Deterritorializing Classics

The representational strategies that dominate many of Euripides' dramas amplify aesthetic and affective intimacies and proximities at the edges of the human (especially skin/clothing, living/dead, human/object). These strategies also often foreground tragic embodiments as constellated and contiguous formations that Deleuze and Guattari might have recognized as "assemblages" – that is, as combinations, extensions, or layerings of bodies and other entities (Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987, cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1977; also Grosz 2008, Wohl 2005, Seeley 2012).

Minority, or ‘minoritarian’ according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a political action. It challenges power and domination; it resists the violent coercion of law and the predominant norms; it deterritorializes itself from majority. Minority does not refer to quantitative. It is a substantial position that lacks power; it looks for escape-lines (ligne de fuite) from institutions, political order and social structure. Minority is not a static position nor is it a quality or characteristic. It is a process of ever-changing identities, of potentiality, of becoming (devenir).

From Aristophanes’ avian protagonists in Birds to the werewolves of the Zeus Lykaios cult in Arcadia, the Greek imagination teems with animal transformations. While scholarship on animals in the ancient world has recently blossomed in what has been called ‘the animal turn,’ modern approaches to human-animal metamorphosis do not typically make it beyond the interpretive framework of analogy, metaphor, or mimesis.

This paper makes use of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “line of flight,” primarily from A Thousand Plateaus, to examine De rerum natura 5.1297-1349, a passage in which Lucretius describes abused animals revolting against their masters on the battlefield. In the animal revolt, Lucretius describes a series of abuses against animals that culminates in humans turning animal bodies, through prosthesis, into war technologies.

Gilles Deleuze’s longstanding engagement with Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time as duration (e.g. Bergsonism, Difference and Repetition, Cinema I and II) is well-acknowledged. This paper evaluates the benefits of using Deleuze’s Bergsonian affiliations to explore Heraclitus’ own thinking on time, as well as its consequent effect upon Empedocles.