Mister V and the Unmournable Animal Death

This chapter focuses on the unmournable nature of animal death, turning to Heidegger, Freud and Melanie Klein (as advocates of both successful and unsuccessful mourning, first and second deaths) as entry points for an analysis of Emilie Deleuze’s 2003 film, Mister V. The film tracks the changes in relationality incurred when the eponymous psychotic horse escapes and tests not only the boundaries of the film’s diegesis but also its own discursive fabulation. Here man, as majority figure, is not an option for becoming. Man must be divested of his majoritarian status before he can become other. In this regard, ‘becoming-animal’ is the missing link between man and ‘becoming multiple’, so that the metamorphosis necessarily entails a ‘loss’ as initiation so that we can enter the substitutive order of becoming-other. This is not necessarily incompatible with Freud. Indeed, the two main trajectories of the latter’s thought: 1) totemic identification and 2) castration (as an initiation into the ‘management’ of loss or lack) also separate out as tendencies of unmourning and ‘successful mourning’, of first and second deaths, respectively. Both are compatible with the anti-Oedipal momentum of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis.