the bwo condition

7/28/2019 The BwO Condition

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The BwO Condition or, The Politics of Sensation

vendredi, 21 mai 2004Alliez, EricAlliez, EricAlliez, EricAlliez, Eric

This text had been written directly in English for the Symposium TransArt IV, Theorie und

Praxis des organlosen Krpers (Akademie der Bildenden Knste, Wien, 8-10 november

2001) and published in E. Alliez, E. von Samsonow (Hg.), Biographien des organlosen

Krpers, Wien, Turia + Kant, 2003, p. 11-29. This is the forth volume of the TransArt

Seriesedited by Eric Alliez and Elisabeth von Samsonow.

Slever en esprit pour voir les choses sous laspect exclusif desprit cest en ralit ne plus

rien voir. (Antonin Artaud)

Mich provoziert jede glatte Flche, sie mit intensivem Lieben zu beschmutzen. [...] Ichzerreie die Haut der Flche und Krieche darunter ins Intrem. (Otto Mhl)

The Body without Organs has to hurt. And it hurts the philosopher.

And its a hard blow.

Body without Organs.

Artauds Body without Organs - an affective, an intensive, an anarchic relation of the body to

forces (it hurts), relations to forces quabecomings (when it works) - To Have Done With the

Judgement of God and Its Power of Organ-isation Ad Infinitum.BwO - A fashionable logo, an up-to-date trademark, a badge of membership ?

A new scholasticism ? A schizo-scholasticism ?

As such it hurts, it hurts the Deleuzian philosopher caught in a trap.

As neurotic anti-production, as imitation without invention, as repetition without forces and

differences, aslogo(s), this refrain of the BwO hurts.

But it does not hurt as the Body without Organs has to hurt me as aphilosopher, because it

does not dis-organ-isemy (supposed) philosophical identity.

Quoting Deleuze and Guattari, the BwO vulgate hurts because

Becoming is not imitating ;

because

No problem of meaning, but only of usage ;

because

To chant viva the Multiple is not to do it. We have to make it. We have to make thought

become nomadic ;


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because

The cheat has a real future but no becoming at all ...

An anti-productive schizo-scholasticism [1]has alimented the reactionagainst Anti-

Oedipusand A Thousand Plateauswhich considers them as dated by-products of 68

thought. And we know how many people would like 68 to have exclusively been the

phantasm of some mauvais matres...

Foucault in his preface to the English translation ofAnti-Oedipuswrote that being-Anti-

Oedipal had become a life-style. But a life-style is neither a fashion nor a hyper-textual

exegesis. In a Foucaldian sense, it is an art,an art de soi :

I think that Anti-Oedipuscan best be read as an "art". [...] Questions that are less

concerned with whythis or that than with howto proceed. How does one introduce desire

into thought, into discourse, into action ? [...] Anti-Oedipusis a book of ethics. [2]

From the Anti-Oedipusthe Body without Organs is the point of crystallisation of a

contradictory and paradoxical movement. On one side, a neurotic hyper-textuality unable to

put the forces infolded in the text to work in a productive inside/outside (in a Deleuzian

manner). On the other, a viral and rhizomatic diffusion of the thousand plateaus of Deleuzo-

Guattarian thought. Involving non-philosophers, involving artists. We cant ignore the fact

that now, in France, more artists read Deleuze and Guattari, the books signed by

Deleuze andGuattari, than academic philosophers, as if philosophy as a disciplinary

institution must not risk itself in thisexperimentation. These non-philosophers give Deleuze

and Guattaris thought a new earth, they actualise philosophy - philosophy, nothing but

philosophy in its constitutive relation to the present - in a process ofchangewhich involves

their lives and their works. This experimental reading/becoming of/in Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, means that for them abandoning the Marxist orthodoxy, Psychoanalysis, and

Structuralism has never been a real problem. What is realis the becoming itself -

what has been ignored, denied by these, yes, reductive theories.

Lets come back to the extreme difficulty of the philosopher in front of the Body without

Organs, for the first cruelty of the BwO, of this expulsive formula of Antonin Artaud,

is againstthe Philosopher.

Prior to Anti-OedipusDeleuze wrote some beautiful books, books already in a relationship

of constant excess to the institutional History of Philosophy : on Hume, Nietzsche,

Bergson, Spinoza, Kant as the enemy (his expression)... These works will be implied and


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employed in the first elaboration of the Deleuzian system,Difference and Repetition. But, as

Deleuze himself said, talking about this pre-Guattarian period, everything may have been

conceptually consistant, formally developed and argued, but anyway it was still strangely

innefficient. Going one step further, the retrospective effect is this one : moving towards a

formal definition of the BwO, the logic of the system remained prisoner of the pure form of

the determinable in thought, asthephilosophical neurosis. (We know howit hurts to get free

of it - a perpetual fight against me.) And the fact is that Difference and Repetitionwill be

immediately followed by this very unique book, The Logic of Sense, where the BwO emerges

for the first time, with Artauds physical words, in the middle of a process it breaks - the

project of a structuralist logic of sense- leading to an aporetic end, an end which will require

and announce the work with Guattari...

See what Deleuze declared about this period in an interview immediately after thepublication ofAnti-Oedipus.

I was working exclusively in concepts and I have to admit in a very timid, in a very self-

conscious way. Felix talked to me about what he called the desiring machines. It was all a

theoretical and practical conception of the unconscious as a machine, it was a conception of

a schizophrenic unconscious. Then I had the impression that he was more advanced. [3]]

The question of a gap between a before and an after (the works with Flix Guattari) is made

more complex inasmuch as in Anti-Oedipus(1972) and A Thousand Plateaus(1980) Deleuzeand Guattari propose two definitions of the BwO - (1) A BwO is an egg, (2) The Body

without Organs is the Ethicsof Spinoza - whichnominaly, discursively, pre-existin a certain

way these two books. The association of Simondons singular and pre-individual being with

the intensive field of individuation of the egg in Difference and Repetition(1968) already

identifies this problematisation(the problematicis the ontological state of the pre-

individual , and as such is opposed to the negative) as an ethicsof the trans-

individual [4]. If we also consider the contemporaneous Spinoza and the Problem of

Expression(1968) - with its Nietzschean and Bergsonian background -, its all there, the

paradigmatic egg and the full centrality of Spinozas philosophy of pure immanence.

And, en vrit, this double definition turns into a single one : the Spinozist Substance is a

distribution of intensities at the surface of the Egg. Deleuze points towards this affirmation

ofintensity, without needing the BwO as such (but what this reallymeans, as such, we dont

really knowfor the moment - we just imagine that it means the break between before and

after), except as the possible common notion (to come) of this (still) nominal definition.


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I would say, that for Deleuze, Spinoza is the philosopher who has been able to relate and

identify for ever Expressionism (through his theory of expression ) and

Constructivism (the so-called geometrical method ) because Spinozist Expression is

the pure expression of univocity asthe affirmation of the non-indifference and of

the openingof Being. As I understand this point, it means that from Spinoza - a Spinoza

with whom Nietzsche and Bergson never stopped to confront themselves... - Deleuzian

philosophy has been a bio-philosophy in the modern andcontemporary sense Deleuze

gave to it (Expression = Construction quathe immanent truth, the truth of

the immanenceof the modern image of thought), and that Deleuze could have said, from

this, the best plane of immanence, I hope that Ill never write a single sentence which is

not immediately a vitalist affirmation.

This notion of bio-philosophy involves vitalism as the constructive expression of a non-

organic totality. It appropriates the founding figure of modern neo-Darwinism, August

Weismann, and his formalisation of germinal life. Weismann posits an egg of germinal

intensity, with an intensive field of differenciation as a dynamism of pure potentiality and

virtuality. Germinal life refers not to points of origin but solely to moments of creative

becoming. In his reconfiguration of the Weismannian legacy - rigorously studied by Keith

Ansell Pearson - Deleuze will insist that becoming is less an overdetermined evolution than a

creative evolution-involution involving transversal communication between heterogeneouspopulations of non-individualised singularities. The egg is a rhizome avant la lettre. The egg

is an intensive multiplicity , to use a Bergsonian concept that Deleuze elaborated for years

(from the first articles on Bergson in 1956 until the publication ofBergsonismin 1966). It

means that becoming and intensive multiplicity are one and the same. In Difference and

Repetitionand A Thousand PlateausDeleuze will present pedagogically (a pedagogy of

concepts...) the controversy between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire as the opposition

between a plane of organisation, a structure of organs developed in an overdetermined

evolution, and a plane of composition, going beyond organs to pure materials that enter

into various combinations, forming a given organ depending on their degrees of speed and

slowness. If Cuvier develops a logic of organs in their relation to a transcendent unity which

realises itself in terms of irreducible functional organs, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire goes beyond

organs and functions to Nature as an immanent abstract machine involving materials in

intense combinations. It is speed and slowness, relations of movement and rest, that assume

priority over the forms of a fixed structure, a fixed organism. It is this mapping of the plane

of Nature as an immanent plane of consistency that provides insight into the nature of the


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BwO. It affirms a molecular plane of Nature traversed by non-formal elements that enter

into this or that individuated assemblage. Keith Ansell Pearsons important book Germinal

Lifeclearly understands this Deleuzian plane as implying an ethology of assemblages, and

the egg-plane freed from the continuity of the germ-plasm as allowing for the powers of

life to express a creative evolution beyond entropic containment - through singularities-

events(quaa field of individuation and pre-individual singularities...).

In Spinozas Ethics, in the Introduction to Book III, we read that the geometric method is

nothing else than a way to study each thing as if they were bodies, planes, lines, points .

But the point, Deleuze explains, is that the geometric method is necessarily genetic because

- using the very same terms- its elements are no longer forms or functions and are

distinguished only by movement and rest, slowness and speed... Spinozas Substance is a

plane of consistency peopled by an infinity of pieces of anonymous matter entering into

connections. To every relation of movement and rest corresponds a degree of power, a kind

of intensity that affects it. It is in this sense that affects are becomings determining what a

body can do (the title of chapter XIV ofSpinoza and the Problem of Expression), and that

the Ethicsis an ethology (developed in A Thousand Plateaus). We know nothing about the

body until we know what it can do, what its affects are, how it can or cannot enter into

composition with other affects. The representation (Descartes) is dissolved bythe affection

(Spinoza), leading to the specific question of a practical philosophy [5]. It is on this Spinozistfield that the Body without Organs will be projected as an attack on the organism quaa

transcendent organisation, and as the immanent alternative ofthe body opening it up to

connections and relations bio-philosophically indissociable from an impersonal and pre-

individual transcendental field , already analysed in terms of an unconscious

surface in The Logic of Sense.

We read :

We seek to determine an impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field, which does

not resemble the corresponding empirical fields, and which nevertheless is not confused

with an undifferentiated depth. [...] What is neither individual nor personal are, on the

contrary, emissions of singularities insofar as they occur on an unconscious surface and

possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution,

radically distinct from fixed and sedentary distributions as conditions of the syntheses of

consciousness. Singularities are the true transcendental events [...] Only when the world,

teaming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens

up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental. [6]


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The Kantian transcendental field becomes an intensive and nomadic surface leading

unconsciously to the Spinozist Egg as the formal definition of the BwO. I mean :

susceptible to a formal reading, analysable through a continuous logic (the one followed

here : in accordance with the logique des noncs), until we perceive thedeep Spaltungof

the Body without Organs for philosophical discourse itself.

After Difference and Repetitionand Spinoza and the Problem of Expression(both published

in 1968), The Logic of Sense(1969) is where Deleuze confronts the concrete affirmation of

the Spinozist univocity of Being developedfromthe rapport of expression - as it implies

the parityof the actions/passions of the soul with those of the body, and gives a real

dynamic for the anti-symbolic equation Expression = Construction - with Structuralism as the

contemporary form of Constructivism. A Constructivism which under-stands the sphere of

expression as purely linguisticin the sense that there is no structure without language-

verbal or non-verbal. Deleuze explains : in relation to psychoanalysis, there is a structure of

bodies in so far as bodies are supposedto talk in a language of symptoms [7]. Aiming at a

speculative univocity of Being and language , The Logic of Senseis going to be an

incredible attempt to examine the conditions under whichStructuralism as a new

transcendental philosophy [8]may be adequate to the expression of the Untersinnof the

chaotic world of bodies, adequate to their affects and mixtures, to the depths and the

groundlessness of the body, since sense is nothing else than the event as an incorporaleffect of the surface. The main question for the series ofThe Logic of Senseis to invest,

above and beyond the opposition of the ground and the surface, the propositional

articulation of sense and language in the actions and passions of bodies able to climb up to

the surface of language. Sense being an incorporeal event implies that the depths of the

body are expressed as a pure surface, making the language games of Lewis Carroll, the

paradoxes of sense and non-sense (the mirror) developed through the double series

(bodies-language, to eat - to talk ...), absolutely paradigmatic of a movement that goes

from bodies to the incorporeal, in a becoming-unlimited(devenir-illimit) travelling alongthe surface. Becoming, the unlimited becoming of bodies, is strictly coextensive to language

when everything climbs up to the surface. Alice in Wonderland... The language games are

surface games, animated nonsenses circulating as flat manifestations of the incorporeal

essence of sense. Immaterial, sense is nothing else than an effect, expressing any affect as a

surface effect - like an optical effect (or effet de miroir).

In the Eleventh series, Deleuze proposes this explanation of Structuralism :

The authors referred to as Structuralists by recent practice may have no essential point in


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common other than this : sense, regarded not at all as appearance but as surface effect and

position effect [...]. Structuralism, whether consciously or not, celebrates new findings of a

Stoic and Carrollian inspiration. Structure is in fact a machine for the production of

incorporeal sense. [9]

With the Thirteenth series ( !), Of the Schizophrenic and the Little Girl , The Logic of

Sensereveals itself as a, if not unique, then very singular case in the history of philosophic

literature. Breakdown. Breakdown of Structuralism as this new materialism, new atheism, new

anti-humanism, of this productivity that is that of our era (as it is celebrated in the article

How Do We Recognize Structuralism ? ) [10]. The breakdown of Carrollian Structuralism is

provoked by Artauds convulsive Body without Organs as an insurrection of the two

languages in depth, of corporal actions and passions, which is going to threaten, to

menace, to lead to implosion theproject of a serial Logic of Sense- and of a

psychoanalysis of sense (even if Deleuze still distinguishes it from bad

psychoanalysis ). Suddenly, a schizophrenic body emerges that destroys the superficial

organisation of sense and language, making the question of the thirteenth series : how to

conceive of a surface adequate to the ultimate broken depths of the body once the series

have disappeared? At this moment, Artauds discovery of a vital body cracks the

surface force de souffrance . Under the name of the body without organs of

Artaud [11], a pure language-affectofbreath-words (mots-souffles)and howl-words(mots-cris), of words-actions and words-passions exclusively tonic and not written, is

substituted for the effect of language. The language-affect of an ex-pulsive body - or,

better, quoting Artaud : lespace du souffle entre la fuite de tous les mots [12]. It is a

machine which breathes.

Deleuze writes - and it has to be quoted at length to feelthe Body without Organs dis-

organ-isingthe philosophical surface (including that of Deleuzes bio-philosophy, this

experience being indissociable from 68 and from his political decision to work with Guattari

in 1969):

Nothing is more fragile than the surface. [...] We see now that we have changed elements,

that we have entered a storm. We might have thought to be still among little girls and

children, but we are already in an irreversible madness. We might have believed to be at the

latest edge of literary research, at the point of the highest invention of languages and

words ; we are already faced by the agitations of a convulsive life, in the night of a

pathological creation affecting bodies. [...]

[We are] in another world and in an entirely different language. With horror, we recognize it


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easily : it is the language of schizophrenia. Even the portmanteau words seem to function

differently, being caught up in syncopes and being overloaded with gutterals. We measure

at the same moment the distance separating Carrolls language and Artauds language - the

former emitted at the surface, the latter carved into the depth of bodies. We measure the

difference between their respective problems. Were thus able to acknowledge the full

impact of the declarations made by Artaud in his letter from Rodez :

I have not produced a translation of "Jabberwocky". I tried to translate a fragment of it, but

it bored me. I never liked this poem, which always struck me as an affected infantilism... I do

not like poems or languages of the surfacewhich smell of happy leisures and of intellectual

success - as if the intellect relied on the anus, but without any heart or soul in it. The anus is

always terror, and I will not admit that one loses an excrement without being torn from,

thereby losing ones soul as well, and there is no soul in "Jabberwocky"... One may inventones language, and make pure language speak with an extra-grammatical or a-

grammatical meaning, but this meaning must have value in itself, that is, it must issue from

torment... "Jabberwocky" is the work of a profiteer who, satiated after a fine meal, seeks to

indulge himself in the pain of others... When one digs through the shit of being and its

language, the poem necessarily smells badly, and "Jabberwocky" is a poem whose author

took steps to keep himself from the uterine being of suffering into which every great poet

has plunged, and having been born from it, smells badly. There are in "Jabberwocky"

passages of fecality, but it is the fecality of an English snob, who curls the obscene within

himself like ringlets of hair around a curling iron... It is the work of a man who ate well - and

this makes itself felt in his writing...

Summing this up, we could say that Artaud considers Lewis Carroll a pervert, a little pervert,

who holds onto the establishment of a surface language, and who has not felt the real

problem of a language in depth - namely, the schizophrenic problem of suffering, of death,

and of life. To Artaud, Carrolls games seem puerile, his food too worldly, and even his

fecality hypocritical and too well bred. [13]

We are in another world... In a world that sees through the ridiculousness of the thinker ,

of the abstract thinker , remaining on the shore , limiting him/herself to the counter-

actualization of the violent alternative of the Body without Organs - to the actor or

dancers simple, flat representation [14]. And if, as Deleuze concludes, we would not give a

single page of Artaud for the complete works of Carroll, its because Artauds Body without

Organs hurts philosophy in such a way that Deleuzian biophilosophy has no other choice

than toactthe productivity of the surface from the intensities of the schizo body and its


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progressive and creative disorganisation . It will be the task ofAnti-Oedipusto give to

contemporary philosophy the plane of immanence as thissurface of intensities, without

which concepts cant be real, and as the movement of life going through the material field

of thought in a body without subject, interacting amachinic body.

Break, breakthroughwithout which materialism remains an Idea,or a Decision(Badiou,

Lardreau, and their viva the Materialism ! [15]) ; without which conceptual operations cant

be made as physical ones. (The physicalityof the concept - as a center of vibrations - is

developed in What is Philosophy ?, Deleuze and Guattaris testament-book. But we also

have to quote Deleuzes answer, in an interview from 1980 : The idea of a non-organic life

is constant in A Thousand Plateaus. Its precisely the life of the concept. This Nietzschean

affirmation associates the Body without Organs with the Dionysian insurrection against the

Apollinian world and Schopenhauerian philosophy...) Dionysian breakthrough, without which

the Spinozist-Substance-as-a-distribution-of-intensities-at-the-surface-of-the-Egg = BwO

cant be experimented withas the schizophrenic unconscious of the world giving its

internal conditions to events,asthe only consistancy of concepts. (The confrontation

Deleuze/Badiou on this question of the Event is, here, absolutely fundamental - knowing

that Badiou, in his book about Deleuze, totally eliminated the works with Guattari because

he needed to ignore therenewal of Deleuzian philosophy from the BwOs

breakthrough [16]...)It is in this experimentalsense - on a field oftranscendantal experimentation- that the Body without Organs is indissociable from the

absolute break/down it provoked in the Deleuzian discourse, from the Thirteenth series

ofThe Logic of Senseto the opening ofAnti-Oedipus(it cost Deleuze the Collge de

France) :

It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said theid.

Everywhere itis machines - real ones, not figurative ones : machines driving other machines,

machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and

connections. [17]

Substituting this machinic constructivism for the structuralist one, Deleuze and Guattari offer

the Body without Organs as the physical identitybetween Expressionism and Constructivism.

Physical identity means that it is not anymore a problem for thought (thought

immanent tolife ) but the vital dimension of life into which thought plunges [18] to

become philosophy ANDnon-philosophy, flowing into this emotion that makes the mind

aware of this terrible, disturbing sun of matter, and passes through its white hot flame

(Artaud). A conflagration allowing the philosopher, in this schizo experimentation, to


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become nonphilosopher so that non-philosophy becomes the earth and people of

philosophy [19]. The crystallisation on the BwO of the viral and rhizomatic diffusion of

Deleuzo-Guattarian thought we evoked at the beginning has no other ground than this

mutual becoming. It realisesthe equation Expression = Construction = Becoming

(the unthinkablefor Badious Lacanian Post/Hyper-Structuralism [20]), and involves

nothing but bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds, and gradients. A harrowing,

emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to

matter, to a burning living center of matter [21].

The question, here, is not to answer once more to the mauvais procsregarding the so-

called apology for schizophrenia , supposedly incorporated in the notion of the Body

without Organs. Deleuze and Guattari did it at length in A Thousand Plateaus. When the

BwO becomes the name of the becoming of philosophy itself, the first question is to

determine as precisely as possible the lines ofbecomingimplied by this new feeling. (In the

sense in which Artaud wrote that thought has to be able to answer to all the

manifestations offeeling and life) [22].

I see two lines, which are necessarily and absolutely One, informing and deforming the

plane of consistency of Deleuzo-Guattarian thought :

1 / The Logic of Sense becomes a Logic of Sensation ;

2 / Biophilosophy realises itself as a Biopolitics.

To conclude, lets briefly follow these two lines of becoming.

1 / The aporetic lot ofThe Logic of Senseis fixed in its last paragraph, when the question of

a something else remains as the fact of the Stoic-Carrollian logic of sense, and

which must await the work of art to come which will only give an answer. In Kafka : Toward a

Minor Literature(1975), published by Deleuze and Guattari as a sort of Appendix to Anti-

Oedipus, the something else is a sequence of intensive states forming a collectivebecoming which limits Sense to the direction of its lines of flight . ( Du sens, subsiste

seulement de quoi diriger les lignes de fuite. [Of sense there remains only enough to direct

the lines of flight] [23]. ) An asignifying, intensiveuse of language, speaking on the same

level asstates of things (parlant mme les choses ) [24], which gives to the syntax the

forces cry, and makes it a machine of expression in an intense matter = energy. These

forces are all positives in relation to the intensity = 0 of the Body without Organs, a

production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero (thats why the BwO is


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an egg) [25], and requires an I feel deeper than any vcu... To feel is to become, to

become-other. I feel that I becomemeans that what is real is the becoming itself, the

breakthrough of the nomadic intensities produced on the BwO- and this is nota

correspondance of relations making a structure, fixing the becoming in a structure(against

Structuralism : a correspondance of relations does not add up to a becoming [26]). Kafka

(the becomings-animal of Kafka) meets Artaud (a world of pure intensities) when Art has no

other question than to capture forces (capter des forces) because force is the constitutive

condition of sensation for a body ; because sensation reaches the body by breaking through

the organism which imprisons life. But at this point, Literature, Minor Literature , must be

relieved by Painting, Painting rendering visible, immediatly, the pure presence of the

body , the materiality of the body, its intensive reality as a Body without Organs liberated

from its organic representation. (The figure of D.H. Lawrence is important here : not onlybecause he suddenly began to paint in 1926 - four years before his death - ; but after all,

because his conception of the plastic arts is based on the reality of a glorious bodywhich,

after having animated his literary works, necessarily turned to the pictural act [27].) Painting

makes the Bwo visible in the sensation : this experience has been Artauds, who discovered

the body without organs through Van Gogh - Van Gogh le suicid de la socit [28]-

and, possibly, anticipated this discovery in drawingswhich (explains Artaud) are not

anymore artistic themes , works of art, works of aesthetic simulation . Action-

drawing,says Derrida [29]. (See the sequence : Couti lanatomie [c. september 1945] ;

La potence du gouffre [c. october 1945] ; Lexcration du Pre-Mre [april 1946] ;

La projection du vritable corps [november 1946 - december 1947/january

1948] [30].)There is no other reason forthe Logic of Sense to be substituted with the Logic

of Sensation, and to be associated with painting, once painting, action-

paintinghystericalypresents( by an excess of presence ) the sequence Expression =

Construction = Becoming - and does so without the concept of sign (deconstructed, in

terms of literature, in the Kafkabook). Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation(1981) follows A

Thousand Plateaus(1980) so closely because painting presents materially the work of art as

a being of sensation, and nothing else [31]... Being the most Cezannian of contemporary

painters, Bacon makes - Deleuze explains -truth fall back on the body to liberate through its

de-formation, its dis-organ-isation, a most profound and almost unlivable Power (une

Puissance plus profonde et presque invivable) [32]. What is this truth ? It is less an aesthetic

truth than the truth as pure sensible, the intensive truth of the Body without Organs

which embodiesaesthetics as aisthesis = sensation. Logic of Sensation means that any true

immanence is aesthetic - and that it is the work of art to express it in a politics of sensation,


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constructing a block of sensation that stands alone (the Whiteheadian expression

rediscovered by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy ?) as a new possibility of life.

This means a politics of sensationrather than an aesthetics in the common sense of the

notion. Because Art is not an end, but a way to draw lines of life, a way to liberate matters of

expression in constructing new sensible territorialities which involve real becomingsas

the realmediaof Art in its vital association with Non-Art.

(Extending this Artaudian line, we come across the material actionsof Viennese Actionism,

plunging bodies into the chaos of sensations, dis-organ-ising them to presentbodies as

Living Paintings of a schizo process involving a machinic unconscious . Mhl especially,

who proposed the guiding principle Materie = Farbe, and writes : in the material

action, the body is like a broken egg that lets its yolk be seen ).

2 / That Biophilosophy realises itself as a Biopolitics, as a Politics of Being qua Life

constitutively related to Sensation(and not anymore, necessarily, under the conditions of the

Unconscious),it means How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs ? [33].

Before being a question, it is a constructiveanswer to the crack upof a Logic of Sense, as

formalised in the Twenty-Second series, Porcelain and Volcano :

If to will is to will the event, how could we not also will its full actualization in the corporeal

mixture, subject to this tragic will which presides over all ingestions ? [...] [Perhaps] it is

possible to maintain the inherence of the incorporeal crack while taking care not to bring it

into existence, and not to incarnate it in the depth of the body ? More precisely, is it possible

to limit ourselves to the counter-actualization of an event - to the actor or dancers simple,

flat representation - while taking care to prevent the full actualization which characterizes

the victem or the true patient ? All these questions point out the ridiculousness of the

thinker : [...] When Artaud speaks of the erosion of thought as something both essential and

accidental, a radical impotence and nevertheless a great power, it is already from the

bottom of schizophrenia. Each one risked something and went as far as possible in takingthis risk ; each one drew from it an irrepressible right. What is left for the abstract thinker

once she has given advice of wisdom and distinction ? Well then, are we to speak of

Bousquets wound, about Fitzgeralds and Lowrys alcoholism, Nietzsches and Artauds

madness while remaining on the shore ? Are we to become the professionals who give talks

on these topics ? [...] Indeed, how are we to stay on the surface without staying on the

shore ? How do we save ourselves by saving the surface and every surface organization


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including language and life ? How is this politics, this full guerilla warfareto be

attained ? [34]

A politics, a complete guerilla warfarethrough which Artaud is Spinoza raised from the dead

(Spinoza ressuscit)because it is only from Artaud the Schizothat wecan try to perceive

and understand Spinoza by way of the middle [35]. It means that the great book about the

BwO isthe Ethicsbecause the only universal process is Schizophrenia as the field of

immanence of desire(it is through the BwO that we desire, the BwO is thecontinuumof

desire).The fact that the same word, schizo, [...] to designate both the eventual

breakthough and the possible breakdown, and all the transitions, the implications of the two

extremes is the inevitable confirmation of the absolute productivity of the schizophrenic

process, and of its social repression everytime desire is taken away from its field of

immanence by the organ-ised transcendances of the Judgement of God. Thebreakdown:

the more the process of production is led off course, brutally interrupted, the more the

shizo-as-entity arises as a specific product [36]

If the BwO is the Real, always-already expressed, but which has to be singularly constructed

for each of us, there where the intensities go and break through ; if it is not at all a notion

or a concept, but a practice, a set of practices [37] implying a maximum of caution to be

able to separate the BwO from its emptied or cancerous doubles, it is because the Body

without Organs isthe Combat in us. What combatsJudgement and all the organ-isations

that imprison life, all the regressions that render desire fascist or mortified ; but, after all, as

Deleuze explains in this late text, To Have Done With Judgement , it is the combat

betweenforces, the combat by which a force captures and eliminates others, all these

associations of forces creating aselective becomingand produced by a powerfull non-

organic vitality. The aesthetic/aisthetic truth of the Body without Organs is an art de soi.

Make Combat, not War.

Because the Judgement of God is always on the side of war, against the social power of

difference.

In war, Deleuze writes in a terribly actual proposition, the will to power means that the

will wants strength [puissance] as a maximum of power [pouvoir] or domination [38].

Combat War - or, Comment se faire un Corps sans organes. This was the beginning ofPour

en finir avec le jugement de dieu, when Artaud was combatting the American relation to


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war, to demonstrateby the crushing properties of force the superiority of American

products [39].

With Artaud and his burning will to practise life (exercer la vie), Deleuze and Guattari

draw the lines of a becoming-revolutionary for the present world.

This is the BwO Condition for their philosophy to become an onto- ethopoiethics [40].

[1] I use this locution in a very immediateand primitiveway, as a sort of

phenomenological description of this new oedipian D&G territoriality, which has

nothing to do with Keith Ansell Pearsons use of this term when he writes that Difference and

Repetitionproduced a unique schizo-scholasticism , cf. K.A. Pearson,Germinal Life, The

difference and repetition of Deleuze, London-New York, Routledge, 1999, p. 2.

[2] Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,

1983 , p.xii-xiii. In a text published in 1983, Lcriture de soi , Foucault also understands

the aesthetics of the existence as an ethopoiethics ; re-edited in M. Foucault, Dits et

crits, vol. IV, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 415-430.

[3] Gilles Deleuze, Entretien sur lAnti-dipe [1972], Pourparlers, Paris, Minuit, 1990, p.

24 ; [Negotiations, p. ?

[4] See Deleuzes article Gilbert Simondon, LIndividu et sa gense physico-

biologique , Revue philosophique de la France et de lEtranger, vol. CLVI, n 1-3, janvier-

mars 1966, p. 115-8 ; re-edited in G. Deleuze, Lle dserte et autres textes (Textes et

entretiens 1954-1974), Paris, Minuit, 2002, p. 120-4. Simondons book was published in 1964

(Paris, PUF) - it means (in terms of the Deleuzian chronology) exactly between Nietzsche et

la philosophie(1962) and Le bergsonisme(1966). On the question of the egg, Deleuzes

constantly refers to A. Dacq, Luf et son dynamisme organisateur, Paris, Albin Michel,

1941.

[5] See G. Deleuze, Spinoza. Philosophie pratique, Paris, PUF, 1970 ; re-edited, modified and

augmented in 1981 (Paris, Minuit). Spinoza : Practical Philosophy, San Francisco, City Light

Books, 1988.

[6] G. Deleuze, Logique du sens, Paris, Minuit, 1969, p. 124-5 ; The Logic of Sense, New

York, Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 102-3. See as well, in the Fifteenth series, Of


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singularities , the footnote about Simondons book which presents it as a new conception

of the transcendantal.

[7] This crucial example is given by Deleuze at the very beginning of his important article

about Structuralism, cf. G. Deleuze, A quoi reconnat-on le structuralisme ? , in F. Chtelet

(ed.), Histoire de la philosophie, t. VII : Le XXe sicle, Paris, Hachette, 1972 ; republished in G.

Deleuze, Lle dserte, p. 239. How Do We Recognize Structuralism ? in C. S. Stivale, The

Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari : Intersections and Animations, New York, The

Guilford Press, 1998, p. 259. The article was written in 1967 and is presented as such : We

are in 1967 , underlines Deleuze. Lets remember that Anti-dipewas published in 1972,

the same year as the structuralist article, but the Carollian plane of Structuralism

affirmed in the article clearly makes it philosophically contemporary to The Logic of

Sense(1969).

[8] G. Deleuze, A quoi reconnat-on le structuralisme ? , p. 244. How Do We Recognize

Structuralism ? in C. S. Stivale, p. 263.

[9] G. Deleuze, Logique du sens, p. 88 ; Logic of Sense, p. 71.

[10] G. Deleuze, A quoi reconnat-on le structuralisme ? , p. 245, p. 269 ; How Do We

Recognize Structuralism ? in C. S. Stivale, p. 264, p. 282.

[11] Deleuze quotes the following passage of Artauds in a footnote : Pas de bouche Pas

de langue Pas de dents Pas de larynx Pas dsophage Pas destomac Pas de ventre Pas

danus Je reconstruirai lhomme que je suis (Logique du sens, p. 108). No teeth No larynx

No esophagus No stomach No intestine No anus I shall reconstruct the man that I am

(Logic of Sense, p. 342).

[12] A. Artaud, Projet de lettre Georges Le Breton , in uvres compltes, Paris,Gallimard, vol. XI, p. 187.

[13] G. Deleuze, Logique du sens, p. 101-4 ; Logic of Sense, p. 82-4. We should notice that

in his article about Louis Wolfsons book, Le schizo et les langues, Deleuze writes that the

vitalist cosmology of the Artaudian body without organs, because of Artauds breath-words,

goes beyond the limits of the Wolfsonian equation in its proximity to Carrolls games (G.

Deleuze, Louis Wolfson, ou le procd , Critique et clinique, Paris, Minuit, 1993, p. 28, n.

5 ; reedition modified of the preface to Wolfsons book, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, entitled


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Schizologie ; Essays Critical and Clinical, Louis Wolfson, or, The Procedure ,

Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1997, p. 16).

[14] G. Deleuze, Logique du sens, p. 183-4 ; Logic of Sense, p. 157.

[15] See the pseudo-anonymous, Vive le materialisme !, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2001.

[16] Cf. A. Badiou, Deleuze. La Clameur de ltre, Paris, Hachette, 1997 ; see also the

Dossier Badiou/Deleuze I published in Futur Antrieur, n 43, 1997-98/3 andMultitudes,

n 1, mars 2000 - and its prolongation in my article Badiou. La grce de

luniversel , Multitudes, n 6, septembre 2001.

[17] G. Deleuze, [Anti-dipe], p. 7 ; [Anti-Oedipus], p. 1.

[18] Cf. G. Deleuze, Limmanence : une vie... , Philosophie, n 47, septembre 1995.

Deleuzes very last text... Immanence : A Life , in G. Deleuze, Pure Immanence. Essays on

Life, New York, Zone Books, 2001.

[19] G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Quest-ce que la philosophie ?, Paris, Minuit, 1991, p. 105 ; What

Is Philosophy ?, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 109.

[20] With this equation, we verify that Deleuzo-Guattarian thought is nota Post-

Structuralism (if this notion has not a purely chronological meaning). Conversely and strictly

speaking, one can say that The Logic of Sensetried to develop a Post-Structuralist

philosophy. In his recent book, Le priple structural, figures et paradigme(Paris, Le Seuil,

2002), Jean-Claude Milner presents, quite rightly, Lacanism as a Hyper-Structuralism - and

reads Anti-Oedipusas anti-structure .

[21] Quoting the beginning of this passage from Anti-Oedipus, p. 19 : The breasts on [...]

judge [Schrebers] naked torso are neither delirious nor hallucinatory phenomena : they

designate, first of all, a band of intensity, a zone of intensity on his body without organs. The

body without organs is an egg : it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and

longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the

becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors.

Nothing here is representative ; rather, it is all life and lived experience : the actual, lived

emotion of having breasts does not resemble breasts, it does not represent them, any more

than a predestined zone in the egg resembles the organ that it is going to be stimulated to


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produce within itself. Unsurprisingly, the third Thesis ofViva the Materialismreads : as pure

Decision, Materialism has nothing to do with matter - this, of course, is said against

Deleuze (cf. G. Lardreau, Lexercice diffr de la philosophie. A loccasion de Deleuze,

Lagrasse, Verdier, 1999).

[22] A. Artaud, Lettre monsieur le lgislateur de la loi sur les stupfiants , uvres

compltes, Paris, Gallimard, vol. I, p. 68 : quelle [la pense] puisse rpondre toutes les

manifestations du sentiment et de la vie .

[23] G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littrature mineure, Paris, Minuit, 1975, p.

39 ; Kafka : Toward a Minor Literature, Minneapolis - London, University of Minnesota Press,

1986, p. 21.

[24] G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Mille plateaux, Paris, Minuit, 1980, p. 110 ; A Thousand Plateaus,

London, Athlone Press, 1988, p. 87.

[25] G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Mille plateaux, p. 189-190 ; A Thousand Plateaus, p. 153.

[26] Cf. G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Mille plateaux, p. 290 ; A Thousand Plateaus, p. 237. The

critique of Structuralism is developed in Plateau 10( Becoming-intense, Becoming-animal,

Becoming-imperceptible... ).

[27] See D.H. Lawrence, Introduction to these paintings , in The Paintings of D.H.

Lawrence, Mandrake Press, 1929. In Pour en finir avec le jugement , chap. XV ofCritique

et clinique, Deleuze refers the body without organs to both Artaud and Lawrence (p.

164) ; Essays Critical and Clinical, To Have Done with Judgement , p. 131.

[28] Artauds texts with the body without organs are gathered in the volume XIII ( !) of

the uvres compltes, Paris, Gallimard. This volume consists ofVan Gogh le suicid de la

socit(1947) ; Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu(1948) ; Le Thtre de la

cruaut(1948).

[29] J. Derrida, Artaud le Moma, Paris, Galile, 2002, p. 98.

[30] These four drawings are presented in the exhibition Hommage Antonin Artaud ,

Museum Quartier, Vienna, 7 September - 17 November 2002, curated by Cathrin Pichler


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and Hans-Peter Litscher. On the drawing La potence du gouffre , we read : La potence

du gouffre est ltre et non son me et cest son corps .

[31] G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Quest-ce que la philosophie ?, p. 155 ; What Is Philosophy ?, p.

164.

[32] Cf. G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, Paris, Ed. de la Diffrence, 1981,

chap. VII ( Lhystrie ) and VIII ( Peindre les forces ).

[33] Associated with the Artaudian date of November 28th 1947 - the date of Pour en finir

avec le jugement de dieu - Comment se faire un Corps sans Organes ? is the title

ofPlateau 6. In the Preface to the Italian translation ofA Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and

Guattari explain that its difference to Anti-Oedipusis that multiplicity is no longer consideredas a synthesis under the conditions of the Unconscious, but as a pure substantive (p.

XII). Plateau 6will develop the idea that Artauds Hliogabaleand Tarahumarasexpress

precisely this multiplicity of fusion, the fusibility as infinite zero, plane of consistancy (p.

196). It means that from Anti-Oedipusto A Thousand Plateaus, Artaud is still at work.

[34] G. Deleuze, Logique du sens, p. 183-4 ; Logic of Sense, p. 157-8.

[35] G. Deleuze, Spinoza. Philosophie pratique, p. 164 ; Spinoza : Practical Philosophy, p.122.

[36] G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Lanti-dipe, p. 161-2 ; Anti-Oedipus, p. 136.

[37] G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Mille plateaux, p. 186 ; A Thousand Plateaus, p. 149-150.

[38] G. Deleuze, Pour en finir avec le jugement , in Critique et clinique, p. 167 ; Essays

critical and clinical, p. 133.

[39] Cf. A. Artaud, Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, p. 72 : [les Amricains] veulent

toute force et par tous les moyens possibles faire et fabriquer des soldats en vue de toutes

les guerres plantaires qui pourraient ultrieurement avoir lieu, et qui seraient destins

dmontrerpar les vertus crasantes de la force la surexcellence des produits amricains, et

des fruits de la saveur amricaine sur tous les champs de lactivit et du dynamisme possible

de la force. English translation in Antonin Artaud Selected Writings, Berkeley, University of

California Press, 1988, p. 555 : [The Americans] want at all costs and by every possible


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means to make and manufacture soldiers with a view to all the planetary wars which might

take place, and which would be intended to demonstrate by the overwhelming virtues of

force the superiority of American products, and the fruits of American sweat in all fields of

activity and of the superiority of the possible dynamism of force.

[40] In La Signature du monde, ou Quest-ce que la philosophie de Deleuze et Guattari ?,

Paris, Cerf, 1993, I experimented the concept of onto-ethology.

the bwo condition

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