Anonymous User asked: michael help i made a huge mistake (got a political science degree) and now people approach me in the street and ask me to explain deleuze and guattari. you're the college professorest guy i know. what the heck is a body without organs. xoxo, your biggest fan. thank you.
i thought about this one for a long time because it is a little trickier than the last one despite the overlap and i want to be helpful and clear. some of my examples are going to focus on sex, also, just because i think it's illustrative, but i'm not going to be terribly explicit. just a heads-up if reading about that sort of thing can be difficult for you!
so, like the rhizome, the body without organs (BwO) is an image or metaphor used by Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) to suggest not a literal thing in the world but a certain mode of looking at/thinking about/apprehending the world and stuff in it. it is trickier because the form it describes, however, ends up seeming more obscure (rather than the straightforward structural bent of the rhizome) because it's a bit more wiggly overall in terms of what it does/can describe. a clearing gesture i can make right now is that, like the rhizome, the BwO is not necessarily good or bad, but something that can contribute to good or bad outcomes. but the question still stands: what the hell is it?
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