How do you make yourself a body without organs? Using Knausgard’s «My struggle» as an ethical case

Abstract: The concept of “the body without organs” takes up a great part of the oeuvre of Deleuze and Guattari. Yet, it is difficult to answer their question—“How do you make yourself a body without organs?”—or to understand their answer. In this paper, I propose that the body without organs is an ethical concept. To support this assertion, I relate, especially, Deleuze’s thought on the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s auto-fictive project, My Struggle, suggesting that My Struggle can be read as a body without organs. By doing so, I aim at two things: first, to illustrate a possible application of Deleuze’s ethic, and, second, to show how such an ethic may guide us regarding what we ought to do.