A Thousand Plateaus: 'How to make yourself a Body Without Organs?' Review 

I like you Micah, man. Cool comment, nice profile pic and first to comment. Keep it up!

Tai galbūt dėl to, kad Lietuvis : )

Asceticism as a doctrine organizes forces by restricting sensual pleasure in favor of spiritual-becoming. This wouldn't be what D&G are advocating for as it inherently restricts experimentation into those intensities that may be so allocated by a spiritual leader as sensual and base. This isn't to rule out however the possibility of ascetic intensities being present. But as a lifestyle asceticism does not encourage experimentation.

The Greeks created a new anthropology that was based on the idea of ​​man in form. To be a man was to be physically conditioned. It meant having a role, where that role consisted of learning that role, being fit for life as a citizen of the polis. In ancient Rome, Seneca had imported this Greek idea into Italy. It was a link between philosophy and the arena. It was the fundamental step towards the insertion of the struggle as a metaphor for the struggle of life in an arena. Disciplines combined in a panathlon in Western European culture. Stay in the arena until the end. The gladiator's metaphor has been modified for human existence as a struggle to stand up to the end. A fight in the arena of life. The best man would be the best gladiator. Hegel is not the first to conceive the subject as a substance, but the Stoics. It is true that Christian culture has a foot in the legacy of Greek athletics. Egyptian and Syrian monks were keenly aware of being men who want to live their entire lives on a training ground. The monastery was not yet called a monasterium, but asketeria, a Greek word for a monastery. What was practiced in these places was the ascent, that is, askesia, askesis, asceticism. It's training. The monastery was the place where someone trained. That is why it is said that a cloister is a part of the religious architecture of monasteries, convents, cathedrals and abbeys. It typically consists of four corridors forming a quadrilateral and, as a general rule, has a garden in the middle. Hence it is said that the life of a cloister or cloister is the common name given to the life of monks, friars or nuns. In the past, monks themselves were seen as "athletes of Christ". In Hellraiser's films, demonic characters are called cenobites, cenobites are withdrawn people, they are creatures that live in community and seek gratification, especially pleasure: death, sadomasochism, extermination. If the French spoke of the plateaus in 1980, it means that they were already in the current situation of secularization of religion and the de-spiritualization of asceticism. The religion of the exercising contexts is cleaned up. What religion was initially was a training system where people spent hours reading, days in cells on their knees, making movements with their mouths, reciting passages, writing, kept their legs crossed, maintained body posture, here and there maybe even acts of penance. If the search for heights is cleared, for the transcendent, for a high light, the human being lives, as such, in repetition and gives form and content to his own life through a more or less conscious ritualism, made of repetitive exercises, therefore, ritualism is part of human life, but spirituality is not always. “Spirituality” is not impregnated with religiosity, since we are endowed with de-spiritualization, since it is increasingly linked to the fitness, wellness, financial, political, ideological features, the true form of change that the world and itself man needs, is one capable of revaluing life, the Being itself and depends on an inner action. It is a transformative imperative: human beings sensitive to its appeal should begin to work on themselves. The human antropology is ascetic. We balance standing.

don't say I'm not smart it will ruin your self esteem and discipline just don't say it

I'm rather new to Deleuze but I'll try my hand here: I think you're missing the point about the ethical dimension of Deleuzian philosophy. He wants us to schizophrenize our otherwise rigid ways of thinking by establishing lines of flight and pursuing the body without organs as an always-distant process of becoming. He borrowed this concept from Schreber, elaborated upon it, and advocated for an ethical means of pursuing a lifestyle centered around and within it. The body without organs is not a "reduction" of schizophrenia to something dramatized, but an elevation of schizophrenia to the level of an ideal to admire and pursue; it's taking the positive content of schizophrenia as a guide to all of us who are informed by dominant norms and rigid states of consciousness. Rhizomatic/schizophrenic thinking are the path to true creativity and originality, and this is what Deleuze is aiming at. Deterritorializing and destratifying our fixed identities and egos and replacing them with "intensities" and "becomings" will bring us closer to our world of flux and transformation rather than lost in the mental, ideological, symbolic and interpretive abstractions perpetuated by dominant narratives. Is it really "pure bullshit" to advocate for carefully settings one's desire free and identifying sources of rigidity and stratification in one's life? If we dig through the difficult terminology and try to be open minded rather than reactionary about these things, they actually start to seem rather intuitive. And on top of that, they aim at setting us free and opening up our creative potentialities.