual, and, on the other hand, the potency of indeterminate matter, which can receive any form whatsoever, finds itself limited to a single
species. Thus, one is the cause of the definition and determination of the other."96 It might seem that despite the acknowledgment of the
world soul's drive toward manifestation, matter nevertheless takes all the initiative. This is a controversial issue in interpretation. Graham
Harman, for in stance, argues that effectively the principle of form plays no signifi cant role in Bruno's theory of individuation.97 A more
generous view is voiced by Leo Catana. As Catana understands it, in Bruno there is a dialectical relationship between matter and the world soul.
The world soul actively restricts or contracts indeterminate matter to a species, but matter likewise defines and determines the world soul.
Matter and the world soul are thus codetermining principles. The world soul con tains an infinite
number of possible species (rather than the finite and limited set figured in Aristotelian secondary substances), but
matter makes those species forms emerge through its powers of differentiation. This is why Bruno determines
that individuation involves a duplex contractio (double contraction) of matter and the world soul. Matter ac counts for the concrete differences
of various individuals, because its conditione (complexion) is a principle of determination. The world soul, which is the formal principle, can be
contracted in matter to the extent that certain materials have the capacity to receive certain forms. Thus, in
contrast to Aristotle,
Bruno does not believe matter receives its life from form. Form is not the only principle of the
individual; soul is not the only life of the body. Rather, an individual is alive because a form of the
world soul has been contracted by matter. Matter is thus alive, and the entire universe is animated.
All things are living in a univocal sense, and there is no longer a hierarchy of rational, animal, sensate,
and insensate forms of being. Humans are not distinguished by their rational capacities but by the
particular kinds of bodies they have - the particular matter which has attracted and contracted the
World Soul.