Meditation on the Animal and the Work of Art

This chapter explores the notion of “becoming-animal” as a process of “creating a relation to territory” in reference to the artist and the writer. For Deleuze, the animal has a privileged and very specific relation to the notions of territory and world, one that is based on a relative number of affects and on a process of selection (i.e., the extraction of singularities from a milieu or an environment [Umwelt]). The animal entertains a relation to its world that is produced in terms of a relation to distinctive territory, whereas the human is found to have a relation to world, but no proper territory of its own). However, for Deleuze, the writer and the artist are often described as beings who enter into a process of becoming where the subject loses its own proper identity as an individual or a human being and enters into a process that closely approximates the animal’s “captivation” by an environment, to employ Heidegger’s term, even though the artist or the writer produces a specific world by extracting lines, fragments, colors, visions or scenes from its external environment in order to compose a territory that is expressed by the work of art.