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Reflections of Indian Philosophy in Deleuze's ‘Body without Organs’

Article  in  Deleuze and Guattari Studies · February 2018

DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2018.0293

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November 21, 2017 Time: 04:16pm dlgs.2018.0293.tex

Reflections of Indian Philosophy in

Deleuze’s ‘Body without Organs’

Meenu Gupta Assistant Professor-3, Department of English and

Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India

Abstract
As the title suggests, this paper looks at the Deleuzian concept of
body without organs and compares it with Indian Philosophy. In the
Indian context, the concept of moksha/nirvana comes near to it as
both are practices that aim at liberation; here, ‘liberation’ is never the
awaited end of the process but the process itself. The traditional western
substantialism rests on things whereas Deleuze, like Indian Philosophy,
celebrates ‘experience’ and the ‘incorporeal’. Thus, body without organs
plays a role in individuation. It hints at a journey beyond ‘the self’
which is full of ecstasy or the ananda of the Indian thought system.
The question of Being, which not only is conceptual identification,
is presented in terms of the virtual and the actual. For Deleuze and
Guattari, every actual body has a virtual dimension, a vast reservoir
of potentials, and this is the body without organs. The actual emerges
from it and carries it with it. Further, the plane of immanence is a
field in which concepts are produced. It is neither external to the Self
nor forms an external self or a non-self. It is ‘an absolute outside’,
very much like Brahman. The pragmatics of Deleuzian theory is that it
explains life to be ‘immanence of immanence, absolute immanence’ – an
utter beatitude – which has a Vedantic counterpart where the essential
Brahman is a combination of three attributes – sat (being), chit (mind)
and ananda (bliss). Thus, this paper aims at the interesting comparison
between Deleuzian theory and Indian Philosophy.

Deleuze and Guattari Studies 12.1 (2018): 13–28

DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2018.0293
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs
November 21, 2017 Time: 04:16pm dlgs.2018.0293.tex

14 Meenu Gupta

Keywords: body without organs, immanence, Brahman, plane of

immanence, virtual, actual

I. Introduction
Brian Massumi rightly spells out Deleuzian philosophy when he calls it
‘self-problematizing’; always confronting the reader with the question of
what it is all about, and what to do with it. It challenges the reader to do
something with it. It is pragmatic, not dogmatic. Pierre Hadot attributes
this distinction between discourse about philosophy and philosophy
itself to the Stoics:

For the Stoics, the parts of philosophy – physics, ethics, and logic – were not,
in fact, parts of philosophy itself, but rather parts of philosophical discourse
. . . philosophy itself . . . is no longer a theory divided into parts, but a unitary
act, which consists in living logic, physics, and ethics. (Hadot 1995: 269–70)

In his analysis of the history of philosophy, Hadot concludes

despondently that all modern philosophy is only a discourse. Deleuze
does it by his model of ‘the self’ and his practical advice to the individual
concerning how it should be (un)made: ‘Let’s go further still, we haven’t
found our BwO yet, we haven’t sufficiently dismantled our self’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004b: 167). ‘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’ (166).
Moksha/nirvana is ‘nondesire as well as desire’. Confusing? Sure it
is. It seems that moksha/nirvana is already accomplished the moment
you undertake it. To unravel the perplexity that is held in the above
statement, it is important to understand that it is not at all ‘a notion or a
concept but a practice, a set of practices’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b:
166). You can never reach moksha/nirvana; you are forever attaining it.
In Indian Philosophy too, you cannot attain moksha/nirvana, you are
forever in the process of attaining it. Through the understanding of ‘the
self’, Deleuzian thought, like Indian Philosophy, makes us aware of its
fluid state in contrast to the popular belief in its stasis: paradoxically,
dismantling occurs as soon as one understands its constitution to reach
the body without organs (BwO) that according to Indian Philosophy
gives meaning to our life. The reading of Deleuze has been an experience
of revisiting Indian Philosophy. In fact he, like Indian Philosophy, uses
the concept of experience and examines the notion of the incorporeal.
Contrary to western substantialism that rests on things, this celebration
of thought as an event is the basis of Indian Philosophy.
November 21, 2017 Time: 04:16pm dlgs.2018.0293.tex

Reflections of Indian Philosophy in Deleuze’s BwO 15

Deleuze’s remarkable study Empiricism and Subjectivity ends with the

claim that ‘philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we are
doing, not as a theory of what there is’ (Deleuze 1991: 133). He talks
of non-personal individuation, by which he means that a time of day, a
breath of air, a place, an illness – all have a proper name (haecceities).
Haecceities, events, incorporeal transformations are inscribed on the
plane of consistency, and are apprehended in themselves; nomadic
essences, vague yet rigorous; continuums of intensities, which go beyond
constants and variables; becomings, which have neither culmination nor
subject but draw one another into zones of proximity. Thus, BwO comes
naturally into play in individuation. Very similar to this idea, there is
an idea in the Indian thought system according to which a life has
no beginning – anadi – and no end – ananta. It is that system wherein
our existence is without borders. There is no starting or finishing line.
According to the Indian belief of Brahman, there exists non-personal
individuality which is the linking incorporeal that connects all beings.
The manas, in Indian Philosophy, roughly is at the centre of the as-
cending order which starts with atman, buddhi, manas, sense organs, the
physical body and the social body. It distinguishes the two journeys: out-
ward and inward. And the journey inward which sways from the ‘body
with organs’ can be explained with Artaud’s declaration of war on the
organs on 28 November 1947 (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 166) that
there is nothing more useless than an organ. Further, Deleuze enumer-
ates a number of ways in which the body discards organs in crippled,
diseased or afflicted state and contrasts it with the BwO which is full of
ecstasy (ananda – the state of bliss). Thus, it is a journey beyond ‘the self’.

II. Understanding ‘the Self’

Deleuze argues that ‘the self’, a concept that evokes the self primarily as
an entity, as separate or finite matter, is a misleading and erroneous way
of conceiving what it is to be human. He was interested in thinking of
human subjects as movement, as made up of intersecting lines of force
where matter and force are not separable. The problem of imagining ‘the
self’, he says, as a separate finite entity, places an unnecessary limitation
on the internal life of ‘the self’ as it shapes itself to fit the requirements of
logic and of language. In both Deleuzian and Indian thought, knowing
one’s Self is the path of liberation; the construction of oneself as ego or
self as entity closes down the capacity to see the world in oneself and the
other. And every human being is fighting a war with and against oneself,
and with and against the forces that govern him. Since the powers are
not just external things, but permeate each of us, ‘philosophy throws
November 21, 2017 Time: 04:16pm dlgs.2018.0293.tex

16 Meenu Gupta

us all into constant negotiations with, and a guerrilla campaign against

ourselves’ (Deleuze 1995: vii). The idea of the ego as a fixed entity, that
both Indian and Deleuzian thought work against, is strung together out
of a series of moments or events, which together take on an illusion of
being solid, of being this and definitely not that. The definition of ‘the
self’ which the Upanishads offer to us is also similar; according to that
definition, it is the spirit behind the organs of sense which is essential
knowledge, and shines within the heart which is reached after the sun,
the moon, the fire and the voice have been silenced:
We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to
bits, and leftovers . . . we no longer believe in a primordial totality that once
existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004a: 45–6)
Like all of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts, the ‘body without organs’
can also be interpreted in a variety of ways, and is manifested on a
variety of levels. It is most central to their collaborative work Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, though Deleuze uses it decades prior, and the phrase
comes from a radio play by Antonin Artaud. In brief, the body without
organs is best understood as their way of conceptually emphasising
dimensions of embodiment beyond organisation, or in other words
of looking at how different kinds of bodies become organised, rather
than thinking of them as static, already organised wholes. From his
very first book, Deleuze was fascinated by the field of ‘embryology’,
which is nothing other than the science of how organisms acquire
their organisation. And eventually, with Guattari, he describes the
BwO as ‘an egg’, a substance ‘crisscrossed with axes and thresholds,
with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients
marking the transitions and the becomings’ (Deleuze and Guattari
2004a: 21). This has to be understood in relation to how science and
philosophy have traditionally conceived of the body. In anatomy, the
privilege has always been on the normal, healthy, functional organ, to be
understood individually as a definite entity but also conceived as part of
an integrated organic whole. In a more philosophical key, this leads not
only to the idea of the body as a well-oiled mechanism under the control
of a transcendent mind, but also to the idea of the ‘social organism’,
of society as an integrated whole made up of differentiated functional
components, again under the control of some sovereign authority.

III. Movement Is to Man as Entity Is to Superman

Even if for Deleuze the question of Being is not amenable to
conceptual identification proper, he still qualifies ‘Being as Fold’
November 21, 2017 Time: 04:16pm dlgs.2018.0293.tex

Reflections of Indian Philosophy in Deleuze’s BwO 17

(Deleuze 1988: 110). If we step away from the familiar philosophical

notion of identity, the question of Being can be presented slightly more
positively in terms of the virtual and the actual. The actual, while
composed of identities which we perceive and interact with, is not all
there is. Behind, beneath and within the actual is the virtual. The actual
is composed of identities, the virtual is not. The virtual is not a mirror of
the actual, the relation between them is com-pli-cated (le pli, in French,
means the fold) and, significantly, ‘the virtual is not opposed to the real;
it possesses a full reality by itself. The process it undergoes is that of
actualisation’ (Deleuze 1994: 211).
In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze equates mystical experience
with an event of a sudden actualisation of potentialities, that is,
awakening of perceptions, such as seeing and hearing, by raising them
to a new power of enhanced perception (Deleuze 1989). This is a
‘percept’ which is future-oriented towards a virtual object of perception
(appearing for the present moment as yet imperceptible) within the very
dynamics of becoming-other or becoming-actual when both movements
meet each other and the ascending/descending lines cross and traverse. In
these critical junctures of experience, ‘the body plunges into the virtual
or spiritual depths which exceed it’ (Goddard 2001: 57).
The excess of meanings actualises itself in a singular transformative,
quasi-mystical, experience. Traditionally such experience is taken to be
ecstatic, but not necessarily. The discovery of the spiritual depth in
oneself is ‘enstasy’ understood as complementary to ecstasy or rapture
beyond oneself: the way to paradise as a symbol of the most fundamental
layer uniting human soul and cosmos can be found by either experience.
Deleuze notices that the point of the unification of experience is not only
virtual, but also such a point ‘is not without similarities to the One-
Whole of the Platonists’ (Deleuze 1990: 93). Indeed, mystics’ ‘vision
and . . . voice . . . would have remained virtual’ unless some specific
conditions or events in the real experience that are necessary for the
actualisation of the virtual had been established; thus expanding the
perceptual field (Goddard 2001: 54).

IV. Being and Self

For Deleuze and Guattari, every actual body has a limited set of traits,
habits, movements, affects, and so on. But every actual body also has
a virtual dimension: a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections,
affects, movements, and so on. This collection of potentials is what
Deleuze calls the ‘body without organs’. To ‘make oneself a body
without organs’, then, is to actively experiment with oneself to draw
November 21, 2017 Time: 04:16pm dlgs.2018.0293.tex

18 Meenu Gupta

out and activate these virtual potentials. These potentials are mostly
activated (or ‘actualised’) through conjunctions with other bodies (or
body without organs) that Deleuze calls ‘becomings’.
Deleuze and Guattari call the Earth a body without organs. ‘This
body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by
flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by
mad or transitory particles’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 45). That
is, we usually think of the world as composed of relatively stable
entities (bodies, beings). But these bodies are really composed of sets of
flows moving at various speeds. This fluid substratum is what Deleuze
calls ‘body without organs’ in a general sense. It is believed, in Indian
Philosophy too, that the world is an illusion, a projection of things
and forms that are temporarily phenomenal and sustain the illusion of
oneness and permanence. Each object in the material universe is what
it is because of the aggregation of things that sustain its current state.
Change one of them and the object becomes something else in time
and space. Thus, Indian scriptures believe that creation is the play of
consciousness. It differentiates itself into diverse things and in the end
withdraws everything into itself for no apparent and specific reason.
The world is nothing but a mere vibration of consciousness in space; for
here, there is no contradiction between the infinite consciousness and the
apparent existence of the universe.
God in his eternal and absolute aspect is pure consciousness and his
creation is a mere formation within that consciousness. Etymologically
speaking, this creation or maya is that which arises from Prakriti
(nature) or Pradhana (primal energy). ‘Ma’ means the source, the cause
and ‘ya’ means that which proceeds, goes, walks or spreads out. Thus
literally, maya means that which issues forth, expands or arises from
the source – ma, the universal mother. It is also described as the play or
lila of God enacted through his creative and dynamic energy or force
(shakti). Our existential reality and the objective reality with which our
senses interact every moment and which we hold to be true, are either
the deliberate projection of the primordial Nature or the mechanical
movements of its blind force. Most of the Hindu schools agree that
Nature is the cause of all manifestation, either on its own or through
the enfoldment of the Divine Will. In this state of illusion we remain in
the domain of duality; it disappears only when our minds and senses are
fully stabilised and we are able to experience things without the division
of the seer and the seen. The only way to steer clear of maya is to be able
to see the truth as it is, which is possible only when our egos yield place
to our real selves.
November 21, 2017 Time: 04:16pm dlgs.2018.0293.tex

Reflections of Indian Philosophy in Deleuze’s BwO 19

Bergson offers a spiritual account of this, wherein the mental activity

is real, intrinsic and springs from its own unfolding as activity. In
contrast to Kant, for whom reason, sensibility and imagination are
requirements for empirical knowledge, Bergson examines a composite
mind which is important to understand consciousness called actuality,
and the real nature of mental acts exist virtually. This special kind
of reality (virtual) is outside normal reality and this virtual nature of
perception and memory makes our actual experience composite. Both
outer and inner realities cannot be perceived independently.
But if the virtual is distinct from the identities of the actual, and
if it is itself real, then what is it? It is the difference, the ground of
difference, out of which the actual emerges and which the actual carries
with it. Being, then, is this virtual/actual nexus of difference, the mutual
enfoldment of ‘two inseparable planes in reciprocal presupposition’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 121). For Deleuze, difference ‘is the
noumenon closest to phenomenon’ (Deleuze 1994: 222), that is, by
virtue of its own ontological status; it is difference that can also make a
difference in the world of human experiences. The dynamic of difference
is of double movement: difference presents itself as both ‘differentiation’
(with a ‘t’) in the virtual; and as ‘differenciation’ (with a ‘c’) in the
actual. The structures of multiple differential relations comprise ‘ideas’
as intensive multiplicities. Deleuze considers ‘ideas’ as “‘differentials”
of thought, or the “Unconscious” of pure thought . . . related not to
a Cogito . . . but to the fractured I of a dissolved Cogito’ that would
describe a pre-conceptual (indeed, decentred) subject of experience
(Deleuze 1994: 194).

V. Dismantling of Self
Through the example of the masochist, Deleuze explains the importance
of pain and suffering to pleasure that unties the pseudo bond between
desire and pleasure extrinsically. It is a delayed continuous process as it
is a positive desire, which withholds joy. It reminds one of Keats’s Odes
where the poet matures to find the same joy in sadness in his ‘Ode on
Melancholy’. And then the Indian liberation that is moksha or the state
of achieving nirvana is a state in flux and with innate joy.
Deleuze further explains body without organs as a plane of
consistency that fuses all opposition in a determined zone of intensity
on a BwO. It is in fact the delay, an infinite regress that testifies an
achieved state in which desire constructs its own field of immanence.
The desire for desirelessness fulfils the desire by constructing its own
November 21, 2017 Time: 04:16pm dlgs.2018.0293.tex

20 Meenu Gupta

field of immanence which delays as well fulfils the paradoxical lack and
yearning, both. In the Indian search for bliss, you become blissful where
every moment becomes eternity.

VI. The Plane of Immanence

Philosophy is constructivism, and constructivism has two qualitatively
different complementary aspects: the creation of concepts and the laying
out of a plane. Concepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but
the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls
them. The plane envelops infinite movements that pass back and forth
through it, but concepts are the infinite speeds of finite movements that,
in each case, pass only through their own components (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 35–6). For Deleuze there is no such thing as a concept in
itself. A concept is always the result of work on a matter, or, in the
words of Deleuze, ‘in every respect, truth is a matter of production,
not adequation’ (Deleuze 1994: 6). Deleuze defines this plane to be a
basic diagram, horizon, ground: essentially, a field in which concepts are
produced, circulate and collide with one another. It can be seen as an
atmosphere: formless, fractal, a reservoir but an indivisible medium – it
makes Deleuze’s philosophy a ‘field philosophy’; very similar to Gestalt
psychology. It is important to remember here that an infinite field is
virtual. This medium exists in tandem with the concepts it populates.
But if it is true that the plane of immanence is always single, being
itself pure variation, then it is all the more necessary to explain why
there are varied and distinct planes of immanence that, depending upon
which infinite movements are retained and selected, succeed and contest
each other in history. The plane was certainly not the same in the time
of the Ancient Greeks, or in the seventeenth century, and even today;
these are still, vague and general terms: there is neither the same image
of thought nor the same substance of being. The plane is, therefore, the
object of an infinite specification so that it seems to be a One-All only in
cases specified by the selection of movement. This difficulty concerning
the ultimate nature of the plane of immanence can only be resolved step
by step. The plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be
thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the non-thought within
thought. It is the base of all planes, immanent to every thinkable plane
that does not succeed in thinking it. It is the most intimate within the
thought and yet the absolute outside.
When he speaks of thought as a series of events, and not as the act
of a unifying subjectivity, what Deleuze is criticising is the very idea
November 21, 2017 Time: 04:16pm dlgs.2018.0293.tex

Reflections of Indian Philosophy in Deleuze’s BwO 21

of a content, of an anteriority of thought relative to the text or the

utterance supposed to express it. He replaces this contrast of interior and
exterior with the idea of a machinery, an arrangement or, in the case of
philosophy, an ‘assemblage’ (agencement) of relations a text maintains
not only with other texts but also with other realities.
The field of immanence is not external to the Self nor does it
form an external self. It is ‘an absolute outside’ that knows no self
because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence in
which they have fused. Brahman too is ‘an absolute outside’ where the
field of immanence is not the Self/selves but fusion where everything
is allowed. Here, the self consists of the prajna atman, that is, the
absolute knowing subject where it has no consciousness of objects, and
yet is not unconscious. Brahman is a given matrix through which all
vibrations, migrations and gradients pass through; a single substance for
all attributes. Is there a totality of all bodies without organs? Deleuze
asks and further elaborates this:

Is there a totality of all BwO’s? If the BwO is already a limit, what must
we say of the totality of all BwO’s? It is a problem not of the One and
the Multiple but of a fusional multiplicity that effectively goes beyond
any opposition between the one and the multiple. A formal multiplicity
of substantial attributes that, as such, constitutes the ontological unity of
substance. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 170)

To interpret, it is something always in the state of fluidity. The

dismantling of the organism is paradoxically opening the body to
connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions,
levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity. And a word
of caution: it is not easy to dismantle an organism from the body or
to dismantle significance from the soul and even to dismantle subjective
from secure reality consciousness. For, in order to dismantle an organism
from the body one courts death, in order to dismantle significance
from the soul one courts falsehood illusion, and in order to dismantle
subjective from secure reality consciousness one courts hallucination and
psychic death.
Further, Deleuze insists that the organism should be reformed not in
a violent stroke lest it should fall for the above dangers; it should be a
slow process of destratification. The BwO is always swinging between
the surface that stratifies it and the plane that sets it free. And in the
Indian context one does not have to renunciate earthly pleasures to
become a yogi; but be a part of the illusion to shake it off slowly and
gradually. In fact, this leads to struggle which gives the meaning to life.
November 21, 2017 Time: 04:16pm dlgs.2018.0293.tex

22 Meenu Gupta

What will the violent action do? It will blow apart the strata without
taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed,
plunged into a black hole or catastrophe. This is worse than staying
stratified – organised, signified, subjected. Then what should be the right
process is:
Lodge on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an
advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization,
possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and
there . . . all times . . . Connect, conjugate, continue. (Deleuze and Guattari
2004b: 178)

This is because we are in a social formation and we should acknowledge

our place to descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within
which we are held. Reaching to the side of the plane constituting
the BwO, the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires,
conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. Crossing thresholds, ‘me’
takes place of ‘my’ body without organs reaching a collective where all
the individual collectives merge. In brief, the body without organs is
best understood as the way of conceptually emphasising dimensions of
embodiment beyond organisation, or in other words, of looking at how
different kinds of bodies become organised, rather than thinking of them
as static, already-organised wholes.

VII. Body without Organs

Thus, if the ‘body with organs’ is the diseased/degenerative one which
botches it and translates everything into phantasies (away from the real),
the body without organs is populated only by intensities. Only intensities
pass and circulate: ‘nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to
interpret’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 169). It causes intensities to
pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive,
lacking extension:
It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a
given degree – to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is
nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0;
but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite
intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive
magnitude starting at zero. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 169)

Deleuze’s tantric egg (bija), the non-vegetarian Brahman seems very

parallel to the concept of Indian Brahman and atman where atman is the
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Reflections of Indian Philosophy in Deleuze’s BwO 23

Deleuzian tantric egg that transforms into an organism full of intensities

and it is the only energy that gets transformed. BwO is the field of
immanence of desire. Desire is defined to be a process of production
without reference to any exterior agency. Whether a lack that hollows
it out or a pleasure that fills it; this is similar to a process of self-
exploration which has nothing to do with the external environment,
and it desires equanimity which equates pain with pleasure (not meant
to be bodily). The field of immanence is the axis of the journey
inward.
In some passages of the Upanishads, the first principle of things is
defined now as the not-empirical being and now as the empirical not-
being. This universe was in the beginning not-being; this not-being was
being. It arose; thereupon an egg was developed. Brahman, which is
usually named sat (being) or satyam (reality), has a twofold meaning.
If satyam is the reality of experience, Brahman is contrasted with it as
satyasya satyam, that which alone in this reality is truly real:

Not-being was this in the beginning;

From it being arose.
Self-fashioned indeed out of itself,
Therefore is it named ‘well-fashioned.’
(Deussen 1906: 129)

Thus, the pair of opposites of empirical–non-empirical and being–not

being have no significance, like all other pairs in duality, and they
are transcended by Brahman. He is neither being nor not-being
higher than that which is and that which is not; he comprehends
in himself empirical reality, the realm of ignorance and the eternal
reality, the kingdom of knowledge. The views put forward in the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad centre on the conviction that Brahman, the
atman, is the knowing subject within us; and on this very account is
unknowable.
The plane of consistency is the totality of all BwOs – a pure multi-
plicity of immanence – where all gets deterritorialised by abstracting
from the Self. Every BwO is made up of plateaus, itself a plateau
in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency.
A plateau is a component of passage. The anarchy and unity are one
and the same thing, not the unity of the One but unity that applies
only to the multiple. This is, as expressed by Artaud, the multiplicity
of fusion, fusionability as infinite zero, the plane of consistency. It is
also important to note the blocks of organs which keep the organism
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24 Meenu Gupta

locked into a stratum that blocks the flows and anchors us in this, our
world. This can be explained and understood in terms of sense organs
and physical organs that steer the mind away from this totality by moh,
maya or illusionary attachment. There is an extensive discourse on
detachment in Indian Philosophy.
Organisms, and not the organs, are the enemies of the body. Then
why did God create this system? In Deleuze’s judgement, God wanted
to rip it apart to be the first. The judgement of God uproots it from
its immanence and makes it an organism, a signification, a subject. The
organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the
BwO, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation and sedimentation
that imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchised
organisation, organised transcendences. It is amazing that the Body of
the BwO upon the judgement of God enters into the strata of the
organism and swings between the two poles: the surfaces of stratification
into which it is recoiled, on which it submits to the judgement, and the
plane of consistency in which it unfurls and opens to experimentation.
This is a perpetual and violent combat between the plane of consistency
which frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata
and the surfaces of stratification that block it or make it recoil. In the
Indian version, this is maya or illusion in which God binds us divided
into the three strata: the organism, significance and subjectification;
whereas the BwO opposes the strata as a whole which has no signifier,
never interprets, has nomadism as the movement, is ever in a motionless
voyage and enters into desubjectification.
By shifting the emphasis from the organism to the body without
organs, Deleuze hopes to accomplish two things. First, to demonstrate
the becoming of the organism, the ways in which differentiated organs
are formed out of an undifferentiated mass, along ‘axes and thresholds’
of development. Thus, he wants to suggest – by drawing parallels with
embryology and sociology – that past philosophers have misunderstood
this dynamic ‘becoming’ through categories of static, organic being.
When ‘being’ is conceived in terms of static elements or ‘organs’,
however, their coming-into-being becomes a mystery, and seems to
demand some transcendental ‘designer’. So, what seems to be a mystical
experience is a potential human ability to raise ‘each faculty to the level
of its transcendent exercise [and] to give birth to that second power
which grasps that which can only be sensed’ (Deleuze 1994: 165), thus
connecting the levels that seemingly belong to two disparate Platonic
realms of intelligible and sensible by establishing a mutual bond akin to
the synchronistic bridge between mind and matter.
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Reflections of Indian Philosophy in Deleuze’s BwO 25

VIII. Meaning of Life

The perplexity about defining the transcendental field is whether it can
be defined by this pure immediate consciousness with neither object nor
self, as movement which neither begins nor ends. Gilles Deleuze himself
states that it cannot be defined by consciousness which is nonetheless
co-extensive with it, but withdraws from all revelation. Consciousness
becomes a fact only if a subject is produced at the same time as its object,
all three of them being outside the field and appearing as ‘transcendent’.
This alignment can be seen as ‘living in the present’ in Indian Philosophy.
Further for Deleuze, the transcendent is not the transcendental. Without
consciousness the transcendental field would be defined as a pure plane
of immanence since it escapes every transcendence; of the subject as well
as of the object. A very important observation here is that when the
subject and the object are taken to be outside the plane of immanence,
and hence taken to be universal subject or object in general to which
immanence is itself attributed, then the transcendental is completely
denatured and merely reduplicates the empirical while immanence is
deformed and ends up being contained in the transcendent. This clearly
points out the mistake that is often made in aiming at the transcendent
and not the immanence and of course the rectification process has also
been elucidated. Thus as Deleuze puts it, the plane of immanence is no
more defined by a subject or an object capable of containing it than the
transcendental field is defined by consciousness.
A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is a
sheer power, utter beatitude. It ceaselessly posits itself in a life and no
longer refers back to a being. The essential Brahman in the Vedantic
counterpart is a combination of three attributes, it is described as
sacchidananda, that is, as being (sat), mind (chit) and bliss (ananda).
The key word throughout Deleuze’s writings, as we have seen, to be
found in almost all of his main texts without fail, is ‘immanence’. This
term refers to a philosophy based around the empirical real, the flux of
existence which has no transcendental level or inherent separation. In
his last text, published a few months before his death, ‘Immanence: A
Life . . . ’, Deleuze repeatedly insists that philosophy can only be done
well if it approaches the immanent conditions of that which it is trying
to think; this is to say that all thought, in order to have any real force,
must not work by setting up transcendentals, but by creating movement
and consequences. For him, pure immanence is A LIFE:
It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life.
A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete
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26 Meenu Gupta

power, complete bliss . . . it is an absolute immediate consciousness whose

very activity no longer refers to a being but is ceaselessly posed in a life
. . . Maine de Biran . . . discovered, beneath the transcendence of effort, an
absolute immanent life[.] The transcendental field is defined by a plane of
immanence, and the plane of immanence by a life. (Deleuze 2001: 27–8)

The word atman signifies the consciousness in man which experiences

gross objects during the waking state, subtle objects during the
dream state, and the bliss arising from absence of the duality and
object in dreamless sleep. The Upanishads speak of the transcendental
Brahman as devoid of qualifying attributes or indicative marks, and
of the phenomenal Brahman as endowed with them. The attributeless
Brahman is called the supreme or unconditioned Brahman, and the
other the inferior or conditioned Brahman. The unconditioned Brahman
is free from the limiting adjuncts of space, time and causation. The
Upanishads point out that it is absolutely spaceless. The identity of
Brahman and atman or the Self, has been expressed in the well-
known Vedic dictum ‘That thou art.’ The Upanishads repeatedly say the
realisation of the unconditioned Brahman is the supreme purpose of life,
because it bestows immortality. Rather than one life which expresses
itself in the being of ‘man’, Deleuze’s Superfold describes the ways in
which life is composed of different styles or combinations, an ‘unlimited
finity’ – finitudes or distinct combinations that are not united by a single
vital current:

What is the superman? It is the formal compound of the forces within man
and these new forces. It is the form that results from a new relation between
forces. Man tends to free life, labour and language within himself . . . it is the
advent of a new form that is neither god nor man and which, it is hoped, will
not prove worse than its previous forms. (Deleuze 1988: 110)

Agamben writes: ‘In this light, Deleuze’s notes on Foucault, published

by François Ewald under the title “Desire and Pleasure,” contain an
important definition. Life, Deleuze, says, is not at all nature; it is, rather,
“desire’s variable field of immanence”’ (Agamben 1999: 235). Given
what we know of Deleuzian immanence, this means that the term ‘life’
designates nothing more and nothing less than the immanence of desire
to itself. And this desire is neither alterity nor a lack but is understood
as Spinoza’s theory of ‘striving’ (conatus); as the desire to persevere in
one’s own Being, whose importance Deleuze often underlines, and which
contains a possible answer to these questions. Thus the potentiality
that constitutes life in the original sense coincides with the very desire
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Reflections of Indian Philosophy in Deleuze’s BwO 27

to preserve one’s own Being that, in Spinoza and Deleuze, defines the
potentiality of life as absolute immanence, complete beatitude.
About singularity and individuality Deleuze says that a life should
not be contained in the simple moment when individual life confronts
universal death. Rather, a life is everywhere, in all the moments a certain
living subject passes through and that certain lived objects regulate:
immanent life carrying along the events or singularities which do nothing
more than actualise themselves in subjects and objects. This indefinite
life does not itself have moments, however close together they might be,
but only meantimes, between moments in the absolute of an immediate
consciousness. The indefinite article cannot be the indetermination of the
person without at the same time being the determination of the singular.
The ‘One’ is not the transcendent which can contain everything, even
immanence, but is the immanence contained in a transcendental field.
‘A’ is always the index of a multiplicity; art event, a singularity, a life.
Although a transcendent which falls outside the plane of immanence
can always be invoked or even attributed to it, it remains the case
that all transcendence is constituted uniquely in the immanent current
of consciousness particular to this plane. Transcendence is always a
product of immanence. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad also identifies
Brahman with bliss where ‘the Brahman world’ is understood not to be
the world of Brahman, but Brahman as the world (not brahmano lokah,
butbrahma eva lokah).

References
Agamben, Giorgio (1999) ‘Absolute Immanence’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays
in Philosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
pp. 220–39.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Foucault, trans. Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam,
New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles (1991) Empiricism and Subjectivity, trans. Constantin V. Boundas,
New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (2001) Pure Immanence, trans. Anne Boyman, New York: Zone
Books.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004a) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, London:
Continuum.
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28 Meenu Gupta

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004b) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Continuum.
Deussen, Paul (1906) The Philosophy of the Upanishads, New York: Dover
Publications.
Goddard, Michael (2001) ‘The Scattering of Time Crystals: Deleuze, Mysticism and
Cinema’, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion, London and New York:
Routledge, pp. 53–64.
Hadot, Pierre (1995) Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, Oxford:
Blackwell.

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