The Writer is a Sorcerer: Literature and the Becomings ofA Thousand Plateaus

Abstract

In this paper, I trace the concept of ‘becomings’, most thoroughly articulated in the tenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, as it relates to the notion of the writer as sorcerer. More precisely, my aim is to articulate how it is that Deleuze and Guattari conceptualise the writer as really (not merely imaginatively) effecting what they understand as ‘becomings’ (-woman, -child, -animal, etc.). My thesis is that if the writer is a sorcerer, capable of enabling real becomings, it is because language itself, for Deleuze and Guattari, is bodily and material, and the author, particularly the literary author, has the ability to disrupt language's representational domain of sense, causing language to hum with the intensive vitality that puts it in closest proximity to the body, from whence language emerges in the first place. We shall first look to Bergson and Spinoza, from whom Deleuze and Guattari abstract their intensive conception of the body in A Thousand Plateaus. From here we will outline the apparent progression of becomings in the tenth plateau. Finally, we will look to the Kafka book as outlining the material and affective capacities of literature.