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This chapter explores hunger and the anorexic body in Amélie Nothomb’s autofictional work. It analyses relations between hunger, desire and pleasure, sensation and immanence, investigates the making of a Deleuzian Body without Organs through the dematerialisating structures of anorexia, and opens out the possibility of the rematerialisation of the body alongside literary experimentation with corporeality. The chapter shows how Nothomb’s work both resonates with and reorients Deleuze’s thinking, with particular regard to notions of molarity, to the politics of beauty and illness, to experiments with body and art, and to the location of the limit.

This chapter analyses Gilles Deleuze’s work (alone and in collaboration with Félix Guattari), as a philosophy of flows, of possibilities and of vitality. It explores the ways in which his thought has been resisted by conventional feminism, and later taken up by a range of recent feminist and queer theorists, while providing its own particular readings as a feminist literary critic. The chapter unpicks Deleuze’s thinking through the conceptualisation of transcendental empiricism, exploring relations between a-subjectivity, the event and the fold. It then analyses Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-psychoanalytical theory through the aleatory flux of desire, the Body without Organs and notions of nomadic becoming. Finally it considers the Deleuzian concept of difference, thinking through its possible relations with politics and with art, and unfolding a philosophy of the becoming of the body that lays the foundations for the rest of the work.

This chapter argues that the best way to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s notoriously difficult concept of the body without organs (BwO) is to start by thinking about its function in the overall schema of their work. It argues that we cannot arrive at an understanding of the concept solely by returning to the work of Artaud. This is because the concept does not exist in isolation, but is part of a network of interlocking concepts that together constitute the basic conceptual apparatus of schizoanalysis.

This chapter defines the concept of a machine and a narrator in Proustian terms. Simply put, the Proustian narrator is a“Body without Organs”—unlike the Cartesian definition—and it is a being of pure sensation (no eyes, no ears, no memory, and above all, no thought), while the machine of Deleuze and Guattari is anything that interrupts a flow. Therefore the literary machine is a spiderweb—a vast and complicated partly animal and partly herbal web that interrupts the flows of signs and impressions that get caught up in it; and the narrator is the spider that drags its heavy body to the place of the interruption and spins a cocoon around the impression it finds there (i.e., to develop the impression into a sign) in order to finally drink its blood (extract its essence, its spiritual idea).

This chapter examines the problem of the relationship between language and the bodily drives through a close reading of the last quarter of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. It explores Deleuze’s original use of Melanie Klein’s theories in his psychodynamic account of the formation of subjectivity, which blends insights from Freud, Lacan, and Klein, as well as his own innovations. The story of the Oedipus complex, in Deleuze’s eyes, is ultimately about the difficult relationship between body and mind, where a certain splitting or fragmentation belongs to each. The proximity of perversion and sublimation in Deleuze’s thought is highlighted, as well as the relationship between what Deleuze calls the formation of the phantasm and Lacan’s idea of the fundamental fantasy. The chapter concludes by sketching the difference between Deleuze’s “logic of sense” and Lacan’s “logic of the signifier,” focusing on the example of children’s questions in a comedy sketch of Louis C.K.