lykánthropos

“Shapes,” an episode in the first season of the X-Files: untimely deaths force an American Indian reservation in Montana to revisit a legend of a morphological demon that rides the threshold between man and wolf. Fox Mulder uncovers what he is certain is the first ever X-File and an account by Lewis and Clark of ‘Indian Men’ who can turn themselves into wolves. Dana Scully, the physician, the skeptic, responds “Mulder, what this folder describes is called lycanthropy, it’s a type of insanity in which an individual believes that he can turn into a wolf. No one…can physically change into an animal.”

Believed for centuries in Western Society to be a form of melancholia, lycanthropy was literally thought to be a psycholibidinal hallucination, a disorder resulting from a distorted perception of ones own (human) internal dynamics. Epistemologically mutated, schizoid-species, the lycanthrope shows as that representation will always fail when it comes to putting into symbols the voice inside that says ‘you are a wolf.’ This utterance resists externalization as event, recording as enunciation; it is not delusion but exploded truth. The penultimate expression of this interior singularity comes when the wolf-human howls at the moon—Lyotard’s “intensely spun top” at which “one thinks without criteria of falsification.”[1] Perhaps when Deleuze and Guattari speak of the body without organs—“nothing here is representative; rather, it is all life and lived experience”—they are referring to this same unassignable sound that will always mark the moment before the emergence of value—the amorphous innards of a body under auto-erasure, continually destroying all trace of the inscriptions marking what it is in a perpetual re-recording.[2] The lycanthrope undetermined to be either human or not human (wolf); its simultaneity is the limit point of the event, the imperative to be this or not-this. Deleuze and Guttari take note that this “feeling of transition,” of “naked intensity stripped of all shape and form,” is “often described as hallucinations and delirium.”[3] Hallucinations, however, are merely the smoke rising from binary machines imploded upon themselves; the when they fail to grasp, with a one or a Zero, the non-contingency that is the lycnathrope’s self-effacing scream at the moon, to other wolves: “I am not the producer, the archivist, the knower of this cry.”[4]

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[1] Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 31.
[2] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 19.
[3] Ibid., 18.
[4] Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 40.