Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

The Ontological Significance of Deleuze and

Guattari's Concept of the Body Without Organs

Ronald M. Carrier

To cite this article: Ronald M. Carrier (1998) The Ontological Significance of Deleuze
and Guattari's Concept of the Body Without Organs, Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology, 29:2, 189-206, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.1998.11665445

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.1998.11665445

Published online: 04 Jan 2016.

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 }oumal of the British Society for Phenomenolo~y. Vol. 29. No.2, May 1998

THE ONTOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF DELEUZE

AND GUATTARI'S CONCEPT OF THE BODY
WITHOUT ORGANS
RONALD M. CARRIER

In the introduction to What Is Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari state that "philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and
fabricating concepts." 1 They clarify this claim by going on to say, "More
rigorously, philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts." 2 To
understand a philosopher is to understand her/his concepts. This
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understanding of concepts involves not only understanding the content of the

concepts s/he has created, but also understanding what conditions necessi-
tated the creation of her/his concepts and to what ends they are to be turned.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the creation of philosophical concepts is directed
toward articulating the nature of that which is, and especially toward articu-
lating it anew. To create philosophical concepts is to create an ontology, but
the ontology created is always a problematic ontology: the creation of
concepts is a response to a problem that the act of conceptual creation poses
as such. To articulate an ontology through the creation of philosophical
concepts is to discover problems that have been badly formulated hitherto
and to resolve them properly through conceptual creation. "All concepts are
connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and
which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution
emerges .... [E]ven in philosophy, concepts are only created as a function of
problems which are thought to be badly understood or badly posed
(pedagogy of the concept)."'
In this paper I shall discuss one of Deleuze and Guattari's more elusive
ontological concepts, that of the body without organs. It will be a response to
the question posed at the beginning of the section of A Thousand Plateaus
entitled "November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without
Organs?": "People ask, So what is this Bw0?"4 To answer this question, I
shall situate the concept of the body without organs within Deleuze's
account of repetition for itself in Difference and Repetition. I shall show that
the concept of the body without organs is a concept of an open field of
potentials of an individual human being insofar as it is an individual, an open
field that has the temporal significance of a pure past. It is produced in the
course of a process of singularization of oneself that, in aiming to set into
play difference as such in the determination of an individual human being as
a singular being, is oriented toward a future that selects against the represen-
tational domestication of difference.
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 To understand what the body without organs is, it must be located within
the machinic process of desiring-production whereby an individual human
being is constituted as an individual. But this is not all: the process of
desiring-production itself has to be understood as a particular mode of
repetition for itself. In this and the next section, I shall explain how the first
two moments of desiring-production function as moments of repetition, in
this way exhibiting the ontological and temporal significance of the body
without organs. In the third section, I shall discuss the third moment of
desiring-production, its significance in the overall critique of traditional
philosophy as representation, and the role that the body without organs plays
in this third moment.
There are three moments of desiring-production, three equiprimordial
syntheses: "production of productions, of actions and of passions; produc-
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tions of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve

as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of
anxieties, and of pain. " 5 These three productions or syntheses - the
connective, the disjunctive, and the conjunctive - are, as particular modes of
the moments of repetition, at once productions of an individual human being
as a being and of that human being as temporal. Desiring-production as a
mode of repetition is at once the production of beings and the production of
time. It is a temporalization that takes place in and through beings in their
Being that operates in terms of a distinction in the nature of real beings
between the actual and the virtual.
The connective synthesis, the production of production, is a synthesis of
the actual, of that which is present as the present in time. For Deleuze and
Guattari, an individual human being is a congeries of organs. An organ is an
affection, a determinate power of acting or of being acted upon - it is what a
being can do or suffer. An individual human being is a collection of active
and passive powers, and is the individual human being that s/he is in virtue
of the powers which s/he brings to bear and which are brought to bear upon
her/him. These active and passive affections are constituted in the connective
synthesis, which is a passive synthesis. "Desiring-machines are binary
machines, obeying a binary law or set of rules governing associations: one
machine is always coupled with another .... [T]here is always a flow-
producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or
draws off part of this flow ... " 6 Each of the organs is produced by means of
the interruption or breaking of a flow produced by another organ, and itself
produces a flow to be interrupted by another organ. "Every machine ... is
related to a continual material flow (hy/e) that it cuts into. It functions like a
ham-slicing machine, removing portions from the associative flow ... " 7 This
interrupting of a flow that occurs in the constitution of an organ is the consti-
tution of a habit by means of a process of contraction and contemplation. An

190
 organ, an affection, is produced by means of a passive synthesis in which
successive elements in a flow are contracted together and a quality different
from that of the elements is drawn from them. The interruption of the flow
consists in the drawing off of the elements from the flow and the drawing of
a different flow from the elements contracted. The contraction that occurs in
the production of a desiring-machine is a production of a difference, for the
quality produced in contraction does not resemble the elements that are
contracted. Moreover, the extraction of the elements from the flow and of the
new quality from the elements that occurs in contraction cannot be said to be
caused by any of the elements contracted or by any one being outside the
process of contraction. It is because this process of contraction is not the
outcome of the action of a being that can be identified as a conscious agent
that it is a passive synthesis, a synthesis that is unconscious because it is a
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process that takes place prior to conscious activity.' But while uncaused by
any being in particular, there is nevertheless a selectivity at work in
contraction. There is a discrimination, a non-subjective perception, that takes
place in the contraction of elements from a flow and the production of a new
flow therefrom. This selectivity with regard to what is contracted and to that
for which contraction takes place is contemplation. It is in and through
contemplation that what is produced in contraction is maintained as what it
is. This maintenance of what is produced in contraction is effected both by
the retention of elements that have been contracted in what is produced and
by the anticipation that the contracting which gave rise to what is produced
in contraction will be continued!
Brian Massumi offers as a very simple example of the production of an
affection through contraction and contemplation the process of sedimen-
tation.'" Grains of sand come to rest next to one another, accumulating in a
layer of muck at the bottom of a body of water. Each grain is an element
drawn from a flux (the grains of sand suspended in the water) and contracted
into the muck at the bottom. Which grains are selected to make up a
particular muck is at once a matter of chance (with respect to which
individual grains are selected) and of necessity (with respect to the character-
istics selected for among grains of sand). The process of sedimentation
results in the production of a new individual being (the muck), which is the
product of a process of contraction (of the grains of sand) and contemplation
(the selectivity being explicable in terms of physical laws). The grains of
sand deducted from the water are the elements contracted into the muck,
which is formed and maintained by means of the sedimentary selection
process that is the contemplation. For Deleuze and Guattari, an individual
human being, with regard to the connective synthesis, is composed of a
multitude of such contractions and contemplations taking place at several
levels at once. "We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air- not

191
 merely prior to the recognition or representation of these, but prior to their
being sensed. Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but
also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, or retentions and expectations." 11
Each individual human being consists of a multitude of organs, a multitude
of affections produced through contraction and contemplation, and of the
interactions of these organs on and between the levels on which they are
produced. What differentiates organs and levels of passive synthesis are the
elements drawn off and the selective processes that contemplate them. It is
this multitude of passive syntheses that makes the active syntheses in which
the human being as an agent is fashioned possible.
A desiring-machine - an organ or affection produced through contraction
and contemplation -is constituted through the interruption of a material flow
and the drawing of a difference from it. In so acting, the desiring-machine
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itself produces a flow that can be interrupted by another desiring-machine.

"Hence the coupling that takes place within the partial object-flow
connective synthesis also has another form: product/producing. Producing is
always something 'grafted onto' the product; and for that reason desiring-
production is production of production, just as every machine is a machine
connected to another machine." 11 The connective synthesis is a production of
production because organs are taken up by other organs as their raw material,
and these other organs are themselves taken up in turn. The elements
contracted in a passive synthesis are themselves the products of passive
syntheses, processes of contraction and contemplation, that make later
passive syntheses at other levels possible. To take up the example of
sedimentation again: successive occurrences of deposition leave successive
layers of muck that are themselves contracted into a layer of rock through a
process of compression. This layer of rock is then itself open to further
processes of selection. In an individual human being, affections at one level,
the products of passive syntheses, are taken up as elements of another
passive synthesis at a higher level. This is especially true of the synthesis of
that human being as conscious agent. "Action is constituted, in the order of
generality and in the field of variables which correspond to it, only by the
contraction of elements of repetition. This contraction, however, takes place
not in the action itself, but in a contemplative self which doubles the agent."n
The subject as conscious agent, insofar as its conscious agency is the product
of the synthesis of actions, is itself the ongoing product of a complex and
unconscious passive synthesis, both in the case of individual actions and in
the case of more extended projects. In short, as collections of affections
produced by the connective synthesis of contraction and contemplation, an
individual human being is caught up in a multiplicity of series of actions and
passions, and is the individual human being s/he is in virtue of her/his
location within these series. What an individual human being is "in itself' as

192
 an individual cannot be separated from the multitude of actions and passions
whereby it comes to be, maintains itself, and passes away; or from the beings
out of which it is produced and of which it is the material for further
production. The nature of an individual human being cannot be separated
from the various material contexts - physical, biological, and cultural - in
which that nature is produced.
The connective synthesis of actual beings is a synthesis of present beings,
and this is because it is a synthesis of the present in time. According to
Deleuze and Guattari, with respect to the connective synthesis both the past
and the future cannot be said to exist. Only the present exists and is actual,
and the past and future are dimensions of the present. The past is the present
past in the form of the retention of past clements of contraction, and the
future is the present future of the anticipation or expectation of future
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contractions in contemplation. In the connective synthesis, an individual

human being is produced as a living present, as a present time the duration of
which extends for as long as that human being endures; and her/his past and
future are constituted in the connective synthesis that produces her/him,
constituting them as the present past and present future of the living present
that she is. "[S]ynthesis constitutes time as a Jiving present, and the past and
future as dimensions of this present. This synthesis is nonetheless intratcm-
poral, which means that this present passcs." 14 The living present produced in
the connective synthesis is not a nunc stans. It produces time as actual, as
present, but it is itself an intratemporal synthesis in that the present is
produced as a present that passes away. Though it is logically conceivable
for there to be an infinitely enduring present, which would be a perpetual
present or nunc stans, in fact any present is contingent upon the availability
of elements for contraction. A present being is constituted through
contraction and contemplation, and it passes away when contraction and
contemplation separate, when the being can no longer maintain itself as what
it is. "The duration of the organism's present, or of its various presents, wiJI
vary according to the natural contractile range of its contemplative souls. In
other words, fatigue is a real component of contemplation ... "" Such separa-
tions, such fatigues, mark the boundaries of the Jiving present. At the
beginning of the living present, there is the fatigue of the living presents
contracted as elements in the coming-to-be of a new living present. The
elements are themselves living presents, and in being contracted they no
longer exist as what they were, now existing as parts of another present of
another kind. In the case of the sediment, the grains of sand no longer exist
as individual grains suspended in water, but as parts of the muck into which
they have been contracted. At the end of the Jiving present, there is the
fatigue of the Jiving present coming to its end, having its contraction and
contemplation separated by an external force, either through the exhaustion

193
 of its material or through its destruction or through its contraction into
another present. The muck may be dissipated through agitation of the water
above it, or it may be contracted along with other layers of muck into a layer
of rock.
The connective synthesis is a synthesis of a present that passes. This
presents a paradox: the present constitutes time, but it also passes away in
the time that it constitutes. This paradox is resolved in the recognition that
the connective synthesis refers to another time that provides the ground of
the first synthesis. This second time is itself the product of the second
synthesis in desiring-production, the disjunctive synthesis. In contrast to the
connective synthesis, which is a synthesis of the actual and of the present in
time, the disjunctive synthesis is a synthesis of the virtual and of the past as
such in time. Here the concept of the virtual, adopted from Bergson, must be
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distinguished from the concept of the possible, and in three ways. These
three distinctions concern the role of the possible within what, in Difference
and Repetition, Deleuze calls representation. According to Deleuze,
representation is the manner in which traditional philosophy from Aristotle
onward attempts to tame difference as such by restraining it within fixed and
enduring limits. This fixed and enduring limitation is the essence of the
concept with which traditional philosophy is concerned. (Deleuze here
emphasizes the etymology of "concept": the con-cept is a holding with and
fixing within.) The four means by which traditional philosophy subordinates
difference are (I) the identity of an undetermined concept; (2) the analogy of
ultimate determinable concepts to one another; (3) the opposition that relates
determinations within the concept; and (4) the resemblance of the
determined object of a concept to the concept itself. 16 The first manner in
which possibility depends upon representation is with respect to opposition.
The possible is opposed to the real within representation as something
conceptually abstracted from and poorer in content than the real. Virtuality
differs from possibility on this point in that, while the virtual and the actual
differ from one another, they are not opposed to one another because they
are both real. The virtuality of a being is its ideality, but this ideality is not a
conceptual abstraction, for it belongs to the being itself. Put scholastically,
the virtual is not an objective distinction but a formal one. 17
The second manner in which possibility depends upon representation is
with respect to resemblance. Possibility is that which comes to be realized in
the real. The possible, insofar as it is open to realization, is the image of the
real, predetermining what can be the case for the real; and realization is a
process of coming to resemble the possible through an exclusive selection
from a closed range of options determined by the possible. In contrast,
virtuality is not possibility but potentiality: the virtuality of a being consists
in its potential to have determinate characteristics, to possess the actual

194
 affections that constitute the being insofar as it is actual. Unlike the possible,
though, this potential does not predetermine the actual. The determinate
affections of an actual being do not preexist in the virtual as they exist in the
actual (though in a sense the actual determinations are in the virtual prior to
their incarnation in the actual, in a manner to be explained below). The
determinations do not preexist in the actual because, although the virtual is
real, it does not exist. The virtuality of a being is not a closed range of
possible characteristics from which realization must select, but an open field
of potential characteristics which is produced along with and at the same
time as the actual in the course of actualization. The actual does not resemble
the virtual, for the virtuality of an actual being itself comes to be as what it is
at the same time as the actual being comes to be actual. "It is difference that
is primary in the process of actualization - the difference between the virtual
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from which we begin and the actuals at which we arrive, and also the
difference between the complementary lines according to which actual-
ization takes place. In short, the characteristic of virtuality is to exist in such
a way that it is actualized by being differentiated and is forced to differen-
tiate itself, to create its lines of differentiation in order to be actualized." 1'
The third manner in which possibility belongs to representation is with
respect to identity. Possibility "refers to the form of identity in the concept" 1"
- that is, what is possible for a being is determined according to the concept
of the being, which constitutes the selfsameness of the being in question. In
contrast, the virtual "designates a pure multiplicity in the Idea which
radically excludes the identical as a prior condition."111 The determinacy of
the virtual, of a being's potentiality, is not constituted in terms of identity or
selfsameness. This means that virtuality and actuality cannot be understood
in terms of the Aristotelian distinction between potentiality and actuality. For
Aristotle, the potential of a material being, which is attributed to the matter
of the being, is a determinate potential only in reference to the form which
informs it. And this form is, for Aristotle, that part of a material being which
is selfsame in itself and forces the matter of the being within fixed and
enduring limits. It is only insofar as the selfsame form of a material being
has seized upon the matter and informed it that the matter comes to have a
determinate potential. For Deleuze, Aristotelian form is the concept within
which Aristotle seeks to domesticate difference; and since Aristotelian
potential is understood in terms of form, it cannot be what De leuze means by
virtuality .11 However, this does not mean that the virtual lacks all
determinacy - it is determinate, but the determinacy proper to the virtual is
not to be understood in terms of identity, in terms of fixed and enduring
limits.
At the same time that the connective synthesis produces a human being in
its actuality, the disjunctive synthesis produces a human being in its

195
 virtuality. For De leuze and Guattari, the body without organs is produced in
the disjunctive synthesis as the virtuality of an individual human being,
her/his own potentiality, at the same time as her/his affections are produced
as her/his own actuality. Like the organs that constitute an individual human
being as actual, the body without organs of an individual human being is the
product of a passive synthesis in which the pure past in time of that human
being is produced. "The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless
it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective
synthesis, as the identity of the producing and the product ... The body
without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what
remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing
whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the
body without an image." 22 Recall that in the connective synthesis two or
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more elements are contracted and a new being of a different kind is drawn
off in the contraction. The contracted elements, prior to their contraction, are
themselves present beings with determinate affections, capacities to act and
to be acted upon. In being contracted, the elements reach a point of fatigue in
which their contractions are separated from the contemplations which
maintain them as what they are. Certain of the active and passive powers of
the contracted elements are selected and subordinated within the being
produced in the contraction. What of the other powers of the elements? They
are not annihilated, but instead are neutralized or deactualized. They become
what the contracted elements could have done or suffered but can no longer.
Moreover, the contraction brings powers that the contracted elements
possessed but could not have actually exercised prior to their contraction into
actuality as powers subordinate to the being produced in the contraction.
Previously actual powers are neutralized or deactualized, and previously
neutral powers are actualized. To return once more to the example of
sedimentation: when the layers of sediment are compressed into a layer of
rock, the individual layers of sediment "lose" a certain suppleness they
possessed as layers of muck and "gain" the capacity to resist the force of
gravity and so support what is placed upon them.
The disjunctive synthesis produces the body without organs, the neutral,
open field of potential powers of an individual human being, as the pure past
of the living present produced in the connective synthesis. These two
syntheses necessarily occur at once, for the living present that passes would
not pass were it not already past, and the pure past would never be consti-
tuted were not a living present being constituted. This means that the body
without organs is contemporaneous with the actual human being that it was.
Moreover, the body without organs coexists with the actual human being at
each and every moment in its constitution. The body without organs is the
whole of the potential powers of an individual human being that s/he has

196
 possessed at some time in the past of that human being. This whole enfolds
within itself the powers that have been neutralized and actualized in the
course of all the contractions that have produced the present actual human
being. The coexistence of the body without organs with the actual human
being does not mean that the body without organs exists. Only actual beings
exist. Rather, the body without organs "insists with the former present, [and]
it consists with the new or present present."'' The virtuality of a real human
being inheres in its actuality without itself existing. Present beings pass away
and come forth within the pure past, but this pure past does not itself come
forth or pass away. Instead, it coexists along with the presents coming to be
and passing away. But this means that, although the body without organs of
an individual human being never itself exists, it is nevertheless, as the pure
past, preexistent. "It's not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made,
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although in certain respects it is preexistent."'' Finally, the body without

organs coexists with the actual human being because the body without
organs coexists with itself. It is in this coexistence of the body without
organs with itself that the body without organs finds its proper determinacy.
"The present can be the most contracted degree of the past which coexists
with it only if the past first coexists with itself in an infinity of diverse
degrees of relaxation and contraction at an infinity of levels ... "'~ The body
without organs is determined in its coexistence with itself through the
reciprocal determinations within and between its levels - the differential
relations between the different kinds of potential powers of an individual
human being and between the degrees of variety of the relations between
potential powers - and the complete determination that relaxes or contracts
the levels - the distribution of singular and regular points and the conver-
gence and/or divergence of series that form around the singular points. The
production of the body without organs in time in the disjunctive synthesis
consists in its differentiation, in which its levels and degrees are determined
and its singular points distributed. For Deleuze and Guattari, this constitutes
a production of recording in which the production of production that takes
place in the connective synthesis is retained in the form of a pure memory.
'The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a
surface for the recording of the entire process of production of desire, so that
desiring-machines seem to emanate from it ... Machines attach themselves
to the body without organs as so many points of disjunction, between which
an entire network of new syntheses is now woven, marking the surface off
into co-ordinates, like a grid."'" In the differentiation of the virtual content of
the body without organs, there is distributed disjunctively the whole of the
potential powers of all the elements the contraction of which went into the
constitution of an actual human being. This disjunctive distribution consti-
tutes her/his own history, a history that is purely past.

197
 The connective synthesis is a synthesis of the present in time, referring to
a simultaneous disjunctive synthesis of the pure past in time. That the pure
past that is the body without organs is produced in time, just as the living
present that is the actual human being with its various organs in time,
suggests that there is a third synthesis which produces a third time. Deleuze
and Guattari call this third synthesis the conjunctive synthesis, in which the
future as such is produced. To understand what occurs in this third synthesis,
it must first be recalled that the question of this paper - "So what is this
BwO?"- is posed by Deleuze and Guattari within a section of A Thousand
Plateaus entitled "How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?"
For Deleuze and Guattari, the production of the body without organs is a
problem to be solved. But this raises the question: Why would one want to
make a body without organs for oneself? What is the problem that emerges
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along with the problem of how to make a body without organs?

It was noted above that the virtuality of the body without organs had to be
distinguished from the possibility that depends upon a structure of represen-
tation which seeks to tame difference as such. Representation involves the
establishing and maintaining of concepts, fixed and enduring limits within
which difference is constrained and domesticated. For Deleuze and Guattari,
these representational concepts are at work as much in the world of action as
in philosophical discourse. This suggests that, to the extent that Deleuze and
Guattari are concerned with the problem of the production of the body
without organs, they are also concerned with overcoming the subordination
of difference to the concept and its identity and allowing difference as such
to develop itself. Deleuze and Guattari indicate that this is so when they
write, "We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the
opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the
organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of
the organs called the organism." 27 The organism is an individual human
being insofar as it is representationally structured in its affections, "a
phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order
to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions,
bonds, dominant and hierarchical organizations, organized transcendences." 2"
The organization of the organism consists in the twofold imposition of a
good sense which hierarchically distributes the organs that constitute the
actual human being and a common sense which posits a Self that is the
single origin of the organs and a selfsame object toward which the organs are
coordinated. Good sense arrays the organs in terms of analogy, while
common sense arrays them in terms of identity. "[W]hile common sense is
the norm of identity from the point of view of the pure Self and the form of
the unspecified object which corresponds to it, good sense is the norm of
distribution from the point of view of the empirical selves and the objects

198
 qualified as this or that kind of thing (which is why it is considered to be
universally distributed). Good sense determines the contribution of the
faculties in each case, while common sense contributes the form of the
Same."~" The organism is opposed to the body without organs in that the
organization that constitutes the organism imposes upon the body without
organs a representational structure that the body without organs as such docs
not possess. It imposes fixed and enduring limits upon the open field of the
body without organs, attempting to ensure that the pure past will be a pure
past that allows the conservation of the present. In short, the organization of
the organism attempts to convert the virtuality of the body without organs
into the possibility of the organism. But while the organism is opposed to the
body without organs in that it attempts to bound off that which is by its
nature open, the organism is derivative of the body without organs in that in
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organizing the organs - organs produced in a connective synthesis that

presupposes a disjunctive synthesis of the body without organs - the
organism presupposes the open field upon which it attempts to set bounds in
a secondary motion. "[T]he BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions,
sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an
organism ... occur.""' The possible of the organism is the outcome of an
artificial bounding of the virtual in terms of what is presently actual. "If the
real is said to resemble the possible, is this not in fact because the real was
expected to come about by its own means, to 'project backward' a fictitious
image of it, and to claim that it was possible at any time, before it happened?
In fact, it is not the real that resembles the possible, it is the possible that
resembles the real, because it has been abstracted from the real once made,
arbitrarily extracted from the real like a sterile double.'''~
The body without organs is opposed to the organism, then, because it is in
and through the production of the body without organs that an individual
human being can escape the organization of the organs that is the organism.
The body without organs forms the problem for which the imperative
question is, "How do I constitute myself in a manner that will exclude the
organism?" Deleuze and Guattari do not regard themselves as speaking
metaphorically in calling the body without organs a problem: the virtual
aspect of a being is its ideal aspect, and Ideas are essentially problems.
Following the mathematician Albert Lautman, Deleuze ascribes three aspects
to the problem: "its difference in kind from solutions; its transcendence in
relation to the solutions that it engenders on the basis of its own determinant
conditions; and its immanence in the solutions which cover it, the problem
being the better resolved the more it is determined."'~ These are the very
characteristics of the body without organs as the virtual aspect of an
individual human being produced in the disjunctive synthesis. The body
without organs, as virtual, differs in kind from the actual human being and its

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 organs, which are a solution; the body without organs transcends the actual
human being in being the open, differentiated virtual field which, as
completely determined, specifies its conditions of solution; and the body
without organs is immanent in the actual human being which solves the
problem the question poses. But which question? Which are the appropriate
questions? For Deleuze and Guattari, the appropriate questions are those
which will set difference as such into play and let it remain in play. Such
questions pose true problems, in that such problems allow for solutions that
do not close off and cover over the problems. True problems set difference
as such into play in that the problems remain problems even in their
solutions, solutions which must be repeated anew each time.
What does this mean? For Deleuze and Guattari, representational concepts
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are always general concepts, in that the objects which are determined by a
representational concept are particulars that are, with respect to the concept
that determines them, equal to one another and exchangeable for one another.
In relation to the representational concept, the distinctions that individuate the
particulars that are its objects are a matter of indifference, except insofar as
such individuating factors obstruct the conceptual determination of the object.
To escape the organization of the organs that is the organism is to escape being
an object of determination by the representational concept "human being,"
which means that the process of desiring-production by which one effects such
an escape is not a process of particularization, but rather a process of individu-
ation or singularization. "Generality, as generality of the particular, thus stands
opposed to repetition as universality of the singular."" In posing the question
"How do I constitute myself in a manner that will exclude the organism?" one
poses a problem that, in its ideality, is a universal (and not something general)
the solution for which is singular (and not particular). Hence the emphasis in
the preceding pages on the individual human being: to solve the problem of
excluding the organism from oneself is to make oneself a singular being, to
individuate oneself as such and not insofar as one is a human being. So in
order to effect such singularity, each individual human being must discover its
own solution to this problem. No one can stand in for- i.e. represent- another
in this regard. Thus the question of how to escape the organism is the question
that poses the problem of making oneself a body without organs that makes the
question of such an escape resolvable; and the answer that resolves this
question is, as a singular solution that individuates the questioner, an answer
for oneself and for oneself alone. In contrast, to the extent that the constitution
of the organism expresses a question-problem complex, it involves the posing
of a false problem, a problem which gives the appearance of being ready-
made and exhausted in the solution that is the constitution of the organism.
Insofar as representation privileges particularity over singularity, it gives a
bad solution to a false problem.

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 But how is the true problem of the body without organs solved? It is
solved in the conjunctive syntheses, in which the future as such is produced
in the production of oneself as a singular being. For Deleuze and Guattari,
that which is singular is singular, not only retrospectively, but also prospec-
tively. That which is singular is that which is new, and new not only once
(with respect to past beings) but for all time (and so with respect to future
beings as well). This means that the solution to the problem of escaping
representation must, in their view, be a solution which escapes not only past
forms of representation but also any future forms that may arise. Such a
solution is produced in the conjunctive synthesis. In contrast to the
production of the body without organs in the disjunctive synthesis, which is a
differentiation of the virtual content of the problem that is the body without
organs, the conjunctive synthesis is a differentiation, an actualization of the
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body without organs that solves the problem.' 4 The conjunctive synthesis
consists in an oscillation between the virtual and the actual in which the
differentiated body without organs is differentiated, incarnated in the
constellation of actualized organs which an individual human being develops
in its individuation of itself in order to escape the bounds of the organism.
The conjunctive synthesis produces the singular human being - more
precisely, the singular being that was human- as a subject and the future as
such as the final element in a pure order of time, a formal and empty order
directed from the past through the present toward the future.
One begins with the past by constituting for oneself a body without organs
which escapes the bounds set by the organization of one's organism. Here
lies a danger: one may seek to produce the body without organs simply by
demolishing the organism. But this is simply to disable oneself. "You don't
reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is
why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the
beginning: they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking
for the point at which they patiently and momentarily dismantle the organi-
zation of the organs we call the organism."'~ One destroys one's present
affections in such a way that one produces the potential for fewer and weaker
affections than one possessed before. This is indeed the production of a body
without organs, but it is an empty body without organs from which only
reactive affections can be actualized. To produce a body without organs from
which as many active affections and as few reactive affections as possible
can be actualized - a full body without organs - one is to take advantage of
the affections one possesses in virtue of one's organization, to turn one's
powers of acting and suffering back against themselves such that there takes
place a de-differentiation of one's affections that produces a potential for
active affections. This is necessarily (and literally so) a matter of experimen-
tation, or trial and error. It is not simply a matter of reviving or duplicating

201
 the past, even though one is producing a body without organs that is, by its
nature as virtual, a pure past. For one is attempting here to produce a
potential that exceeds the bounds of a present-oriented possibility, since only
such a potential can lead to the singularization of oneself. "In effect, there is
always a time at which the imagined act is supposed 'too big for me.' This
defines a priori the past or the before. It matters little whether or not the
event itself occurs, or whether the act has been performed or not: past,
present, and future are not distributed according to this empirical criterion."'•
One does not and cannot have a preconception of what one could do, and so
one should proceed with caution."
Next, one passes through the present, actualizing the potentials one has
produced, transforming oneself by producing new affections, changing what
one can do. "The second time, which relates to the caesura itself, is thus the
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present of metamorphosis, a becoming-equal to the act and a doubling of the

self, and the projection of an ideal self in the image of the act."'" Since the
aim is to produce a being that is new once and for all, what is produced in
this actualization is selected from the body without organs according to the
criterion of what Deleuze calls the eternal return. "The selective character of
eternal return appears clearly in Nietzsche's idea: it is not the Whole, the
Same, or the prior identity in general which returns .... Only the extreme, the
excessive, returns; that which passes into something else and becomes
identical. That is why the eternal return is said only ... of the pure intensities
of that Will [to power] which are like mobile individuating factors unwilling
to allow themselves to be contained within the factitious limits of this or that
individual, this or that Self."'" The function of the eternal return in the
connective synthesis is to act as the criterion of the future, to select from the
potential differences provided by the body without organs only those differ-
ences which, in being actualized, result in a singular being, a being that is
eternally new. It selects from the potentials offered in the body without
organs those which dismantle the organism, not only now but for all time. It
selects from the open field of potential affections those which are active and
are only active, excluding those which could allow the return of the
structuring of the affections characteristic of the organization of the
organism. "[W]hat is produced, the absolutely new itself, is in turn nothing
but repetition, the third repetition, this time by excess, the repetition of the
future as eternal return .... Eternal return affects only the new, what is
produced under the condition of default and by the intermediary of metamor-
phosis. However, it causes neither the condition nor the agent to return ... " 40
Deleuze and Guattari call the one who is produced in this orientation toward
the future a subject. The subject is constituted by the interplay of the active
affections s/he selects for her/himself in her/his orientation toward the future.
"In a word, the opposition of the forces of attraction and repulsion produces

202
 an open series of intensive elements, all of them positive, that are never an
expression of the final equilibrium of the system, but consist, rather, of an
unlimited number of stationary, metastable states through which a subject
passes .... This subject is not itself at the center ... but [is] on the periphery,
with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined by the states through
which it passes." 41 Who one is consists here in the path traced out by the
passage from one to another of the active affections in their exercise, which
path forms an open series without fixed identity.
But there is a second reason for caution here, another danger
corresponding to a second kind of body without organs to be avoided. For
while it is the aim of the process of desiring-production to produce a future
that excludes the organism, this is not to be done through homogenization of
oneself. This runs counter to the intention of posing the problem of the body
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without organs, which is to set difference as such into play, resulting in an

open-ended differenciation and re-differenciation. If one proceeds by
homogenization, then - instead of dismantling the structure of the organism
by destroying the organism and producing a human being with reactive
affections (by way of the empty body without organs) or by escaping the
organism and producing a singular being defined in terms of an open system
of active affections (by way of the full body without organs) - one
dismantles the organism by making one affection take the place of all the
others, and which tends toward the erasure of any difference at all. The field
of potential corresponding to this manner of proceeding is the cancerous
body without organs; and the homogenized individual thus produced is, for
Deleuze and Guattari, worse than the organized human being}l
To conclude: the body without organs is something that is produced by an
individual human being insofar as s/he engages in desiring-production, a
process that is carried out as such when s/he poses for her/himself the
problem of escaping the organization of the organism but is carried out to
some extent at any time. Ontologically speaking, the body without organs is
not the human body conceived either objectively or subjectively, but is rather
the virtuality of an individual human being, an open field of unactualized
potential for acting or being acted upon in determinate ways. Temporally
speaking, it is the pure past in time of an individual human being, the "what
could have been" of that human being, which is opened up to revision in
desiring-production as such. The concept of the body without organs thus
has a central place in Deleuze and Guattari's account of repetition for itself.
For as the virtual aspect of a being is the turning-point in the occurrence of
its repetition as such, so the body without organs is the turning point of
desiring-production undergone by an individual human being. It is that
toward which an individual human being moves in deactualizing the
affections s/he possesses in virtue of having been subjected to organization;

203
 and it is that from which s/he returns in actualizing the potential affections
s/he selects in order to bring about an open system of affections that are only
active. Since the body without organs functions as the turning-point of
desiring-production as such, the problem to be solved in a manner that sets
difference as such into play, which body without organs one produces is a
crucial matter for one who seeks to be a singular being. But since such
production is directed toward the future as such, toward a future that selects
what is new and therefore unknown, which body without organs one will
produce is always to some extent unforeseeable. Desiring-production is
therefore fraught with ineliminable risk, for the only way to determine which
body without organs one will produce, which problem one will pose for
oneself by seeking to escape the organism, is by producing it. "How can we
fabricate a BwO for ourselves without it being the cancerous BwO of a
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fascist inside us, or the empty BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or

hypochondriac? ... It is a struggle, and as such is never sufficiently clear."•'
Northwestern University

Bibliography
Deleuze, Gilles, Bergsoni.Hn, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. (New York:
Zone Books. 1988).
- , Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994).
- , The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. (New York: Columbia
University Press. 1990).
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thou.mnd Plateaus, Trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. 1987).
-,Ami-Oedipus, Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
- , What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994).
Husser!, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction ro Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion
Cairns. (Dordrecht: Maninus Nijhoff, 1960).
Massumi, Brian, A User's Guide to "Capitalism and Schizophrenia": Deriations from Deleuze
and Guattari. (Cambridge, Mass.: Swerve Editions-MIT Press, 1992).

References
I. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?. trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 2.
2. Ibid., 5.
3. Ibid., 16.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), !50.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and
Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1983). 4.
6. Ibid., 5.
7. Ibid.. 36.
8. On this point Deleuze and Guattari are in accord with Husser!. "In any case, anything built
by activity necessarily presupposes. as the lowest level, a passivity that gives something

204
 beforehand: and, when we trace anything built actively, we run into constitution by passive
generation. The 'ready-made' object that confronts us in life as an existent mere physical
thing (when we disregard all the 'spiritual' or 'cultural' characteristics that make it
knowable as, for example, a hammer, a table, an aesthetic creation) is given with the
originality of the 'it itself, in the synthesis of a passive experience. As such a thing, it is
given beforehand to 'spiritual' activities, which begin with active grasping" (Edmund
Husser!, Cartesian Medillltions: An lmroduction to Phenollll'twlo!(.\', trans. Dorion Cairns
(Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960). 78). But unlike Husser!, Deleuze and Guattari refuse
to represent the connective synthesis, the passive genesis of the actual, as something to be
attributed to a transcendental ego. Such an attribution is an error, since it is the result of
conceiving the process that produces affections in the image of the affections it produces.
Husser! '"provides himself with a ready-made form of common sense, conceives of the
transcendental as the Person or Ego, and fails to distinguish between x as the form of
produced identification and the quite different x. that is, the productive nonsense which
animates the ideal game and the impersonal transcendental field" (Gilles Deleut.e, Tht'
Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columhia University
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Press,l990),116).
9. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columhia
University Press, 1994), 69-74.
10. Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to '"Capitalism and Schizophrenia": Dt'1'iatio11s from
Deler•ze and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass.: Swerve Editions- MIT Press, 1992), 4!!.
II. De leuze, Difference and Repetition, 73.
12. De leuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 6.
13. De leuze, Difference and Repetition. 75.
14. Ibid., 76.
15. Ibid., 77.
16. Ibid., 29.
17. Gilles De leuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hahberjam (New York:
Zone Books, 1988), 96.
18. Ibid., 97.
19. De leuze, Difference and Repetition, 211.
20. Ibid., 211-212.
21. Deleuze discusses Aristotelian metaphysics as a mode of what he calls '"organic" or "finite
representation" in Difference and Repetition, 30-35. I use "domesticate" advisedly in
speaking of the relation of Aristotelian representation to difference. Aristotle argues in De
Gene ratione et Corruptione that the nature of prime matter is determined. not hy form, hut
hy the contrarieties of hot versus cold and dry versus moist. Prime matter has its own
nature independent of substantial form, a nature that is tamed to the extent that prime
matter is taken over hy a substantial form and so becomes the matter of a substance.
Aristotle does not regard such domestication as irrevocable, though: matter accounts not
only for the continuity of change (insofar as it is the substratum of substantial change) but
also for its perpetuity (insofar as, in escaping the control of its substantial form, it is the
cause of the passing away of the substance).
22. De leuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 8.
23. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. 82.
24. Deleuze and Guauari, A Thousand Plateaus, 149.
25. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 83.
26. De leuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. 11-12.
27. De leuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 158.
28. Ibid., 159.
29. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 133-134.
30. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 159.
31. De leuze, Bergson ism, 98.

205
 32. De leuze, Difference and Rep<'tition, 178-179.
33. Ibid., I.
34. Ibid.. 207.
35. Dcleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 160-161.
36. De leuze, Difference and Repetition, 89.
37. Dcleuzc and Guattari enumerate some criteria for such experimentation in A Tlwu.mnd
Plateaus, 160-161.
38. De leuze, Difference and Repetition, 89.
39. Ibid.. 41.
40. Ibid., 90.
41. De leuze ami Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 19-20.
42. Deleuze and Guattari discuss the cancerous body without organs in A Thousand Plateaus,
162-163.
43. Deleuzc and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 163.
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PIO COLONNELLO
The Philosophy of Jose Gaos
Translated from Italian by Peter Cocozzella
Ed. by Myra Moss
Introduction by Giovanni Gullace
Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA 1997. VI,l28 pp.
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has painstakingly translated this ground-breaking study from
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