ABSTRACT
What is the body without organs, and what, if anything, is its theological significance? Gilles Deleuze observes that ‘The judgment of God, the system of the judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of He who makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism’,2 and that, because this is so, ‘the way to escape judgment is to make yourself a body without organs, to find your body without organs’.3 The body without organs, in other words, diverges from the body-as-organism in such a way as to undo the judgement of God and the theological system. While, at first reading, these claims may be incomprehensible, they yield their sense when situated in the context of Deleuze’s critique, in The Logic of Sense, of ‘the order of God’4 – an order within which the self-identical nature of God authorises the analogous identities or integrities of language, subject and body. Against this divine order, Deleuze affirms an order of the Antichrist (LS, p. 292), an order expressive not of identity but of difference as such, and in so doing undoes the order of God and the judgement on which it is based and which it in turn enforces. In this essay, then, I will argue that the body without organs – the BwO – emerges out of the order of the Antichrist as a vital antitheological trope, challenging the divine order and expressing the creative power of pure affirmation.
