‘The reality of becoming’: Deleuze, Woolf and the Territory of Cows

Woolf's modernist animals affected Deleuze and Guattari's animal philosophy, as they describe in A Thousand Plateaus. This essay focuses on the significance of these references to Woolf's aesthetics for Deleuzian philosophy, whilst also considering how we can better understand Woolf's broader exploration of animality (in texts including The Waves, Flush and Between the Acts) through close engagement with Deleuze's conceptual framework (in particular ‘becoming-animal’ and ‘de-’ and ‘reterritorialisation’). In mapping various appearances of one of the oldest domesticated animals, cows, in the work of both, the essay builds an argument about the shared bovine territory in their writings and the ontological and ethical implications of this. It therefore expands upon the relationship between Deleuze and Woolf at the same time as affirming the importance of their animal ontology, ethics and aesthetics for animal studies more widely.