Vol. 6 No. 2 (2025): Political animals: animality, community, and the future body politic (continuous publication)
Special Dossier

The Revolutionary power of becoming-animal: Achilles as posthumanist hero

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Stefan Dolgert
Brock University
Bio

Published 2025-12-26

Keywords

  • Posthumanism,
  • Deleuze and Guattari,
  • critical animal studies,
  • ancient political theory,
  • social movements

Copyright (c) 2025 Stefan Dolgert

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

DOLGERT, Stefan. The Revolutionary power of becoming-animal: Achilles as posthumanist hero. (Des)troços: revista de pensamento radical, Belo Horizonte, v. 6, n. 2, p. e59979, 2025. DOI: 10.53981/destrocos.v6i2.59979. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/article/view/59979. Acesso em: 15 jan. 2026.
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Abstract

Recent works in political theory (e.g., Nussbaum, Donaldson & Kymlicka) have stressed that animals should be considered as parties to the social contract, but while animal rights advocates have a rich theoretical repertoire on which to draw, their political achievements remain notably limited to date. In this essay, I argue for the utility of the concept of "becoming-animal" (Deleuze and Guattari) as a means of remedying this efficacy gap. I do so by outlining a notion of "posthuman courage" drawn from the portrayal of Achilles in the Iliad, and argue that social movements like animal rights neglect the darker hues of the human ethical palette at their peril. By exploring the bestial transformation of Achilles in Homer's text, we gain a more capacious appreciation of the world-disturbing potential for animal advocates, and uncover a distinctly inhuman strain in one of the core texts of Western humanism.

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