Post-Human: Anthropomorphism and Becoming-Animals

The purpose of this paper is to explore the rhetorical strategies to evade the anthropocentricity in representation, which are conducive to conceptualize the post-human. For this purpose, I will investigate the ecologically oriented concept of anthropomorphism, and becoming-animals which is proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. Anthropocentric anthropomorphism has been frequently found in the western culture which has privileged human's superiority to non-human beings. Consequently the possible bonds between humans and animals have been ignored and humans tend to repress their animality in themselves. But the consideration of anthropomorphism as ecologically friendly rhetoric is strategically helpful to lower the boundaries between humans and animals and further to recognize the animality in humans. Similar to ecological use of anthropomorphism, the concept of "becoming-animals" is helpful to explore the possibility of forming post-human identity which is always in process of becoming, which is neither humans nor animals. A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification. It is to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone. The purpose of becoming-animals is neither to support animal rights, nor the recognition of individuality. Rather it is to become a new being in progress. "Anthropomorphism" and "becoming-animals" as ecologically useful rhetoric tend to hint at the possible conceptualization post-human which overcomes the fixation of being or any type of essentialistic centrism.