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.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.These primordial movements are conceived in terms of an ovoid form—'the egg of the world' (aduno tal)—within which lie, already differentiated, the germs of things; in consequence of the spiral movement of extension the germs develop first in seven segments of increasing length, representing the seven fundamental seeds of cultivation, which are to be found again in the human body ... The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors (Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 19).This is how it should be done. Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continua of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980/1987, p. 161) 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 and A Thousand Plateaus ) 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): 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. In Deleuze and Guattari's collaboration, the term describes an undifferentiated, unhierarchical realm that lies deeper than the world of appearances. It relates to the proto-world described in the mythology of many different cultures. Deleuze and Guattari often use the example of the Dogon egg, based primarily on anthropological reports from Marcel Griaule. Describing the Dogon story of the origins of the cosmos, Griaule writes: