Body without organs

The term was first used in a radio production of Antonin Artaud's “Ending Divine Justice” (1947).

“When you made him a body without organs, then you delivered him from all his automatic reactions and returned him to true freedom.” ^[one]

Deleuze first mentions the expression in Chapter 13 of the “Logic of Meaning” - “Schizophrenic and the Little Girl” ^[2] , which contrasts two separate and peripheral ways of interacting in the world. A little girl (Alice) explores the world of “surfaces”: a changing area of ​​social phenomena and meaningless words that nonetheless function. The schizophrenic (whose representative is Artaud), on the contrary, explores the "depths", completely rejects the "surface" and instead returns to the body.

For a schizophrenic, words are compressed and become not nonsense, but bodies that produce and hear them. Deleuze refers to the “new dimension of a schizophrenic body, an organism without parts, which functions only through insufflation, respiration, evaporation and circulation of fluid (a higher body or a body without Antonin Artaud's organs). This body is also described as “howling,” a conversation in a “language without articulation,” which has more in common with the primitive act of extracting sound than with pronouncing certain words.

According to Deleuze and Guattari , the term describes an undifferentiated non-hierarchical region that lies deeper than the world of external manifestations. It refers to the original word described in the mythology of many cultures. Deleuze and Guattari often use the example of a Dogon egg, based primarily on the anthropological reports of Marcel Griol . Describing the Dogonian history of the cosmic beginning, Griol writes:

These initial movements are described in the ovoid form - the "egg of the world" (aduno tal) - which is based on already differentiated embryos of things; as a result of spiral movement and expansion, the embryos develop first in seven segments and increase in length, showing seven fundamental seeds that must also be found in the human body [...] ^[3]

According to Griol, the basic patterns of organization inside the egg are manifested in all areas of the Dogon’s life: generic structures, village structure, understanding of the body, and so on. The egg metaphor helps to suggest future formation gestations and the formation potential of many realities of the same origin.

Anti-Oedipus

Anti-Oedipus is the first part of the two-volume “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”.

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari expand the concept of a body without organs by comparing its real potential with the potential of an egg:

A body without organs is an egg: it is dotted with axes and rapids with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines intersected by gradients that indicate the transitions and formation of the subject, which develops along these specific vectors. ^[four]

For Deleuze and Guattari, each actual body has a limited set of attributes, habits, movements, influences, etc. But each actual body also has a virtual dimension: a huge reservoir of potential signs, connections, influences, movements, etc. This set of potentials is what Deleuze calls TBO. An ideal body without organs is "schizophrenia as a clinical object", this drop in intensity is a means of blocking all the influences of reality, "unproductive, sterile, sterile, unusable."

Unlike other social mechanisms, such as the Body of the Earth, the Body of a despot or the Body of capital, an ideal body without organs cannot describe other bodies. A body without organs is neither the “original primordial essence” (proof of the primordial nonexistence), nor what is left of the lost totality, but is “the last remnant of the deterritorialization of society”. It is necessary in order to “make yourself a body without organs,” and then actively experiment with yourself in order to stretch and activate virtual potentials. These potentials are mainly activated (or “actualized”) through alliances with other bodies (or TBW), which Deleuze calls “becoming.”

Deleuze and Guattari use the term TBO in the broad sense of the word to refer to the virtual dimension of reality as a whole (which they increasingly call the "consistency plan" or the "plane of immanence"). In this sense, they are talking about the land of solid waste. "Earth", according to them, is "this body without organs. This body without organs is penetrated by unformed, unstable flows, directed in all directions ..." ^[5] . That is, we usually think of a world that consists of relatively stable entities. But these bodies consist of many streams moving at different speeds (rocks and mountains, like slowly moving streams, living things, like streams of biological material, language as a stream of information, words, etc.). This liquid substrate is what Deleuze calls TBO in the broad sense.

• B. The road . Body without organs

• Bodies without organs (BWO)
• Immanence Plan