Lupine and zig-zag lines: queer affects in Alain Guiraudie’s L’inconnu du lac and Rester vertical

In this article I investigate how a theory of becomings-animal operates in a number of contemporary queer French films by director Alain Guiraudie (L’inconnu du lac (2013) and Rester vertical (2016)). In particular I explore how a becomings-animal’s association with a Deleuzian theory of affect enhances our understanding of queer intimacy. The aim of this article is to reposition queer intimacy as an ontology outside – outside synthetic and vertical lines of filiation and kinship and inside the disjunctive lines of the outside (what is irregular, random, rural, cosmic). Drawing at first on intimacy as an ontological non-relationality (Bersani 2008; 2009) and on the idea of separation as an ontological necessity of queer intimacy (John Paul Ricco 2017), I want to rethink queer intimacy as exposure outwards – an intimacy to and towards. Within this exteriorization of intimacy, my methodology will rely on the affective power of a Deleuzian theory of lines