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The Tantric Egg

In Anti-Oedipuswe read:

The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and

thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, tra-

versed by gradientsmarking the transitions and becomings, the des-

tinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors.

Nothing here is representative; rather, it is all life and lived experi-

ence: the actual, lived emotion of having breasts does not resemble

breasts, it does not represent them, any more than a predestined

zone in the egg resembles the organ that it is going to be stimulated

to produce within itself. Nothing but bands of intensity, potentials,

thresholds, and gradients. A harrowing, emotionally overwhelming

experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to matter, to

a burning, living center of matter. (Anti-Oedipus, 19, emphasis in the

original)

The Body without Organs is the condition of desiring possibility, a

confusional state of matter in which later possible states are contained

in an undifferentiated manner. But any state of matter, any state of being

contains the later states as actualizations of a virtuality, as a becoming-

organism of the egg.

To explain the meaning of the Artaudian notion of the Body without

Organs, Félix and Gilles turn to a comparison with emotion. The emotion

provoked by an object, an event, a situation, does not resemble this

object, this event, or this situation. The emotion provoked by the

vision of a breast, by the desire to touch it, to caress it, to suck it – all

of these emotions do not resemble the breast, are not facts of its very

matter, if – here is the Body without Organs – we do not refer to the

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