3 JUSTIFICACIÓN Y OBJETIVOS

Leviathan, Moby Dick.

Deleuze and Guattari stress the unique nature of the “individual” with which one enters into alliance when becoming-animal. So despite the rather general sounding use of the word “animal,” they display an important sensitivity to the fact that animals are singular and that a meaningful relationship with a nonhuman animal comes with the prerequisite of acknowledging this particular animal and not the animal in general. Equally, a pet, or what Deleuze calls the “Oedipalized animal,” will not do. Hence Deleuze’s seemingly unnecessary emphasis that “Ahab’s Moby-Dick is not like the little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors and cherishes it.”207 In other words becoming-animal is not comfortable or easy. It cannot rely on pre-existing human notions of psychology: “human tenderness is as foreign to it as human classifications.”208 Hence Melville’s mocking of cetological classification and hence, perhaps, the necessity for the violence which characterises the relationship between Ahab and Moby Dick.

In his essay, “The Scene of Writing,” Rodolphe Gasché observes that, in terms of the order of knowledge of whales, Moby Dick “shatters the whole system” of whale. Describing him as “the pure movement of deviation,” Gasché notes that Moby Dick exhibits singularity in his colour and size such that “with him Cetology as a systematized exhibition of the whale is unshored, spread out again into harbourless immensities.”209 This comment sends us back to the title of the novel which now reads as an either/or: Moby-Dick; or, the Whale, but not both. The general singular whale is a convenient object of study, but as soon as we move to a specific whale, the system necessarily collapses. This effect underlines both the fragility and violence of cetology.

205

Royle, “Even the Title: On the State of Narrative Theory Today,” 10.

206

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 243.

207

Ibid., 244.

208

Ibid., 244–5.

209

Rodolphe Gasché, “The Scene of Writing: A Deferred Outset,” Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies 1 (1977): 156.

It is theorised by Andrew Benjamin in Of Jews and Animals where he writes that philosophy traditionally refers to animality as something unchanging and essential: “What this means is that the animal is only included in terms that account either for generation or classification. That inclusion is itself connected to the related exclusion of a possible recalcitrant animality.”210 In other words, once an animal becomes singular, or badly behaved, the whole system of

classification collapses. Since the position of the human is secured against the unchanging nature of the animal, it is not just cetology which collapses, but in a vertigo-inducing movement, all of animal classification, including humans, is swept away. As Deleuze notes, there is a “Whalers’ Law, which says that any healthy whale encountered must be hunted, without choosing one over another.”211 It is the breaking of the law which results in the failure of the voyage and the sinking of the Pequod. It threatens the economic system which the voyage is supposed to support and ultimately, it threatens human life, not just through the death of the crew but also as the sovereign creature with the power of life and death over all others. We see that Deleuze and Guattari appreciate the impossibility of deriving final meanings from relationships of becoming:

What counts for a great novelist—Melville, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, or Musil—is that

things remain enigmatic yet nonarbitrary: in short, new logic, definitely a logic, but

one that grasps the innermost depths of life and death without leading us back to

reason. The novelist has the eye of a prophet, not the gaze of a psychologist.

We cannot know for sure, or finally, what Moby-Dick means. The relationship between Ahab and Moby Dick can never be reduced to a final answer or a fixed set of points. It remains forever outlandish in a manner which brushes against the limits of human knowledge. It reveals the edges of logic and reason and can be said to transform or to shake logic. If the novelist is the prophet, then we are returned once again to predictions of the end of the world. Remember that Derrida, with no little enigma of his own, announces that during moments of nakedness, exposed in front of an animal, he is “like a child ready for the apocalypse.”213 Read through the frame of Deleuze’s novel-as-prophet, we start to see the apocalyptic effects of an appreciation of the sorts of relationships which humans can enter into with nonhumans. The end of the world, in a Heideggerian sense, is the end of a world as realised and formed by the “world forming” human. In this sense, literary works like Moby-Dick are world forming in that they displace the rational human who is said to inhabit the world, sovereign in his reason.

210

Andrew E. Benjamin, Of Jews and Animals. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 78.

211

Deleuze, “Bartleby; Or, the Formula,” 79.

212

Ibid., 82.

213

Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 12.

Yet for all this talk of alliance through becoming whale, to the point “where he can no longer be distinguished from Moby Dick, and strikes himself in striking the whale,”214 we must not lose sight of the fact that it is precisely with the goal of striking (and killing) Moby Dick that Ahab’s becoming-whale operates. This is the point where Deleuze’s theory of becoming deviates from Derrida’s discourse on animality. As we have seen, Derrida’s insistence on the singular animal is tied to the ethical imperative not to harm in any way the animal with which one enters into the face to face relationship. On the contrary, Ahab’s entire “alliance” with the white whale is premised on Moby Dick’s death.

Having reached the ethical limits of Deleuze’s theory of becoming, we turn to Maurice Blanchot’s reading of Moby-Dick which draws the novel into comparison with The Odyssey. Like Deleuze, he sees Ahab and Moby Dick as engaged in a transformative relationship:

Ahab and the whale are engaged in a drama, what we can call a metaphysical drama,