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Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy: Critical Essays
This collection of critical essays from renowned scholars around the world provides the best contemporary criticism and analyses available of Deleuze's work, and includes a previously unpublished essay by Deleuze himself.
352 pages, Paperback
Published April 18, 1994
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January 17, 2024
[Lingis' Society of Dismembered Body Parts]
• THE NOTION OF SOCIETIES formed by contract posits law as the transcendent, universally valid, and transtemporal horizon of the contents of contracts. The notion of contract posits individuals as autonomous agents, individuals individuated as seats of understanding and will.
• Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics had separated the value of terms from their meanings: to consider the meaning of a term is to consider the way it designates its referent; to consider the value of a term is to consider the other terms that can substitute for it.
• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus offers a new mapping of the libidinal body-the libidinal body of the primary process-which will serve to guide what the theorists have to say about societies. If, when we envision our bodies as organisms, we envision them as integrated sets of functions, the libidinal body being depicted in Deleuze and Guattari is not such an organism; it is the anorganic body, the orgasmic body. What we usually call the body as organism is the body of secondary process libido, the oedipalized body.
• An anorganic body is not defined by its constitutive organization, but by its states. Anti-Oedipus distinguishes different states of the body. From birth, the orifices couple on to organs they find contiguous with them, and draw in nutritive flows.
• With the forces of its own strong jowls the infantile mouth draws in the milk, along with gulps of air and warmth. These forces produce plenitude, satisfaction, and contentment, which is not simply an affect shim¬ mering over the inner content. For contentment is itself a force; the infantile body closes its orifices, curls up upon itself, closes its eyes and ears to outside fluxes, makes itself an anorganic plenum-a "body without orgclllS," in Artaud's expression. This undifferentiated and closed plenum produces and reproduces itself; Deleuze and Guattari identify the id, and the primary repression that produces the id, with this state of the body. Its contentment is a primary mode of death drive, which is not a compulsion to disintegrate into the quiescence of the inert, but a primary catatonia.
• Here the organs figure not as orifices leading into the inner functional body, but as produc¬tive apparatuses attached to the surfaces of the closed plenum of the body, functioning polymorphously perversely to extend pleasure surfaces.
• Excitations are not properly "sensa¬tions;' that is, sense data, givens of meaning and orientation, or information bits to be fed into the inner functional body. They are contact phenomena and reveal the other as the convex reveals the concave face of a surface.
• For Deleuze and Guattari the question of the nature of the social system or structure or fabric is formulated as a question of code. "Society is not first of all a milieu for exchange where the essential would be to circulate or to cause to circulate, but rather a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark and to be marked"
• The social machinery operates essen¬tially to record, channel, regulate the coded flows of libidinal energies. Three different kinds of codings determine the socius as the body of the earth (in nomadic societies), as the body of the despot (in imperial societies), and as the body of capital (in capitalist societies).
• Savages do not belong to society as persons, individuals, juridic subjects, but as organs attached to the full body of the earth.
• A second coupling is that of hand with surfaces of inscription. Primitive societies are not manufacturing, but graphic societies. They inscribe the earth with their paths, their dances; they inscribe the walls of their caves or huts; they inscribe their bodies. Savages do not so much build things, shel¬ ters and monuments, as do handcraft; they develop not architectural powers, but manual dexterity.
• A third coupling is that of eye with pain. The pain inflicted, in the initiation rites, is public, theatrical: one watches, the eye does not circumscribe, survey, comprehend; it winces, it senses the pain. As the young Maasai maiden is being scarified, the thorn inserted again and again to raise scars in regular patterns across her back, down her thighs, all afternoon, the others watch, eyes like flies feasting on the pain.
• Savage inscription cuts into living flesh; the markings, perforations, inscriptions, incisions, circumcisions, subincisions, clitoridectomies are painfuL Savage societies are machines of cruelty. The pain is by no means minimized; initiation rites redouble the pain, include gratuitous fastings, long incarcerations in dark men's houses, beatings, bleedings. Infections, deaths occur. The markings are done in long public feasts.
• The markings with which savage societies record, channel, regulate the coded flows of the energies produced in the couplings are not read. Savage inscriptions are not signs that refer to concepts; they are diagrams and paths for the hand.
• The leopard footprint one sees on the path does not refer to the name and notion of leopard, but links up directly with the leopard itself. The leopard claw-print that one sees inscribed by human hand on the path or on the body of the initiate does not refer to the voice that utters the name "leopard" and conceives the meaning of that name; it directly designates the leopard itself.
• The eye does not read this sign; it sees the mark of the beast; it winces; it senses the pain.*****
• Marx had spoken of the dismemberment of the human body in the social machinery of industrial capitalism.
• Marxism invokes the missing whole organism, that of the species individual, to which the diverse limbs and organs, attached to the body of industry, would, in principle, belong.
• The private individual is constituted by a privatization of his organs, his productive engines. It is the social machine itself that privatizes the organs, decodes their couplings with their immediate objects, and makes their flows of substance and energies abstract.
[Notes on Grosz 100 Tiny Sexes]
• Those feminists who have explicitly addressed Deleuze and Guattari's work, in the main, have tended to be rather critical, or, at the very least, suspicious of the apparently masculine interests, orientations, and metaphors in their writings; worried about the models and images of machines, assemblages, planes, forces, energies, and connections advocated; suspicious regarding their use of manifestly misogynist writers like Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence; critical of an apparently phallic drive to plug things, make connec¬tions, link with things.
• They have paid lip service to feminist interests in their advocacy of the processes of becoming-marginal or becoming-woman as part of their challenge to totalizing procedure. But they exhibit a certain blindness to feminine subjectivity, a feminist point of view and the role of women in their characterizations of the world . . . They fail to notice that the process of becoming-marginal or becoming-woman means nothing as a strategy if one is already marginal or a woman . . . What they ignore is the question of sexual difference, sexual specificity and autonomy. GO OFF LIZ
• Alice Jardin’s Gynesis: To the extent that women must "become woman" first. . .might that not mean that she must also be the first to disappear?
• Irigaray: for women to accept Deleuzian perspectives regarding notions like desire, machinic functions, assemblages, and so on is to once again subsume women under the neutral¬ized masculinity of the phallocratic:
o That pleasure which perhaps constitutes a discovery for men, a supplement to enjoyment, in a fantasmatic "becoming-woman;' but which has long been familiar to women. For them isn't the [Body without Organs] a historical condition? And don't we run the risk once more of taking back from woman those as yet unterritorialized spaces where her desire might come into being? Since women have long been assigned to the task of preserving "body-matter" and the "organless," doesn't the [Body without Organs] come to occupy the place oftheir own schism? Of the evacuation of women's desire in women's body? OKAY LUCE
o To invoke the notion of "becoming-woman" in place of a concept of "being woman;' Deleuze and Guattari participate in the subordination, or possibly even the obliteration, of women's struggles for autonomy, identity, and self-determination, an erasure of a certain, very concrete and real set of political struggles, which, if it were directed to, say, the struggles of other "minority" groups
• In this paper, I would like to temporarily suspend critical feminist judg¬ment in order to "enter into" the project(s) articulated in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. I would like to explore how this text might possibly be used by and for feminist theoretical projects, which involves some commitment to their overarching framework, basic presuppositions, and central concepts.
• Not only do they seek out alternatives with which to contest or bypass the metaphysical bases of Western philosophy (which Derrida terms "logocentrism": the necessary presumption of givenness or presence); they seek to position traditional metaphysical identities and theo¬retical models in a context that renders them merely effects or surface phenomena within a broader or differently conceived ontology or meta¬ physics. GOOD SUMMARY OF THEIR WORK
• Instead of understanding desire as a lack or a hole in being, desire is understood by Deleuze-again following Spinoza and Nietzsche-as immanent, as positive and productive, a funda¬mental, full, and creative relation.
o Instead of aligning desire with fantasy and opposing it to the real, as psycho¬ analysis does, for Deleuze, desire is what produces the real; instead of a yearning, desire is an actualization, a series of practices, action, production, bringing together, making machines, making reality. "Desire is a relation of effectuation, not of satisfaction:'
• Since Plato, desire has been conceived under the dominance of the subject and the sign. Whether the subject has been conceived in terms of conscious¬ ness and ideas (as in Plato or Hegel) or the unconscious (as in Freud and Lacan) desire has been that yearning to fill in, to reproduce a lost plenitude, whether the plenitude of the Idea or .that of the pre-Oedipal. So too, desire must transform itself into signification: for Lacan, it is the lack constitutive of desire that propels the subject into the order of signification, which, in its turn, marks the subject with a lack impossible to fill (this is the advent of demand from the order of the Real
o By contrast, for Deleuze and Guattari, following Spinoza, Platonism is inverted, if not reversed: desire is primary and given rather than lack; it is not produced, an effect of frustration or ontological lack, but is primitive and primary, not opposed to or postdating reality, but productive of reality.
o Desire does not take for itself a particular object whose attainment it requires; rather, it aims at nothing in particular above and beyond its own proliferation or self-expansion.
o are these not words and flourishes and not getting at desire at all though
• And, in the sixth place, Deleuze and Guattari resurrect the question of the centrality of ethics, of the encounter with otherness in a way that may prove highly pertinent to feminist attempts to rethink relations between the main¬ stream and the margins, between dominant and subordinated groups, oppressor and oppressed, self and other, as well as between and within subjects. Here ethics is no longer conceived on the basis of an abstract system of moral rules and obligations, such as proposed by Kantian or Christian morality (that is, in terms of moral prescriptions and imperatives), nor in opposition to conceptions of politics (as it commonly has in, for example, Marxist theory) . Rather, Deleuze and Guattari are participants in what might be described as the advent of a "postmodern ethics;' an ethics posed in the light of the dissolution of both the rational, judging subject and the contract¬ based, liberal accounts of the individual's allegiance to the social community.
o Their ethics: the relation of a being respected in its autonomy from the other, as a necessarily independent autonomous being¬ the culmination and final flowering of a phenomenological notion of the subject-Deleuze and Guattari in no way privilege the human, autonomous, sovereign subject; the independent other; or the bonds of communication and representation between them. They are concerned more with what psychoanalysis calls "partial objects;' organs, processes, and flows, which show no respect for the autonomy of the subject. Ethics is the sphere of judg¬ments regarding the possibilities and actuality of connections, arrangements, lineages, machines:
• In Deleuze and Guattari's work, the subject is not an "entity" or thing, or a relation between mind (interior) and body (exterior). Instead, it must be understood as a series of flows, energies, movements, and capacities, a series of fragments or segments capable of being linked together in ways other than those that congeal it into an identity. "Production" consists in those processes that create linkages between fragments-fragments of bodies and fragments of objects-and "machines" are heterogeneous, disparate, discontinuous assemblages of fragments brought together in conjunctions (x plus y plus z) or severed through disjunctions and breaks, a concept not unlike a complex form of bricolage or tinkering described by Levi-Strauss.
o A "desiring machine" opposes the notion of unity or One
o They are multiplicities of (more or less) temporary align¬ments of segments. They do not represent the real; they are the real. They constitute, without distinction, individual, collective, and social reality. Desire does not create permanent multiplicities, which would produce what is stable, self-identical, the same. It experiments rather than standardizes, producing ever-new alignments, linkages, and connections. Rhizomatics, or schizoanalysis, does not study the coagulations of entities, the massifications of diverse flows and intensities, but lines of flow and flight, trajectories of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization.
o Deleuze and Guattari use the metaphor of the rhizome, an underground-but perfectly mani¬fest-network of multiple branching roots and shoots, with no central axis, no unified point of origin, and no given direction of growth-a prolifer¬ating, somewhat chaotic, and diversified system of growths
• Rhizomatics, then, is a name for a method and an objective: it names a
• decentered set of linkages between things, relations, processes, intensities, speeds or slownesses, flows-proliferations of surface connections. In this sense, rhizomatics is opposed to hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and semi¬otics, each of which seeks, in its different way, to link an object (a text, a subject, a sign) with a hidden depth or latency-sense, the unconscious, the signified. Rhizomatics is a form of pragmatics: it is concerned with what can be done; how texts, concepts and subjects can be put to work, made to do things, make new linkages GREAT DEF RHIZOMATICS
• Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the Body without Organs (BwO ) consti¬ tutes their attempt both to denaturalize the human body and to place it in direct relations with the flows or particles of other bodies or entities.
o the BwO refers indistinguishably to human, animal, textual, sociocultural, and phys¬ical bodies. Rather than, as psychoanalysis does, regard the body as the developmental union or aggregate of partial objects, organs, drives, and bits, each with their own significance and their own pleasures, which are, through oedipalization, brought into line with the body's organic unity, Deleuze and Guattari instead invoke Antonin Artaud's conception of the Body without Organs. This is the body disinvested of all fantasies, images, and projections, a body without a psychical interior, without internal cohe¬sion or latent significance.
o The Body without Organs is not a body evacuated of a psychic interiority; rather, it is a limit or a tendency to which all bodies aspire. Deleuze and Guattari speak of it as an egg, a surface of intensities before it is stratified, organized, and hierarchized. 1t lacks depth or internal organization, and can instead be regarded as a flow, or the arresting of a flow, of intensities
o The Body without Organs does not oppose or reject organs, but rather is opposed to the structure or organization of the body, insofar as it is stratified, regulated, ordered, and functional; insofar as it is subordinated to the exigencies of property and propriety. It is the body before and in excess of the coalescence of its intensities and their sedimentation into meaningful, functional, organized, transcendent totalities, which constitute the unifica¬tion of the subject and of signification.
o Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two kinds of Body without Organs: the emptied Body without Organs, exemplified by the drug addict, the masochist, and the hypochondriac, and the full Body without Organs, in and through which intensities circulate and flow, where powers, energies and productions are engendered.
o The Body without Organs is the field of becomings.
• While becoming-animal is a major line of flight from identity, the mode of becoming most privileged in Deleuze and Guattari's writings is becoming¬ woman, through which, they claim, all other becomings are made possible: ''Although all becomings are already molecular, including becoming-woman, it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass through becoming¬ woman. It is the key to all other becomings"
• It is for this reason they claim that not only must men become-woman, but so too must women. Presumably this means that for women, as much as for men, the process of becoming-woman is the desta¬bilization of molar (feminine) identity:
o Becoming-woman is not imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it . . . not imitating or assuming the female form, but emitting parti¬cles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman
o Deleuze and Guattari explain that they are not here advocating the development of any form of "bi-sexuality:' For them, bisexuality is simply an internalization of binarized sexuality, the miniaturization of the great molar polarities of the sexes without in any way contesting them. Becoming¬ woman disengages the segments and constraints of the molar identity in order to rein
• THE NOTION OF SOCIETIES formed by contract posits law as the transcendent, universally valid, and transtemporal horizon of the contents of contracts. The notion of contract posits individuals as autonomous agents, individuals individuated as seats of understanding and will.
• Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics had separated the value of terms from their meanings: to consider the meaning of a term is to consider the way it designates its referent; to consider the value of a term is to consider the other terms that can substitute for it.
• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus offers a new mapping of the libidinal body-the libidinal body of the primary process-which will serve to guide what the theorists have to say about societies. If, when we envision our bodies as organisms, we envision them as integrated sets of functions, the libidinal body being depicted in Deleuze and Guattari is not such an organism; it is the anorganic body, the orgasmic body. What we usually call the body as organism is the body of secondary process libido, the oedipalized body.
• An anorganic body is not defined by its constitutive organization, but by its states. Anti-Oedipus distinguishes different states of the body. From birth, the orifices couple on to organs they find contiguous with them, and draw in nutritive flows.
• With the forces of its own strong jowls the infantile mouth draws in the milk, along with gulps of air and warmth. These forces produce plenitude, satisfaction, and contentment, which is not simply an affect shim¬ mering over the inner content. For contentment is itself a force; the infantile body closes its orifices, curls up upon itself, closes its eyes and ears to outside fluxes, makes itself an anorganic plenum-a "body without orgclllS," in Artaud's expression. This undifferentiated and closed plenum produces and reproduces itself; Deleuze and Guattari identify the id, and the primary repression that produces the id, with this state of the body. Its contentment is a primary mode of death drive, which is not a compulsion to disintegrate into the quiescence of the inert, but a primary catatonia.
• Here the organs figure not as orifices leading into the inner functional body, but as produc¬tive apparatuses attached to the surfaces of the closed plenum of the body, functioning polymorphously perversely to extend pleasure surfaces.
• Excitations are not properly "sensa¬tions;' that is, sense data, givens of meaning and orientation, or information bits to be fed into the inner functional body. They are contact phenomena and reveal the other as the convex reveals the concave face of a surface.
• For Deleuze and Guattari the question of the nature of the social system or structure or fabric is formulated as a question of code. "Society is not first of all a milieu for exchange where the essential would be to circulate or to cause to circulate, but rather a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark and to be marked"
• The social machinery operates essen¬tially to record, channel, regulate the coded flows of libidinal energies. Three different kinds of codings determine the socius as the body of the earth (in nomadic societies), as the body of the despot (in imperial societies), and as the body of capital (in capitalist societies).
• Savages do not belong to society as persons, individuals, juridic subjects, but as organs attached to the full body of the earth.
• A second coupling is that of hand with surfaces of inscription. Primitive societies are not manufacturing, but graphic societies. They inscribe the earth with their paths, their dances; they inscribe the walls of their caves or huts; they inscribe their bodies. Savages do not so much build things, shel¬ ters and monuments, as do handcraft; they develop not architectural powers, but manual dexterity.
• A third coupling is that of eye with pain. The pain inflicted, in the initiation rites, is public, theatrical: one watches, the eye does not circumscribe, survey, comprehend; it winces, it senses the pain. As the young Maasai maiden is being scarified, the thorn inserted again and again to raise scars in regular patterns across her back, down her thighs, all afternoon, the others watch, eyes like flies feasting on the pain.
• Savage inscription cuts into living flesh; the markings, perforations, inscriptions, incisions, circumcisions, subincisions, clitoridectomies are painfuL Savage societies are machines of cruelty. The pain is by no means minimized; initiation rites redouble the pain, include gratuitous fastings, long incarcerations in dark men's houses, beatings, bleedings. Infections, deaths occur. The markings are done in long public feasts.
• The markings with which savage societies record, channel, regulate the coded flows of the energies produced in the couplings are not read. Savage inscriptions are not signs that refer to concepts; they are diagrams and paths for the hand.
• The leopard footprint one sees on the path does not refer to the name and notion of leopard, but links up directly with the leopard itself. The leopard claw-print that one sees inscribed by human hand on the path or on the body of the initiate does not refer to the voice that utters the name "leopard" and conceives the meaning of that name; it directly designates the leopard itself.
• The eye does not read this sign; it sees the mark of the beast; it winces; it senses the pain.*****
• Marx had spoken of the dismemberment of the human body in the social machinery of industrial capitalism.
• Marxism invokes the missing whole organism, that of the species individual, to which the diverse limbs and organs, attached to the body of industry, would, in principle, belong.
• The private individual is constituted by a privatization of his organs, his productive engines. It is the social machine itself that privatizes the organs, decodes their couplings with their immediate objects, and makes their flows of substance and energies abstract.
[Notes on Grosz 100 Tiny Sexes]
• Those feminists who have explicitly addressed Deleuze and Guattari's work, in the main, have tended to be rather critical, or, at the very least, suspicious of the apparently masculine interests, orientations, and metaphors in their writings; worried about the models and images of machines, assemblages, planes, forces, energies, and connections advocated; suspicious regarding their use of manifestly misogynist writers like Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence; critical of an apparently phallic drive to plug things, make connec¬tions, link with things.
• They have paid lip service to feminist interests in their advocacy of the processes of becoming-marginal or becoming-woman as part of their challenge to totalizing procedure. But they exhibit a certain blindness to feminine subjectivity, a feminist point of view and the role of women in their characterizations of the world . . . They fail to notice that the process of becoming-marginal or becoming-woman means nothing as a strategy if one is already marginal or a woman . . . What they ignore is the question of sexual difference, sexual specificity and autonomy. GO OFF LIZ
• Alice Jardin’s Gynesis: To the extent that women must "become woman" first. . .might that not mean that she must also be the first to disappear?
• Irigaray: for women to accept Deleuzian perspectives regarding notions like desire, machinic functions, assemblages, and so on is to once again subsume women under the neutral¬ized masculinity of the phallocratic:
o That pleasure which perhaps constitutes a discovery for men, a supplement to enjoyment, in a fantasmatic "becoming-woman;' but which has long been familiar to women. For them isn't the [Body without Organs] a historical condition? And don't we run the risk once more of taking back from woman those as yet unterritorialized spaces where her desire might come into being? Since women have long been assigned to the task of preserving "body-matter" and the "organless," doesn't the [Body without Organs] come to occupy the place oftheir own schism? Of the evacuation of women's desire in women's body? OKAY LUCE
o To invoke the notion of "becoming-woman" in place of a concept of "being woman;' Deleuze and Guattari participate in the subordination, or possibly even the obliteration, of women's struggles for autonomy, identity, and self-determination, an erasure of a certain, very concrete and real set of political struggles, which, if it were directed to, say, the struggles of other "minority" groups
• In this paper, I would like to temporarily suspend critical feminist judg¬ment in order to "enter into" the project(s) articulated in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. I would like to explore how this text might possibly be used by and for feminist theoretical projects, which involves some commitment to their overarching framework, basic presuppositions, and central concepts.
• Not only do they seek out alternatives with which to contest or bypass the metaphysical bases of Western philosophy (which Derrida terms "logocentrism": the necessary presumption of givenness or presence); they seek to position traditional metaphysical identities and theo¬retical models in a context that renders them merely effects or surface phenomena within a broader or differently conceived ontology or meta¬ physics. GOOD SUMMARY OF THEIR WORK
• Instead of understanding desire as a lack or a hole in being, desire is understood by Deleuze-again following Spinoza and Nietzsche-as immanent, as positive and productive, a funda¬mental, full, and creative relation.
o Instead of aligning desire with fantasy and opposing it to the real, as psycho¬ analysis does, for Deleuze, desire is what produces the real; instead of a yearning, desire is an actualization, a series of practices, action, production, bringing together, making machines, making reality. "Desire is a relation of effectuation, not of satisfaction:'
• Since Plato, desire has been conceived under the dominance of the subject and the sign. Whether the subject has been conceived in terms of conscious¬ ness and ideas (as in Plato or Hegel) or the unconscious (as in Freud and Lacan) desire has been that yearning to fill in, to reproduce a lost plenitude, whether the plenitude of the Idea or .that of the pre-Oedipal. So too, desire must transform itself into signification: for Lacan, it is the lack constitutive of desire that propels the subject into the order of signification, which, in its turn, marks the subject with a lack impossible to fill (this is the advent of demand from the order of the Real
o By contrast, for Deleuze and Guattari, following Spinoza, Platonism is inverted, if not reversed: desire is primary and given rather than lack; it is not produced, an effect of frustration or ontological lack, but is primitive and primary, not opposed to or postdating reality, but productive of reality.
o Desire does not take for itself a particular object whose attainment it requires; rather, it aims at nothing in particular above and beyond its own proliferation or self-expansion.
o are these not words and flourishes and not getting at desire at all though
• And, in the sixth place, Deleuze and Guattari resurrect the question of the centrality of ethics, of the encounter with otherness in a way that may prove highly pertinent to feminist attempts to rethink relations between the main¬ stream and the margins, between dominant and subordinated groups, oppressor and oppressed, self and other, as well as between and within subjects. Here ethics is no longer conceived on the basis of an abstract system of moral rules and obligations, such as proposed by Kantian or Christian morality (that is, in terms of moral prescriptions and imperatives), nor in opposition to conceptions of politics (as it commonly has in, for example, Marxist theory) . Rather, Deleuze and Guattari are participants in what might be described as the advent of a "postmodern ethics;' an ethics posed in the light of the dissolution of both the rational, judging subject and the contract¬ based, liberal accounts of the individual's allegiance to the social community.
o Their ethics: the relation of a being respected in its autonomy from the other, as a necessarily independent autonomous being¬ the culmination and final flowering of a phenomenological notion of the subject-Deleuze and Guattari in no way privilege the human, autonomous, sovereign subject; the independent other; or the bonds of communication and representation between them. They are concerned more with what psychoanalysis calls "partial objects;' organs, processes, and flows, which show no respect for the autonomy of the subject. Ethics is the sphere of judg¬ments regarding the possibilities and actuality of connections, arrangements, lineages, machines:
• In Deleuze and Guattari's work, the subject is not an "entity" or thing, or a relation between mind (interior) and body (exterior). Instead, it must be understood as a series of flows, energies, movements, and capacities, a series of fragments or segments capable of being linked together in ways other than those that congeal it into an identity. "Production" consists in those processes that create linkages between fragments-fragments of bodies and fragments of objects-and "machines" are heterogeneous, disparate, discontinuous assemblages of fragments brought together in conjunctions (x plus y plus z) or severed through disjunctions and breaks, a concept not unlike a complex form of bricolage or tinkering described by Levi-Strauss.
o A "desiring machine" opposes the notion of unity or One
o They are multiplicities of (more or less) temporary align¬ments of segments. They do not represent the real; they are the real. They constitute, without distinction, individual, collective, and social reality. Desire does not create permanent multiplicities, which would produce what is stable, self-identical, the same. It experiments rather than standardizes, producing ever-new alignments, linkages, and connections. Rhizomatics, or schizoanalysis, does not study the coagulations of entities, the massifications of diverse flows and intensities, but lines of flow and flight, trajectories of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization.
o Deleuze and Guattari use the metaphor of the rhizome, an underground-but perfectly mani¬fest-network of multiple branching roots and shoots, with no central axis, no unified point of origin, and no given direction of growth-a prolifer¬ating, somewhat chaotic, and diversified system of growths
• Rhizomatics, then, is a name for a method and an objective: it names a
• decentered set of linkages between things, relations, processes, intensities, speeds or slownesses, flows-proliferations of surface connections. In this sense, rhizomatics is opposed to hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and semi¬otics, each of which seeks, in its different way, to link an object (a text, a subject, a sign) with a hidden depth or latency-sense, the unconscious, the signified. Rhizomatics is a form of pragmatics: it is concerned with what can be done; how texts, concepts and subjects can be put to work, made to do things, make new linkages GREAT DEF RHIZOMATICS
• Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the Body without Organs (BwO ) consti¬ tutes their attempt both to denaturalize the human body and to place it in direct relations with the flows or particles of other bodies or entities.
o the BwO refers indistinguishably to human, animal, textual, sociocultural, and phys¬ical bodies. Rather than, as psychoanalysis does, regard the body as the developmental union or aggregate of partial objects, organs, drives, and bits, each with their own significance and their own pleasures, which are, through oedipalization, brought into line with the body's organic unity, Deleuze and Guattari instead invoke Antonin Artaud's conception of the Body without Organs. This is the body disinvested of all fantasies, images, and projections, a body without a psychical interior, without internal cohe¬sion or latent significance.
o The Body without Organs is not a body evacuated of a psychic interiority; rather, it is a limit or a tendency to which all bodies aspire. Deleuze and Guattari speak of it as an egg, a surface of intensities before it is stratified, organized, and hierarchized. 1t lacks depth or internal organization, and can instead be regarded as a flow, or the arresting of a flow, of intensities
o The Body without Organs does not oppose or reject organs, but rather is opposed to the structure or organization of the body, insofar as it is stratified, regulated, ordered, and functional; insofar as it is subordinated to the exigencies of property and propriety. It is the body before and in excess of the coalescence of its intensities and their sedimentation into meaningful, functional, organized, transcendent totalities, which constitute the unifica¬tion of the subject and of signification.
o Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two kinds of Body without Organs: the emptied Body without Organs, exemplified by the drug addict, the masochist, and the hypochondriac, and the full Body without Organs, in and through which intensities circulate and flow, where powers, energies and productions are engendered.
o The Body without Organs is the field of becomings.
• While becoming-animal is a major line of flight from identity, the mode of becoming most privileged in Deleuze and Guattari's writings is becoming¬ woman, through which, they claim, all other becomings are made possible: ''Although all becomings are already molecular, including becoming-woman, it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass through becoming¬ woman. It is the key to all other becomings"
• It is for this reason they claim that not only must men become-woman, but so too must women. Presumably this means that for women, as much as for men, the process of becoming-woman is the desta¬bilization of molar (feminine) identity:
o Becoming-woman is not imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it . . . not imitating or assuming the female form, but emitting parti¬cles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman
o Deleuze and Guattari explain that they are not here advocating the development of any form of "bi-sexuality:' For them, bisexuality is simply an internalization of binarized sexuality, the miniaturization of the great molar polarities of the sexes without in any way contesting them. Becoming¬ woman disengages the segments and constraints of the molar identity in order to rein
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