The Red-Haired Man
There was a red-haired man who had no eyes or ears. Neither did he have any hair, so he was called red-haired theoretically. He couldn’t speak, since he didn’t have a mouth. Neither did he have a nose. He didn’t even have any arms or legs. He had no stomach and he had no back and he had no spine and he had no innards whatsoever. He had nothing at all! Therefore there’s no knowing whom we are even talking about. In fact it’s better that we don’t say any more about him.
BWO
Coined by Antonin Artaud in a 1947 radio text and adopted by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the “body without organs” names a field of immanence in which the patterned organisation that normally channels life—circulatory systems, familial roles, linguistic grids, psychic hierarchies—has been suspended so that raw intensities and potentials can flow without being captured by pre-given structures. Deleuze and Guattari take the phrase literally enough to stress that an organism is a historically produced arrangement, not an ontological given: capitalism, the State, the Freudian family romance, even the inherited image of the body as a unified biological machine all function as “organising” strata that pin desire to fixed coordinates. To “make a body without organs” therefore means undoing those strata just enough to let desire re-compose itself along novel, non-hierarchical lines; it is an experiment in subtracting organisation rather than a fantasy of disembodiment. The operation is Spinozist—aiming at an increased capacity to affect and be affected—but it also carries Artaud’s warning: peel back too much, or treat the BwO as a transcendent goal rather than a provisional plane, and one risks a catatonic or “cancerous” body that can no longer circulate intensities at all. Thus the BwO is both a critical device and a constructive workshop, a space where subjectivities detach from inherited forms, assemble new machinic couplings, and then plunge back into the organised world bearing configurations that were impossible within its prior coordinates. Antonin Artaud forged the phrase “corps sans organes” in the winter of 1947 while rehearsing his final radio work, Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu. Having returned from nine years in French asylums, electro-shocked and racked by chronic neural pain, Artaud mounted a direct assault on what he called the “organised” body—the body parsed by anatomical partitions, moral disciplines, and the theological verdict that life must submit to higher order. The etymology is telling: Greek organon once meant any instrument that mediates force, a tool interposed between impulse and act. For Artaud, each organ had become precisely such an instrument of capture—lungs conscripted to polite breath, tongue drafted into civilized speech, genitals shackled by reproductive duty. To tear these instruments away was not to praise formlessness but to recover an elemental, pre-instrumental flesh able to vibrate directly with cosmic intensity. Historiographically the gesture belongs to a broader, post-Vichy revolt against transcendental arbiters—State, Church, medical authority—whose “judgment” had culminated, for Artaud, in institutionalised cruelty. In the broadcast he hammers a drum and screams: “Quand vous lui aurez fait un corps sans organes… alors vous l’aurez délivré de tous ses automatismes.” The line conflates political, physiological, and metaphysical registers: abolish the imposed circuitry and the body escapes its conditioned reflexes. Yet Artaud immediately concedes the danger. Strip too much and one risks catalepsy; the raw field of the body can petrify into a “cadavre concret,” a cancerous stasis. The body without organs therefore oscillates between apocalypse and apotheosis—an edged rite rather than a stable ideal. Historically situated in the aftermath of war, censorship, and psychiatric coercion, Artaud’s BWÖ is the negative theology of his earlier Theatre of Cruelty translated into somatic terms. Where the theatre sought gestures that rupture language, the BWÖ seeks a flesh that ruptures the organism. It is a liturgical exorcism aimed at releasing “pure presence,” a daemonic surplus preceding any grammar of organs, institutions, or gods. That Deleuze and Guattari later seize on the phrase testifies to its methodological power: it names not an escapist fantasy but a procedure—subtractive, hazardous, indispensably experimental—by which the inherited map of the body can be cleared long enough for other cartographies of desire to crystallise. Artaud’s late formula “make a body without organs” reprises the apophatic impulse that had already driven his Theatre of Cruelty: each seeks presence through subtraction and refuses every mediating code that stands between sensation and its incandescent source. In the 1930s manifestos Artaud declared war on the “psychological theatre,” abolishing plot and décor so that screams, percussion, and gyrating lights might wound the spectator into immediacy. That was a negative liturgy: the play eliminated representation so that something prior to logos—call it cruelty, call it the sacred—could surge forth. After the war Artaud internalised the ritual. The radio text Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu no longer asks theatre to scour the stage; it asks flesh to scour itself, to peel away the instrumental organs whose very names (Greek organon: tool) betray their service to external judgment. The Body without Organs is therefore Cruelty turned inward, a somatic via negativa that would unmake the anatomical hierarchy the way his earlier mise-en-scène unmade Aristotelian dramaturgy. Negative theology speaks of God only by erasure—neti neti, “not this, not that.” Artaud’s somatic rhetoric follows the same grammar. He hammers, “No lungs, no stomach, no anus,” as though each excision purifies the residual body of a false predicate. Yet, as in classical apophasis, the stripping never ends in void; it aims at an excessive fulguration, an “unnameable” force that theology once called divine and Artaud now calls life before judgement. Theatre of Cruelty demanded that actors become “athletes of the heart,” sweating out parasitic words; the BwÖ demands that life become an athlete of itself, vibrating without the relay of organ-machines, capital routines, or grammatical reflexes. The move from stage to soma thus translates a metaphysics of absence into a biophysics of intensity. Both procedures remain perilous. Just as negative theologians warn that the apophatic path can dissolve into nihilism, Artaud concedes that excessive subtraction produces the “cadavre concret,” a paralysed, cancerous body. The BwÖ is therefore not an end-state but a threshold, a constantly recalibrated limit where organs are loosened enough to release potential yet retained enough to circulate it. In that suspended space—echoing the suspended moment of Cruelty when language fails and gesture becomes incantation—Artaud imagines a new liturgy, one that no longer appeals to transcendent judgment but reveals, within the stripped flesh, an immanent surge of ungovernable life. Antonin Artaud coined the body without organs at the end of the 1940s, as Europe sifted rubble and moral exhaustion left by the war. His radio manifesto Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu disavowed every anatomical partition, every pedagogical or ecclesiastical circuit that had delivered bodies into the machinery of fascism and psychiatry. The epithet without organs was less a plea for shapelessness than a bid to unclamp sensation from institutional grafts: lungs deprived of liturgical cadence, genitals unscripted by genealogical duty, voice wrested from semantic policing. By refusing the organon—instrument, mediator—Artaud sought an immediacy prior to the verdicts of State, clinic, or liturgy. That act of stripping echoed the via negativa of his Theatre of Cruelty but internalised its target. Where the 1930s stage shredded plot to expose raw affect, the late radio text shredded anatomy to expose prerepresentational intensity. The gesture belonged to the same historical threshold that pushed phenomenology to confront embodiment after Hegel: just as the Phenomenology of Spirit tracks consciousness shedding alienated shapes, Artaud tried to press somatic life into a pre-dialectical flame, before the organ became thesis and body synthesis. Catatonia haunted the project as its counter-pole, the frozen corpse produced when subtraction overshoots vitality. Deleuze and Guattari retrieve this phrase three decades later, no longer as private exorcism but as a diagram for collective production. In Anti-Oedipus, written amid the debris of May ’68 and the long shadow of Nazi biopolitics, the organism becomes a stratum that capitalism and psychoanalysis share in taming desire. A body without organs is therefore a plane where intensities run transverse to the familial graph, the factory schedule, the Freudian theatre. Artaud’s existential liturgy mutates into an anti-economic, anti-representational pragmatics: subtract just enough articulation to let flows splice into unforeseen couplings, then re-enter the world equipped with new circuits of desire. Their second volume, A Thousand Plateaus, refines the distinction between flexible BwO and “cancerous” BwO, acknowledging the peril Artaud had named while imbuing it with a Spinozist ethics of capacity. Michel Foucault’s famous jacket blurb—“a book of ethics”—captures the anti-fascist imperative driving this expansion: fascism, for them, is a libidinal craving for organs that over-organise. The BwO becomes a tactical surface where one learns to loosen but not liquefy, to deterritorialise yet avoid suicidal stasis, staging a micropolitical warfare against the disciplines that had culminated in Auschwitz and, later, the psychiatric violence Foucault diagnosed. For Deleuze alone, cinema provided further evidence. The Cinema books transpose BwO logic into montage: movement-image and time-image break classical editing the way BwO breaks the organism, freeing perception from motor schemata anchored in organic action. The screen turns into a luminous flesh whose organs—shot/reverse-shot, continuity, narrative telos—are momentarily suspended so that pure optical and sonic situations may circulate. Artaud’s shriek becomes a cut unmoored from continuity, a cinematic spasm of liberated affect. Derrida enters Artaud early, in “La parole soufflée,” reading the playwright’s glossolalia as both assault on and symptom of logocentrism. He agrees that the West’s metaphysics of presence has grafted instruments onto the body, but he doubts any subtractive purge can reach an unmediated origin. Artaud’s scream still passes through magnetic tape, radiophonic circuits, alphabetic transcription—each a prosthesis that writing cannot peel away. Where Artaud imagines an immaculate flesh prior to the organ, Derrida detects the trace that already inscribes absence within presence. Extending this suspicion, Derrida interprets the BwO’s litany—“no mouth, no anus”—as a negative theology whose very syntax reinscribes the organ in the act of denying it. The apophasis cannot escape the pharmakon: cure and poison, incision and supplement, entangled. For Derrida, life is always already prosthetic; the dream of pure intensity risks resurrecting the metaphysics it would destroy. His deconstruction therefore affirms Artaud’s revolt yet folds it back into différance, the endless spacing that makes both flesh and text iterable. When Derrida turns to Deleuze and Guattari he applauds their attack on representational enclosure but warns, in essays such as “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” that an immanence purged of any transcendence may ignore the haunting of the trace. The BwO’s smooth plane still requires cuts, signs, subject-positions to be said, written, inhabited. The machinic assemblage cannot circumnavigate writing; inscription is its very fuel. Derrida thus situates their cartography within an economy of supplementation that neither Spinozist plenitude nor anti-Oedipal delirium can annul. Lifedeath, the hybrid coin Derrida coins in his 1975-76 seminar, crystallises this insight. Drawing on biology’s revelation that apoptosis is genetically scripted into growth, he posits life as structured by its own absence: the cell carries death as its condition of proliferation, text carries erasure as the price of legibility. Lifedeath serialises Artaud’s cadavre concret and Deleuze’s cancerous BwO into a law of general writing: any attempt to purge the mark merely reinscribes it elsewhere. Existence is neither organ nor its removal but a rhythm of incision where vitality depends on the cut that imperils it. Across thirty years, then, the concept migrates from Artaud’s post-war cry of agony, through Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-institutional pragmatics, to Derrida’s grammatological folding of presence into trace. Each node intersects wider currents: WWII’s lessons about totalitarian anatomy, Foucault’s archaeology of discipline, the cinematic reinvention of perception, the Hegelian quest to dissolve alienation. What begins as an exorcism of organs becomes a cartographic machine and finally a theory of iterability, mapping twentieth-century thought’s passage from the hope of unmediated spirit to the recognition that every liberation writes its own limit. Derrida first presents “La parole soufflée” in 1965, later folding it into L’écriture et la différence (1967), the collection that turns “writing” from a secondary technique into the name of an irreducible structure—archi-écriture—already at work in every act of speech or embodiment. The title, literally “blown-away speech,” signals a double movement: souffle is at once breath (the metaphysical figure of living presence) and the gust that displaces that presence, scattering it like ash. Derrida chooses Artaud because the playwright aspired to purge the Western stage of textual residues, to recover a vocal immediacy prior to script, organ, or theology; the essay shows how that aspiration is itself scripted, ventilated by the very chain it would escape. Artaud’s glossolalic cries, Derrida notes, invoke an originary tongue “before words,” yet they survive only on magnetic tape, in typewritten transcripts, in the bureaucratic files of the asylum: each recording a prosthesis, each prosthesis a mark that outlives its emitter. This survivance is the hinge of différance: the mark endures by differing from any self-present voice and by deferring the closure of meaning to a future reading. Far from restoring a pure body, Artaud’s radio howl exemplifies how breath becomes supplement, how presence passes through the spacing that sustains and fractures it. The organ Artaud would excise—“this tongue that won’t obey”—returns as trace, unavoidable because it is the condition of any utterance, even the most rebellious. Hence Derrida reads the body without organs as an apophatic litany whose syntax reinscribes what it negates: to say “no lungs, no anus” still calls the organ to mind, situating absence within a grammatical slot. The supposed void is structured like writing—an interplay of blanks and letters. Artaud discovers only “cruelty,” a wound that never seals, because différance ensures that the cut cannot stabilize into pure plenitude or pure loss; every excision leaves the contour of a sign. The paradox is not failure but law: the body is legible precisely where it tries to erase its alphabet. Writing, then, is not the enemy of life but the rhythm that makes lifedeath possible—the term Derrida will coin a decade later to name the cellular code in which growth and programmed decay are the same inscription. In “La parole soufflée” the code is already visible: Artaud’s vitality circulates through the mechanical breath of microphones and paper; his desire to annihilate mediation survives only by being mediated. What the scream exposes is the structural pharmakon: poison to immediate presence, remedy to oblivion. Derrida lets the gust remain undecided, suspending the dream of pure intensity while refusing to dismiss its pathos. The essay thus stages the hinge where Artaud’s negative liturgy and Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic plane fold back into différance, the restless spacing that both rends and sustains every body, every word.
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