One of the terms that tend to bother and elude readers of Deleuze is the Body Without Organs (BwO). And in a study point (pg. 88) of Logic of Sense I came across a section that led to a kind of epiphany that involves suddenly starting to feel what you already know in the sense of what Zizek referred to (in reference to Rumsfeld (as the unknown known. And it was important to the extent that it crystallized for me how Deleuze chose to be approached and why he, along with other French thinkers, chose to engage in free indirect discourse which I’ll explain below. Anyway:
“To these values a glorious body corresponds, being a new dimension of the schizophrenic body, an organism without parts which operates entirely by insufflation , respiration, evaporation, and fluid transmission (the superior body or body without organs of Antonin Artaud.) Undoubtedly, this characterization of the active procedure, in opposition to the procedure of passion, appears initially insufficient: fluids, in fact, do not seem less harmful than fragments.”
Being as focused on Deleuze, a philosopher, as we tend to be, it gets easy to forget that he actually copped the concept from Artaud (a writer who was clearly trying to convey a schizophrenic experience (and assimilated it to the point that he could write as poetically about it as he did above. Note, for instance, the last line:
“….fluids, in fact, do not seem less harmful than fragments.”
It’s as if Deleuze just threw the line in because it seemed pretty and fitted in with the rest of the quote. And the important thing to understand here is that the BwO was conceived by Artaud, a writer, as a literary concept to be felt as compared to a philosophical concept which is meant to be known or understood. And I’m not sure Deleuze ever departed from that original sense of it. He used it because it sounded cool and inspired a lot of evanescent and oblique (that which glances the corner of the eye (systems of meaning.
To engage in the futile effort of zeroing in on an elusive target: this is why we have to consider any attempt to “truly” explain the BwO as suspect. Since it started (and may well have remained in the hands of Deleuze (as a creative expression meant to suggest a schizophrenic state, there is no reason to believe that the BwO is something that was ever meant to be truly understood. Beyond that, any meaning extracted from it is pretty much like that of a dream or abstract art: it comes from the discourse that goes on around it.
Therefore, the question to be asked about the BwO is not so much what it actually means; but, rather, how it feels. You mainly have to ask how it feels to you and play those feelings against how it seems to feel to Deleuze as well as Artaud. And the important thing to take from this is that we are dealing with a philosophy that has engaged in the deconstruction of stealing the privilege of objective presence in philosophy and demarginalized the role of feel and sense. Hence, the book that was one of Deleuze’s first attempts to write his own philosophy: Logic of Sense.
And I’m quite sure if we dug deeper into Deleuze, we would also find points at which he sought to steal the privilege from feel and sense.
He is, after all, the suspect.