Malevich: Becoming Human through Symbolic Madness...

Kazimir Malevich  "Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension" (1915)

 from Google AI:

Your comparison captures a foundational divide in continental philosophy regarding the relationship between the human mind, rationality, and nature.

For G.W.F. Hegel, madness is a necessary but tragic breakdown that a human must navigate to separate from animal nature and realize rational freedom. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "becoming-animal" is a revolutionary, liberating process meant to escape the oppressive structures of human rationality, identity, and capitalism.

---

Direct Overview: Hegel vs. Deleuze & Guattari

Dimension	Hegel's Madness	Deleuze & Guattari's Becoming-Animal
Direction of Movement	Upward and Outward: Leaving nature/animality behind to enter objective human socialization.	Downward and Outward: Escaping human stratification ("deterritorialization") to enter a pre-individual flow of intensities.
The Status of the Animal	A state of immediate, unthinking submersion in nature that lacks self-reflection.	A pack, a multiplicity, and a "line of flight" away from state-sanctioned identities.
Role of Rationality	The ultimate goal. Madness is a temporary rupture in the emergence of reason.	The cage. Rationality (molar, Oedipal identity) is an apparatus of capture and social control.
The End Goal	The Unified Subject: A fully self-conscious, autonomous human integrated into society.	The Non-Identity: Dismantling the face/ego to experience freedom through sheer affect and flux.

---

1. Hegel: Madness as the Cracking of the Animal Soul

In his Philosophy of Mind (specifically the "Anthropology" section), Hegel views the biological human as starting in a state of nature—a purely "animal" existence where the soul is seamlessly submerged in its environment, operating on immediate feeling and instinct.

The Rupture of Madness: To become a rational human (Geist or Spirit), the individual must break this immediate unity with nature. Madness (Verrücktheit) occurs at the threshold of this transition. It is the stage where the mind begins to turn inward, separating its subjective thoughts from outer reality.
The "First Step": In madness, the mind gets trapped or fixated on a singular, subjective impression (a "fixed idea"). While destructive, Hegel notes this is a uniquely human privilege. An animal cannot go mad because it does not have an inner world to get lost in.
Overcoming via Habit: By working through madness and anchoring itself via habit, the mind disciplines its body, masters its inner chaos, and steps out of the animalistic state into the shared, predictable world of human language, culture, and objective reason.

2. Deleuze & Guattari: Becoming-Animal as Breaking the Human Cage

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari turn this Hegelian trajectory completely on its head. They argue that the highly structured, rational human subject (the "molar" individual defined by family, job, state, and the Oedipal complex) is not the peak of freedom, but a site of profound political and psychic capture.

What it is Not: "Becoming-animal" is not imitating an animal, playing dress-up, or regression into a primitive biological state.
What it Is: It is an alliance or "hideous pact" with an animal multiplicity (a pack of wolves, a swarm of rats, a hive) to dismantle your own rigid identity. It is about adopting the speeds, slownesses, and affects of the animal to find a "line of flight" out of human systems of control.
The Goal of Undoing: Instead of building a unified, self-conscious ego (Hegel's goal), Deleuze and Guattari want to achieve a state of "flesh" or "non-identity". By "becoming-animal," the human un-humans themselves, short-circuiting the normalizing expectations of society to release repressed, revolutionary flows of desire.

The Core Philosophic Conflict

The friction between these two positions is a perfect proxy for their broader metaphysical clash:

Hegel operates on a teleological dialectic. The animal state must be negated and sublated (overcome yet preserved) so that the higher form—the rational human—can materialize. Madness is the turbulent friction of that evolution.
Deleuze and Guattari operate on a flat ontology of immanence. There is no "higher" rational plane. For them, Hegel’s concept of a unified, self-conscious subject is just a highly efficient prison. Freedom is not found by climbing out of nature into human society, but by breaking out of human society through continuous, nomadic transformations.

Passing through the Obscene Zero Point 

Beyond Animality

Kazimir Malevich, "Black Square" (1915)