Solidarité: Journal of the Radical Left
Becoming, in Guattari’s sense, can move between and beyond the conventional dichotomies of social analysis, which means that there are many ways to subvert the phallocratic order of the world. Becoming is about subversive forms of life—ways of being-in-the-world, and becoming-woman is only one particular subversive modality. This is why Guattari speaks also of “becoming-child in Schumann, becoming-animal in Kafka, becoming-vegetable in Novalis, becoming-mineral in Beckett.” 19 He utilizes the concept of becoming-woman for the purposes of criticizing reactions to what is both seen to be and actually subversive in homosexuality. Guattari insists on this overarching point: “In a more general way, every ‘dissident’ organization of libido must therefore be linked to a becoming-feminine body, as an escape route from the repressive socius, as a possible access to a ‘minimum’ of sexed becoming, and as the last buoy vis-à-vis the established order.”20 A politics of subversive becoming makes us slippery, makes it difficult to establish people with fixed identities, and thus makes it difficult to hold people down or to lock them out on the grounds of who they are. A politics of subversive becoming is not easy, it is fraught with difficulties and material limitations, but for Guattari, becoming is an emancipatory project, and emancipation is never easy. Also, Guattari does not want us to faithfully preserve and defend his conception of becoming-woman, for it is only one possible nodal point of becoming, for being-in-the-world. He says that “it’s important to destroy ‘big’ notions like woman, homosexual… Things are never that simple. When they’re reduced to black-white, male-female categories, there’s an ulterior motive, a binary-reductionist operation meant to subjugate them.”21 Hence, even if we would become-woman in any certain way, we would need another becoming still, possible and desirable, in order to keep new emancipatory horizons open. Following this, to speak of becoming-ghost is a perfectly fitting turn. We know the usual story that death makes ghosts, but we also know, in the case of authors with posthumous influence, that there is a very real sense of life after death there. We can 36