Drinking Animals: Sobriety, Intoxication and Interspecies Assemblages

While Deleuze explored the temporalities of alcoholism in American literature in The Logic of Sense, and Jean Clet Martin, among others, has extended this inquiry by further extracting the alcoholic’s lines of flight from the same literature, this chapter breaks the mould by understanding alcohol, distilled and in its pure form of ethanol, as well as its imbibition, as a question of a component that passes through anthropocentric, and across multiple non-anthropocentric assemblages. The exploitation of ethanol fermentation, for example, exists across species. Indeed, as we entertain more overtly human cultural examples, such as ‘wine’ for cats, a recent Japanese pet trend, the metabolic communion of interspecies companionship requires that the material expressivity of the substance is overcoded because the ‘wine’ is not only non-alcoholic but liquid catnip in a ‘wine’ bottle. Indeed, theorization of the pursuit of shared pleasures – using Guattari’s ethological terms, we might say deterritorializing from deterministic biological factors yet also modifying these in some measure as well (Machinic Unconscious) – and engaging multiple species is this chapter’s goal, achievable by plotting the passages of alcohol and its related components across assemblages and their material and socio-cultural expressive trajectories beyond strictly anthropocentric and Western prerogatives.