- #1 Making a Body without Organs
- #2 Anti-Oedipus: Full Empty
- #3 Anti-Oedipus: Emptiness as Resistance
- #4 Anti-Oedipus: paranoid machine
- #5 Anti-Oedipus: BwO
- #6 Anti-Oedipus: BwO
- #7 Anti-Oedipus: BwO
- #8 Anti-Oedipus: BwO
- #9 Anti-Oedipus: BwO
- #10 A Thousand Plateaus: BwO
- #11 A Thousand Plateaus: BwO
- #12 A Thousand Plateaus: BwO
- #13 A Thousand Plateaus: BwO
So the celibate machine is a good thing?
Well, sort of. Again. D&G don’t exactly like the categories of good and bad. But they do explicitly describe the residuum of the celibate machine as positive. A celibate machine takes on all kinds of different desiring-machines (thinking that these machines are his /her “true” subjectivity). However, these desiring-machines are simply miraculating on his/her BwO. There is no “real” self. D&G are very stubborn on this point. But no-self is positive thing.
What does the celibate machine produce?
Intensive qualities. “There is a schizophrenic experience of intensive qualities in their pure state, to a point that is almost unbearable—a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form.”
What kind of intensive quality?
Usually these intensive qualities, or intensities emerge as what are thought of as hallucinations (I see, I hear) and delirium (I think). However D&G reject the interpretation of these intensities as “I see” or “I hear” or “I think.” These intensities are experiential, “I feel.” Therefore the celibate machine (Schreber), when dressing up like a woman is neither hallucinatory or delirious. Rather “… the breasts on the judge’s naked torso… designate, first of all, a band of intensity, a zone of intensity on his body without organs.” (16)
Where do these pure intensities come from?
Repulsion and attraction (of BwO and desiring-machines). The intensities are all positive (not oppositional) in relation to the zero state of the BwO. “In a word, the opposition of forces of attraction and repulsion produces an open series of intensive elements, all of them positive, that are never an expression of the final equilibrium of a system, but consist, rather, of an unlimited number of stationary, metastable states through which the subject passes.” (16).“The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the designations of the subject developing along these particular vectors. “ (16)
So how does the celibate machine produce intensities?
Lets back-track. 2 routes to the intensity:
1. The points of disjunction on the BwO form circles that converge on the desiring-machines; then the subject is produced as a residuum alongside the machine (like a spare part adjacent to the machine). The subject passes through all the degrees of the circle, and passes from one circle to another. This subject itself isnot at the center, which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined by the states through which it passes.
2. By means of the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, the proportions of attraction and repulsion on the body without organs produce, starting from zero, a series of states in the celibate machine; and the subject is born of each state in the series, is continually reborn of the following state that determines him at a given moment, consuming-consummating all these states that cause him to be born and reborn (the lived state coming first, in relation to the subject that lives it).
