The Wrong Side Out With(out) God: An Autopsy of the Body Without Organs

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 507-532
Author(s):  
Matthew G. Whitlock
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Antonin Artaud ◽  
Lacanian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Wrong Side ◽  
Body Without Organs

While the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of ‘body without organs’ (BwO) is developed alongside their critique of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is also developed alongside their critique of Christianity, most poignantly in the sixth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus. Here Deleuze and Guattari quote Antonin Artaud in order to show how ‘the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against the BwO’. In order to understand this relationship between judgement of God and the BwO, this essay explores Deleuze's critiques of Christianity in his earlier works and concludes that the BwO, much like Artaud's own poetry, is developed in contrast to an internalised form of Christianity.

The Common as Body Without Organs

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (supplement) ◽  
pp. 46-63
Author(s):  
Vidar Thorsteinsson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Fundamental Importance ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Conceptual Apparatus ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Social Factory ◽  
The Common

The paper explores the relation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's work to that of Deleuze and Guattari. The main focus is on Hardt and Negri's concept of ‘the common’ as developed in their most recent book Commonwealth. It is argued that the common can complement what Nicholas Thoburn terms the ‘minor’ characteristics of Deleuze's political thinking while also surpassing certain limitations posed by Hardt and Negri's own previous emphasis on ‘autonomy-in-production’. With reference to Marx's notion of real subsumption and early workerism's social-factory thesis, the discussion circles around showing how a distinction between capital and the common can provide a basis for what Alberto Toscano calls ‘antagonistic separation’ from capital in a more effective way than can the classical capital–labour distinction. To this end, it is demonstrated how the common might benefit from being understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual apparatus, with reference primarily to the ‘body without organs’ of Anti-Oedipus. It is argued that the common as body without organs, now understood as constituting its own ‘social production’ separate from the BwO of capital, can provide a new basis for antagonistic separation from capital. Of fundamental importance is how the common potentially invents a novel regime of qualitative valorisation, distinct from capital's limitation to quantity and scarcity.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

scholarly journals SUBJETIVAÇÕES RIZOMÁTICAS E A IDEIA DE CORPO SEM ÓRGÃOS EM A FÚRIA DO CORPO, DE JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-275
Author(s):  
Francisca Gilmara da Silva Almiro ◽  
Roniê Rodrigues da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Body ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
The Way

O trabalho apresenta uma leitura da obra A Fúria do corpo, de João Gilberto Noll, a partir dos conceitos de Corpo sem Órgãos e Rizoma propostos pelos filósofos franceses Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. Nesse sentido, objetiva estudar a construção identitária das personagens da referida narrativa, estabelecendo uma associação com essas noções filosóficas, problematizando, sobretudo, a errância das personagens e a linguagem utilizada para a composição da obra. Ao longo da leitura crítica, destacaremos como o texto de Noll nos desafia à construção de sentidos através de uma subjetividade constituída a partir de linhas de fuga, ideia discutida pelos filósofos supracitados. Ao adentrarmos no texto ficcional pelo viés de tais linhas, é possível entender como as personagens percebem e vivem suas experimentações rizomáticas. Desse modo, não se pretende aqui atribuir sentidos fechados à narrativa, mas sugerir que o Corpo sem Órgãos e o Rizoma são características que representam as experiências errantes das personagens encontradas na escrita de Noll. Palavras-chave: Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea. João Gilberto Noll. Identidade. Corpo sem Órgãos. Rizoma. THE RHIZOME AND THE IDEA OF BODY WITHOUT ORGANS IN THE FURY OF THE BODY, BY JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL Abstract: This paper presents a reading of The Fury of the Body, by João Gilberto Noll, based on the concepts of Body without Organs and Rhizome proposed by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It aims to study the characters’ identity construction, establishing an association with these philosophical notions, exploring, especially, the characters’ wandering nature and the language used in the composition of the work. Throughout this critical reading, emphasis will be given on the way Noll’s text challenge us to construct directions through a subjectivity built from escape lines, a concept defined by Deleuze and Guattari. By reading the narrative through these lenses, it is possible to understand how the characters perceive and live their rhizomatic trials. Thus, the intention here is not to attribute closed meanings to the narrative, but to suggest that the Body without Organs and the Rhizome are features that represent the characters’ wandering experiences in The Fury of the Body. Keywords: Contemporary Brazilian Literature. João Gilberto Noll. Identity. Body without Organs. Rhizome.

Theatres of Terror and Cruelty: From Noise to the Voice

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillaume Collett
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Antonin Artaud ◽  
Present Book ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
The Voice

While, for many, Deleuze’s philosophy is synonymous with his concept of the ‘body without organs’, and even though he first explicitly develops this concept in The Logic of Sense, a large part of the present book argues that it is rather the organ-ised body – here figuring specifically as incarnated structure, building explicitly on Leclaire – on which his onto-logic of sense hinges. Nonetheless, this body only emerges later on in the ‘dynamic genesis’, the psychoanalytic portion of The Logic of Sense which provides a psycho-sexual account of language acquisition and of the emergence of sense, and first we must turn to the dis-organ-ised body of Klein and Artaud. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops his conception of the body without organs based on a reading of the work of Antonin Artaud.

scholarly journals How Do You Make Yourself a Theatre without Organs? Deleuze, Artaud and the Concept of Differential Presence

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA CULL
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Antonin Artaud ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Radio Play

This article provides an exposition of four key concepts emerging in the encounter between the philosophical man of the theatre, Antonin Artaud, and the theatrical philosopher, Gilles Deleuze: the body without organs, the theatre without organs, the destratified voice and differential presence. The article proposes that Artaud's 1947 censored radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God constitutes an instance of a theatre without organs that uses the destratified voice in a pursuit of differential presence – as a nonrepresentative encounter with difference that forces new thoughts upon us. Drawing from various works by Deleuze, including Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, A Thousand Plateaus and ‘One Less Manifesto’, I conceive differential presence as an encounter with difference, or perpetual variation, as that which exceeds the representational consciousness of a subject, forcing thought through rupture rather than communicating meanings through sameness. Contra the dismissal of Artaud's project as paradoxical or impossible, the article suggests that his nonrepresentational theatre seeks to affirm a new kind of presence as difference, rather than aiming to transcend difference in order to reach the self-identical presence of Western metaphysics.

scholarly journals An Autoethnography of Fat and Weight Loss: Becoming the Bw0 with Deleuze and Guattari

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie M Sheach Leith
Keyword(s):  
Weight Loss ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Body ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Fat Bodies ◽  
The Biggest Loser ◽  
Political Value

This article experiments with some of the insights provided by the work of Deleuze and Guattari as a move towards deterritorializing fat bodies. This is necessary because in contemporary Western society the fat [female] body is positioned and frequently experienced as lacking in social, cultural and political value and as being in need of surveillance and control, not least by the neo-liberal ‘self’. This article is a response to Deleuze and Guattari's plea to ‘think differently’, in this case about fat and weight loss. The article eschews the paradigmatic form of the traditional academic research paper, adopting a semi autoethnographic approach to present an analysis of my engagement with the Biggest Loser (diet) Club. Thinking through rather than about the body it focuses on embodied experiences of fat and the on-going process of cutting that body down to ‘normal’ size. By utilising two central concepts in Deleuzoguattarian thought – ‘becoming’ and the ‘body – without – organs’ (BwO) - I seek to demonstrate the embodied, theoretical and ethical potential of utilising Deleuze and Guattari's work to explore fat and weight loss and how this might productively serve to deterritorialize contemporary discourses which stigmatise fat bodies.

Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor’ Voloshin’s Nirvana (2008)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlad Strukov
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
The Subject

Symbolisation is not about providing symbols as naïve interruptions of the moving image but rather opening the cinematic production to pro-nomination, that is, meaning-making before all names and terms. This process is similar to ex-scription (from Latin ‘exscriptus’, meaning ‘a copy, a transcript’). According to Nancy, it means ‘that the thing’s name, by inscribing itself, inscribes its property as name outside itself’ (1993: 175), or what I called above, strategies of externalisation. Here cinematic work is about writing as ‘ex-scribing’, or working from another edge, or describing states while also pointing to another, metaphysical dimension, that of ex-scription. I explore the possibility of presenting the subject cinematically as a mode, that is, a system of gestures and emotions, and everything else that comes to pass: ‘waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 153). My analysis of Nirvana attests, the body without organs is first and foremost a performing body, a body that is performing itself by means of itself, whereby the boundaries between internal and external structures are blurred and the body becomes a continuous act of inscribing meaning.

Reflections of Indian Philosophy in Deleuze's ‘Body without Organs’

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-28
Author(s):  
Meenu Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Actual Body ◽  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
Indian Thought ◽  
Body Without Organs

As the title suggests, this paper looks at the Deleuzian concept of body without organs and compares it with Indian Philosophy. In the Indian context, the concept of moksha/nirvana comes near to it as both are practices that aim at liberation; here, ‘liberation’ is never the awaited end of the process but the process itself. The traditional western substantialism rests on things whereas Deleuze, like Indian Philosophy, celebrates ‘experience’ and the ‘incorporeal’. Thus, body without organs plays a role in individuation. It hints at a journey beyond ‘the self’ which is full of ecstasy or the ananda of the Indian thought system. The question of Being, which not only is conceptual identification, is presented in terms of the virtual and the actual. For Deleuze and Guattari, every actual body has a virtual dimension, a vast reservoir of potentials, and this is the body without organs. The actual emerges from it and carries it with it. Further, the plane of immanence is a field in which concepts are produced. It is neither external to the Self nor forms an external self or a non-self. It is ‘an absolute outside’, very much like Brahman. The pragmatics of Deleuzian theory is that it explains life to be ‘immanence of immanence, absolute immanence’ – an utter beatitude – which has a Vedantic counterpart where the essential Brahman is a combination of three attributes – sat (being), chit (mind) and ananda (bliss). Thus, this paper aims at the interesting comparison between Deleuzian theory and Indian Philosophy.

scholarly journals Acoplamentos Louco-Formiga: qual o impostergável para um corpociborgue? / Madman-Ant Linkages: which the unpostponable for a cyborgbody?

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 202
Author(s):  
Alexandre Sobral Loureiro Amorim ◽  
Ricardo Burg Ceccim
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Antonin Artaud ◽  
Body Without Organs

ResumoAportando para o campo dos estudos científicos da saúde provocações sobre o corpociborgue, o artigo traça um percurso textual inusitado para estudar a saúde na contemporaneidade. Produzindo acoplamentos do conto de ficção-científica “A Formiga Elétrica”, de Philip K. Dick, com as (des)construções poéticas do Corpo-sem-Orgãos, de Antonin Artaud, apreendeu-se que, após tornar o corpo máquina, insurge impostergável um potente desejo de retorno, pois o andróide (vir-a-ser do ciborgue) luta - após atingir sua perfeição como máquina - para conquistar a vida e suas sensações (memórias, inscrições, riscos). Buscou-se pensar os movimentos de corpos (im)possíveis que se rebelam contra sua ciborguização para que a vida possa escapar: rasgos nos territórios da clínica; deslocamentos de realidade; imaginação; subversão da norma e desconstrução do controle sobre o corpo; fabulação de corpos-humanos-outros na saúde coletiva. Corpo-sem-Órgãos para outras clínicas (im)possíveis.Palavras-chave: Ciborgue; Corporeidades; Corpo-sem-Órgãos; Ficção-Científica; Saúde Coletiva. Abstract Contributing to the field of health scientific studies with provocations on cyborgbody, the article provides an unusual textual route to study health in contemporary society. Producing linkages between science-fiction short story "The Electric Ant" by Philip K. Dick, with the Antonin Artaud’s poetic (dis)constructions of the Body-without-Organs, was apprehended that, after rendering the body as a machine, protested postponed a powerful desire of return, as the android (the cyborg becoming) struggles - after reaching its perfection as a machine - to conquer life and its sensations (memories, inscriptions, risks). Was quested to think the movements of (im)possible bodies who rebel against their cyborgzation so that life can escape: tears in the clinic territories; reality shifts; imagination; standards subversion and deconstruction of control over the body; other-human-bodies fabulation in collective health. Body-without-Organs to other (im)possible clinics.Keywords: Cyborg; Corporealities; Body-without-Organs; Scientific-Fiction; Collective Health.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document