Reflections of the Indian Philosophy in Deleuze’s ‘Body without Organs’
I. Introduction – Brian Massumi rightly spells out the Deleuzian philosophy when he calls it ‘self-problematizing’; always confronting the reader with the question of what it is all about, and what to do with it. It challenges the reader to do something with it. It is pragmatic, not dogmatic. Pierre Hadot attributes this distinction between discourse about philosophy and philosophy itself to Stoics: ‘For the Stoics, the parts of philosophy - physics, ethics, and logic - were not, in fact, parts of philosophy itself, but rather parts of philosophical discourse... philosophy itself... is no longer a theory divided into parts, but a unitary act, which consist in living …show more content…
It is the most central to their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia, though Deleuze uses it decades prior, and the phrase comes from a radio play by Antonin Artaud. In brief, the body without organs (or BwO) is best understood as their way of conceptually emphasizing dimensions of embodiment beyond organization, or in other words of looking at how different kinds of bodies become organized, rather than thinking of them as static, already- organized …show more content…
And eventually, with Guattari, he describes the BwO as ‘an egg’, a substance ‘crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings’. (Deleuze: Anti-Oedipus,21) This has to be understood in relation to how science and philosophy have traditionally conceived of the body. In anatomy, the privilege has always been on the normal, healthy, functional organ, to be
I. Introduction – Brian Massumi rightly spells out the Deleuzian philosophy when he calls it ‘self-problematizing’; always confronting the reader with the question of what it is all about, and what to do with it. It challenges the reader to do something with it. It is pragmatic, not dogmatic. Pierre Hadot attributes this distinction between discourse about philosophy and philosophy itself to Stoics: ‘For the Stoics, the parts of philosophy - physics, ethics, and logic - were not, in fact, parts of philosophy itself, but rather parts of philosophical discourse... philosophy itself... is no longer a theory divided into parts, but a unitary act, which consist in living …show more content…
It is the most central to their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia, though Deleuze uses it decades prior, and the phrase comes from a radio play by Antonin Artaud. In brief, the body without organs (or BwO) is best understood as their way of conceptually emphasizing dimensions of embodiment beyond organization, or in other words of looking at how different kinds of bodies become organized, rather than thinking of them as static, already- organized …show more content…
And eventually, with Guattari, he describes the BwO as ‘an egg’, a substance ‘crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings’. (Deleuze: Anti-Oedipus,21) This has to be understood in relation to how science and philosophy have traditionally conceived of the body. In anatomy, the privilege has always been on the normal, healthy, functional organ, to be