Lucius’ Line of Flight: Molecularity, Becoming-Animal, and Interminability in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

This essay undertakes a non-teleological exploration of Lucius’ escapes, physical intensities, and transformations in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses informed by the theoretical collaboration of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Combining a tactic of “following” with the “components of expression” of Kafka’s oeuvre, and drawing mainly upon the theoretical assemblage developed in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, this reading first addresses Lucius’ emergent state of evasion and molecularity prior to his asinine metamorphosis. Attention then turns to Lucius’ becoming-animal, tracing his “line of flight” from established modes of social, linguistic, and physical organization, and attending in particular to the areas of eating, expression, running, and hurting as sites of physical intensity specific to Lucius’ unique human-asinine hybridity. Finally, this exploration of Metamorphoses moves to the Isis-book as initiating a new and sustained line of flight for Lucius, in which his becoming-animal yields to a becoming-everybody/everything. After his anamorphosis and Isiac revelation, Lucius’ nomadic subjectivity and his growing proximity to nature and the cosmos become potentially interminable during the sequence of initiations at the end of Book 11.