As a joke, a friend dared me to write a Deleuzean analysis of Nintendo’s popular video game character Kirby. But as I thought about this challenge more and more, it occurred to me that the example of Kirby is probably as good an illustration as any for Deleuze and Guattari’s famously difficult concept of the Body without Organs (BwO).

In the sixth chapter of their second collaborative book A Thousand Plateaus, titled ‘How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?’ Deleuze and Guattari initially propose the example of the Dogon Egg. According to the faith of the Dogon tribe of Mali, the universe originated in the form of an egg:

“In the beginning, Amma, alone, was in the shape of an egg: the four collar bones were fused, dividing the egg into air, earth, fire, and water, establishing also the four cardinal directions. Within this cosmic egg was the material and the structure of the universe, and the 266 signs that embraced the essence of all things.”

Deleuze and Guattari want to make a similar use of the idea of the egg, and the reference to the Dogon tribe helps us to make sense of some of their stranger proclamations in the essay. For instance, their answer to the eponymous question: “At any rate, you have one (or several). It’s not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any rate, you make one, you can’t desire without making one.”

One always is or has a BwO already, but one is also never quite a BwO until it’s too late, as per the diagram on pg.282 of Anti-Oedipus: What is one’s fate when they become a BwO? It would mean becoming a pure intensity, a being of non-sense. The Dogon Egg is a BwO only because it is solely intensive; it is impossible to move anywhere inside it without stepping into some place qualitatively different from wherever one was.

An easier way to go about explaining the concept is by comparing it with their idea of the ‘virtual’. The virtual is a space of real-but-not-actual possibilities that constantly vie for realization. This concept comes from Gilbert Simondon’s work on individuation-crystallization. For Simondon, singularities (particular and discretely discernible things) are always the products of cascading bifurcations in a pre-individual state space.

To illustrate Simondon’s idea, Muriel Combes provides the following example: “in super-cooled water (i.e. water remaining liquid at a temperature below its freezing point), the least impurity within a structure isomorphic to that of ice plays the role of a seed for crystallization and suffices to turn the water into ice.” In this example, the possibility of the super-cooled water becoming ice insofar as the process of bifurcation has not been initiated is real-but-not-actual; the water has a virtual component that is already ice.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the virtual is also intensive. The egg is intensive because it has not individuated into anything. It is a space of pure potentiality – it hasn’t crystallized into any determinate form, but many determinate forms are virtually contained in it already. A BwO is just this: a non-singular space of pure becoming.

This is also why one always already is or has a BwO but never quite becomes one: insofar as one changes, in their changing they are a BwO. But insofar as they become-something, in their changing they are never a BwO, even if they need to be a BwO to change. A BwO is never ‘something’; this is why Deleuze in his later interviews is so hesitant to use the definite article without some ironic twist (always writing it as “the”) – the definite article implies a singularity, but insofar as we do change in real ways, we are splayed across a virtual space as multiplicities. So Deleuze and Guattari infamously comment at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus, “Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”

How, then, is Kirby a BwO? If BwOs are never determinate (since they are always purely intensive), it would seem like the fact that Kirby has a detetminate form counts markedly against his being a BwO. However, whenever Kirby exists in his neutral ‘state’, his existence like this is purely provisional. His main power is becoming: he eats an enemy and transforms himself to perform some of their abilities.

We therefore observe that what seems like a determinate form in Kirby is actually a preindividual form which is defined by the numerous virtual trajectories or bifurcations accessible to it when the right crystallizations are achieved.

Thus, there is never “a” Kirby; he is always already many. And because Kirby is, in a neutral way, just a representation of something purely intensive, he is wholly a BwO. But doesn’t this contradict our earlier comment that one can never “be” a BwO, that it’s defined by never being a “something”, and instead just being a becoming?

Unsurprisingly, Kirby remains a BwO even with this objection in mind. One “is” a BwO only insofar as they are solely intensive, and the logical category of ‘limit’ cannot be intelligibly applied to intensities. That is, a purely intensive being would be, in a sense, infinite. To understand this, let us recall Deleuze’s Spinozism as well as proposition III from book 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics: “Things which have nothing in common cannot be one the cause of the other”, or proposition VIII: ” Every substance is necessarily infinite”.

A substance for Spinoza is infinite because something is finite only if it is limited by something else. Something can be limited by something else only if it can be affected by something else. However, substances cannot affect each other, and since substances are all that there is (alongside the modes which are their affectations), all substances are infinite.

A BwO is a substance. On some readings of Deleuze this is an unlikely proposition to assent to. For instance, if we follow Deleuze’s early philosophy of difference, we find that only difference in-itself is substance, and all intensities are secreted by it as accretions of the process of different/ciation.

However, on another, more radical reading, all BwOs are qualitatively different from one another – again, as purely intensive spaces. This can be found as well in Deleuze’s reading of Bergson: since time is intensive (it varies qualitatively from itself at every moment/duration), no previous moment in time can have an entirely determinative influence upon another moment in time. This is Bergson’s argument for the existence of free will.

Then, BwOs are (at least very much like) Spinoza’s substance. And since Spinoza’s substance is infinite, BwOs are infinite. However, Kirby is not infinite. And yet, this is what guarantees that he is a BwO. The variety of Kirby’s self-different/ciations (his transformations) always approach a non-limit but never quite reach it. Insofar as there are infinitely many things, and Kirby transforms differently whenever he eats something new, Kirby can (theoretically) become infinitely many different things. Thus, Kirby has a speculative existence as an infinite being.

But despite this, Kirby is never infinite. Although Kirby could become infinitely many things, he never does. The variety of his transformations approaches infinity but always falls barely short of it. Only if Kirby was infinite could he be a BwO; but since he isn’t infinite but can be, he is therefore a BwO. This is because a BwO is never something which one becomes; it is rather the intensity of becoming in its purest and most basic form.