Slog - The Stranger's Blog

Line Out

The Music Blog

« New Weapon Unveiled at WTO | Holy wow Band of Horses »

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

The Shame of the Animal Kingdom

Posted by on December 13 at 10:40 AM

For your pleasure, read this passage from an overview of a series of interviews between Claire Parnet and the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze—it was conducted in the late-80s and screened after the philosopher’s death in 1995.


[Parnet asks Deleuze about his] relationship to animals. She knows that he does not care for domestic animals, but she notes that he has quite a bestiary, rather repugnant, in fact — of ticks, of fleas — in his writings, and that he and Guattari have developed the animal in their concept of “animal-becomings.” So she wonders what his relationship to animals is.

Deleuze is rather slow to respond to this, stating that it’s not so much about cats and dogs, or animals as such. He indicates that he is sensitive to something in animals, but what bothers him are familial and familiar, domestic animals. He recalls the “fatal moment” when a child brings a stray cat home with the result that there was always an animal in his house. What he finds displeasing is that he doesn’t like “things that rub” (les frotteurs); and he particularly reproaches dogs for barking, what he calls the very stupidest cry, the shame of the animal kingdom. He says he can better stand (although not for too long) the wolf howling at the moon than barking.

The whole overview is here.