Body without organs and capitalism in Deleuze and Guattari: Critical potential or fetishism?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to consider the critical potential of the notion of the body without organs (BwO), specifically its possible role in a critique of capitalist society, given that both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus fall within this framework. Deleuze and Guattari describe the BwO as the limit from which lines of flight and deterritorializations emanate, in order to combat the stratifications that capture and subordinate individuations, desires, and multiplicities. However, this description of the BwO is, paradoxically, still comparable to the effects of exchange value and commodity fetishism. This article outlines an unsuspected parallel between the unproductive nature of capital (which appropriates the product of abstract labor) and the unproductive nature of the BwO (which appropriates the product of desiring machines); these similarities are underpinned by the ahistorical description of the productive forces and the destitution of the proletariat in order to replace it with the schizophrenic. The article concludes that, beyond the critiques of stratifications and the possibilities of liberating the flows of desires and multiplicities, there remains an underlying conceptual thread that leads to a defense of technological, financial, and globalizing capitalism.