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by Corry Shores
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Waves of Intensity Traversing
the Meat of the Body without Organs
Tomas Geyskens’ paper, “Painting as Hysteria: Deleuze on Bacon,” provides further elaboration on our physiological disorganizations. Citing Josef Breuer’s work in Studies on Hysteria, Geyskens describes a symptom of hysteria in which the hysteric’s thoughts can cause patches of inflammation on the skin.[1] Could it be that some disruption in the brain-tissues’ functioning sends waves of nervous energy to the flesh, disrupting its orderly operation? In fact, according to Deleuze, a “wave” of “vibration” with a “variable amplitude” is always flowing through our bodies. Geyskens draws from another passage by Breuer who claims that one’s “cerebral path of conduction” does not resemble a “telephone wire” that becomes excited only when certain circumstances call upon it to “transmit” a “signal” of nervous energy from one part of the body to another. Rather, we must instead consider this nervous “telephone line” as conducting a constant flow of electrical current that is prerequisite for any sensation.[2] Deleuze explains that this nervous energy flows-around our body’s zones, oscillating at varying degrees of level, which is their valency: their strength, power, or amplitude.[3] When it “encounters external forces at a particular level,” a sensation appears.[4] Perhaps what Deleuze means, is that when sensation occurs, the always-flowing energy wave will be at some zone of the body, which will be stimulated by an exterior force that adds an additional intensive wave to the one already flowing through that region of contact. In this place where the two waves of different valencies are coupled, forced together, a provisional organ springs-up and endures for only as long as the force acts upon it. Afterwards, it recedes back into the body and springs-up again in another zone when having another sensation.[5] A body under the influence of sensations in this sense, then, is not a body working organically, as we find in the case of phenomenology’s corps vécu (lived body); it is not the body as la chair (flesh) but as la viande: meat.[6] The body’s meat hangs off the bones, as Deleuze illustrates with Bacon’s Study for Portrait III, after the Life Mask of William Blake.
Although seemingly lacking in animation, butchered meat in a sense is still “alive;” it is able to contort under the influence of stimuli, as Luigi Galvani demonstrated in his classic experiment (1771) in which he made dead frogs’ legs twitch by applying electrical current to them. Thus, even though the body as meat is not the lived body, it is still a body alive with sensations that activate it by disorganizing its “zones” with coupled energy waves of different levels, which circulate unpredictably through different areas in a confusion of sensations. The butchered body, then, is not made-up of discrete organs working together in organic harmony; but rather, it is one big indeterminate organ: a disorganized body whose organs are temporary, and come about only when forces evoke even greater disorganizations, as in the case of sensation.
The body’s surface zones – where sensations bring about indeterminate organs – might be related to Deleuze’s account of the erogenous zones, which are “cut up on the surface of the body, around orifices marked by the presence of mucous membranes;” and he adds that even internal organs can be considered as erogenous zones.[7] Although it is not clear if the zones of sensation are erogenous zones, it helps to draw this parallel when considering the provisional organ. The examples in Bacon’s artwork that Deleuze uses to illustrate such provisional organs are often erogenous zones: the mouth, anus, and genitals. Deleuze exemplifies these zones by directing our attention to such paintings as these below (Two Figures 1955; from Triptych, Three Figures in a Room, 1964; and from Triptych, May-June 1973.).
In these paintings, an enclosure (circle or some other geometrical shape) applies pressure to the figure in the painting, whose interior seeks release through one of these provisional organs, serving as holes of escape; (we address this in more detail in the second part of the thesis). What is important to note is that the body’s internal waves meet an exterior force of influence, creating a sensation where the two cross, which brings about the organ at that place of contact. What we see in the bottom painting is that “what is a mouth at one level becomes an anus at another level;”[8] that is to say, the particular circumstances of the coupling of internal and exterior forces determine the sort of sensation we have, and thus also the sort of provisional organ.
We could, then, consider intensity as the amount of disorganization in our butchered body, happening when different zones are channeling different valencies of nervous energy. This would correspond to many of our experiences of disorientation: the greater our internal disorders, the more intensity we feel in our confused sensations. From Deleuze's perspective, intensity is not the sum total of all the valencies of nervous energy; instead, it is the amount of dis-coordination between the zones channeling varying levels of energy. When disorganized to such an extent, intensities flow freely through the body, which is made-up of one indeterminate organ, and is thus “the body without organs,” (BwO).[9] Some try to reach this experience of pure intensity in-itself through sensory distortion, using drugs to experience a sort of vertigo.[10] Deleuze mentions Artaud’s and Castaneda’s use of peyote for this purpose.[11] Although drugs are not the preferred means to attain a BwO, we might imagine these altered states for illustration. It could be that in these instances, the perceptual senses and the imagination develop some degree of autonomy and creativity, bringing to the drug user’s attention the dis-coordinations among – and between – his thoughts and perceptions. In moments of synaesthesia, when for example sounds are seen in vision, the indeterminacy of the body’s organs becomes more apparent. There is no law, apparently, that prohibits the eyes from listening. Perhaps instead, there never were such sharp distinctions between these sense organs: the illusion of their discretion might result from some regulative functioning of the body (or brain) responsible for sorting through the chaos of different sensations. Thus, we might consider ‘zones’ to be the indeterminate bodily regions that do not necessarily integrate organically, and thus cannot be called organs.
As we noted when discussing Kant, these irregularities in our sensations result from heterogeneous rhythms that are uneven and unpredictable: our internal flows of nervous energy already vary chaotically in valency, and when sensation couples them with new waves, they stand together in “rhythmic unity.” Because sensations only occur when these waves are coupled, it is this sort of intensity which is the rhythm of sensation. We can only discover it by “going beyond the organism,” whose faculties or zones are synchronized. It is for this reason that Deleuze considers phenomenology’s “hypothetical” lived body to be a “paltry thing” in comparison to the “more profound and almost unlivable Power” of the rhythmically-intensed butchered body without organs. The unity of this rhythm is not the unity of conjunction, which requires both conjuncts to be compatible; rather, it is a forced coincidence or superposing of contrary nervous wave flows, found only where “rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed;” (le rythme lui-même plonge dans le chaos, dans la nuit, et où les différences de niveau sont perpétuellement brassées avec violence).[12]
With its zones and faculties so disoriented, the BwO cannot represent objects, as we saw in Kant’s sublime; but more importantly, the BwO cannot represent itself. It cannot be a signified to which some name is affixed. This is one of the most potent implications of Deleuze’s notion of intensity: the subject has a nomadic “identity.” (We postpone giving a detailed description of Deleuze's sort of selfhood; yet, we may at least now note that it is not what philosophy has hitherto considered personal identity or subjectivity). Yet, Deleuze is not describing a post-modern erasure of subjectivity, but something far more creational. On account of the inherent tendencies of the faculties to try to come together around a common representation, the self does not disintegrate into nothing, but rather it becomes new things, new contrary things, although without any destination, like a nomad.[13]
With this more indeterminate sense of selfhood, BwO’s can better exchange intensive waves so to bring about a “conjunction of flows” that is a “continuum of intensities.”[14] The BwO is always in a collectivity, in a totality of BwO’s exchanging intensive waves; thus, not only is there the communication of intensity between indeterminate bodily zones (or faculties) within a BwO, there is also communication of intensity between disorganized bodies. One means of this communication of intensive rhythm is what Deleuze terms aesthetic analogy.
[1] Tomas Geyskens, “Painting as Hysteria: Deleuze on Bacon,” delivered at Philosophical Criticisms of the concept of Sexuality in Psychoanalysis,” Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,
[2] Geyskens, p.7.
[3] Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation, Transl. Daniel W. Smith, (
[4] Logic of Sensation, p.34. Logique de la sensation, p.49.
[5] Logic of Sensation, p.34. Logique de la sensation, p.49-50.
[6] Geyskens, p.8. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p.32; 34. Logique de la sensation, p.47; 49.
[7] Logic of Sense, p.226. Logique du sens, p.229.
[8] Logic of Sensation, p.35. Logique de la sensation, p.50.
[9] Logic of Sensation., p.34. Logique de la sensation, p.49-50.
[10] Difference & Repetition, p.237. Différence et répétition, p.305.
[11] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (London: Continuum, 1987), p.175, 179. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2: Mille Plateaux, (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), p.196, 199.
[12] Logic of Sensation., p.32. Logique de la sensation, p.47.
[13] Thousand Plateaus, p.177. Mille Plateaux, p.197-198.
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