Abstract

Werner Herzog’s documentary film Grizzly Man about the life and death of Timothy Treadwell invites us to consider the relation between Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal and phenomenological accounts of lived embodiment. In this paper I begin with a general account of becoming-animal and suggest that this concept is helpfully elucidated by considering the ways in which some aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s practice can be understood as a rhizomatic phenomenology of our lived experience that in part extends the work of Merleau-Ponty. What emerges between the two philosophies is the possibility of bodily "molecularity" as a mode of lived embodiment. I argue that this molecularity is what enables the potential interpermeation of bodies across their differences, such as occurs in the event of becoming-animal. Alphonso Lingis’s descriptions of our becoming-animal as lived experience serve here as an evocative source for clarifying this proposition further. I conclude by returning to Herzog’s film to consider the risks and consequences of becoming-animal--not only for the human who becomes, but also for the animal who, as Deleuze and Guattari note, is no less transformed.