In this paper, I seek to examine Deleuze’s fascination with “spiritual automata” as a counterpoint to his more famous notion, the “body without organs”. I shall argue that both are grounded in a deep reflection, on Deleuze’s part, on the problems and issues generated by Spinoza’s notion of parallel attributes. Ultimately, I argue, the development of the two notions is motivated by identical metaphysical worries regarding the tenability of transformation, persistence, and affective interrelations between individuals. The answer, (...) for both thinkers, is the insertion of a “third” relational term, which virtually interfaces with each without violation of their parallel development. For Spinoza, such term is the absolutely infinite substance; for Deleuze, it is instead the notion of sense and the faculty of sense-making. (shrink)

Group sex among men who have sex with men may be understood as a ‘radical’ practice insofar as it transgresses dominant social discourses around appropriate sexual relations—prioritizing heteronormative, monogamous and risk‐averse sex. These practices are generally defined as steeped in risk, most commonly due to the potential for transmitting human immunodeficiency virus and sexually transmitted infections and accompanied by the possibility of legal and social repercussions. Our ethnographic research study explored the desires, practices and contexts of group sex participants (n (...) = 10) within a popular group sex party destination located in the United States. We employ a poststructuralist perspective (utilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari) to understand group sex events with the pretext that bodies have no inherent ethics, meaning or essence: they are ‘bodies without organs’. We identify group sex as a form of boundary play, in which participants pursue new limits to what their bodies can do but within a carefully constructed environment that establishes norms of interaction meant to secure trust and safety between participants. A variety of risk reduction practices are shown to be promoted and honoured within these eventful sexual(ized) spaces. The application of poststructuralist concepts of ‘boundary play’ and ‘bodies without organs’ helped to depict the construction and navigation of pleasure, safety and risk among group sex participants. (shrink)

Félix Guattari spent his entire working life at La Borde psychiatric clinic where a radicalised form of psychoanalysis, ‘schizoanalysis’, was applied, based on the theory that emerged in Anti-Oedipus and was elaborated in A Thousand Plateaus. In the medium of this non-Oedipalised therapeutic plane lies the ‘body without organs, a body not fully organised but open to every form of expression and metamorphosis. The ideas and practice involved in schizoanalysis, which have now been in effect for (...) fifty years in every social and cultural field, have produced a new hybrid of Lacanian analysis and schizoanalysis, with the recent queering psychoanalysis expanding further the revolutionary character of the latter. The general logic and the determinate ideas of A Thousand Plateaus were applied as a reciprocal presupposition between content and form: free expression, interconnectedness, becoming-woman and -imperceptible, a deterritorialisation of models, roles and relations. (shrink)

In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new concepts of “machine” and “organism.” The problem of the relationship between machines and organisms has a long philosophical history, and this essay treats their work as a contribution to this debate. It is argued that their solution to this problem is found in their difficult concept of the “body without organs,” a concept that is given some much-needed clarification in the essay. The (...) first section details Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the machine, examining the ways in which it differs from the traditional concept as described by Canguilhem: their machines do not have predictable movements, but instead produce events; they do not have a purpose; they are able to reproduce themselves. The second section details their conception of the organism through their account of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: organisms are bodies which normalize and which create hierarchies; they also do not have a purpose; they have a “unity of composition.” The final section argues that their concept of the “body without organs” shows us how to understand the relation between the two transformed concepts, and defines the body without organs as the becoming-machine of the organism. (shrink)

This paper examines and contrasts the Chinese notion of ‘inside-outside connectivity’ emphasized in Taijiquan studies with French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘Body without Organs.’ Pursuing this dialogue while relating this to sport redresses a lack of novel thought and linkages with contemporary thought in Chinese scholarship, and most interestingly for sport, opens new lines of inquiry that help redefine our bodies as holistic sites of performance.

The paper explores the relation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's work to that of Deleuze and Guattari. The main focus is on Hardt and Negri's concept of ‘the common’ as developed in their most recent book Commonwealth. It is argued that the common can complement what Nicholas Thoburn terms the ‘minor’ characteristics of Deleuze's political thinking while also surpassing certain limitations posed by Hardt and Negri's own previous emphasis on ‘autonomy-in-production’. With reference to Marx's notion of real subsumption and (...) early workerism's social-factory thesis, the discussion circles around showing how a distinction between capital and the common can provide a basis for what Alberto Toscano calls ‘antagonistic separation’ from capital in a more effective way than can the classical capital–labour distinction. To this end, it is demonstrated how the common might benefit from being understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual apparatus, with reference primarily to the ‘body without organs’ of Anti-Oedipus. It is argued that the common as body without organs, now understood as constituting its own ‘social production’ separate from the BwO of capital, can provide a new basis for antagonistic separation from capital. Of fundamental importance is how the common potentially invents a novel regime of qualitative valorisation, distinct from capital's limitation to quantity and scarcity. (shrink)

This essay examines the anti-producing human body in its limit case of public self-induced starvation, as figured in Franz Kafka's short story ‘A Hunger Artist’ and Steve McQueen's film Hunger. Both works represent the fasting body as hollowed out, a resistance to capitalist-spectator capture that spatialises itself as a smoothing, a relative reconfiguration of parts to whole through the evacuation of flows. In both works the human body becomes a local body without organs, paradoxically (...) disarticulated from the more complex assemblages that constitute it while recording potential circuits of disturbance or resonance predicated upon the porousness of bodily boundaries. (shrink)

This article focuses on the aesthetics of the psychedelic experience. Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception remains one of the few studies that investigates the aesthetic dimension of the psychedelic experience as profoundly meaningful as such, because it gives direct attention to the nonhuman otherness of the universe that is hard to describe in words, but that can be felt and sensed. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari have investigated psychedelics as a perceptual, aesthetic, phenomenon. They argue that psychedelic aesthetics offers an experience (...) at the limits of perception to the point of ultimate abstraction of geometric figures and grains. Drawing upon the works of two experimental filmmakers from two different generations and backgrounds, Philippe Garrel’s enigmatic Le Révélateur ( The Revealer, 1968 ) and Morgan Quaintance’s thought-provoking Surviving You, Always (2021), the borders of the perceptual field by cinematographic means will be investigated. These works are exemplary of how the nonhuman perception of the camera, its ‘bodies without organs’, and its affective intensity evoke a psychedelic, mind-revealing, experience and an ethics of – in Deleuze’s words – ‘becoming not unworthy of the event’. (shrink)

필자는 본 논문을 통해 서구 형이상학이 제시하는 몸의 위상을 분석한 뒤 새로운 몸 개념을 통해 기존의 몸의 도식의 전복 가능성을 고찰해 보고자 한다. 데카르트에 의해 수립된 몸의 도식은 몸-자동기계(body-mecanic)와 의식조정-자동기계라는 이중의 층위로 분절화되어 있는데 우리는 논증을 통해 이것을 비판적으로 분석하도록 할 것이다. 기존의 몸 도식이 ‘메카닉(mecanic)’이라는 정합적이고 기능주의적인 유기체 논리에서 벗어나지 못하고 있다는 점에 주목하여, 필자는 들뢰즈와 가따리의 “기관 없는 신체(Corps sans organes)” 개념의 프리즘을 통해 “장기-몸(intestins-corps)”이라는 새로운 몸 개념을 제시하고자 한다. 장기-몸(intestins-corps)은 일련의 정합적이고 유기체적인 질서로부터 적출되어 나와 카오스적인 (...) 에너지로 들끓으며 이질적 요소들과의 무한연접으로 열려있는, 새로운 차원의 몸이다. 이러한 장기-몸의 봉기를 가장 잘 나타내주는 사태는 다름 아닌 극한고통이 도래하는 출산이라고 본다. 필자는 출산이 어떤 의미에서 ‘장기-몸’이 실질적으로 가동되는 상태인지를 지젝의 논의의 분석을 통해 심도 있게 고찰할 것이다. 또한 출산을 거친 자들이 상징질서로 편입되지 않고 금기를 깨고 되돌아오는, 살아있는 망자(the living dead)임을 지젝의 논의로부터 분석해 보겠다. 이로서 출산과 같은 극한고통의 체험이 갖는 카오스적 파괴의 힘이 어떤 측면에서 상징적 질서에 균열을 가할 수 있는지도 발터 벤야민의 ‘신적 폭력’ 개념을 착안해 고찰할 것이다. (shrink)

While the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of ‘body without organs’ is developed alongside their critique of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is also developed alongside their critique of Christianity, most poignantly in the sixth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus. Here Deleuze and Guattari quote Antonin Artaud in order to show how ‘the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against the BwO’. In order to understand this relationship between judgement of God and the BwO, this essay explores Deleuze's (...) critiques of Christianity in his earlier works and concludes that the BwO, much like Artaud's own poetry, is developed in contrast to an internalised form of Christianity. (shrink)

The concept of “the body without organs” takes up a great part of the oeuvre of Deleuze and Guattari. Yet, it is difficult to answer their question–“How do you make yourself a body without organs?”–or to understand their answer. In this paper I propose that the body without organs is an ethical concept. To support this assertion, I relate, especially, Deleuze’s thought on the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s auto-fictive project, My (...) Struggle, suggesting that My Struggle can be read as a body without organs. By doing so, I aim at two things: first, to illustrate a possible application of Deleuze’s ethic, and second, to show how such an ethic may guide us regarding what we ought to do. (shrink)

A mythic symbolic type is a binary-structured, gender-oriented cultural mask. Whoever enters it will never exit and will behave according to the mask’s logic. The article focuses on the men of the semi-commune Little Home trapped in the mask. It will examine this cultural structure’s organization of binary-opposition in a unique kind of intensity, I called “masculine waves.” In the final part, a discussion will be presented in the context of Deleuze’s Becoming and Bloch’s utopia.

As the title suggests, this paper looks at the Deleuzian concept of body without organs and compares it with Indian Philosophy. In the Indian context, the concept of moksha/nirvana comes near to it as both are practices that aim at liberation; here, ‘liberation’ is never the awaited end of the process but the process itself. The traditional western substantialism rests on things whereas Deleuze, like Indian Philosophy, celebrates ‘experience’ and the ‘incorporeal’. Thus, body without (...) class='Hi'>organs plays a role in individuation. It hints at a journey beyond ‘the self’ which is full of ecstasy or the ananda of the Indian thought system. The question of Being, which not only is conceptual identification, is presented in terms of the virtual and the actual. For Deleuze and Guattari, every actual body has a virtual dimension, a vast reservoir of potentials, and this is the body without organs. The actual emerges from it and carries it with it. Further, the plane of immanence is a field in which concepts are produced. It is neither external to the Self nor forms an external self or a non-self. It is ‘an absolute outside’, very much like Brahman. The pragmatics of Deleuzian theory is that it explains life to be ‘immanence of immanence, absolute immanence’ – an utter beatitude – which has a Vedantic counterpart where the essential Brahman is a combination of three attributes – sat, chit and ananda. Thus, this paper aims at the interesting comparison between Deleuzian theory and Indian Philosophy. (shrink)

:In this essay I will look at four recent films that have organ transplantations “at their heart”: 21 Grams, L'Intrus, Dirty Pretty Things and Heart of Jenin. Each film in its own way shows how Nancy's concept of the intruder balances in a different dynamics between biopolitical and biophilosophical concerns and proposes in various ways a changed concept of sacrifice, transforming sacrifice from religious offering into political or ethical resistance and allowing a-religious strivings to persist.

Much has been written about the disagreement and even radical opposition between Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s conceptualizations and those of Jacques Lacan: for example, about desire, psychotherapy, the subject and the radically opposed political consequences that result from their approaches. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate from a Lacanian perspective that in the case of a central concept such as the body, there are rather more similarities than differences. Its main thesis is that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s (...) body without organs is very close to Lacan’s notion of the Other jouissance and that with slightly different strategies they both provide arguments to fight the same enemy: that is, the control and repression of singularity under capitalism. (shrink)

The impact of Gilles Deleuze on critical thought in the opening decades of the twenty-first century rivals that of Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault on critical thought in the closing decades of the twentieth. The "Deleuze and..." industry is in overdrive in the humanities, the social sciences, and beyond, busily connecting Deleuzian philosophy to everything from literature to architecture, metaphysics to mathematics, ethics to physics, sexuality to technology, and ecology to theology. What of Deleuze and the Bible? What does the (...) Bible become when it is plugged into the Deleuzian corpus? An immense affective assemblage, among other things. And what does biblical criticism become in the process? A practice of close reading that is other than interpretation and renounces the concept of representation. The book begins with an extended exposition of Deleuzian thought, and proceeds to unexegetical explorations of five successive themes: Text (how to make yourself a Bible without Organs, and why); Body (why there are no bodies in the Bible, and how to read them anyway); Sex (a thousand tiny sexes, a trillion tiny Jesuses); Race (Jesus and the white faciality machine); and Politics (democracy, despots, pandemics, ancient prophets). Cumulatively, these explorations limn the fluid contours of a Bible after Deleuze. (shrink)

흔히 들뢰즈 철학의 변화 혹은 전회과정을 논할 때에, 1969년과 1972년 사이에 발생한 중요한 사건, 즉 펠릭스 가타리와의 만남을 기점으로 전기와 후기로 나누고 있다. 가타리를 만나기 전에 들뢰즈는 1952년 흄에 관한 첫 저서 이후 계속해 온 서양철학사에 대한 비판적·창조적 독해의 성과를 집대성하여 1968년에 『차이와 반복』을, 다음 해인 1969년에는 들뢰즈 철학의 체계화를 처음으로 시도한 것으로 평가되고 있는 『의미의 논리』를 출간하였는데, 여기까지가 전기(前期)에 해당한다. 그리고 1969년에는 당시 정신분석에 관한 연구를 하고 있던 가타리를 만나 공통작업을 개시하였다. 그로부터 3년 뒤인 1972년에 발표된 것이 바로 그들의 (...) 최초의 공동연구 성과인 『안티 오이디푸스』였는데, 이 저서부터 후기(後期)가 시작되었다고 할 수 있다. 그렇다면 우리의 관심은 『안티 오이디푸스』를 전후로 그의 저작을 나누는 결정적 차이점은 무엇인가 하는 점이다. 이 차이점을 규명함으로써 가타리와의 공동작업의 의의나, 그 이후 저작들의 서술 유형의 변화, 나아가 들뢰즈 철학 자체의 내적 변동과정을 밝혀낼 수 있을 것이다. 따라서 본 논문의 목적은 『의미의 논리』와 『안티 오이디푸스』를 구별하는 차이점 내지 단절점의 구체적 내용을 규명하는 데에 있는데, 우리는 그것을 ‘탈기관체’라고 간주한다. 즉 이전의 전통적인 철학사적 문맥을 대신하여 개념들이 전개되는 새로운 장(場)으로서 초점화 되고 있는 것이 다름 아닌 ‘탈기관체’라는 개념이라고 규정하여 그 의미를 밝히려고 한다. (shrink)

RESUMEN Nos adentramos en esos procesos de subjetivación en los que el músico de jazz experimenta en sí otras formas de corporalidad, que se dirimen entre sujeción a esquemas y ruptura de los corsés por una teatralidad en escena. Aparentemente, en la improvisación prima lo subversivo y la reificación del músico como autor libre; sin embargo, observamos empíricamente una corporalidad plural que trasciende el espacio de la escena y que facilita que todos los actores intervengan en el proceso de creación. (...) Hallamos una red de solidaridad que desplaza continuamente los puntos fijos por donde transita la música; así, cuando a un músico le falta el aire, su compañero le da el relevo. Si lo fundamental en la praxis de la música son las continuas alternativas que ofrece, concluimos con una reflexión ética sobre la naturaleza transitoria de la música y su temporalidad kairológica, en la que el músico, sintiendo la brevedad del instante de la nota que muere cuando nace, se reencuentra con lo insignificante de la que está hecha su condición humana. ABSTRACT We enter these processes of subjectivation in which the jazz musician experiences in himself other forms of corporeality, which are settled between subjection to schemes and breakup of the corsets by a theatricality on stage. Apparently, in improvisation what is subversive and the reification of the musician as a free author take priority; nevertheless, we empirically observe a plural corporeality that goes beyond the space of the scene and that facilitates that all the actors take part in the process of creation. We found a solidarity network that continuously displaces the fixed points where music circulates; thus, when a musician is short of breath, his partner takes over. If what is fundamental in the praxis of music is the continuous alternatives it offers, we conclude with an ethical reflection on the transitory nature of music and its kairological temporality, in which the musician, feeling the briefness of the instant of the note that dies when it is born, joins the insignificance of his human condition. (shrink)

The latest book by the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek takes the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as the beginning of a dazzling inquiry into the realms of radical politics, philosophy, film (Hitchcock, Fight Club ), and psychoanalysis. Of Organs without Bodies Joan Copjec ( Imagine There's No Woman ) has written: "With all his ususal humor and invention, Zizek -- the acknowledged master of the 180 degree turn -- here takes a trip into "enemy" territory to deliver (...) Deleuze of a marvelously rebellious child, one that seriously challenges Deleuze's other progeny with a surprising but convincing bid for succession. Those who thought Deleuze's forward march into the future would follow a straight path are forced to rethink their stance. From now on all readings of Deleuze will have to take a detour through this important -- even necessary -- book." Eric Santner ( On the Psychopathology of Everyday Life ) describes Organs without Bodies as offering "an entirely new degree of conceptual clarity and political urgency. Through his deep engagement with the logic of Deleuze's project, Zizek opens up new possibilities of thought beyond the terms of the current political debates on globalization, democratization, war on terror. Once again, Zizek has produced an utterly timely and radically untimely meditation." Recently profiled in The New Yorker , and hailed by the Village Voice as "the giant of Ljubljana," Zizek is one of the most provocative and entertaining thinkers at work today. (shrink)

Artificial devices that functionally replace internal organs are likely to be more common in the future. They are becoming more and more technologically feasible, increases in chronic diseases that can compromise various organs are anticipated, and donor organs will remain necessarily limited. More people in the future may have bodies that are partly nonorganic. How might artificial organs affect how we experience and conceptualize our bodies and how we understand the relation of the body to (...) the experiencing, acting subject, or self? Here, I focus on artificial heart devices (AHDs), including total artificial hearts (TAHs) and ventricular assist devices (VADs). While other devices, such as pacemakers and implantable cardiac defibrillators, assist the heart, I focus on devices that replace rather than assist organic function. AHDs, I argue, may have two opposing effects. On the one hand, having an AHD could alter experience, seemingly confirming that selves are shaped by the specifics of embodiment. On the other hand, AHDs are likely to encourage people to regard bodies as machines that are separable from the self. AHDs thus both confirm and undermine a body-self dualism. People with these devices may come to regard their bodies as machinelike even while having an artificial part alters their subjective experience. (shrink)

With a new introduction by the author In this deliciously polemical work, a giant of cultural theory immerses himself in the ideas of a giant of French thought.

The measure of the true love for a philosopher is that one recognizes traces of his concepts all around in one's daily experience. Recently, while watching again Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, I noticed a wonderful detail in the coronation scene at the beginning of the first part: when the two closest friends of Ivan pour golden coins from the large plates onto his newly anointed head, this veritable rain of gold cannot but surprise the spectator by its magically excessive (...) character - even after we see the two plates almost empty, we cut to Ivan's head on which golden coins "nonrealistically" continue to pour in a continuing flow. Is this excess not very "Deleuzian"? Is it not the excess of the pure flow of becoming over its corporeal cause, of the virtual over the actual? (shrink)

This article reads Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien through Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of le corps sans organes and devenir-femme, devenir-animal in order to illuminate both Wittig's formal and figurative concerns and her larger literary objectives. The dismembered and dismember-ing lesbian lovers that Wittig describes in Le Corps lesbien illustrate a process of becoming-woman, becoming-animal and becoming-other that leads to a becoming-minoritarian and a renunciation of stratification and subjectification in the body without organs. This process is a (...) celebration of dispersed, multiplicitous identity that exists in haecceities. Wittig's lesbian lovers undergo various becomings in the text to illustrate the multiplicity of possibilities as they move towards the BwO, and the text as a whole uses this BwO to resist and dismantle the hetero-patriarchal order. (shrink)

You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People ask, So what is this BwO? - But you're already on it, scurrying like vermin, grouping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveller and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight - fight and are fought - seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous defeats; on (...) it we penetrate and are penetrated; on it we love. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 150). (shrink)

This article focuses on Stephen Frears's 2003 Dirty Pretty Things. I argue that Frears's portrayal of the encounter between a Nigerian man and a Turkish woman in contemporary London invites us to re-conceptualize the relationship between the migrant and the host country. The film invites us to compare the circulation of migrants across a globalized transnational world to organs removed from one body and implanted into another. It questions our usual definitions of home and belonging, host and guest, (...) health and the power to circulate. It both refers to the hospitality paradigm and radically rephrases it by making us consider the relationship between migrants and nations according to a different grid. It does not simply propose an alternative grand narrative but rewrites a familiar script without trying to erase it. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The current article deals with the correlation between virtual and physical reality as they concern the body. The thesis of this article is that the lived body transposed into virtual reality becomes a body without organs in Deleuze’s terms, i.e. the lived body, a sensitive field of sensorial events immersed in a lived space, becomes a virtual body made up of intensities, of pure forces or magnitudes within a vector space, thereby losing (...) its affective qualities. Furthermore, lived and virtual bodies build up a correlation bridged not by intentionality, as phenomenology would maintain, but by sensation. Virtuality is thus characterised by both the loss of corporeality and the simulation of the lifeworld. But how can the split between the real and the virtual body be bridged? On the one hand, in Deleuze’s conception of sensation, real and virtual collapse into one another so that the real world ‘resonates’ with its virtual double. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of form relates both realities in terms of a correlation of signification between the physical and the existential realms. With recourse to the notion of structure or form, I will argue that the phenomenal and the virtual do not represent different modes of being, but are bound by a correlation ruled by sensation as a system of intensive forces. (shrink)

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine narrates the intense struggle of a self divided and dissociated from itself in the throes of becoming other than what it is. His attempts at conversion and self-transformation involve a struggle with his habituated self; his habits, ever resistant to change, impede his becoming. Insofar as Augustine disavows the significance of his self ’s multiplicity to enabling his capacity to convert, he comes short of providing us with an account of the self ’s capacity for (...) change. It is on this point that reading Confessions with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “the body without organs” (a term that describes creative experimentation with forms of life and subjectivity) helps deepen our insights into the self ’s becoming. Such a minor reading of Confessions can be achieved by extracting the concept of “formless matter” (a term Augustine uses to designate the primacy of the capacity for mutability in creation) from his reading of Genesis in order to bring it to bear on thinking through the work of the self that enables his capacity for conversion. Beneath the theological account that privileges heaven, because of its changeless “cleaving to God,” over the ever-transient creatures of the earth, there lies an ontological account wherein formless matter, the capacity to change, plays a pivotal role in ethical becoming and capacitation. In his process of conversion, Augustine breaks his habituated patterns of sensing and makes himself into a “body without organs” in order to be capacitated by alterity, and in so doing enables a becoming different that takes place with and through difference. (shrink)

RESUMEN: Jacques Lacan introduce en su seminario XX Aún una distinción entre dos tipos de goce [jouissance]: un goce fálico o sexual propiamente masculino, y en el caso de la posición femenina, y complementario del anterior, un goce Otro o goce del cuerpo absolutamente particular de cada mujer. Deleuze y Guattari piensan la feminidad en Mil mesetas como un devenir-mujer consistente en la construcción de un "cuerpo sin órganos" singular y propio más allá del organismo que resulta de disciplinar familiar (...) y socialmente este cuerpo. Este estudio pretende demostrar la convergencia de ambas propuestas al pensar la feminidad como una vivencia singular del propio cuerpo. ABSTRACT: Jacques Lacan distinguishes in his seminar XX Still between two types of jouissance: a phallic and male sexual jouissance, and in the case of the women, an absolutely particular Other jouissance of the body of each subject. Deleuze and Guattari think femininity in A Thousand Plateaus as a becoming-woman involving the construction of a "body without organs" unique and singular beyond the familiarly and socially disciplined body. This study aims to demonstrate the fundamental coincidence of both proposals when thinking femininity as a particular experience of the own body. (shrink)

Résumé L’incarnation phénoménologique a-t‑elle, dès Husserl, une origine christique? Ce qu’on a appelé le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie amorcé dans les années 1960 en France obéirait bien plutôt, en ce cas, à l’inspiration du mouvement phénoménologique dès ses débuts. On explore ici cette question, en mettant la chair phénoménologique à l’épreuve de l’athéisme de Deleuze et du thème du « corps sans organes » issu du rapport conflictuel d’Antonin Artaud avec la mystique chrétienne, et en remontant à la crise (...) ouverte par Arius ainsi qu’au Concile de Nicée.Does phenomenological incarnation have, already in Husserl, a Christian origin? What has been called the theological turn of phenomenology in the nineteen-sixties in France would in that case be much more in line with the initial inspiration of phenomenology. Exploring this question, we try here to put phenomenological flesh to the test of Deleuze’s atheism and of the theme of a “body without organs” resulting from the conflict between Antonin Artaud and Christian mysticism, and to consider anew both the crisis generated by Arius and the teachings of the Council of Nicaea. (shrink)

In this article, I imagine a scene in Plato’s cave where Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari encounter Pinocchio, the most famous puppet. I want to examine the forms of resistance created by the expressions of the Body Without Organs during the process of Pinocchio’s formation and bring together the elements that undermine the pedagogical causality established between telling a lie and the elongation of the nose to show that a different reading of The Adventures of Pinocchio is (...) possible. I hope to achieve this reading by demonstrating the constant conflict of the two logics in The Adventures of Pinocchio: the logic of punishment and the logic of symptoms. This research can also be read as preparing a possible strategic escape plan for Pinocchio, Deleuze and Guattari for a permanent escape from Plato’s cave. (shrink)

Feminist analysis of cultural mythology surrounding organ donation offers a critical perspective on current U.S. transplant policy. My argument is three-pronged. First, I argue that organ donation is appropriately understood as a sacrifice. Structurally, donation accords both to general and to specifically Christian archetypes of sacrifice. The characterization of donation as sacrifice resonates in the cultural psyche even though it is absent in public rhetoric. Second, I characterize widespread feminist concerns about the over-glorification of sacrifice. These concerns provide a helpful (...) framework for considering whether the sacrifice of organ donation is over-glorified in our culture. Third, I consider several specific aspects of organ recruitment and organ allocation. Each demonstrates an over-glorification of sacrifice that leads to a dangerous "routinization" of sacrifice. None of these excesses are addressable without due attention to the symbolic import of organ donation and transplantation. I close by suggesting lessons my analysis offers to Christian churches who support donation, to the discourse of bioethics, and to the general public. (shrink)

Foucault’s debt to Kant is usually examined with respect to his ethos of critique. In fact, Kant’s writings on aesthetic judgment, teleological judgment, and anthropology constitute an important, if implicit, object of Foucault’s genealogical efforts to free Western culture from a scientia sexualis that oppresses sexual minorities. Comparing Foucault’s use of Kant to the use made by psychoanalytic theorists of sexual difference, this paper argues that the concept of non-teleological pleasure found in Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgment may provide grounds (...) for queer thinkers to resist and reconfigure associations between death, knowledge, and sexuality as a function of organisms—associations inherited from the post-Kantian philosophical anthropology and biological medicine of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Because complex organs taken from unequivocally dead people are not suitable for transplantation, human death has been redefined so that it can be certified at some earlier stage in the dying process and thereby make viable organs available without legal problems. Redefinitions based on concepts of "brain death" have underpinned transplant practice for many years although those concepts have never found universal philosophical acceptance. Neither is there consensus about the clinical tests which have been held sufficient to (...) diagnose the irreversible cessation of all brain function – or as much of it as is deemed relevant – while the body remains alive. For these reasons, the certification of death for transplant purposes on "brain death" grounds is increasingly questioned and there has been pressure to return to its diagnosis on the basis of cardiac arrest and the consequent cessation of blood circulation throughout the body. While superficially a welcome return to the traditional and universally accepted understanding of human death, examination of the protocols using such criteria for the diagnosis of death prior to organ removal reveals a materially different scenario in which the circulatory arrest is not certainly final and purely nominal periods of arrest are required before surgery begins. Recognizing the probably unresolvable conflict between allowing enough time to pass after truly final circulatory arrest for a safe diagnosis of death and its minimization for the sake of the wanted organs, Verheijde and colleagues follow others in calling for the abandonment of the "dead donor rule" and the enactment of legislation to permit the removal of organs from the dying, without pretence that they are dead before that surgery. While it may be doubted whether such a "paradigm change" in the ethics of organ procurement would be accepted by society, their call for its consideration as a fully and fairly informed basis for organ donation is to be applauded. (shrink)

The paper attempts to establish a methodological complementarity between Foucault’s and Deleuze’s accounts of the body on the basis of Nietzsche’s theory of active and reactive forces systematically elaborated in Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie. Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s physics of forces opens up two prospective developments of Nietzsche’s legacy: the genealogical critique of the historical body produced by reactive forces on the one hand and the invention of a new unknown body produced by active forces on (...) the other. The paper shows how throughout their careers both Foucault and Deleuze pursue these two divergent yet mutually complementary scenarios respectively. Given the shared background of both thinkers, neither is complete without the other, especially when the question of resistance is at stake. Just as active force is necessarily presupposed by the existence of reactive force in the Nietzschean calculus, Foucault’s reactive body cannot exist without its own inverse, Deleuze’s active ‘body-without-organs’. (shrink)

A novel theoretical framework for an embodied, non-representational approach to language that extends and deepens enactive theory, bridging the gap between sensorimotor skills and language. -/- Linguistic Bodies offers a fully embodied and fully social treatment of human language without positing mental representations. The authors present the first coherent, overarching theory that connects dynamical explanations of action and perception with language. Arguing from the assumption of a deep continuity between life and mind, they show that this continuity extends to (...) language. Expanding and deepening enactive theory, they offer a constitutive account of language and the co-emergent phenomena of personhood, reflexivity, social normativity, and ideality. Language, they argue, is not something we add to a range of existing cognitive capacities but a new way of being embodied. Each of us is a linguistic body in a community of other linguistic bodies. The book describes three distinct yet entangled kinds of human embodiment, organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective; it traces the emergence of linguistic sensitivities and introduces the novel concept of linguistic bodies; and it explores the implications of living as linguistic bodies in perpetual becoming, applying the concept of linguistic bodies to questions of language acquisition, parenting, autism, grammar, symbol, narrative, and gesture, and to such ethical concerns as microaggression, institutional speech, and pedagogy. (shrink)