“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through a window.”
(Gilles Deleuze)
"There is a recognizable conflict between the desiring machines and the body without organs.
The body without organs can no longer tolerate any machine connections, any machine production, any machine noise."
(Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus)
"The "body without organs"—a paradigm developed by the French authorial duo, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari—stands widely recognized as a counterpoint to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.
It is not about the absence of essential organs but rather a construct defined by order, signification, and subjectivity. These core concepts—order, signification, and subjectivity—also play pivotal roles in gender studies The body without organs does not concern itself with organs per se.
Deleuze and Guattari challenged the "sacred cows" of psychoanalysis, medicine, and philosophy, confronting prematurely determined "facts," causations, and processes with their complex—initially disorienting but ultimately coherent—functional understanding, shaking the foundations of the natural sciences. To illustrate, the biological-medical body is divided into functional units: the brain, the digestive system, the reproductive system, the musculoskeletal system, etc. Each organ has a specific function from which it cannot deviate. But wait—every organ? The brain/head is primarily associated with individual personality—it is where the "I" resides. It is the control center, the supreme governing entity, and is thus not considered a mere body organ. In contrast, the rest of the biological body is the body per se, described as submissive matter—just a carrier without influence on personality. This body comprises many small units directed by the brain. This already suggests the hierarchical organization of the biological body—the separation of mind and body, culture and nature.
This structuring also reflects societal organization, such as the state and its "organs" (legislative, executive, judicial). Do they not symbolically represent the spirit of a nation, with the body politic representing the rest of the organs?
In her work, Nikolina Zunec humorously and often sarcastically exaggerates the Deleuze-Guattari paradigm. Her "organ figures," digitally generated on a computer, partially hand-altered, and later printed, appear as independent life forms uninterested in returning to their assigned roles in the collective. Instead, they acquire a "head"—a will of their own—that fluctuates between anarchistic behavior and absurdity, leaving viewers puzzled yet amused."
January 2022