Oltre il corpo senza organi. L’Artaud di Deleuze

This paper takes as its polemical target those interpretations that attempt to reduce Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Antonin Artaud’s life and work to just the body without organs. After framing the extremely rich and unclassifiable figure of Artaud, this essay briefly reports some of the most important points of his reception in contemporary French philosophy, between literary criticism and deconstruction (Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida). Moving on the retrace all the texts in which Deleuze confronts and uses Artaudian language, the last part of this contribution focuses on the chronological limits of their encounter: the Essays Critical and Clinical (1993) and the thirteenth chapter of The Logic of Sense (1969). Far, then, from reducing Deleuze’s philosophy to a flat, conflict-free ontology, the Thirteenth Series of the Schizophrenic and the Little Girl is important precisely to highlight Artaud’s importance: underneath the event of language and form, stands suffering and screaming.