The BwO Condition or, The Politics of Sensation vendredi, 21 mai 2004 Alliez, 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 Series edited 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. [...] Ich zerreie 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 qua becomings (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 a philosopher, because it does not dis-organ-ise my (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 ; 1

because The cheat has a real future but no becoming at all ... An anti-productive schizo-scholasticism [1] has alimented the reaction against Anti-

Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus which 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 of Anti-Oedipus wrote that being-AntiOedipal 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-Oedipus can best be read as an "art". [...] Questions that are less concerned with why this or that than with how to proceed. How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action ? [...] Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics. [2] From the Anti-Oedipus the 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 DeleuzoGuattarian 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 ofchange which 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 real is 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 against the Philosopher. Prior to Anti-Oedipus Deleuze 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 2

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, as thephilosophical neurosis. (We know how it hurts to get free
of it - a perpetual fight against me.) And the fact is that Difference and Repetition will 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 publication announce the work with Guattari... of Anti-Oedipus. See what Deleuze declared about this period in an interview immediately after the I was working exclusively in concepts and I have to admit in a very timid, in a very selfconscious 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) Deleuze and Guattari propose two definitions of the BwO - (1) A BwO is an egg, (2) The Body without Organs is the Ethics of Spinoza - whichnominaly, discursively, pre-exist in 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 problematic is the ontological state of the preindividual , and as such is opposed to the negative) as an ethics of the transindividual [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 of intensity, without needing the BwO as such (but what this really means, as such, we dont

really know for 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.

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 as the affirmation of the non-indifference and of the opening of 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 and contemporary sense Deleuze gave to it (Expression = Construction qua the immanent truth, the truth of the immanence of 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 nonorganic 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 heterogeneous populations 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 ofBergsonism in 1966). It means that becoming and intensive multiplicity are one and the same. In Difference and

Repetition and A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze 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 4

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

Life clearly 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 (qua a 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 of Spinoza and the Problem of Expression), and that the Ethics is 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 by the affection (Spinoza), leading to the specific question of a practical philosophy [5]. It is on this Spinozist field that the Body without Organs will be projected as an attack on the organism qua a transcendent organisation, and as the immanent alternative of the body opening it up to connections and relations bio-philosophically indissociable from an impersonal and preindividual We transcendental field , already analysed in terms of an unconscious

surface in The

Logic

of

Sense.
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] 5

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 Spaltung of the Body without Organs for philosophical discourse itself. After Difference and Repetition and 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 developedfrom the rapport of expression - as it implies the parity of 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 linguistic in 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 supposed to talk in a language of symptoms [7]. Aiming at a speculative univocity of Being and language , The Logic of Sense is going to be an incredible attempt to examine the conditions under which Structuralism as a new

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

effect of the surface. The main question for the series of The Logic of Sense is 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 along the 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 6

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

Sense reveals 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 the project 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-affect of breath-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 feel the Body without Organs dis-

organ-ising the 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 7

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 surface which 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 invent ones language, and make pure language speak with an extra-grammatical or agrammatical 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 counteractualization 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 to actthe productivity of the surface from the intensities of the schizo body and its 8

progressive and creative disorganisation . It will be the task of Anti-Oedipus to give to

contemporary philosophy the plane of immanence as this surface 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 a machinic body. Break, breakthrough without 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 physicality of 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 with as the schizophrenic unconscious of the world giving its internal conditions to events, as the 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 is therenewal in this

of

Deleuzian

philosophy
-

from
on a

the

BwOs
of

breakthrough [16]...)It

experimentalsense

field

transcendantal experimentation - that the Body without Organs is indissociable from the absolute break/down it provoked in the Deleuzian discourse, from the Thirteenth series of The Logic of Sense to the opening of Anti-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 the id. Everywhere it is 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 identity between Expressionism and Constructivism. Physical identity means that it is not anymore a problem for thought (thought immanent to life ) but the vital dimension of life into which thought plunges [18] to

become philosophy AND non-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 9

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 realises the equation Expression = Construction = Becoming (the unthinkable for 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 procs regarding the socalled 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 of becoming implied by this new feeling. (In the sense in which Artaud wrote that thought has to be able to answer to all the manifestations of feeling and life ) [22]. I see two lines, which are necessarily and absolutely One, informing and deforming the plane 1 2 To / / of The consistency Logic of Sense realises follow Biophilosophy lets briefly of Deleuzo-Guattarian a Logic as two lines a of of itself these thought : Sensation ; Biopolitics. becoming. becomes

conclude,

1 / The aporetic lot of The Logic of Sense is 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 AntiOedipus, the something else is a sequence of intensive states forming a collective
becoming 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, intensive use of language, speaking on the same

level as states 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 10

an egg) [25], and requires an I feel deeper than any vcu... To feel is to become, to become-other. I feel that I become means that what is real is the becoming itself, the

breakthrough of the nomadic intensities produced on the BwO - and this is not a
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 only because 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 body which, 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 drawings which (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 for the Logic of Sense to be substituted with the Logic

of

Sensation,

and

to

be

associated

with

painting, once

painting, action-

painting hystericaly presents ( 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 Kafka book). 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, 11

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 sensation rather 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 becomings as the real media of Art in its vital association with Non-Art. (Extending this Artaudian line, we come across the material actions of Viennese Actionism, plunging bodies into the chaos of sensations, dis-organ-ising them to present bodies 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 constructive answer to the crack up of 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 taking this 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

12

including language and life ? How is this politics, this full guerilla warfareto be attained ? [34] A politics, a complete guerilla warfare through which Artaud is Spinoza raised from the dead

(Spinoza ressuscit)because it is only from Artaud the Schizo that we can try to perceive
and understand Spinoza by way of the middle [35]. It means that the great book about the BwO is the Ethics because the only universal process is Schizophrenia as the field of

immanence of desire (it is through the BwO that we desire, the BwO is thecontinuum of
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 is the Combat in us. What combats Judgement 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

between forces, the combat by which a force captures and eliminates others, all these
associations of forces creating aselective becoming and produced by a powerfull nonorganic vitality. The aesthetic/aisthetic truth of the Body without Organs is an art de soi. Make 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 of Pour Combat, not War.

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

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

13

war, to demonstrate by 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 immediate and primitive way, 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

Repetition produced 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, janviermars 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 14

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-dipe was 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 15

 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 and Multitudes, 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 not a PostStructuralism (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-Oedipus as 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 16

produce within itself. Unsurprisingly, the third Thesis of Viva the Materialism reads : 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 of Critique 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 of Van 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

17

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 of Plateau 6. In the Preface to the Italian translation of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari explain that its difference to Anti-Oedipus is that multiplicity is no longer considered as a synthesis under the conditions of the Unconscious, but as a pure substantive (p. XII). Plateau 6 will develop the idea that Artauds Hliogabale and Tarahumaras express precisely this multiplicity of fusion, the fusibility as infinite zero, plane of consistancy (p. 196). It means that from Anti-Oedipus to 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 dmontrer par 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 18

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 .

19