Incite Seminars

The Body without Organs
_{^{with Hannes Schumacher}}

An intensive 8-week online seminar course on Deleuze & Guattari

📅 SATURDAYS, weekly for 8 weeks, beginning January 31, 2026.
⏰ 1-3 PM Eastern US Time. See time zone converter if you’re in a different location to make sure you get the time right.
🔗 A Zoom link will be available after you register.
💰Three options (registration at bottom of this page.):
(i) $150 for non-members (become a member).
(ii) $120 for members.
(iii) Solidarity. We are happy to make our offerings available at reduced cost if you can not otherwise join. If you would like to request this option, please email us at inciteseminarsphila@gmail.com with the following information: (1) your current country of residence; (2) reason for requesting this option; (3) amount you can pay: $60, $90, $120 (we will then send you the payment link).

GROUP DESCRIPTION

The Body without Organs (BwO), which was originally envisioned by Antonin Artaud, has been conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari in various different ways. Stylized as a concept of philosophy, the BwO is central to their major works on capitalism and schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.

In Anti-Oedipus, we are thrown into a schizophrenic world of desiring-production. Confronted with the constant noise and organized by the machines, the BwO protests in its brutish force:

The body is the body
it is all by itself
and has no need of organs
the body is never an organism
organisms are the enemies of the body. (Artaud)

The BwO here is the element of anti-production. Nonetheless, it is itself “produced [and] not the proof of an original nothingness.” The BwO “is not God, quite the contrary.” Only in society, it takes the form of a divine purpose in the socius, which defines the rise and fall of three historical stages: Earth, Despot, Capital. And yet, the BwO is no “primordial entity that later projects itself into different sorts of socius”; rather, it is the “ultimate residuum” of the entire process. This is to say that the BwO proper “tends to free itself only at the end,” that is, at the end of capitalism.

Following this idea, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari explore the revolutionary potential of the BwO in its pure form beyond the limitations of the socius: “How do you make yourself a body without organs?” Here they engage with the lived practice of experimental sexuality in masochism, courtly love and Daoism, aiming at a self-perpetuating “desire of desire” that is able to resist neo-liberal
power structures by pushing capitalism to its limits. Does this necessarily entail a sort of “accelerationism,” as proclaimed by contemporary authors: #accelerate to blow the system from within? Or might Deleuze & Guattari, in fact, propose a very different avenue of protests: freeing desire from capital? How could this be practically achieved?

GROUP MATERIALS

In this intensive seminar we make ourselves familiar with two major works of Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari by focusing on one—perhaps the most intriguing—of their concepts. PDFs of Anti-Oedipus and
A Thousand Plateaus will be provided on registration.

SESSIONS

1) Antonin Artaud and the conceptualization of a non-concept
Part I: The BwO in Anti-Oedipus
2) Desiring-Machines and the BwO
3) Earth
4) Despot
5) Capital
6) Capital²
Part II: The BwO in A Thousand Plateaus
7) How do you make yourself a BwO?
8) How do you make yourself a BwO?²

FACILITATOR

Having lived and studied all around the world, Hannes Schumacher works at the threshold between philosophy and art. He has worked intensively on Hegel and Deleuze, and he has also published widely on Nishida, Nāgārjuna, chaos theory, global mysticism, and contemporary art. Hannes is the founder of the Berlin-based publisher Freigeist Verlag and co-founder of the grassroots art space Chaosmos ∞ in Athens, Greece. He has facilitated the following courses and groups at Incite Seminars: “Nishida Kitarō: The Logic of Place and the Religious Worldview”; “Who’s Afraid of Hegel: Introduction to G. W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic”; “Chaos Research Group”; “Reading After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux”; “Deleuze & Guattari: What is Philosophy?”; “Plato’s chôra through the lens of Derrida”; “Anarchia and Archai: Reimagining the Pre-Socratics” (with Carlos A. Segovia); “Reading Nietzsche’s Zarathustra” (current); and “Liana of the Resurrected.”

REGISTRATION

Members

Non-Members (become a member)