Analysis Of Deleuze And Guattari's 'Body Without Organs'

Traditional psychoanalysis theory emphasises that, for individuals to function in society, it is vital for them to repress their instinctive desires, or any other desires viewed as incompatible with society’s structures. If not, individuals will suffer problems later on in the form of an adverse mental conflict – such as schizophrenia – which will prevent them from being functional members within society. Thus, schizophrenics and others who perceive the world differently, or express different values irrelevant to production, are viewed by traditional psychoanalysts as abnormalities who needed to be cured.
However, Deleuze and Guattari argue that this perception of schizophrenia by psychoanalysis – particularly within capitalist societies –
The ‘body without organs’ has been subjected to many different literary interpretations as its meaning and form throughout the text is deliberately vague, to contrast with the structured repression of capitalist society. It usually refers to the deeper reality underlying some well-formed whole constructed from fully functioning parts. However, Deleuze and Guattari do essentially emphasise the body without organs as the ideal state for an individual – both physically and mentally –, and ultimately the form that they should aspire to.
In the introduction, Deleuze and Guattari first refer to the body of organs as a broken-down body of an individual following production – an individual who has been reduced to such a bare state that they no longer resemble the human form anymore. It is a body that is no longer capable of fulfilling basic human functions such as urinating, consuming or reproduction and, hence, has lost all connection with the human identity. At one point in the text, they point out that: “The body without organs is not god, quite the contrary, but the energy that sweeps through it is divine.
But it is the relative limit of every society; it effects relative breaks, because it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized, but also a socius that is even more pitiless than any other. Schizophrenia, on the contrary, is indeed the absolute limit that causes the flows to travel in a free state on a desocialized body without organs. Hence one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which it continually reproduces on a widened