Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Body of the Letter: From Name-of-the-Father to Re-père
- 2 Theatres of Terror and Cruelty: From Noise to the Voice
- 3 The Three Syntheses of the Body: From the Voice to Speech
- 4 Logic of the Phantasm: From Speech to the Verb
- 5 The Speculative Univocity of Being and Language: From the Verb to Univocity
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Theatres of Terror and Cruelty: From Noise to the Voice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Body of the Letter: From Name-of-the-Father to Re-père
- 2 Theatres of Terror and Cruelty: From Noise to the Voice
- 3 The Three Syntheses of the Body: From the Voice to Speech
- 4 Logic of the Phantasm: From Speech to the Verb
- 5 The Speculative Univocity of Being and Language: From the Verb to Univocity
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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:
Man is sick because he is badly constructed […] there is nothing more useless than an organ. 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.
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’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Psychoanalysis of SenseDeleuze and the Lacanian School, pp. 50 - 63Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016