Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences [Paperback]

Slavoj Zizek (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415969212 | ISBN-13: 978-0415969215 | Publication Date: October 26, 2003

The latest book by the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek takes the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as the beginning of a dazzling inquiry into the realms of radical politics, philosophy, film and psychoanalysis. In this deliciously polemical work, Zizek shows Deleuze's connections to both Oedipus and Hegel, figures from whom the French philosopher distanced himself. Zizek turns some Deleuzian concepts around in order to explore the 'organs without bodies' in such films as Fight Club and the works of Hitchcock. Finally, he attacks what he sees as the 'radical chic' Deleuzians, arguing that such projects turn Deleuze into an ideologist of today's 'digital capitalism'. With his brilliant energy and fearless argumentation, Zizek sets out to restore a truer, more radical Deleuze than the one we thought we knew.

Editorial Reviews

Review

For those who thought they could by-pass Deleuze as well for the most passionate Deleuzians, Organs Without Bodies will be a major revelation. By placing Deleuze into proximity with his great antipodes--Hegel and Lacan--Zizek endows Deleuze's tireless elaboration of the processes of differentiation and becoming in all spheres of life with an entirely new degree of conceptual clarity and political urgency. Through his deep engagement with the logic of Deleuze's project, Zizek opens up new possibilities of thought beyond the terms of the current political debates on globalization, democratization, war on terror. Once again, Zizek has produced an utterly timely and radically untimely meditation.
–Eric Santner, author of On the Psychotheology of Everday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig

With all his ususal humor and invention, Zizek-- the acknowledged master of the 180 degree turn -- here takes a trip into enemy territory to deliver Deleuze of a marvelously rebellious child, one that seriously challenges Deleuze's other progeny with a surprising but convincing bid for succession. Those who thought Deleuze's forward march into the future would follow a straight path are forced to rethink their stance. From now on all readings of Deleuze will have to take a detour through this important -- even necessary -- book.
–Joan Copjec, author of Imagine There's No Woman

Even Mr. Zizek's most devoted fans sometimes wonder if he would do them a favor by not writing a book this month. Anyone feeling guilty for not yet having read Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuize and Consequences , published by Routledge in December, may instead want to consult Mr. Zizek's essay on Gilles Deleuze (the philospher of schizoanalysis) in the winter issue of Critical Inquiry..
–Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2004

About the Author

Slavoj Zizek is a researcher at the University of Ljubljana. He teaches and lectures frequently in the United States and in Europe. Among his books are Enjoy Your Symptom!, Opera's Second Death, and On Belief, as published by Routledge.

Product Details

• Paperback: 217 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (October 26, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415969212
• ISBN-13: 978-0415969215
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #830,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"The most dangerous philosopher in the West," (says Adam Kirsch of The New Republic) Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce;" "Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle;" "In Defense of Lost Causes;" "Living in the End Times;" and many more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Anti-Deleuze, February 16, 2004

By 

David "shibano" (St. Petersburg, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (Paperback)

Even if you like Zizek (which I do), this book is a disaster. Don't waste your time. I was hoping to see Slavoj sneek into "enemy" territory and offer some of his "rock-star of theory" antics about Deleuze since he mentions him so often in his other works -- usually referencing Coldness and Cruelty or The Logic of Sense, but this book is almost chemically-free of Delueze (a thinker of the first-rate whom I quite admire). The book is a hodge-podge of recylced writings (something Zizek is becoming quite comfortable with the more he writes). Deleuze is barely mentioned and often when he is Zizek is often simply wrong about his "take" on him. Most of the time Zizek is just spouting off (and it's not even the inspired kind of spouting that got him famous!) If you want to read something fun by Zizek read Enjoy Your Symptom or Looking Awry; if you want something more substantial read They Know Not What They Do, The Sublime Object of Ideology, or even The Ticklish Subject. If you want to learn about Deleuze read Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Gilles Deleuze by John Marks or Michael Hardt, for a more slanted but engaging encounter perhaps Badiou's Clamour of Being -- but better yet just try reading some of Deleuze's books: they are wonderful, and Dialogues or Pure Immanence are easy books to begin with. I couldn't agree more with the review Eric made below. Looking for Deleuze in this text is like trying to find grapes and nuts in grapenuts: tedious and an utter waste of time.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An Attack on Deleuze or on Zizek's Idea of "Deleuze", April 19, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (Paperback)

One wonders when reading this book whether Zizek is even making specific reference to Deleuze's work. He seems more to be writing from an idea he has in his head of Deleuzian's, Deleuze's followers. Having given Zizek a lot of attention in previous books, if only to have an understanding of what his contribution to things like Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Film and Critical theory might be, I have grown quite tired of his shooting from the hip/writing for the agrandissement of his ego. His desire to associate Deleuze with Hegel is just about as helpful to a reader as Badiou's attempt to make Deleuze a Heiddegerian. It just doesn't work. Especially from the perspective of those who know the breadth of Deleuze's work good enough to decipher the sheer irrelevance and sheer idiocy at times of Zizek's desire to be provocative. I can honestly say that this book helped me zero percent in appreciating either Zizek's originality nor the thought of Deleuze. Big Thumbs Down!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A sloppy critique, One of Zizek's Worst, April 14, 2006

By 

Thomas Meli (NY, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (Paperback)

Zizek's failed encounter with Deleuze will prove to haunt him since Deleuze and Guattari provded a framework to get outside of Lacan which Zizek still remains embedded in completely. I should say from the start, Zizek is absolutely brilliant, but his slip ups are all too numerous and his hasty publication of books have created an unendurable repetition of content. There are content problems with the book and style problems, as many of the previous reviewers have truthfully attested to. But even the 100 or so pages on Deleuze are wrought with references to movies and books (and sometimes the occasional refreshing joke), but all in all, the book probably amounts to 30-40 real pages of thorough critique. The problem is that Zizek prepares books by writing books, and in reading the most recent big work - "The Parallax View" (which Zizek calls his most important work), one sees that the books of the previous 4 years were a type of movement towards this.

First I how those interested in Zizek might go about critiquing Deleuze which is coupled with recommendations for Zizek's other works. After that I will recommend an alternative route to people interested in a crtique of Deleuze (outside of those made in other reviews - such as "Deleuze: A Critical Reader")

If you want to get an idea of how to critique Deleuze through Zizek, I recommend reading Lacan very closely, and critiquing Deleuze through Lacan. But if Lacan is intractable for you, Zizek is a helpful guide to realize Lacan's contributions. I would even hasten to add that if one is unfamiliar with Lacan, one cannot account for the weaknesses and strengths of a text like anti-oedipus (which has the capacity to perform the same reduction on lacan). If one were to buy a book on Zizek, I think the least scatterbrained and most theoretical (Hegelian) is "For they know not what they do" but be sure to get the second edition with the very long preface (80 pgs) which reconfigures his position now with regard to his previous work. Organs without bodies is important to see how Zizek directly comprehends Deleuze's work (and at times, he reposes problems in interesting directions), but it will probably piss alot of Deleuzians off, and not because his critiques are right on, but because he has hardly payed attention to the unique elements of Deleuze's philosophy (which is to say, he critiques Deleuze as if he would critique any positive thinker, without exploring in depth, the complexity of his system).

Zizek is most interesting for his Lacanian reading of Hegel, which is quite good, and very interesting. His main (hegelian) idea is that the ontological or the transcendental is created from the failure to fully represent the real. In Deleuzian terms, Zizek would say that the virtual is created from the inconsistency of the actual, which we then generalize into the virtual. Therefore, Deleuze's claims to "think without an image" are undoubtedly a way to make the reader forget Deleuze's own positioning (which is mainly from Nietzsche). And yes, for those of you who bash Hegel without ever having even read him, Deleuze is extremely close to Hegel in many ways, and if you don't understand how they are alike and different you don't really understand the problems either of them face. But Zizek treats this proximity as if it was an attack (which merely just calls into question Deleuze's own aversion to Hegel which does betray a proximity). This is immature, but perhaps is only as immature as Deleuze's aversion to Hegel. [But Deleuze never wrote a critique of Hegel in this fashion! As Zizek ahs done with Deleuze].

But Zizek did make me pay attention to key passages that I did not before, which accent the transcendental nature of Deleuze's empiricism. Zizek's own failure to critique Deleuze made me question my own (as other readers have) deification of Deleuze. I began to ask why Does Deleuze call his system "Transcendental Empiricism" if he destroys transcendence at every turn in favor of immanence? The answer is that Deleuze is situated in the transcendental turn in philosophy which reconcieves as the transcendental not the noumenal thing in itself (as in Kant), but rather the situation in which the noumenal and the phenomenal are limits [as in Heiddeger, Husserl, Lacan, and Merleu-Ponty](recall the passage in A thousand Plateaus that the body without organs is a limit). What this means is that Deleuze's concept of Difference cannot be concieved as something apart from the situation of the human being which does not have access to all of reality (recall Deleuze's claim that "Difference is not diversity, diversity is given, Difference is by which the given is given") This "by which" as Difference (and Derrida's Differance) makes Deleuze's immanence very problematic since this "middle" area is still human. The real problem is whether the structure of consciousness (expressionism) can be extended to the world "Everything is consciousness because it possesses a double" (Difference and Repetition, 220). This question is always the question they come back to, and it is the shakiest component of Deleuze's system. It is also the component that needs to be confronted via lacan, which unfortunately Zizek fails to do in a systematic way. Plus he writes the book After Deleuze dies, when Zizek had active engagement with his ideas very early on.

If anything, it is good to convince oneself that one is questioning one's own idols. If you want a breath of fresh air in philosophy, I recommend the books: "Contingency, Hegemony, Universality" which contains a dialog between Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek (he doesn't make stupid references every 5 seconds in this book). I also Recommend any book by Renaud Barbaras ("Desire and Distance" might be an extremely interesting counterpoint to Deleuze). Another book - "Naturalizing Phenomenology" is an essential book that deals with what Zizek does badly, how consciousness studies and cognitive studies contribute to these contemporary thinkers.

Whatever you decide, it is true that Zizek's critique is essential to understand in order to truly understand Deleuze's strengths and weaknesses, whether you get it from this book or others. If you can remain Deleuzian and take Lacanians seriously, you can only then call yourself Deleuzian.