Between a desert island as a mythical concept of origin (Deleuze, 2004) and what Deleuze described (later, with Guattari) as a fluent space of composition, independent of “any determined path” (1987: 371), comes a concept of a people that literature alone commands a power to invoke; a people producing itself as force producing new lines of becoming. Like the movements of production and imagination, these becomings are transcendent to “the difference between artificial and natural” (ibid: 69) to the extent that a people’s origin, like an island’s, is “radical and absolute” (Deleuze, 2004: 10). Both islands and peoples have the same movement in the sense that they transversally become-other, whereby the island “would be only the dream of humans, and humans, the pure consciousness of the island” (ibid). However, each also has a different goal: the island acquires consciousness through a people who “bring the desertedness to its perfection… such that through them the island would become conscious of itself as deserted and unpeopled” (ibid). As a consciousness of what it is not, the island defines itself autonomously of human signification. It becomes itself out of that seeming intermezzo between the material and immaterial, geographical and sublime; arising in their middle like a rhizome, an interbeing (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 25). As in modern Island Studies, between the archipelago and aquapelagic (Hayward, 2012a, 2012b) each surfaces and evolves in transversal lines of becoming-other (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 296).
https://www.shimajournal.org/issues.php#v13n2
'Being is the scandal of Nature waiting for a new host' 