BwO

I confess that I'm more bemused by Plateau 6. each time I read
it. Perhaps I'll start with a naive reminiscence, which may
help someone else who needs examples. When I first tried to
cope with AO and was feeling totally lost, I was reading at
the same time Ursula Le Guin's -The Left Hand of Darkness- and
when I got to the foretelling scene in Ch.5 I suddenly
thought, My god that's it, the body without organs. Everything
is there, the zones of intensity, the lines of flight, the
destratification, and above all the desubjectification. The
link, of course, is the Tao, which is part of the assemblage
for both texts.

Yet, in the end, in Le Guin's text, all this is used to
achieve the quite specific goal of command over a higher
plane, that of prophecy. And I guess one of the problems of
this plateau is the internal contradiction between the goals
proposed, which are anti-authoritarian to the point of actual
danger, as D&G emphasise, and the language in which they are
based, which is unusually dictatorial. I'm looking at the
French text, and would like to know what the translator did
with all those infinitives, because if you say -examiner le
probleme- it implies not just -to examine the problem- or -
examining the problem- but very strongly -Examine the
problem!-.

What is the plane on which organs are refused and that on which we find
their constant reappearance in metonymic or metaphorical form.
It seems to be demanding a return to the -real- and at the
same time saying that the real is only meaningful in
figurative terms. The BwO is constantly with us and yet always
deferral, we refuse the ideal, yet if courtly love isn't an
ideal, what is it? Would someone like to have a go at
unpacking these paradoxes for me?

Marie


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