Between

Here are a few comments on the beginning of the chapter. Just as with Trinity, I didn't feel comfortable tackling the whole essay just yet.

1. Becoming is involutionary, involution is creative. To regress is to move in the direction of something less differentiated. But to involve is to form a block that runs its own line "between" the terms in play and beneath assignable relations. (D-G, 239)

Sorcerers have always held the anamalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes they are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. (D-G, 246)

2. D-G reveal a dual-system--series and structure--the mathematical equivalence--the formula--the known. As a feature of the human complex it propagates removal from animal-hood; placed upon, set above and "responsible for" the outside. This material constructing, this Oedipal reterritorialization which reflects the world as an avatar of man or as an equivalence of him, reduces and defines. Correspondence delimits movement and man is either totemic or serialized, but never outside of "is to."

3. The presence of correspondence and proximity of the reflective properties of filiation cast shadows upon the lines of flight between the human and the animal. The shadows of the idea, which D-G also reveal as fluid and oscillating, subject the human and 'animal' alike to progressive and restrictive movements. But the obscuration of the spaces between does not truly delimit movement under or in them, the terms of idea and relations of correspondence and filiation do not prevent the contraction of involution and cutting of the rhizome.

4. The between becomes the pathway of becoming. The space is neither physical, limiting or static; it carves and etches through, under and around culture and complex. It presses against the edge of space and slides below, and in its opened valleys fills with becoming. Against the edges of the known, stretching outside of the village, alliance is made--cutting between the shadows of totems which slide slowly, leaving behind them tracks of history, we find the choice of becoming.