Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: Living With Deleuze, Intimating in the Dance of Movements, Moments, and Sensation

Abstract

In this article, I argue that writing with intimacy through an animation of Deleuzian thought helps to destabilize the simply human practice of signifying, representing, and locating emotions within a metaphysics of being, which firmly ignores affective relationality and the emergence of posthuman practices of thinking and doing. By positing the practice of intimating, I argue that such an approach will prompt movement away from thinking about what a body is or what it might mean toward moving with and sensing encounters and engagements with what bodies can do. Continuing this line of thinking and writing with Deleuze will involve me in engaging in rupture, of taking a line of flight, of speculating about intimacy, not as a linear, molar attribute of simply human bodies, but rather as a complex, relational multiplicity of molecular lines. In this, I suggest that, in what Manning calls the “politics of touch,” bodies are always in the play of affective relationality, engaging in the dance between affecting and being affected, always sensing and shifting in intensive moments of movement and change. I extend this argument by proposing that intimating, as a practice of doing, involves working, with Deleuze and Guattari, with difference as “involutionary,” as emergent in and creative of fields of play in which “becoming-animal” leads us to new sensings of what bodies can do. In this “becoming-animal,” therefore, I will argue with and from Deleuze that intimating can be conceptualized as a means of “worlding” in which practices of always being on the lookout can be used to animate new creative relational forces in event/ful encounters with spacetime in so(u)rceries of the always not-yet-known.