Though Deleuze and Guattari take great pains to avoid any taint of the
transcendent, the Body-without-Organs, or BwO, veers ineluctably towards sacred
forces. In “How to Build a Body without Organs,” the authors explore the BwO in
the context of drugs and somatic spiritual praxis (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 149–
66). There is mention of Taoist arts, of Artaud’s peyote experiences in Mexico, of a
Castaneda-like “egg.” The most important parallel, however, is one that they do not
explicitly draw, and that is between the BwO and Hindu tantra. Loosely speaking,
tantra aims, not to suppress or transcend the emotional and physical energies of the
body, but to embrace and transmute those energies through a kind of internalized,
psycho-ritual alchemy.^3 Over and against study and reflection, tantra emphasizes
procedures: mantra, visualization, hatha yoga, ritual, all geared toward the
transmutation of a fundamental cosmic energy called shakti. A serpentine store of this
stuff, known as Kundalini, lies coiled at the base of the spine. This energy, which
some claim is artificially stimulated by certain drugs, can be coaxed up the various
etheric centers—or chakras—that lie along the central channel, or sushamna,
associated with the spine. As metaphor and sometimes as practice, sexuality is key to
this process, and the most paradigmatic tantric sexual procedure is the retention of
orgasm in the male, an ascesis which helps transmute sexual energy into rarer and
more potent elixirs.
I apologize for this almost offensively oversimplified account, though at the very
least it reflects notions of tantra circulating within the popular discourse of
bohemian or alternative spirituality. At the moment, though, I want us to hear the
tantric echoes in Deleuze and Guattari, echoes that in turn will help us understand
the alchemical dynamics of the rave. Here is Deleuze himself on courtly love:
Now, it is well known that courtly love implies tests which postpone pleasure,
or at least postpone the ending of coitus. This is certainly not a method of
deprivation. It is the constitution of a field of immanence, where desire
constructs its own plane and lacks nothing.... Courtly love has two enemies
which merge into one: a religious transcendence of lack and a hedonistic
interruption which introduces pleasure as discharge. It is the immanent
process of desire which fills itself up, the continuum of intensities, the
combination of fluxes, which replace both the law-authority and the pleasure-
interruption.... Ascesis, why not? Ascesis has always been the condition of
desire, not its disciplining or prohibition.
(Deleuze 1993:139–40)The process whereby desire “constructs its own plane and lacks nothing” is
intimately allied with the emergence of the BwO. And if one replaces the term
“desire” with “energy” or “shakti” one can sense the continuity of this construction
with tantric procedures—operations that, on an admittedly crude and ad-hoc level,
inform both Goan trance parties and the “spiritual hedonism” of the freak
subculture that gave these fetes their shape.
ERIK DAVIS 255