Body without organs

The "body without organs" (French: corps sans organes) is a concept used by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It usually refers to the deeper reality underlying some well-formed whole constructed from fully functioning parts. At the same time, it may also describe a relationship to one's literal body.

Deleuze began using the term in The Logic of Sense (1969), while discussing the experiences of playwright Antonin Artaud. "Body without Organs" (or "BwO") later became a major part of the vocabulary for Capitalism and Schizophrenia, two volumes (Anti-Oedipus [1972] and A Thousand Plateaus [1980]) written collaboratively with Félix Guattari. In these works, the term took on an expanded meaning, referring variously to literal bodies and to a certain perspective on realities of any type. The term's overloaded meaning is provocative, perhaps intentionally.

The term originates from Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947):

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.

Deleuze first mentions the phrase in a chapter of The Logic of Sense called "The Schizophrenic and the Little Girl", which contrasts two distinct and peripheral ways of encountering the world. The Little Girl (whose exemplar is Alice), explores a world of 'surfaces': the shifting realm of social appearances and nonsense words which nevertheless seem to function. The Schizophrenic (whose exemplar is Artaud) is by contrast an explorer of 'depths', one who rejects the surface entirely and returns instead to the body.

For the Schizophrenic, words collapse, not into nonsense, but into the bodies that produce and hear them. Deleuze refers to "a new dimension of the schizophrenic body, an organism without parts which operates entirely by insufflation, respiration, evaporation and fluid transmission (the superior body or body without organs of Antonin Artaud)." This body is also described as "howling," speaking a "language without articulation" that has more to do with the primal act of making sound than it does with communicating specific words.

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