Gilles Deleuze, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The body without organs is not an absence of organs, not a return to some pre-organic indifference, not the fantasy of a body dissolved into nothingness. It is produced — produced at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product.1 That last phrase is the key: the BwO is not what precedes production but what emerges within it, as its own surface of inscription.
Desire, as Félix and I argued, is a process that unrolls a plane of consistency, a field of immanence — crisscrossed by particles and fluxes that break free from objects and subjects.2 Desire is strictly immanent to this plane, which it does not pre-exist and which must be constructed.3 This is why the BwO cannot be confused with lack. Voids and deserts are fully part of desire; they are not signs of something missing but constitutive features of the field itself.4
The anorexic body without organs is the clearest case: its void has nothing to do with lack, and is part of the constitution of the field of desire criss-crossed by particles and fluxes.5 Nor is desire to be understood through pleasure as its norm — not because desire cannot be satisfied, but on the contrary, by virtue of its positivity, the plane of consistency it draws in the course of its process.6
The Taoist circuit of intensities between Yin and Yang illustrates this: the condition for the circulation and multiplication of force is precisely that the man not ejaculate — not a delay of pleasure to produce a surplus, but the constitution of an intensive body without organs, a field of immanence in which desire lacks nothing and therefore cannot be linked to any external or transcendent criterion.7
How does one construct such a plane? Not by violent destratification. The danger is real: if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or dragged toward catastrophe.8 Staying stratified is not the worst that can happen; the worst is throwing the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever.9
The method is patient and meticulous: lodge yourself on a stratum, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment — always keeping a small plot of new land.10 The BwO reveals itself only there, at the limit of this careful work: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities.11
The plane of consistency would be the totality of all BwOs — a pure multiplicity of immanence, one piece Chinese, another medieval, another perverse, another scientific, all in a movement of generalized deterritorialization in which each person takes and makes what she or he can.12
The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product.Anti-Oedipus, pp. 36–37
it seemed to us that desire was a process and that it unrolled a plane of consistence, a field of immanence, a 'body without organs', as Artaud put it, crisscrossed by particles and fluxes which break free from objects and subjects.Dialogues II Revised Edition, pp. 108–109
Desire is therefore not internal to a subject, any more than it tends towards an object: it is strictly immanent to a plane which it does not pre-exist, to a plane which must be constructed.Dialogues II Revised Edition, pp. 108–109
The plane of consistence or of immanence, the body without organs, includes voids and deserts. But these are 'fully' part of desire, far from accentuating some kind of lack in it.Dialogues II Revised Edition, pp. 108–109
The void which is specific to the anorexic body without organs has nothing to do with a lack, and is part of the constitution of the field of desire criss-crossed by particles and fluxes.Dialogues II Revised Edition, pp. 108–109
If pleasure is not the norm of desire, it is not by virtue of a lack that is impossible to fill but, on the contrary, by virtue of its positivity, in other words, the plane of consistency it draws in the course of its process.A Thousand Plateaus, p. 178
It is not a question of experiencing desire as an internal lack, nor of delaying pleasure in order to produce a kind of externalizable surplus value, but instead of constituting an intensive body without organs, Tao, a field of immanence in which desire lacks nothing and therefore cannot be linked to any external or transcendent criterion.A Thousand Plateaus, p. 178
If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe.A Thousand Plateaus, p. 182
Staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected—is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever.A Thousand Plateaus, p. 182
Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.A Thousand Plateaus, p. 182
It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities.A Thousand Plateaus, p. 182
The plane of consistency would be the totality of all BwO's, a pure multiplicity of immanence, one piece of which may be Chinese, another American, another medieval, another petty perverse, but all in a movement of generalized deterritorialization in which each person takes and makes what she or he can.A Thousand Plateaus, p. 178