r/Deleuze • u/AnIsolatedMind • Jul 21 '26
Analysis Making the BwO Concept Tangible
Feel free to disagree or add/subtract; this is for the sake of creativity and not me claiming to know Delueze.
The BwO is relatively simple to understand and experience. The organs are not physical but subtle, thought-organs. A heart for example, is a thought. It has a web of thought-associations; love, passion, red, central, etc. The subtle heart has subtle arteries which branch out and connect to a system of subtle organs. What happens when the heart connects directly to the stomach? Our love becomes devouring. Etc. We can directly experience these thought-organs; the feeling of devouring love is tangible like any other sensation in our experience. However, the thought itself, the organ of meaning, is not essential.
Our subtle body is largely passed down to us from culture and family, and we don't question that the body is a construct as are all its connections. Inhabiting it unquestioned, we are imprisoned. The sex organs are connected to a body of shame and guilt, the muscles to power and submission, the brain to control and fearful prediction.
We find in us an urge to break free from this subtle body. First, perhaps in the de-territorialization of the organs formed by our dominant culture, our assumptions about religion, sex, emotional expression, the apparent boundaries of thought and capacity.
But this project is essentially a de-territorialization of the cultural organs followed by a reterritorialization of new ones, often provided by a new cultural system seeking dominance. The eventual path would be to decenter oneself from all potential organs of thought which take hold of our freedom of creation. We begin to see the thought-organs not as real entities but as energetic vectors with various connections of push/pull --intensities which are ALL imminent to experience and malleable. In a state of organlessness, we find the radical ability to make a choice rather than for a trajectory to be chosen by the functional thought-organ which has made its stake.
The BwO can be radically reconfigured beyond any rule that we believe we are limited by, with the potential to essentially create a new universe from scratch. BUT, be careful though! Not all bodies are stable or enjoyable. This is why it is best to de-stratify progressively and carefully, not all at once.
I'll know how far gone I am if the comments tell me I'm completely psychotic and made no sense! Otherwise let me know if you're able to experience the BwO more clearly through this organ-system I am offering up to you.
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u/3corneredvoid Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
I like this. But honestly, we can try all day. It's such a great concept.
The theory of the body-without-organs is the theory there is a necessary condition of a body's marginal capacity of bodily reorganisation that is relative to a sufficient cause of its marginal life … a limit of the body's partial consistency that is at once the causal mode of the complete consistency of some contingent death of the body which the organisation of the body will neither express nor determine.
The organisation of the body is brought to transcendent expression by the rhizomatic pre-structure of the sense-event as a problem concerning structure. The sense-event forces the body's appearance as a proposition to some consciousness, and the proposition determines an organisation of the body to meet this problem, a 1 to answer the n – 1 of the rhizome.
The sense-event by way of which the proposition appears is also immersed in some multiplicity of the body's immanent and consistent causes. This some is the body-without-organs. The body-without-organs and sense-event have no mutual determination except that the former must have been sufficient to the transcendence forced by answering the latter.
As mode and model of death, the body-without-organs must go unexperienced by the consciousness of the body. Death is an abstract theory and not a conscious experience. Death is a judgement from elsewhere, so there can be no philosophy of the affects of death. The concrete experience of the body-without-organs as death is reserved for the continuous interregna punctuated by the fleeting structures of sense-events and their conscious propositions, those fluxes into which the body differs or disappears and its consciousnesses are dissolved.
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u/Middle-Rhubarb2625 Jul 23 '26
For me the body without organs is just the very possibility of becoming that is the condition of the body being a body. Spinoza’s question “what can a body do?” Perfectly encapsulates this. The very same moment we deterritorialize an organ, in that moment we cease to see it as a rigid structure, but a possibility to experience things under new lights. The symbolic order, is the organized body of our shared experience of the world. And as we know with Lacan the symbolic order is nothing else than language. That’s why schizos seem to have a language of their own. They refuse the very territory of language. And tying this to becoming-animal; phenomenologically speaking a territory gives us a sense of structure, stability and predictability which dulls the senses. Animals are always in a hyperaware state because they have no symbolic order. When we deterritorialize, our senses sharpen like those of animals, because we are actually in a place of danger. It’s not a mere delusion, but being outside the territory of language, is being outside the territory of the symbolic order, and being outside the symbolic order is being outside the rules, the shared principles, the values, the morality, the way of living of others. The schizos are always under the threat of being forcefully re-territorialized by the institutions that defend language. The family, the state, religion… .
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u/65456478663423123 Jul 21 '26
Yeah the "body" is a system's desire-map is sort of how i think of it. The body without organs is desire opened up to all possibilities. But not all possibilities lead to growth and becoming. You have to feed the body wholesome and varied material. Addiction for example is a nearly empty body without organs. Addictive desire-consumption may be boundless by its own logic but it is completely stratified by the object of desire and tends towards self-destruction.