
I'm interested in this relationship between the Body Without Organs and the Organ Without Body. In paintings from the Enlightenment, like the one above, like Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson" the distinctions between BwO and OwB become more complicated. In the process of dissection there is an inherent authoritative power executed by the surgeon--he is at will to make claims about the structure of the body and its organs. However, what we see above and in "The Anatomy Lesson" seems to be, in my opinion, an attempt to develop a structure of the organs that disregards the body, the subject. By ordering and categorizing the organs, we begin to see a different sort of body emerge. If this is the case, what has happened to the body? It has been subjugated, opened up, and, in a sense obliterated. By forming organs without bodies do we sacrifice the subjective value of the body (in the sense that "this" body does not belong to "me" anymore)? There seems to be some sort of answer, although it still seems a little hazy to me:
"A" stomach, "an" eye, "a" mouth: the indefinite article does not lack anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference...It is not at all a question of a fragmented, splintered body, or organs without the body (OwB). The BwO is exactly the opposite. There are not organs in the sense of fragments in relation to a lost unity, nor is there a return to the undifferentieaded in relation to a differentiable totality. There is a distribution of intensive principles of organs, with their positive indefinite articles, within a collectivity or multiplicity, inside an assemblage, and according to machinic connections operating on a BwO (ATP, p. 182).
This may be a wierd question, but how do we consider anatomy? Does the scientific, anatomical figure--the cadaver--lose its organs or lose its body? Could it be both, even though D&G say they're opposite? By taking the organs, ordering and structuring them, can we, in effect, create a new body--this time composed of scientific knowledge instead of organs?

I guess I wanted to conclude this inquisitive, confused post with some Artaud. This is what got me on this track:
By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy.
I say, to remake his anatomy.
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,
god,
and with god
his organs.
I think you found a loose strand.
ReplyDeletePULL! PULL! PULL! PULL!