Body without organs

The term was first used by French writer Antonin Artaud in his 1947 play To Have Done With the Judgment of God, later adapted by Deleuze in his book The Logic of Sense, and ambiguously expanded upon by himself and Guattari in both volumes of their work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Referring to his ideal for man as a philosophical subject, he wrote in its epilogue that "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.

[6] Deleuze reinterpreted the term in The Logic of Sense, inspired both by Artaud's text and the work of psychotherapist Gisela Pankow;[7] here, he conceptualized the body without organs in the context of psychoanalysis, observing that the practice as it existed refused the thorough creation of BwOs.

[8] In Deleuze's early formulations of the concept, the body without organs was based in the symptoms related to schizophrenia, such as glossolalia where syllables are formlessly uttered and intoned in sets as if they were words.

[18] The bodies—not merely physical but intensive—of schizophrenics, drug addicts, and hypochondriacs are examples they give of bodies without organs, but they caution against replicating their actions; people should not seek out their negative experiences, which are "catatonicized" and "vitrified".

For instance, in the conclusion of his 1993 essay "Art as Insurrection", he writes: The body without organs is [...] at once [a] material abstraction, and the concretely hypostasized differential terrain which is nothing other than what is instantaneously shared by difference.