Deleuze and Ethology: A Philosophy of Entangled Life

Abstract

Although the title of Cullen's book is Deleuze and Ethology, the author does not focus on passages in which Gilles Deleuze discusses ethology or animals. Cullen does not even quote Deleuze's valuable definition of ethology as “the study . . . of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterize each thing.” Instead, Cullen tries to construct a philosophical ethology of his own with reference to Deleuze's works on cinema, which, Cullen argues, allowed the philosopher “to describe his ontology from the point of view of the particular beings that inhabit the world.” It is this emphasis on particular beings rather than species that, according to Cullen, lies “at the heart of philosophical ethology.”Philosophers have often asked if it is possible to understand what animals feel, as for instance in the famous article “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel. In films, the question of what characters see and feel is also important. When filmmakers use a subjective camera, it is almost always paired with an objective one. They might first show the fearful face of a character (objective view) before letting us see the snake she is seeing (subjective view). Most often, a film will then return to the objective view. The shot/countershot is an essential film technique, because the subjective view is not reached by eliminating the observer (in this case, the objective camera) but by oscillating between the observer's and the character's points of view. Moreover, Cullen adds, the distinction between a subjective and an objective shot is not always clear. In one shot we may see, for example, an intoxicated character from the perspective of a third-person camera, but that camera is swinging and blurred in order to suggest the character's subjective state. Deleuze terms this sort of shot “semi-subjective.”Ethologists likewise mingle points of view. They do not put themselves in an animal's shoes—an impossible task, as Nagel has contended. Instead, they learn to pay attention to what the animals they are studying pay attention to. Ethologists blend their perspective with that of animals, semi-subjectively, and the result is a viewpoint neither completely human nor entirely animal. And so, Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue, in A Thousand Plateaus, the ethologists to some extent “become-animal.” Becoming-animal is not an identification with animals at large but a creative process triggered by encounter with one particular animal; the semi-subjective view is a new perspective that did not exist before the encounter. While ethologists change and become-animal, the animals they study also change during their interactions with ethologists, since they too learn to understand what matters to the particular humans with whom they live. Curiously, Cullen introduces the notion of becoming-animal only in the book's conclusion. But by approaching it indirectly, via Deleuze's consideration of cinema rather than his writings about animals, Cullen offers us a refreshing characterization of a concept central to Deleuze.