The Body without organs is an image 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 schizophrenic 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.
Read more about Body Without Organs: Early Uses, Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Famous quotes containing the words body and/or organs:
“Alas! While your ambitious vanity is unceasingly laboring to cover the earth with statues, with monuments, and with inscriptions to eternalize, if possible, your names, and give yourselves an existence, when this body is no more, why must we be condemned to live and die unknown?”
—Thomas Paine 1737–1809, U.S. writer and magazine editor. Pennsylvania Magazine, pp. 362-4 (1775)
“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)