Artaud and Klein

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. In the radio play To Have Done with the Judgement of God (1947), Artaud writes:

Artaud considers the ‘Judgement of God’ to ‘construct’ the body as an organism, which is to say a body composed of organs. Above all, for Artaud, this means organ-ising the body in terms of sexuality. As Susan Sontag explains, ‘Artaud demonizes sexuality in everything he wrote’, opposing it to a ‘pure body – divested of organs and […] lusts’. Furthermore, along with sexuality Artaud denounces language itself. For Sontag, writing in Artaud is experienced as ‘an agony’ that ‘supplies the energy for the act of writing’, which ‘give[s] form to intelligence’. This in turn defines the body for Artaud in terms of a corresponding ‘capacity for intelligence and for pain’, and not a ‘capacity for sensuous pleasure’.