Introduction

My name is Egawa. Thank you for having me here today.
I’m speaking to you because of an invitation from the editor Harumasa Abe. My research focuses on Western philosophy, centering particularly on philosophers such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. Today I’m speaking completely outside my own area of expertise, but I’ve had the opportunity to view and think over a video of Murobushi’s, and I’ve read Murobushi Ko Shusei (2018), the text which serves as, to borrow a phrase from Kuniichi Uno, Murobushi’s double, so my goal today is to speak as coherently as possible about the various thoughts these sources provoked.
To start, I’d like to briefly explain parallelism of mind and body according to Spinoza. For many years the human body had not been full considered or properly evaluated within Western philosophy. Philosophy had almost exclusively considered the mind, and only the human mind at that. Why is this? It’s because it was thought that the mind, as a soul, was eternal, whereas by comparison the body was inferior, a ruinous object in other words. In the 17^th century, however, Spinoza argued that the mind and the body have the same value. Since a human is made up of both a mind and a body, this assessment seems natural. However, for Spinoza this assessment is valid not only for humans, but for any distinct entity. If there is a body (=object) then there must also be a mind. Conversely, if there is a mind, then there must also be a body. This is what psychophysical parallelism tell us. Within nature, there is no possible way for only one of these two to exist. In other words, the existence of only a mind, or only a body, a physical substance, is not possible within nature. Understanding an individual only as an object is, in other words, akin to thinking that a mind does not exist within that distinct entity. However, according to parallelism, an individual is composed of two aspects: a mind and a body. There were no other philosophers thinking this way at the time. The important point to understand here is that a body is an extension, and the mind is formed from a non-extending idea, and while both are completely different, their ontological value is equal.
If that is the case, it naturally follows that the understanding we have of the human mind to this point completely changes. So when we think about the mind, according to parallelism, we also must constantly, inevitably consider the body as well. This is the kind of philosophical thinking that becomes established. And yet, parallelism does not mean that a human mind and body, the heart and physical form, simply exist in a relationship of parallel correspondence. Rather, it means that the realness of the movements and transitions of the two exist in parallel. Movements of the body are spatial, but how then should we perceive the movements and transitions of the mind? Emotions, for example, can be perceived as this sort of motion that occurs in the mind. Bodily movement and emotional transition. Emotions are expressed within the mind as ideas. The body cannot maintain its existence without various stimuli from objects that exist outside of it. The body can be understood to be essentially a single manifold which exists under these stimuli or transformations. It is in fact the emotion-idea in the mind which responds to these stimuli or transformations in the body.
Spinoza wrote his anti-moralism Ethics in the 17^th century. Deleuze also sought to draw out Antonin Artaud’s concept of “a body without organs” and create a new 20th century Ethics as an extension of Spinozism. This is my own way of thinking as well, and I’m constantly considering how to further advance the good points of both of these arguments with regard for the future of Ethics. Materialism which does not include the body will no longer be anything more than bad idealism. Ideas are instead a natural ability and inevitable expression within materialism. Consideration for the existence of the body will dramatically change our understanding of the human being itself.
I previously raised the idea of the “Artaud Problem” in Philosophy of Death (2005). On the cover of this book is a superimposed image of Artaud and Spinoza. Both share similar thoughts regarding the body, but at the same time it is also true that Artaud was moving away from Spinoza (with cruelty regarding bliss). I will be publishing a book called Cruelty and Inability which contains Philosophy of Death as well as other essays. I consider this title to absolutely be Artaud’s – the problem of the emotion cruelty and the force known as inability. These are discussed in relation to the theme of death. For this talk, I will discuss Ko Murobushi in particular relation to this work.

Psychophysical parallelism’s smallest circuit

Kuniichi Uno’s Tatsumi Hijikata (2017) has the subtitle, The thoughts of the debilitated body. These are thoughts of a body which becomes more debilitated and exhausts itself. In Hijikata’s Butoh Pilgrimage, there appears a line which reads, “I needed something that could be called a ferociously debilitated body in my butoh.” There’s something we can say here regarding “the thoughts of the debilitated body.” Namely, parallelism essentially has an ethic towards shrinking the circuit between the human mind and body. This is completely different from a mind which additively grows, but rather is one through which subtractive thoughts flow. This is, so to speak, the ethics of the debilitated body.
So then, let’s take a look at the figure on the upper left of page 4 of the materials that were handed out. First of all, this is one way of representing parallelism. The semicircle on the right represents the human body, while the semicircle on the left represents the human mind. The body is a type of extension, so therefore it must be in the form of something with extension attributes. The body, as long as it exists, must constantly transform as a result of stimuli received from external objects. In contrast to this, the mind, a product of various ideas, has the ability to understand and recognize things and is where emotion and will exist. All of this is in the left semicircle. Ideas are a form of thought attributes, and it is the aggregate of these ideas which is considered to form the human mind. The Spinozian mind, therefore, is completely unrelated to the concept of I or first personness or individuality. The “I” from Descartes’s famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am” does not exist. Ethics completely deviates from tendencies of thought regarding modern illnesses such as anthropocentrism, sentiocentrism, and the metaphysics of subjectivity. From the beginning, it can be said that Spinoza had conceived a non-I self, a non-conscious unconscious, and a non-subjective embodiment. In other words, Spinoza developed his thoughts on humans with the body as the major premise, and in the 17^th century he discovered the ontological unconsciousness of the mind corresponding to the manifold of bodily transformations.
On this point let’s focus in a little bit with some concrete examples. Take a look at the figure on the upper right of page 4. If the body does not constantly receives stimuli from external objects, then the self’s body cannot maintain its existence. Nothing could be more obvious. We breathe, we eat food, we drink water… Right now, everyone’s feet are on the floor, aren’t they? This should be regarded as a kind of stimulus as well. To have a body is to always receive stimuli, and thereby maintain the existence of the self. This is its primary meaning. However, maintaining the existence of the self does not simply mean preservation. It is inseparable from the desire to use better stimuli to maintain the existence of the self, provided this refers to maintaining the body. For example, better maintaining one’s existence in this heat is the same thing as a desire for stimuli that would prevent a decrease in the one’s body’s ability to function, such as cool air, cool water, shade when walking outside, etcetera. Each human’s day contains all of the changes which increase or decrease the ability of one’s body. This is what creates the reality of our existence. Reality is the intrinsic transformations of the body which come before we ever speak about what is or isn’t. Reality is something which grows or shrinks, or which has a degree of transformation. This is identically expressed in the mind as emotion. In other words, the expression of the degree of bodily transformation is inevitably expressed in the mind by emotions which have mutually qualitative differences.
Next, take a look at the figure at the very bottom. This is a famous image from Bergson’s Matter and Memory. In the middle there is an O which stands for Object. There is an object which is perceived and established as memory. This is represented as A. O and A form a circuit. However, because A is connected to another memory, it expands and becomes B, which forms a new circuit. When this happens, O is newly perceived along with that memory and the reality of B becomes associated with the object. In other words, the expansion of memory brings with it an added depth to the reality of a given object. Memory is constantly pouring into our current perception. Perception or cognition is entirely perception or cognition within memory.
So then, within Deleuze’s Cinema 2, the circuit between O and A is called the smallest circuit. This is the circuit which underlies everything, rather than one which relies on the order of increasingly enormous memories and customs. In contrast to an enormous circuit of order which is activated in the present by a latent past, this smallest circuit is not activated, and is instead only a reversal of the latent and the active. I think parallelism has the same significance, or a more practical and pragmatic meaning. The figure in the middle demonstrates that. It looks like the Bergson diagram from before turned on its side, but you can see that where the body and the mind exist as parallelism, they exist as the smallest circuit. According to Spinoza, the first object of the ideas that make up the human mind is the body of the self. The body constantly receives stimuli from the outside, and based on those transformations a recognition of the self’s body and outside objects is established. The body transforms and those ideas are formed in the mind. This is illustrated by the smallest circuit entitled “Mind and Body” in the center. However, as the left side of this diagram indicates, the human mind has a tendency to continuously expand and swell due to things like an understanding of general concepts, evaluations of customs, and preserving memories. In other words, the mind constantly tries to recognize external existence by forming enormous circuits. Of course, when this happens, things which exist outside of the body are subsequently understood only as part of an order of concepts, customs, and memories. Due to this, the smallest circuit is obliterated within the swollen mind, and the difference in bodily transformations seems to be recognized only in terms of concepts, customs, and habits. However, there is no way that the enormous circuit exists without the smallest circuit or a reliance upon it.

Subtractive parallelism

Parallelism’s Ethics is found in the formation of parallelism of the smallest circuit between the body and the mind. In other words, it thoroughly criticizes the mind’s additive, accelerating enlargement and is a theory which points toward a subtraction of the same while also being an ethics in and of itself. In order to criticize the additive, accelerating mind, activating the smallest circuit is indeed something which can be attributed the subtractive body, or the debilitated body of butoh. And yet, as I see it, this is not a theme which relates only to discrete fields. Rather, I would argue that the subtractive ability of the smallest circuit is something which can be found even in daily life. Thinking affirmatively about the pandemic, we should say that this is an opportunity for a transformation in the additive behavior of humans and a time in which the subtractive body and an alteration of desires is produced.
Take a look at the 3^rd page of your handout. The body of subtraction is the dancing body. There are a variety of ways in which a body exists: the eating body, the running body, the sleeping body, the picture-drawing body, the standing body, and so on. The types are innumerable. However, these are infinitely additive states of the body that correspond to the articulation of language. And yet, for this dancing body, the various sensory states of the body have fallen away while the corresponding linguistic understanding of it has scattered. In other words, these two aspects become mutually inverted. The subtractive body exhausts the various bodily states corresponding to existing verbs while also emitting the idea of bodily deformation by exhausting the various linguistic elements of the mind. This is a figure which has emerged from Murobushi’s dancing body. Here, there is a body which has the power to subtract linguistic activity, or there is a butoh of the same. Attempts to apply language are ultimately unable to express this body’s movement and stillness. What are we looking at? I presume you feel a sense of language’s powerlessness here. We ordinarily see and hear things under the major premise of existent language. Our sensitivity, which is an ability to receive various things from outside sources, is actually incapable of apprehending anything other than what we can verbalize from the start or concepts which we understand. That which cannot be caught in the net of memory, custom, and language passes through unrecognized.
How are we to address this issue? What can be said here is that we sense the obstructive nature of general concepts and linguistic activity. These are things which also constantly arise in the course of our daily lives and which we collect. Arguably, philosophy is particularly active in this pursuit. One of the commentators from Murobushi’s Collected Works (Murobushi Ko Shusei), butoh dancer Akira Kasai, touches on the “obstructive nature of language” based on Murobushi’s own words: “I feel that every language is an obstacle.” There is no need to interpret this obstacle as something negative. Obstacles are certainly one type of limitation, but that does not mean that a limitation indicates something negative; indeed, it can become a starting point for new things to form.
The pain of the obstacle of language is transferred to the breathing of the human body. The body breathes. This is called souffle. Artaud often references this type of breathing. Murobushi also wrote about “breath,” didn’t he? Right now we are in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic which has made us acutely aware of our own breathing. We’ve even become aware of the atmosphere as a result of the pandemic. Artaud continued to have an awareness of the breathing of the body. The breathing that Artaud is aware of cannot be separated from his recognition that French language forms are present in the body. For us, Japanese language forms and the forms of those words become the premise upon which the breath is blown out from our bodies, without any sense that something is wrong. What does this mean? For example, when I decide to go out, if I have a family, I’ll say to them “I’ll be back later.” The form of these words is already present at the doorway which is then breathed out. When this happens, a series of sounds that we hear as “I’ll be back later” come out. Any act of utterance is like this almost everywhere. The act of speech only requires this use of breath from the body. However, the strange sense of incongruity between the various forms of words and the body which breathes them out, and this peculiar but universal problem which is reduced entirely to the breath of the body is what can be called the Artaud problem. The body’s breath, this can be called the body’s body. Actors only breathe out what is possible in response to these word forms (or lines). In this sense, Artaud brought an extraordinary conflict to the space between body/breath/language. Deleuze discusses this topic in The Logic of Sense by converting it to depth/height/surface.
According to Deleuze, Artaud concludes that he has collapsed breath and language, or height and surface, into the depths of the body. So then, the daily life formed by our utterances can be harmoniously, shareably formed by these three phases. One’s own body is constantly involved in skillfully breathing out the various forms of existing language. Artaud felt a real obstacle in this, and questioned whether the breath of the body existed only for this purpose. This not about thinking in another language or anything like that. Rather, this is a universal problem for humans. The reason why is because Artaud introduces a strange aspect which is incompatible with the space between these three phases. The obstruction of language is due to the fact that it can be returned to the problem of body, breath, and language. In any case, there is a wonderfully stable relationship between breath and language. This is what’s called the surface.
Murobushi has a short essay entitled Dancing Inability. I’d like to understand inability to mean the debilitated body which was mentioned earlier. It is an extremely important subtractive force. We talk about things in terms of ability or inability, or strengths and weaknesses. A weakness is a fault, a defect, right? In general, humans can be thought of as being comprised of both of these sides. However, within nature, things like deficiency, negation, and nothingness absolutely do not exist. A Spinozian naturalism does not understand or evaluate things from a point of deficiency or negation. What we need to understand about things like inability and obstacles is not their negativity, that is, not that they actively attempt to target deficiency or negation, but rather that they have a certain realness, and a unique way of transformation. What is the power of inability? What does the debilitated body do? What is born from the obstacle of language? This is precisely the activity (Spinoza) and positivity (Foucault) which the smallest circuit has.

The inverted body – Murobushi’s body and the idea illuminant

The subtractive body, the dancing body, becomes an illuminant of an idea. The transformations of the body are simultaneously, unfailingly expressed within the mind. So then, take a look at page 1 of your handout.

Whatsoever comes to pass in the object of the idea, which constitutes the human mind, must be perceived by the human mind, or there will necessarily be an idea in the human mind of the said occurrence. That is, if the object of the idea constituting the human mind be a body, nothing can take place in that body without being perceived by the mind. (Ethics, Part 2, Proposition 12)[*1]

This is one of the propositions of parallelism, and what is being said here is clear. I’ve already mentioned that the human mind is made up of ideas, and the object of those ideas is the transformation of the body. This means that if there is a bodily transformation, then there must exist a corresponding idea. This is incredible. This is exactly what psychophysical parallelism is. What happens within the object of the idea, in other words, everything which happens within one’s own body, must necessarily be perceived according to the human mind. When speaking about perception, there is no need to think about anything related to awareness. Perception is first having an idea about it. Having an idea in itself means perception of the object. There is nothing in the body which does not exist in the mind, and vice versa. That’s what this is saying. Within a subtractive, debilitated butoh, there may be bodily deformations which make us aware of this.
The idea of the body in this sense is not something which forms a so-called idealism. The idea in parallelism is an extremely materialistic one. The sense of deformation created by Murobushi’s dance is something which exists as an idea which should be perceived. “1 That is why dancing is not simply dancing. It’s feeling. / Dancing, that’s deforming, and it’s feeling that. First my body, no, from first to last, the body must be entirely exposed to deformations” (Dancing – deforming). What are these deformations of the body? Is it simply a strange movement that is not found in everyday life? Or is something which cannot be understood through daily verbs, is it bodily movement which is not often seen? Doesn’t the deformation of the body mean that we must also reach a deformation in our way of understanding things? The subtractive, dancing body exhausts language and in this way can reveal phases of an idea. When this happens the idea truly becomes an illuminating body.
Ideas are primarily emotions regarding sensations of the body. Emotions are what Spinoza refers to as affect, which is completely different from emotion or sentiment. The transformation of the body is known as affection. In other words, transformations and emotions are different, but almost entirely similar expressions. Bodily transformations are manifested as increasing or decreasing changes in the power to act, which are, so to speak, changes in the degree of this power. However, it seems almost impossible to directly recognize the degree of these differential transformations in one’s own body. In other words, the difference in the degree of bodily transformation instead exists in the mind as the idea of a qualitative difference, that is, emotion. Emotions such as joy and sadness, love and hate, hope and fear, compassion and envy – qualitative differences in the mind – are what is comprised by an idea. In this way of thinking, even negative emotions such as anger, jealousy, and hate, for example, and actually all natural power and its inevitability, are expressed within the mind. All emotions are ways of recognizing things. Whether that thing is good for you, in other words something which increases the body’s ability to act, or something which subtracts from the ability of the body to act, something bad which brings sadness, prior to conceptual understanding, what is first conveyed to one’s existence is emotion. This smallest circuit of transformation/emotion is constantly working within us. On top of that is a multi-layered order of memories, customs, general concepts, and more. As long as the transformations of the body are an essential way of existing, the first thing to be formed in the mind will be the idea of emotion.
Let’s look at the next quote. “2 Deformation, first of all, is destruction and generation. / Transition/movement always exist within it.” I agree with this. Nothing else is possible. However, what exactly is meant by transition? It is, as I mentioned before, a change in realness. The degree of destruction and generation is always a matter of the transition of realness, and is arguably what is concealed within deformation. “3 Dancing has already appeared with its deformation before I begin to dance. / As I attempt to transition to the non-I, dance is hidden within that transition.” The block of generation between “dance” and “deformation” for Murobushi starts to become clear. What is first danced exists only within the deformation. What is danced next can only exist if it is accompanied by a generative change into something other than the self. There is a dramatic inversion of ideas and the body surrounding this harsh deformation.

Death prior to the corpse

Exhaustion of the self and subjectivity is what is discussed in the next wonderful remark. “5 With every deformation, / I am something which is dying. / However, the power to perform my last rites is also the power to connect me to the generation of non-me.” Thinking fundamentally about the body, the image of death is always present. This is because the body can always be a model of death. Philosophers who privilege only the mind argue that the spirit is eternal or immortal, which ends up disregarding and eliminating death. Or, an awareness of death is mediated only in terms of an appeal to the fulfillment of life. In contrast to this, physical transformations can, in a positive sense, be a model of death. To put this another way, it is an affirmation of the existence of death before becoming a corpse, or an evaluation of a death prior to becoming remains. Murobushi seems to describe this by living as both destructed form and destructive power.
Spinoza clearly recognizes a death prior to the corpse. In modern terms, Spinoza would probably recognize brain death to be the death of the person. If you consider death to be something which is not limited to becoming a corpse, then the question arises as to what is prior to becoming a corpse, that is, what is equivalent to such a death. I think Spinoza considered a variety of forms of death prior to the corpse. (This is something I consider in Philosophy of Death.) It seems that Murobushi’s problem of death or deformation, or the problem of destruction, can be developed under this line of inquiry. “6 That’s why dance lives in the ambiguous power tied to life and death which exists within its own vibration. It is a boundary experience that shares the pain of the deforming body and the ‘something’ which causes that deformation.”

Toward another body

Nearly all philosophers were concerned with the problem of “another mind.” In fact, it can be said that almost all books were written with the goal of increasing the mind’s capabilities. What these philosophers all share is a dialectical way of thought. In other words, it’s the idea of the superiority of negativity, that is, a shift to a higher value, superior thing through negation. There was no one raising the issue of “another body” in philosophy at the time. However, Spinoza raises the question within Ethics. There were no other philosophers like this. Artaud also, in a similar way, constantly thought about this idea of “another body.” Murobushi also talks about “another flesh.” This is not an issue of the condition of another body. Rather, it refers to the importance of the occurrence of a transition from the current existing body to another. The key point of living in the transition process itself is what Murobushi calls the constant deformation of the body. Artaud’s Theater and Science is one of the most important texts for me.

A human body must die when a person has forgotten to deform or change that body.
Otherwise, the human body does not die, it is not crushed, and it is not buried in a
graveyard.
[…]
The human body is indestructible and immortal. That is a change.
[…]
A shift from one body to another.
From a bodily state of decay and powerlessness
to a bodily state of strength and improvement.

Murobushi, who affirms deformation, resonates perfectly with Artaud. Death comes to the body because the deformation of the body has been forgotten. We can say that consideration for the body can primarily be found in the transition to another body. We can also interpret this to mean a transition from an organic body to an inorganic, organless body. This means that the “strengthened and improved” body is in fact, for an organic body, a body of almost complete inability.
Next, let’s look at the Spinoza statement. “In this life, therefore, we mainly endeavor that the body of childhood, as far as its nature allows and is conducive thereto, should develop into a body that is capable of a great many activities and is related to a mind that is highly conscious of itself, of God, and of things…“ (Ethics, Part 5, Proposition 39, Scholium).[*2] To put another way, the change from the childhood body to the adult body indicates a diversification of stimuli for the body. But, in a parallelism-like accompaniment to this diversification, the mind strives to become more aware of the self, god, and things. In other words, a mind with this awareness can understand the change from a childhood body to an adult one not as a simple maturation, but as a deformation toward another body. Murobushi states the following.

A never now, a nowhere here.
The flesh that has gone out from the flesh.
A different flesh, a different word.
Or, having consumed one’s own flesh, the figure of the self vanishes and becomes
the flesh in a state of nothingness. (No idea is as unrelated to me as “technology”)

Here, the issue of “another flesh” is essentially related to an “outside” existence or a non-existence, to the body in “a state of nothingness.” In any case, these texts seem contain similar questions regarding the deformation of the body.

Graveyard

Now then, when we think about death we must also be aware of the graveyard. In other words, we must be aware of being buried. Artaud affirmed the deformation of a body which is not buried in a graveyard. Murobushi says something interesting in his Nijinski at Midnight text. “Living is exercising the urgency of the body=power. It is transmitted through that urgency. Ephemeral, transient. Transient means not having a grave. This body is my grave.” (translator’s note: The Japanese word for transient reads hakanai, which could also be interpreted as haka-nai, meaning no grave.[*3]) It’s nice to see this word “transmission,” isn’t it? It’s the type of language we’re using right now. This is a new idea amalgam which completely negates our current systematic series. Regarding the systematic occurrence of procreation, Deleuze=Guattari affirmatively argued that other things are combined through transmission. By the way, what is this exercise of bodily urgency? He goes so far as to claim it’s the act of living. This is an issue we should think about. Incidentally, if Murobushi’s body was already a graveyard, then we can say that his body could not be buried any further.
There is an ancient Greek idea called soma sema. In Greek, soma means body and sema means graveyard. In other words, “the body is a graveyard.” When the body becomes a corpse, the mind leaves the body which has become a graveyard, and returns to the world of eternity as the soul. In other words, while the body can be destroyed, the soul is eternal. In this sense, the body is the graveyard. The Pythagoreans also seem to have perceived the body as a graveyard, in the sense that there are souls which are unable to leave bodies which have become remains. In any case, these are ideas which were established from pre-philosophical reasoning, that is, from an evaluation of the body as a negative existence from the outset.
Another thing. The Greek word sema means graveyard, but what is its etymology? It comes from the word sign. A sign, before anything else, is a graveyard. Indeed, a sign is the graveyard (indicator) of all things. Additionally, everything has been fixed in the sign, at the exact time it seems to be approaching death. A sign is the complete opposite of generative change. For us, everything is understood by creating graveyards not just of our bodies, but of everything and turning all of that into signs. This means the theory of signs (semiotics) is the theory of graveyards. Therefore, there is an anti-semiotic thought which attempts to tear down semiotics. In this sense, Spinoza, Artaud, Deleuze=Guattari are all destroyers of semiotics. Anti-semiotics is in fact an extrication from graveyard theory.
So then, if we add a negative prefix to both soma and sema, we immediately establish asoma and asema theory. This is an early Stoic way of thinking and leaves us with, “the non-body thing is a non-signal.” This non-body thing is understood clearly through the lens of parallelism as an idea in the human mind. The non-body thing has a non-meaning effect which is precisely an action of an idea. We are able to draw out these ideas depending on the body’s way of existing. Stimulus of the body is one of the drivers in the alteration from the meaning of a sign to the action of an idea. That stimulus is the deformation of the body. Questioning what sort of speed or slowness, movement or rest, deforms one’s body is the same as questioning in what way the idea illuminates. It’s a matter of what it perceives. Those which have an awareness toward another body, Spinoza, Artaud, Deleuze, Hijikata, Murobushi, and others, seem to have completely different processes which form one and the same concept.

The infinite within deformation

Lastly I’d like to touch on a consideration of infinity.

The flesh is here and cannot be reached. It is what what’s closest and infinitely far.[…]
To be infinitely close and infinitely far is to live at a distance. It is always something which is
separated.
We are infinitely separated from being infinite.
We can only assign infinite meaning to the infinite separations we count.
In other words, we have no end, we cannot end,
we continue to count closeness and distance, and give it meaning.
Provided that I am me, the distance is infinite.
The fact that you and I are cut off, that is endless.
By the way, what is infinity? It is meaninglessness. A meaninglessness which no meaning or
number can reach.
To be finite is to have meaning.
And the fact that we are finite is yet another infinity.
What? Two infinities? (The flesh is here…)

This is a text that makes me want to write what comes next. “What? Two infinities?” That can’t be the case. Infinity should instead be infinite. The first infinity is the infinity that exists outside, while the second infinity is the one which exists inside the finite thing. However, the outside infinity, that is, the infinity of separation or the infinity of meaninglessness, can be considered as the infinity within the finiteness of the latter. In short, what is said is that infinite change can only exist within the finite form of the human body. In other words, infinite changes in finite things. It is a change in which infinity becomes larger or smaller and which can only exist within the finite. The finite body is the form which expresses this infinite compressed transformation. Up to this point I’ve mentioned subtractive body, another body, deformation of the body, and debilitation. These can all be said to be an issue of infinite changes occurring within finite things, or one of that reality. An infinite change is perceived and has its own reality. It seems that from Murobushi’s text we are able to brush against ideas like infinite quantity, infinite degree, and infinite change within the body.

Conclusion–Regarding the body without organs

Speaking in regards to the smallest circuit, or the debilitating body without organs, it is in fact a falling. The butoh body, the dancing body can certainly mimic this kind of body without organs. By itself, the body without organs cannot exist. It is something we can also call the body without image. However, the strength of the body without organs is contained within its senses or perceptions.
For example, let’s say we place our hand into 45 degree hot water, and then after a little while remove it. We can imagine that the 45 degree sensation within the hand will gradually begin to change, and decrease back to the 36 degrees of the body’s standard temperature. However, there is something apart from this series of perceptible sensations which is both incapable of being sensed and yet should be sensed. That is the intensity which the 45 degree temperature itself holds. In other words, the elimination of the degree of sensation which is 45 degrees, put another way, the degree which only exists at the end of a fall to intensity=0, that itself is intensity. The first series is the overall change in sensation which occurs within the organic body. However, the fall in the intensity itself of a second given sensation is instead something which forms and supplies the inorganic, infinitely changing body. The body without organs itself is intensity=0 as a principle of all intensity, and as long as it produces infinitely many intensities and those intensities fall infinitely, we must think of it in this way. We can say that a fall demands an idea of a change in distance. When Murobushi speaks about the “infinite,” we can clearly consider this to be distance. This distance is what it is that should be sensed. The transformations of the body on the one hand consist of a series of sensations, but the body has something else which should be sensed, that is, something which is contained within the incapable-of-being-sensed fall of all sensations to a strength of 0.
This is not a discussion pulled from nothing. In fact, this is something Kant earnestly thought about. In Critique of Pure Reason, he considered a given sensation’s degree to gradually approach zero as an asymptote. Kant described this as a negativity=0 as he worked to apprehend the difference in sensation. To state only the conclusion, Kant’s negativity=0 is, so to speak, a relative 0. In contrast to this, intensity=0 is absolute. This means that the sensations of inclusion (quality) or extension (quantity) themselves fall. The body which is formed and exists as a result of this can be called the body without organs. Separate from the organic body of I, the manifold of self-stimuli composed from sensations through dance is something which should be repeated each time, something which truly will “have made a body without organs” (Artaud, To have done with the judgement of god).
That’s all. Thank you for listening.