“Becoming-Animal”: Cosplay as Sorcery through Deleuze and Guattari’s Tenth Plateau

Abstract

Abstract Cosplay is commonly understood to involve cosplayers donning the accoutrements of popular media entities in a complexly mediated type of “performance.” This article asks to what extent Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “becoming-animal” from the tenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980) can mobilize other understandings of these moments—in particular, their becoming that transcends mimesis, resemblance, or representation. Such “sorcery” is a “molecular” becoming based on alliance with a “demonic” character, one’s passing “by contagion” into becoming with an animal pack, a second alliance with a new human group, effecting a further and dynamic contagion of the human and animal. Maintaining such becoming requires a micropolitical struggle that differs from the identarian one in its capacity for offering schizoanalytic realizations of desire. Does, or can, cosplay effectuate such becoming, in which the human becomes “animal” and the animal becomes human, producing irreducible dynamisms, lines of flight?