Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

order to create a kind of metaphor for the mind-body-cosmos

relationship.

We treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organ-

ism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the

strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and

thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation

and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migra-

tions: all independent of accessory formsbecause the organs appear

and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when

it crosses a threshold, when it changes gradients ... The tantric

egg. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 153, emphasis in

original, translation corrected to conform to original)

The concluding formula, tantric egg, sounds mysterious and sugges-

tive, and recalls the metamorphic wisdom of tantrism, the action that

consciousness can exercise on the body.

Both Gilles and Félix always had a certain intolerance for mystical

inclinations, but it would be interesting to study the terminological

links and also the philosophical implications of their thought with

Buddhism.^5

In the Body without Organs concept, the consonance is obvious: the

BwO is the immanence where pure intensities and non-codified and

unrepeatable singularities flow. These are impermanent singularities:

in its various versions and its very diverse schools, Buddhism is never

far from an essential idea, that of the impermanence of all worlds of

existence and projections. And the other side of impermanence is the

foundational truth of the void.

The visible and experiential forms are only hallucinations of the

mind. And even the ego, to which Western metaphysics devotes a kind

of philosophical adoration, seems for Buddhist thought only to be an

effect of language, the projection of a linguistic and perceptive illusion.

The world – that the pre-Buddhist Hindu tradition defined as maia,

that is, illusory projection – is understood by Buddhism as a succession

of mental variations.

In the definition of the Body without Organs as distributor of inten-

sities that trace the lines of the cosmic world, there is a reflection of the

Buddhist vision. It is at the junction between the rhizomatic reading

and the Buddhist reading that I came to understand the notion of

the Body without Organs as an egg, as the surface of an egg on which

we find in the state of pure potentiality the lines of flight or lines of

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