6 - Matter in Revolt
from Contagion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
Summary
Now obviously we do not have to pay to have the body we have, or we do not have to pay for our genetic make-up. It costs nothing. Yes, it costs nothing – and yet, we need to see …, and we can easily imagine something like this occurring (I am just engaging in a bit of science fiction here, it is a kind of problematic which is currently becoming pervasive).
(Foucault 2008: 227)The body without organs endures throughout Deleuze and Guattari, constantly threatened by physiological and psychoanalytical coding. It opposes the hierarchical, organising principle of the organism and defies the pre-assignation of its (mainly genital) organs according to end-pleasure, as described by Freud (1995: 279–93). Žižek's Lacanian rejoinder to the body without organs is the organ without a body. While Deleuze's bodies are at once monads and machines, singular yet defined by their affective relations, Žižek faults the body without organs for being too hierarchical. He asks: ‘why BwO, why not (also) OwB? Why not Body as the space in which autonomous organs freely float? Is it because “organs” evoke a function within a wider Whole, subordination to a goal? But does this very fact not make their autonomisation, OwB, all the more subversive?’ (2012a: xii). We can quickly generate a short list of organs without bodies in SF. In the Re-Animator films, a renegade scientist confirms that consciousness, or, rather, the unconscious, flows through each and every part of the body, and that ‘pure potentiality’ resides in each organ without a body. Limbs and organs move and act independently and form alliances: three fingers and a single eyeball; a ticklish leg severed below the knee and a forearm. In Frankenhooker (Frank Henenlotter, 1990) a cooler imprisons dismembered body parts, each belonging to a prostitute. Slick with re-agent, they escape to seek vengeance on a drug-dealing pimp. They resemble Francis Bacon paintings: an upended torso with a mouth where a vagina should be, chattering as it walks on its hands with no arms; a head propelled by a clenched fist on an arm that functions as a leg, and hands that grasp; a small tower of breasts with arms that hold aloft a head with a mouth that kisses.
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- Information
- Deleuze and BaudrillardFrom Cyberpunk to Biopunk, pp. 158 - 172Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016