Body and Organism

Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Spinozian imagination produced the following question: “how do you make yourself a body without organs?” Since this, in their words, is not a notion, but a “set of practices,” their writing on the “body without organs” takes the shape of presenting and discussing diverse practices, within which desirE works towards reaching or even transgressing an inaccessible limit. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s contribution leads us to what is the most important problem concerning the body and its “definition.” What they talk about is the “stratum” of organism. The difference between American and European cinema, as articulated by Deleuze, constitutes a framework, within which we can characterise different reactions to images of violence, although there remain certain difficulties in explaining these differences. Finally, the article deals with the problem of the relationship between the organism and the body in view of the notoriously violent scene in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002).

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!