Weaponized Joy

Sometimes, it's fun to take an incredibly obscure point of Deleuze's vocabulary, and use it as a lever to crack open the wider edifice of Deleuze's philosophy (fun to me, OK?). One such obscure point is the distinction between 'differen t iation' and 'differen c iation' (one with a 't' and the other with a 'c'), which Deleuze sometimes leans on in his discussions around the time of Difference and Repetition . Here we're going to use the different/ciation distinction to clarify (partially) another pair of obscure terms: the virtual and the actual. First, the basic architecture (don't worry about what anything means yet, just follow the correlations). Keeping in mind the famous pair 'virtual' and 'actual', we can say that the virtual is what is differenTiated (it is differenTiated 'in-itself' as it were, without any reference to the actual), while the process by which the virtual is actualized is called diffe

Some time ago, I wrote this medium-sized primer to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the 'Body without Organs'. I'm still pretty chuffed with it, because I think the person who it helped above all to grasp this concept is none other than myself . This is not a comprehensive or 'complete' guide by any means, but it does tackle the concept from a few different and related angles that when taken together, give a relatively clear view of the whole, I think. At the end of the post I have added a rather haphazard 'appendix' of sources for the BwO. This is mostly for trivia reasons, and again, for my own self-edification. But hopefully someone finds it interesting. Anyway, without further ado... What is the Body without Organs? Part I: A Thousand Plateaus I The simplest way to understand the BwO is as a pluripotential or equipotential body. That is, a body that has the capacity to settle on a range of different functions and forms in potentia , without