The body without organs (or BwO; French: corps sans organes or CsO) is a fuzzy concept used in the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari. The concept describes the unregulated potential of a bodyânot necessarily humanâwithout organizational structures imposed on its constituent parts, operating freely. The term, first used by French writer Antonin Artaud, appeared in his 1947 play To Have Done With the Judgment of God. Deleuze later adapted it in his 1969 book The Logic of Sense, and ambiguously expanded upon it in collaboration with Guattari in both volumes of their work Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972 and 1980).
Building on the general abstract notion of the body in metaphysics, and on the unconscious in psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari theorized that since the conscious and unconscious fantasies in psychosis and schizophrenia express potential forms and functions of the body that demand it to be liberated, the reality of the homeostatic process of the body is that it is limited by its organization and more so by its organs. There are three types of the body without organs; the empty, the full, and the cancerous, according to what the body has achieved.
