Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

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914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 31

 

or "relatively indivisible," in other words, they are not divisible below or 

above a certain threshold, they cannot increase or diminish without their 

elements changing in nature. A swarm of bees: here they come as a rumble 

of soccer players in striped jerseys, or a band of Tuareg. Or: the wolf clan 

doubles up with a swarm of bees against the gang of Deulhs, under the 

direction of Mowgli, who runs on the edge (yes, Kipling understood the call 

of the wolves, their libidinal meaning, better than Freud; and in the 

Wolf-Man's case the story about wolves is followed by one about wasps 

and butterflies, we go from wolves to wasps). What is the significance of 

these indivisible distances that are ceaselessly transformed, and cannot be 

divided or transformed without their elements changing in nature each 

time? Is it not the intensive character of this kind of multiplicity's elements 

and the relations between them? Exactly like a speed or a temperature, 

which is not composed of other speeds and temperatures but rather is 

enveloped in or envelops others, each of which marks a change in nature. 

The metrical principle of these multiplicities is not to be found in a homo-

geneous milieu but resides elsewhere, in forces at work within them, in 

physical phenomena inhabiting them, precisely in the libido, which consti-

tutes them from within, and in constituting them necessarily divides into 

distinct qualitative and variable flows. Freud himself recognizes the multi-

plicity of libidinal "currents" that coexist in the Wolf-Man. That makes it 

all the more surprising that he treats the multiplicities of the unconscious 

the way he does. For him, there will always be a reduction to the One: the little 

scars, the little holes, become subdivisions of the great scar or supreme 

hole named castration; the wolves become substitutes for a single Father 

who turns up everywhere, or wherever they put him. (As Ruth Mack 

Brunswick says, Let's go all the way, the wolves are "all the fathers and doc-

tors" in the world; but the Wolf-Man thinks, "You trying to tell me my ass 

isn't a wolf?")

 

What should have been done is the opposite, all of this should be under-

stood in intensity: the Wolf is the pack, in other words, the multiplicity 

instantaneously apprehended as such insofar as it approaches or moves 

away from zero, each distance being nondecomposable. Zero is the body 

without organs of the Wolf-Man. If the unconscious knows nothing of 

negation, it is because there is nothing negative in the unconscious, only 

indefinite moves toward and away from zero, which does not at all express 

lack but rather the positivity of the full body as support and prop ("for an 

afflux is necessary simply to signify the absence of intensity"). The wolves 

designate an intensity, a band of intensity, a threshold of intensity on the 

Wolf-Man's body without organs. A dentist told the Wolf-Man that he 

"would soon lose all his teeth because of the violence of his bite"—and that 

his gums were pocked with pustules and little holes.

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 Jaw as high intensity,

 

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2 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

 

teeth as low intensity, and pustular gums as approach to zero. The wolf, as 

the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity in a given region, is not a 

representative, a substitute, but an I feel. I feel myself becoming a wolf, one 

wolf among others, on the edge of the pack. A cry of anguish, the only one 

Freud hears: Help me not become wolf (or the opposite, Help me not fail in 

this becoming). It is not a question of representation: don't think for a min-

ute that it has to do with believing oneself a wolf, representing oneself as a 

wolf. The wolf, wolves, are intensities, speeds, temperatures, 

nondecom-posable variable distances. A swarming, a wolfing. Who could 

ever believe that the anal machine bears no relation to the wolf machine, or 

that the two are only linked by an Oedipal apparatus, by the all-too-human 

figure of the Father? For in the end the anus also expresses an intensity, in 

this case the approach to zero of a distance that cannot be decomposed 

without its elements changing in nature. Afield of anuses, just like a pack of 

wolves. Does not the child, on the periphery, hold onto the wolves by his 

anus? The jaw descends to the anus. Hold onto those wolves by your jaw 

and your anus. The jaw is not a wolf jaw, it's not that simple; jaw and wolf 

form a multiplicity that is transformed into eye and wolf, anus and wolf, 

as a function of other distances, at other speeds, with other multiplicities, 

between thresholds. Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, 

becoming-wolf, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is 

what multiplicity is. To become wolf or to become hole is to 

deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines. A hole is no 

more negative than a wolf. Castration, lack, substitution: a tale told by an 

overconscious idiot who has no understanding of multiplicities as 

formations of the unconscious. A wolf is a hole, they are both particles of 

the unconscious, nothing but particles, productions of particles, particulate 

paths, as elements of molecular multiplicities. It is not even sufficient to 

say that intense and moving particles pass through holes; a hole is just as 

much a particle as what passes through it. Physicists say that holes are not 

the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of 

light. Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration.

 

Let us return to the story of multiplicity, for the creation of this substan-

tive marks a very important moment. It was created precisely in order to 

escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape 

dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the pure state, to cease 

treating it as a numerical fragment of a lost Unity or Totality or as the 

organic element of a Unity or Totality yet to come, and instead distinguish 

between different types of multiplicity. Thus we find in the work of the 

mathematician and physicist Riemann a distinction between discreet mul-

tiplicities and continuous multiplicities (the metrical principle of the sec-

ond kind of multiplicity resides solely in forces at work within them). Then

 

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