#becoming-other

[reliquiaeperustae]

Talbot, in seeking to penetrate secrets, and in seeking to become the raped and feminized male body of India, holds a particularly dubious status in Rice’s liberal, assimilative vampire universe. Where Lestat troubles gender more obviously here than in any other novel, Talbot reifies (through embodiment) a kind of “race trouble” that intersects sexuality, gender, colonization and knowledge at the crossroads of desire. Vampires may no longer be characterized by pallor and alabaster whiteness, but it is not necessarily positive and liberatory that “brown is beautiful” in Tale of the Body Thief. David Talbot’s switch into a young male body, as well as his own becoming-other and becoming-vampire thereafter, is an instance of both general and specific racialized embodiment.

holmes, "becoming-other: (dis)embodiments of race in anne rice's tale of the body thief

[reliquiaeperustae]

More than in any other novel, Tale of the Body Thief portrays the aging David Talbot of the Talamasca group repeatedly as the colonial, British gentleman hunter with no more colonies in which to hunt. His prey, initially a young Brazilian man, is instead eroticized—because, no less, of Brazilian specificity. Whereas Lestat’s vampire kin are of a kind because of their acquired traits that erase specific ethnicities, human British gentlemen and Brazilian youth seem to maintain ineradicable differences: “The people in Brazil are like no people I’ve ever seen,” says Talbot, musing that their great beauty might be “the blending of Portuguese and African, and then toss in the Indian blood."

holmes, "becoming-other: (dis)embodiments of race in anne rice's tale of the body thief

[reliquiaeperustae]

Whereas in Stoker’s work, Count Dracula is a kind of Baudelairean “flâneur” (167) of global proportions whose travels bring with them the risk of infection, Anne Rice’s response in an era of acquisitiveness and liberal desire is to create Lestat, whose travels form part of a general erasure of cultural and racial specificity while relying precisely on these to ground the eroticism for which she is known.

holmes, "becoming-other: (dis)embodiments of race in anne rice's tale of the body thief

[feelingpolitical]

Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming animal does not consist in paying animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not 'really' become an animal any more than an animal 'really' becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be be the animal become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if that something other it becomes is not. This is the point to clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also that it has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another becoming of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the first. This is the principle according to which there is a reality specific to becoming

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible...", 238