Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

(Jeff_L) #1
pre-actualized, pre-specified matter which constitutes desire, that is, a
becoming-other.
And in A Thousand Plateaus, we instead read:

We treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the
organism 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 dis-
placement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms
because the organs appear and function here only as pure intens-
ities ... The tantric egg. (A Thousand Plateaus, 153, emphasis in the
original)

We can consider the tantric egg as the rhythm that allows a syntony
between prana and atman, cosmic breath and singular soul. It is the
locus of indetermination, the condition of becoming-other. Conscious-
ness is constituted by the same elements of which rocks, butterflies
and integrated circuits are made, because in each of these worldly
objects the same undetermined potentiality circulates, the Spinozist
substance.
But this is never tinged with any form of spiritualism because
phenomena of contiguity and osmosis between one state of being
and any other state of being are made possible by matter itself,
by the dynamics that animate it, the manner in which it gives
life to its more or less stable configurations, which in the last ana-
lysis are all unstable (from the point of view of a Time without
Organs).

******

Ah, I was forgetting – sooner or later we will have to talk about the
Time without Organs, that is the independent time of duration, the time
that is not incarnated in the pulsations of the sentient organism, but is
the condition of existence of the body and of its pulsations. The time
of the eternal return.
The biospheric-noospheric continuum cannot be defined either as
biosor as noos because the inorganic proliferates in the organic, the
organic proliferates in the noetic, and the noetic in its turn circulates
prolifically in the organic (as communication psychochemistry teaches
us), and the organic in the inorganic.

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