Training axiom – destroy the instinctive forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces.
(mp 155)

The Body without Organs, or BwO, is the key concept introduced in Plateau #6 ("November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?") of A Thousand Plateaus ("mp") and also in Anti-Oedipus ("ao"), both by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It is probably as close to a serious discussion of the soul as you are ever going to find in postmodernist literature; it is also promoted as a conceptual tool to understand masochism.

The Body without Organs is a pure living body. It is the essence of life, in a manner of speaking. The Body without Organs is the field in which intensity plays. "The BwO is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances and subjectifications as a whole." (mp 151) Human history is full of both successful and disastrous attempts at creating Bodies without Organs: Masochism is the creation of a Body without Organs, as is anorexia nervosa; but so is Tao, so is Spinoza's Amor Dei and Nietzsche's amor fati.

In a way, "Body without Organs" is a misnomer. The goal in constructing a Body without Organs is not to do away with the organs; it is to do away with "organism," the received genetic hegemony of biological organization. The goal is not to end the biotic process, but to become more than biological, to provide yourself with that essence which Nature has so cruelly and stupidly neglected. Death, on the other hand, would negate any possibility of such a principle; it would be the reduction of the person to a bunch of organs without a "body" – without an organizing principle. In death, it doesn't matter what's where. In life, what's where matters more than it ever could in Nature.

However, because the Body without Organs is an abstraction, whose essence or definition will vary from person to person or from moment to moment, it must be manufactured. This manufacturing is a two-step process. First, the Body without Organs as a field, as an abstraction, must be defined; next, something must happen on it, not like a canvas but like a plane (the "plane of consistency") – like a matrix of out-of-phase that gains reality in proportion to the intensity which plays upon it.

For each type of BwO, we must ask: (1) What type is it, how is it fabricated, by what procedures and means (predetermining what will come to pass)? (2) What are its modes, what comes to pass, and with what variants and what surprises, what is unexpected and what expected?

Nature has endowed the human being with nothing absolute. Finding something absolute constitutes a Body without Organs. That absolute always takes the form of a zero (from William S. Burrough's "Cold" to the Taoist's wu-wei). The Body without Organs is a continuum of pure potentiality in which actuality manifests.

The kind of actuality that can manifest from this potentiality depends on the manner in which the BwO was constituted. For example, the masochist constitutes his BwO according to a harsh program whereby the only intensity it knows is pain. He (or she) becomes a map through which pain-intensity ripples. It isn't the case that he likes pain per se; rather, he likes being a Body without Organs, and the pain is the price he's willing to pay to achieve that. The troubadour constitutes his BwO according to a program of emotional focus which carries him beyond the illegal ("Marriage should not be a deterrent to love") and into the realm of blasphemy ("My love for you is worth the fires of Hell," etc.); he (and his lover, together) becomes a universe inhabited by love. The Taoist constitutes her BwO according to a program of breathing exercises and contemplation. She becomes an open sky through which the winds of teh (power/virtue) blow.

While psychoanalysis makes everything a matter of interpretation, particularly the interpretation of fantasy, the Body without Organs is a field of experimentation. So what is it that's being experimented with? Like I said, intensity, but what does that mean in this context? Desire.

Desire is something we're all familiar with. While doctrines like Stoicism and Buddhism aim to eliminate desire, the manufacture of the BwO requires rather that desire be intensified, heightened as far as it'll go, brought to bear like a laser beam. Desire is "a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it." (mp 154) Desire is not lack of pleasure or satisfaction, and does not need such fulfillment to be validated. That's exactly where Stoicism and Buddhism and modern psychoanalysis go wrong. This is the lesson the masochist teaches us: pain "is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure." (mp 155) Courtly love is perhaps a better example: the love is never consummated, it is better for never being consummated; the desire of love washes away the "desire" for intercourse.

Desire is a deterritorialization. It takes you away from yourself; it carries you away, into unfamiliar territory of the soul. One loses oneself in desire. Pleasure is the end of desire because it is a reterritorialization. "But the question is precisely whether it is necessary to find oneself." (mp 156) After all, the key is to obliterate subjectivity, to make oneself a force rather than a "person" in the conventional sense.

No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; instead, there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities. . . . There is no longer a Self that feels, acts, and recalls; there is "a glowing fog, a dark yellow mist" that has affects and experiences movements, speeds. (mp 162)

Becoming a BwO means becoming a living event. "[I]t is that which one desires and by which one desires." (165) That means that we actually construct the BwO all the time. The key, however, is to immerse oneself in this process, to lose oneself in desire — but in such a way that neither does one becomes a slave to one's object of desire (like to drugs), nor is one's life (and therefore the BwO) put at risk (like the ravages of self-mutilation or anorexia). After all, there isn't the need to go to these lengths. You can get drunk on water if you want to. The BwO is always with you. It's only a matter of attitude.

At any rate, you have one (or several). It's not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any rate, you make one, you can't desire without making one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don't. (mp 149)