However, precisely because Plato did not yet have at his disposition the constituted categories of representation (these appeared with Aristotle), he had to base his decision on a theory of Ideas. What appears then, in its purest state, before the logic of representation could be deployed, is a moral vision of the world. It is in the first instance for these moral reasons that simulacra must be exorcized and difference thereby subordinated to the same and the similar. For this reason, however, because Plato makes the decision, and because with him the victory is not assured as it will be in the established world of representation, the rumbling of the enemy can still be heard. Insinuated throughout the Platonic cosmos, difference resists its yoke. Heraclitus and the Sophists make an infernal racket. It is as though there were a strange double which dogs Socrates’ footsteps and haunts even Plato's style, inserting itself into the repetitions and variations of that style.

Gilles Deleuze's engagement with Heraclitus is long-standing, going back to his early work on Nietzsche, and persisting through the collaborative volumes produced with Félix Guattari in which Heraclitus becomes a key exemplar of their own philosophical method, whereby thought and nature are said to fold into one another in creative configurations. For Deleuze, as before him for Nietzsche, Heraclitus’ conception of universal becoming and of the constitutive flows across codes—be they ontological, epistemological, political, or ethical—demands a radical re-evaluation of the place of the human in time, and of the boundaries of subjectivity. Elsewhere, Deleuze states that the very meaning of philosophy is ‘to go beyond the human condition’ by opening us up to the other durations—inhuman and superhuman—with which, and by which, we are disclosed. A further key interlocutor here is Henri Bergson, whose work on time as duration, with psychological and ontological import, is central to the development of many of Deleuze's philosophical positions, including those subsequently nuanced by his work with Félix Guattari. Before attempting to map the plane of affiliations upon which these thinkers move, it is necessary to begin from Heraclitus’ own words on philosophical method and the opposition he draws between the correct, though elusive, practice of νόος (‘thought’, ‘understanding’) and the inadequate model of πολυμαθίη (‘much learning’) adopted by his intellectual predecessors.

The allegory of the Cave in Republic 514a–18d is one of the most memorable Platonic images. The depiction of chained humans in a cavernous dwelling looking at shadows of objects cast on a parapet in front of them but unable to locate the objects themselves until one of them is freed, turns around to see the objects, and finally leaves the cave has haunted and inspired readers throughout the centuries. The prisoners are said to be ‘like us’ (515a), which is taken to refer either to human life in general or to human life in corrupt political environments. Plato's core metaphysical and epistemological doctrines are thought to inhere in the Cave, his belief that the sensible world, represented by the cave, holds people captive to defective and erroneous appearances, and that only philosophy can free and enlighten them, leading them out of the cave to the intelligible realm of the eternal Forms. The cave then houses captives since childhood who believe that shadows of artifacts exhaust reality, and captors who project images of artifacts on the wall and thereby manipulate what the captives see and hear.

The work of Gilles Deleuze is populated by literary and artistic figures who become stuck, confined, and exhausted: he has written about the characters of Samuel Beckett, for instance, who are incapacitated by a compulsion to count and sort; Sacher-Masoch's protagonists, who share their author's eponymous desire to defer endlessly the sexual act; and the notorious figures in the paintings of Francis Bacon, determined but unable to escape the confines of their own bodies. What accounts for Deleuze's interest in scenes of stasis and immobility? These figures, and others like them, seem to appeal to Deleuze precisely because their corporeal limitations coincide with intense and inscrutable affects, as if Spinoza's maxim, ‘we do not even know what the body can do’, is true especially when the body's capacities appear most restricted. This is an aspect of Deleuze's thought that complicates his reputation as a philosopher of limitless becoming, movement, and synthesis.

Since Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari emerged into the realm of Continental philosophy in the late twentieth century, the pair have sustained a prominent and influential presence in the fields of cultural studies, politics and sociology, also literary, artistic and cinematic scholarship, spurred on by the appropriation of the arts in Deleuze and Guattari's own work. The contributions to this special edition bring to light how the rubble-strewn textual field of Classical antiquity also ineludibly invites a methodological framework informed by Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. By its contemporary nature, the Classical ‘canon’ is a warzone of competing translations, fragments and fragmentary orders, de- and re-constructions, bearing a torrid resemblance to the flattened and interconnected plane of existence described in Deleuze and Guattari's work. The pair draw from multiple avenues of academic exploration and encourage the seed-like spread of their multifarious ideas. This article makes a case for employing one concept in particular as a practice for reading Classical texts: ‘multiplicity’.

Lucretius is the first classical author to have written a history of animal resistance. In a fifty-line passage from Book Five of De rerum natura, the ‘animal revolt’ (5.1297–349), Lucretius describes the rise of empire and its instrumentalization of animals for war. When the animals are led onto the battlefield, however, they swerve against their ‘armed teachers and savage masters’ (1311). The linear rise of empire, built on the abuse of animals’ bodies, is deterritorialized by those same animal bodies in a chaotic scene that takes place on what Monica Gale has called a ‘cosmic battlefield’. This paper follows Lucretius’ account in Book Five of De rerum natura of the linear rise of empire, its increasing capture of animal life, and the rupture of empire's linear trajectory by a clinamen, or ‘swerve’, of rebel animals. I compare Lucretius’ account of the rise of empire to what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘molar line’, and the swerve of rebel animals to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the ‘line of flight’.

Looking at us from all sides, you'll find that in our character and lifestyle we're in all respects most like wasps. First, no creature is more sharp-tempered than we are when irritated, or more cantankerous. Then again, we engineer everything else just like wasps: we gather in swarms as if into nests, some of us judging in the archon's court, some before the Eleven, and some in the Odeum, packed in tight against the walls like this, hunched toward the ground and hardly moving, like grubs in their cells. We're very resourceful in making a living, too: we sting everybody and so provide our daily bread.

In the final scene of Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (2015), Daisy Domergue, the sole female character among the titled eight, hangs suspended from the ceiling of the cabin in which they all have fought an operatically violent battle to the death. From her cuffed hand a chain dangles, at the other end of which is another cuffed hand, minus the rest of the body to which it had belonged. Its owner was her bounty hunter, who spent most of his time onscreen physically abusing her, including struggling with her over the control of weapons (e.g., machete and gun). We meet her with a black eye, to which are soon added a broken nose and teeth and a face repeatedly doused in her own blood and that of others. Two equally bloody antagonists string her up, pitting their injuries against her near-dead weight, so that for a time her body is triangulated by her attachment to them as well as to the remaining bit of the bounty hunter.

Despite this paper's title it is only fair to warn the curious reader that it is not about reading Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, or using modern theory to better understand it. At least this is not its main intention. Instead, my wish is to experiment with the Metamorphoses, to wander inside it, to move from the actual to the virtual and the potential; to explore how things connect, proliferate, intensify—rather than learn how they actually are. The paper wishes to provide the readers means whereby they can experience the Metamorphoses, rather than examine categories of genres, style, or mode that lead to interpretation of the text. In other words, this paper addresses the Metamorphoses as Deleuze and Guattari do in their reading of Kafka's work in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. It focuses on modes of becomings, motions of desire, operating machines, assemblages, and language. According to Deleuze and Guattari, minor literature demonstrates literature's ability to challenge the major order, to undermine the doxa, to unstitch the seam between signifier and signified. It breaks forms and encourages ruptures and new routes, which forces reconstruction of content in new ways. It produces lines of flight, flows, streams, ramifications, and junctions instead of immobile paradigms and moulds; it prefers multiple centres to a centre and periphery; it relinquishes principles of unity for the benefit of experiencing multiplicity. Minor literature therefore is a political action containing the possibility of subverting the major order governed by structures of language, fixed and steady position, and state apparatuses.

The reception of Circe's island in and through Classical Antiquity has largely focused on the enigmatic sorceress herself. The long literary chain of interpretive topoi—Circe the witch, the whore, the temptress—stretches from Apollonius, Virgil, Ovid, and Dio Chrysostom to Spenser, Calderón, Joyce, Margaret Atwood, and Madeline Miller. Her role as Odysseus’ benefactor, so unmistakable in Homer, is soon forgotten; to Virgil, she is above all dea saeva, (‘the savage goddess’, Aen. 7.19). One distinguishing feature of Circe and her reception is the focus on representation: the enchantment of Circe, as Greta Hawes puts it, is above all a study in allegory. From the moment Circe put a spell on Odysseus’ companions, transforming them into animals in Book 10 of the Odyssey, Circe has invited analogical reasoning, centered on what the transformation from one being into another represents. More often than not, this transformation is interpreted according to a dualist thinking about humans and animals: subjects are transformed from one being into another being, thus representing some moral or physical degradation. This article, by contrast, concentrates on Circe's island through the lens of becoming-animal, the concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the tenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…’. I explicate the concept of becoming-animal by applying it to a Deleuzian encounter with Circe's island, both in its ancient articulations and in its various receptions, including H.G. Wells's science fiction novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.