'Can They Dance?' towards a philosophy of bodily becoming

Deleuze and Guattari in One Thousand Plateaus, Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter and David Abram in his Becoming Animal all set out to dismantle the mind over body logics common in the modern western world that continue to justify the pursuit of spiritual values at the expense of the earth and its inhabitants. They each coin a non-dualistic concept of materiality with the intention of changing how we think about bodies and how we experience bodies. To their concepts of materiality this article poses a question borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche: Can they dance? In the process of investigating each, LaMothe fleshes out how and why a local, lived philosophy of bodily becoming can move us farther along the path these writers tread towards an appreciation of dance as a practice and resource for earth-friendly ways of thinking and believing.