The Body without Organs
The Body without Organs, that famously obscure concept found throughout Deleuze & Guattari’s project Capitalism and Schizophrenia (and that was originally demanded on the radio by Antonin Artaud in 1947: “to be done with the judgment of God.”) may be clarified and rehabilitated by merely noting its location in history: that is, a strange vision of the body indifferent to the 400 years of knowledge produced by the vivisections of anatomical science. As explored elsewhere on this blog the idea of the body established by science, and maintained by corporate medicine, is founded upon the 17th century dualist claim of the body as dead material. This is why your hospital experience may have left you cold, the gaze of your medical practitioner so impersonal: the body, as organized by anatomical textbooks, is, literally, a dismembered corpse. That such a corpse has produced knowledge is not in question; the question is: knowledge for whose benefit?
The BwO, indifferent to the knives of anatomy, is a body upon which no decisions have been made. The withdrawal of knowledge-claims from the body makes the body effectively ordinary, generic and mystical; a living body of potential; a tantric egg. Per Spinoza, no one yet knows what the body can do. More weirdly, psyche and soma lose their hard borders; as psychoanalysis has long explored mere metaphor can transform the body in ways to which science is oblivious. Speech is embodied speech. Less an object, than a practice, the BwO is not the body that you see in the mirror; the BwO probably cannot be seen at all. It is the lived-body, polymorphic, animated by desire, electrified with pain (or ecstasy), entangled with language, where the distinction between self and other breaks down. You do not have a body; rather, your body has you—like in the way that your mom does.
A further speculation arises: can psychoanalysis conceive of a generic psyche? A psyche without categories?
See also:
The Spontaneous Arousal of the Kundalini
Cosmic Egg, 1994, Ingo Swann
