totem ritual

GD : “We must distinguish three kinds of animals. First, individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, "my" cat, "my" dog. These animals invite us to regress, draw us into a narcissistic contemplation, and they are the only kind of animal psychoanalysis understands, the better to discover a daddy, a mommy, a little brother behind them (when psychoanalysis talks about animals, animals learn to laugh): anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool. And then there is a second kind: animals with characteristics or attributes; genus, classifica-tion, or State animals; animals as they are treated in the great divine myths, 242 J 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... does not filiate, it infects. The difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural partici-pations. That is the only way Nature operates-against itself. This is a far cry from filiative production or hereditary reproduction, in which the only differences retained are a simple duality between sexes within the same species, and small modifications across generations. For us, on the other hand, there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as many differences as elements contributing to a process of contagion. We know that many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from different worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming. The Universe does not function by filiation. All we are saying is that animals are packs, and that packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion. These multiplicities with heterogeneous terms, cofunctioning by conta-gion, enter certain assemblages; it is there that human beings effect their becomings-animal. But we should not confuse these dark assemblages, which stir what is deepest within us, with organizations such as the institution of the family and the State apparatus. We could cite hunting societies, war societies, secret societies, crime societies, etc. Becomings-animal are proper to them. We will not expect to find filiative regimes of the family type or modes of classification and attribution of the State or pre-State type or even serial organizations of the religious type. Despite appearances and possible confusions, this is not the site of origin or point of application for myths. These are tales, or narratives and statements of becoming. It is therefore absurd to establish a hierarchy even of animal collectivities from the standpoint of a whimsical evolutionism according to which packs are lower on the scale and are superseded by State or familial societies. On the contrary, there is a difference in nature. The origin of packs is entirely different from that of families and States; they continually work them from within and trouble them from without, with other forms of content, other forms of expression. The pack is simultaneously an animal reality, and the reality of the becoming-animal of the human being; contagion is simultaneously an animal peopling, and the propagation of the animal peopling of the human being.” JS: “A few days ago, a month maybe, but who's counting, I wrote the following, which you should peruse yourself against: "Thoughts are words-have you thought that thoughts are words? Think, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, what do you see? Thoughts are gigantic worms that pass into procession from the unregarded horizon of through-your-brain procreation, chains of them, concatenated to one another in a never-ending intestinal historical parade, and we are in the tribunes like the state apparatus in the reviewing stand-watching, cheer-ing, not dying. And it is clear where a worm ends and the next one begins. Most of the time it is clear, as worms are clearly defined. I do not even have to say how they are defined because you see them. You say worm, you do not say worm and a quarter, worm and a third. Because worms were manufactured such by someone whose purposes we know nothing about. Who does the wormmaker work for? Go against the general wormmaker. But I protest! See for instance, half of the premate. Bur protest Set tor next worm, the purple and the cobalt blue, the ker-mies, a stunning cross fade the coba to le onher as You stroll your perusal, a correspondence such as never before, as they complete one singular thought. Take a quarter of the present worm and three quar-ters, even two thirds of the next. What exactly makes a complete worm anyway? Whose meaning is it? Who's measuring three quarters or halves or thirds. I won't venture into smaller or less definite units, I leave that for you, I am loath to delve into counting, I am fearful of math sort of things, perhaps this is a lack on my part, but I can't hold them for long in my head, the present's illness, but don't think that they aren't. How do you define units, integers, complete-nesses, sine-qua-nons? Are they coming from the future and disappearing into the past? Are they coming from the past and we must follow them in the future to be "in-the-know"? In whose service are they such? Whose purposes define, defile them? This is the news from around here, though no newspaper will pick it up. # To delve into these activities must be our only goal. We have been conducting our daily march, have been straight-jacketed, I should say, into our daily march by imperception of our resources. The stomach growled and we followed cluelessly, our path to forgetfulness, cuelessly groping in the dark, discovering nothing by our daily floccination, and thus the march of history, no more than a science of carphology. The blind leading the blind. I hate to observe myself resorting to the commonplace, but there you have it. In blind forgetfulness we marched to the dictates of the stomach, not that I am speaking badly about my intestines, they are fine where they are, and I am sure they are doing a fine job, unaware that the energy sources lie elsewhere, not the intestines, but we, forgetful of the elsewhere lying energy sources. Instead we deploy and thus deplete unreplaceable amounts of our internal energy to deploy the external energy necessary to maintain our social masquerade. This is history. Why are we so intent on keeping up the social masquerade, why do we deploy the meager remains of our psychic energy to power up this vicious marionette? To protect perhaps and keep in place the catalogued non-discover-ies of the ancients and flailing and floccinating about through the fog for clear and kind counting sace to their fright. Our fright now.” “denotation is fraught with connotation; denota-tion dangerously shifts its mutational multitudes of meanings in the delusive waters of connotation; always the peril of drowning is present, the drown itself, fodder for the deeper fishes of meaning, the deeper fishes of dream, returns as newer, transmuted meanings, meanings with a past, meanings with a dolorous past, meanings encumbered by amnesia, meanings with stained or even recomposed identities, incomplete identities, vampirized identities, uncertain meanings, marginalized at first, but soon to recompose the armadas of mutual consents, soft guerilla meanings, which subvert by seduction, the subversive seduction of the ignored and marginalised” JO:?