Body-without-body

The body-without-body (shortened in CsO by the authors) is a Concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their common works: the Anti-Oedipus and Thousand plates .

To include/understand CsO it is important to seize the deleuzienne definition desire. As of the Anti-Oedipus (in 1972), Deleuze calls into question the psychoanalytical design of the desire. According to him the desire is not a scene of theater but a factory which produces unceasingly, which creates Agencement S, which is cause of Déterritorialisation and Reterritorialisation. The desire included/understood as machines consequently enables us to conceive the wishing machines. Because in nature and any body there are only mechanical devices, a multiplicity of machines, wishing machine, but also machine-body, machine-energy. Deleuze links the man and nature through a process coupling the machines: “The man and nature produce one in another”.

CsO is a production of the desire, it is opposed to the organization which make us the wishing machines. The body suffers not to have from another organization, or not organization of the whole… CsO is a body without image, a anti-production, but it is inevitable because it penetrates us unceasingly, and unceasingly let us penetrate we it. CsO is a program, an experimentation and not a phantasm. Produced as a whole beside parts to which he is added, CsO is opposed to the organization. Because it is by the body, and the bodies, that the desire passes and not by the organization.

There are multiple possibilities of CsO according to the desires, the beings… Let us quote like example the hypochondriac body, whose bodies are destroyed, or the schizophrenic body, which carries out the fight against its own bodies. If Deleuze likes to take the example of the schizophrene, by quoting in particular the work of Antonin Artaud, it announces that CsO can also be “cheerfulness, extase, dance…” But the experimentation is not alleviating, it can result in death. One needs, consequently, careful being even if the experimentation of CsO is a question of life or death. Because for Deleuze one should not, as the psychoanalysis claims it, to find our me but to go beyond. Said Deleuze, in the Abécédaire , that “one is not delirious on dad-mom, one is delirious the world”. Also specifies T it in Thousand plates : “To replace the anamnèse by the lapse of memory, interpretation by the experimentation. ” Deleuze is opposed to the idea of the desire perceived like lack or phantasm.

For Deleuze, the large book on CsO is the Éthique of Spinoza: the attributes, the substances, the intensities are unaware of the opposition of the one and the multiple since there is multiplicity of fusions, abouchemenents, slips:

“the body is nothing any more but one whole of valves, hoppers, locks, bowls or vases communicating…”

CsO is like an egg on which, and in which, of the intensities circulate, intensities which it produces and distributes in an intensive space, unextended.

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