AI generated: Deleuze’s concept of the Body without Organs (BwO) comes from his collaboration with Guattari, and it draws from various sources, including Artaud and Nietzsche. It’s true that Nietzsche had a significant influence on Deleuze’s thinking, but interpreting how Deleuze adapted Nietzsche is complex, and the charge of misreading Nietzsche is not uncommon in philosophical discourse. Let's unpack the opposition. The Body without Organs (BwO): Deleuze and Guattari describe the BwO as a way of disrupting the rigid structures and stratifications of the organized body, whether these are biological, social, or psychological. The BwO represents a plane of pure potential, undifferentiated and open to new flows of energy, desire, and becoming. It’s a metaphor for breaking free from the oppressive structures that impose form and function on bodies, whether physical, social, or symbolic. In contrast, a body “with organs” refers to the traditional understanding of the body as an organism, organized around functions, hierarchies, and structures (with the organs being necessary parts for sustaining life in an orderly manner). Deleuze and Guattari are not rejecting the physical necessity of organs but rather the idea that life should be constrained by predetermined functions or identities. Nietzsche’s Influence: Deleuze was indeed heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s ideas, especially from The Will to Power and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics, his affirmation of becoming, and his concept of will to power resonated with Deleuze’s philosophical aims. For Nietzsche, life is a constant flux of forces, and the body is a vital site of these forces. However, Nietzsche does not propose the idea of a BwO explicitly, and some critics argue that Deleuze pushes Nietzsche further than Nietzsche himself would go. Nietzsche often speaks of the body in terms of its power, health, and hierarchy of drives-each organ or force in the body must play its role in the dynamic whole. Nietzsche’s emphasis is more on strength and organization-the flourishing body is one that achieves mastery through the effective organization of its drives and instincts, rather than a body that dissolves into pure potentiality. The Debate: Misreading or Creative Appropriation? The claim that Deleuze misread Nietzsche might come from a perceived tension between Nietzsche’s celebration of the strong body (which requires the proper functioning of organs, instincts, and drives) and Deleuze’s notion of the BwO as a refusal of the body's organizational structure. However, Deleuze wasn’t simply trying to repeat Nietzsche but rather extend and reinterpret his ideas for his own purposes. In Deleuze's reading, Nietzsche’s critique of organized structures (be they moral, metaphysical, or social) supports the BwO as a rejection of imposed structures and a call to embrace creative forces. From this perspective, Nietzsche’s emphasis on life as becoming resonates with Deleuze’s idea of a body that resists fixed identities and functions. Making Sense of the Opposition: Nietzsche’s Body with Organs: Emphasizes a well-ordered hierarchy of drives, instincts, and forces that lead to the flourishing of life and power. It involves organization, but this organization is dynamic, flexible, and self-overcoming. Deleuze’s Body without Organs: Is a more radical break from the traditional concept of the organized body, pushing for a plane of pure potentiality and becoming where rigid structures are dissolved. It challenges fixed functions, allowing new forms of life and expression to emerge. The tension between the two can be seen as one between organized power (Nietzsche) and unbounded potential (Deleuze). Deleuze’s interpretation can be seen as a creative reworking of Nietzsche’s ideas, even if it departs from Nietzsche’s original emphasis on order and strength in the body. The "misreading" critique arises if one sees Nietzsche as fundamentally about structuring power, while Deleuze seeks to dissolve such structures. In conclusion, the opposition reflects different emphases in the philosophical projects of the two thinkers: Nietzsche’s concern with mastery and life-affirming organization versus Deleuze’s push for fluidity and deterritorialization. While critics may argue that Deleuze misreads Nietzsche, Deleuze’s approach can also be seen as a productive and innovative adaptation.

I think she's talking about some of the posthumous fragments, which is not really a coherent text. There's a text by Stiegler titled 'On the Future of Our Incorporations: Nietzsche, Media, Events' in which she assembles these fragments into a body that requires organs in order to open itself up to and to be able to incorporate the Dionysian flux. As she points out herself, this is quite a tendentious, polemic reading of Nietzsche, a political reassamblage of the posthumous fragments against the Deleuzian Nietzsche of the 60s.

@@angwantibo thanks

You know 100x more than me about this, so perhaps I have nothing to bring here, but here's an idea. One of the key ideas of the Frankfurt School is that we should abandon ideas which, when applied, result in a worse outcome on what they're trying to achieve in the first place, which they called "Immanent Critique" I think? And one of the major goal of the Frankfurt School was to move politics towards progressivism. And now, some of the highly critical ideas from the Frankfurt School - especially the ones that consider mainstream discourse as irremediably coopted by money and power and deeply tainted - are making it into the broad zeitgeist, and it's a disaster. It comes out as a kind of shrill moralism that denounces all and everything as patriarchal, colonialist and homophobic, to the point that it's putting off a lot of people from the very progressivism it's trying to promote, and there's no shortage of people who loathe billionaire rule but join pro-corporate conservative movements because they hate self-flagellation and permanent self-guilt-tripping. It's also totally failing at its goal of reducing the level of cooption of progressive movements by money and power, and there's no shortage of totally cynical corporate diversity and inclusion drives that use the ideas of the Frankfurt School but do nothing to reduce the rapaciousness of the overall system. If anything, self-criticality in the world of ideas seem to just result in an disoriented ideological mash that leaves the rich even more powerful. It's almost as if we were doing Vladimir Putin-style "White Noise Propaganda" on ourselves. Adorno would be horrified at seeing his ideas used to prop up the very system of corporate domination he spent his whole life trying to fight. In short, we need to go back to the culture of Enlightenment and Modernity and strict logic and truth, not because it was perfect or impervious to slides towards Fascism, but because we tried alternatives with less defined truth and high cognizance of the sources of bias due to power, and they just don't work in practice.

How does Adorno isolate German Fascism as a unique event in history? If anything, in Minima Moralia, one of his main goals is warning against the increase of man-made horrors. "Auschwitz cannot be brought into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states as a mere gradual increase in horror, before which one can preserve tranquility of mind." pg.249. The advice falls on deaf ears but this is not his doing.

@williamwells5263If I ended up doing a video on this it would come out as a hit job. ^^;

@williamwells5263 great debate here.the error is inherent in western philosophy that describes veridicality as entirely objective.This was the error the phenomenologists wanted to eliminate, but failed because by reintroducing relativism they forgot that any truth derived at is relatively true from the objective standard , but quasi absolutely true from the perspective of the subject. Frankfurt as cool is too reductive on objective categories to understand the subject Here is an example .Al Ghazzali and Kierkegaard both understood the importance of the living of the believing subject , thus Christ or Mohammad as real historical figures are not important but Christianity and Islam are . What they do not realize is that they support an immanent God , but erroneously believe in the sanctity of the Koran or the Bible , and that is why they become dangerous philosophers . Jordan Oetrson is such a dangerous philodpher effecting us

I can't tell if this actually has substance or you're high on crack, which is a good thing