The New Headspace Barbara Richards

The Logic of Sense Essay 6/25/17

Bodies Without Organs

In an identity, x = x. Sets hold various identities, including limits and singularities,

placeholders, like zero. A singularity is a point or a non-point, like the eye of a storm or the
center of a whorl of hair. In physics, black holes are singularities, rips in space-time. You could
say singularities are points of pure becoming. A singularity is another point in a set; a point has
zero dimensions.1 Humpty Dumpty, an egg, has no organs; he is made of singularities instead.
He lacks identity.
In the opposition between the surface and depths, the surface, the membrane between
bodies and words, things and propositions, begins to break down and have holes. The body is a
cavity with a broken surface; it is porous, with little holes. If there were no separation between
propositions and things, words would enter bodies. Of course, this is not the case. In the world of
depth, bodies are penetrated by other bodies, mixtures – this is a wound. On the other side, in a
separate set, is sense, the event, an incorporeal effect, a surface effect. The surface effect, the
pure ideal game is set apart; words are set aside from bodies.2
There is also the organism without organs, a body without organs, an egg, like Humpty
Dumpty, or an embryo with undifferentiated organs, or a zygote with poles of cells, thresholds of
potential. On the zygote are the animal and vegetative poles, active and passive poles of cells.
The egg and Humpty Dumpty are points, singularities. They take in both sets of aspects – that of
bodies but also skins, peelings, surface effects, events, sense – a body but a body without
smaller, internal bodies, encased in membranes: a body without organs.
In the egg, this body without organs, there is no surface, no frontier, no difference or
differentiation. The fish become a part of the sea, thus alluding to Humpty Dumpty’s poem
including fish.3 Are the fish apart of the sea or are they separate bodies? In this body without
organs, between surface and depth, words enter bodies. Fire, water and air, classical elements,
combine. Body and words become one – a strange amalgamation, like the portmanteau word.
Hecate is the goddess of the crossroads, the liminal and facing three ways. Circe, is an
expression of Hecate, who is also the goddess of the moon. Circe turned the lotus eaters into
pigs, a moment of pure becoming. There are lost pigs and other animals on Peter Pan’s island.
Hecate and the nocturnal, connect to seemingly nonsense words: “lost pigs of the moon.”4 Water
and fire, classical elements, combine again. The combination of opposites points to the duality of
the body: the fragmented body with separate organs and the body without organs. Peter Pan
releases his shadow; both Peter Pan and Alice release their incorporeal doubles.
There is a difference between the nonsense of the surface and the two series, and the
nonsense below sense and the surface, the nonsense of the depths, when the two series collapse
into one. Sense slides along the surface width, between the two sets of signified and signifying.
Meanwhile, there is no surface or difference between continuous bodies surrounded by their
surface membranes, only depth. The lotus eaters are the nexus, the connection, between pigs and
eating. Eating entails a digestive track from end to end, a tube, a hole, a tunnel, a surface of

1
The Logic of Sense. 80.
2
Ibid 87.
3
Ibid 89.
4
Ibid 90.
epithelium, running through the body, continuous with its surface; skin on the outside and the
meeting of internal and external, inside and outside – one giant surface, running through a depth.5
Sense is the bi-directional line, like Aion, the divider between language and the body,
protecting the body from language – when words pierce bodies, a wounding. Sense is the barrier,
the mirror, keeping words, the incorporeal, proper names – and the body, bodies, the depths,
separate. Sense is a singularity, an empty square, a supernumerary zero, moving between the two
series of propositions and things, eating and speaking. There are two series, the body versus
language and words.
Telescoping, Aion and Alice are unfolding, along an infinite line. Common sense,
identity, is being eroded. The body goes back to being an egg, an undifferentiated body without
organs. Doubles and doppelgangers appear in tandem – Hatter, Hare; Tweedle-dee,
Tweedledum. The nonsense of depth is pitted against the nonsense of the surface.6 The nonsense
of depth, is corporeal; there is no surface or frontier – words pierce bodies and wound them. The
surface collapses, pierced with many holes; it is porous.
The nonsense of the surface is the logic of sense, language, the incorporeal, the surface,
the dividing line between the two series of language and bodies. The surface is like the surface of
a body of water – it is easily pierced. Bodies pierce mixtures, producing surface effects, ripples.
Sense is produced on the surface; when the surface collapses, sense collapses.
Sense is produced at the intersection of identity and direction. Sense doesn’t say its own
sense – like nonsense – it further denotes in a serialization: n1, n2, n3; infinite regression, eternal
return. Sense is the surface between words and bodies. A surface and the liminal space before it,
are indivisible; they are two sides to one whole, like two-faced Janus: a double causality. There
are two forms: the general and the individual, two perspectives,7 surface versus depth. There are
two series of singularities, with empty square and esoteric words, circulating between objects
and words, bodies and language, signified and signifying.

5
Ibid 91
6
Ibid 92.
7
Ibid 99.