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Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences

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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.

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!

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.

Title says how far I am so far. I have to say I'm glad to see that the only person who really liked this book was a unabashed Lacanian. I was starting to get afraid that I had been inventing all the genius of Deleuze and Guattari, and that they may really be as circuitous and unoriginal as Zizek was making them out to be.
However, he (so typically) doesn't even discuss Guattari other than as an "alibi" for Deleuze (hardly a nice term for a very good if perhaps not-quite-so-published as some of our other philosophical friends). And, the only books by Deleuze that Zizek apparently deems worth citing directly are "Logic of Sense" and "Difference & Repetition". And, I have doubts about his readings of Deleuze that he actually does cite. But this is all been said in other reviews.
What I do find useful about this text (again, from the vantage point of pg. 74) is that it is a perfect example of the most common mis-reading of Deleuze that I have seen, and I think the easiest pitfall in reading him, or his collaborations with Guattari. Deleuze is not easy, and Guattari does not make him easier (although, perhaps, more effective; but this is another argument. I think that most people, at least those that I have read Deleuze with, think that he is merely redefining our notions of the real/virtual, material/ideal, world/spirit, consciousness/unconsciousness, duality/monism, etc. But what he is doing has little to do with dialectics. I think his contribution to philosophy both by himself and with the work of Guattari is to begin us thinking undialectically, as hard as this is at the start. Deleuze is by no means perfect, and it could be argued that he doesn't succeed in this task. But to take him in a caricature of dialecticism is to make the first mistake we all must make, and in this Zizek highlights that misstep. In this sense, I would agree with Eric Santner's statement on the back of the book, that all who consider themselves critics or passionate supporters of Deleuze should read this book. But most importantly, should see the strength of dialecticism in our thought, as Deleuze himself points out, and see how no arena or concept of thought is free from this mechanism, and that ESPECIALLY in reading Deleuze we should acknowledge the ease of an all too convenient return to the very thing that is so crucially critiqued in his work.

I think there may be a hint of jealousy in this book. I've often thought of Zizek as the kind of guy who strives to be the rock star of philosophy. Of course, more than ten years after his death, Deleuze is packing more philosophical arenas than Zizek ever will. This is because, in my humble opinion, Zizek is and always will be a second rate philosopher. He is the Douglas Coupland of academic philosophy in that, while he is often an interesting read, one always walks away from the book feeling like they've gained nothing but a few perverse ways of stating the obvious. I will admit, Zizek has a flare for writing, notably, I think in the Ticklish Subject and Welcome to the Desert of the Real. But this book not only failed to accomplish it's goals but it did so rather uninterestingly. Somewhere around the end of the first third of the book he quotes Deleuze's famous passage about buggering other philosophers in the behind. I've always loved the passage and til that point I thought the book was heating up so I had hopes of engaging in an eye-opening debate about Deleuze with both the text and my own preconceptions. But what I got from that point on was a stream of endless, pretentious comparisions between what most people assume Hegel meant and what Zizek somehow interprets Deleuze to mean.

Basically, it seemed to me like Zizek's project was misguided in that it relied too heavily on a limited interpretation of Deleuze based on Zizek's slight admiration for the Logic of Sense and his disdain for Deleuze's work with Guattari. Zizek almost comes off as a crying child who wanted ice cream when everyone else wanted cake and couldn't have his way. He passes over without even the slightest mention the idea that perhaps A Thousand Plateau's truly is a revolutionary text (or radical series of texts - whatever). He does this because he likes better the ideas he has developed out of the Logic of Sense.

In other words, Zizek is fatalistically attached to the offspring that emerged when Deleuze's logic of sense poked him in the butt. The joke's on you, Slavoj!

The style of the book is nothing like the way Deleuze treats other philosophers, the way D treats Nietzsche or Leibniz, for instance. Instead, this book has the informality and confessional style (as well as typically Zizek self-pastiche style that he freely admits to) that makes you feel that you're sitting in a pub and have just plied him with some drinks and have gotten him to reveal his thoughts on D&G's AO as well as how Z, AO and Lacan all fit together, in Z's mind. I very much appreciate this way of communicating in writing - versus Derrida's, for instance. For me personally, Zizek is more of a doctor that is treating philosophical and ideological diseases, rather then just another disease or symptom of a disease himself. And as such he is a public philosopher in the legacy of Bertrand Russell, etc - except from a Hegelian/Lacanian school, rather then an analytic one.

I DO think that this book is important in that it puts pious Lacanians and Deleuzians into a new relationship to each other, as explained below. I don't see how anyone can make sense of this book without having a working acquaintance of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Deleuze+Guitarri - especially Anti-Oedipus, as well as the rereading of Hegel that is presently going on (even by feminists!!!!), inspired greatly by Zizek.

But enough preliminaries - to the book itself.

Zizek in Bw/oO does seem to complain a lot - that Deleuze is not trying hard enough to try to rehabilitating Hegel, but instead is spending way too much time buggering Leibniz. And then also complains about Deleuze not trying hard enough to more "vanishingly mediate" Oedipus, accusing Deleuze of reductionism in his interpretation of Oedipal castration- and ignoring how Oedipus "throws the subject out of the family relation into the wider social network" - that in fact Oedipus is the "Operator of Deterritorialization". (Big Zizekian - "Ha! Ha!" here)

Ok, fine - so Zizek says that Deleuze/Guittari are essentially correct, but that they don't realize that it is actually Lacanian Oedipus and symbolic castration that enables D&G deterritorialized flows and desiring machines and schizoanalysis and so forth.

In other words, Zizek positions himself as the "Vanishing Mediator" between Lacan and Deleuze - and so now Zizek makes it possible to read Deleuze AO from a orthodox-lacanian perspective. Ha! Ha!

There's a lot more to the book then this, but I found this aspect of the book to be perhaps the most important.

"In the past decade, notes Zizek in his introduction to Organs Without Bodies, Deleuze emerged as the central reference of contemporary philosophy: notions like 'resisting multitude,' 'nomadic subjectivity,' the 'anti-Oedipal' critique of psychoanalysis, and so on are the common currency of today's academia--not to mention the fact that Deleuze more and more serves as the theoretical foundation of today's anti-globalist Left and its resistance to capitalism." The paradoxical result of such Deleuzianism is that "while masquerading as radical chic, [it] effectively transforms Deleuze into an ideologist of today's 'digital capitalism'."

For Zizek, "there is another Deleuze, much closer to psychoanalysis and Hegel, a Deleuze whose consequences are much more shattering." The proper Deleuze is that of the great early monographs, the key ones being Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, as well as his later two-volume study on cinema. This series of works is to be distinguished from the books Deleuze and Guattari cowrote, A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus and What Is Philosophy?, which dominate Deleuze's reception in English-speaking academe and present a sanitized, politically correct version of his philosophy. For Zizek, this political Deleuze is a fake, not least because of his rejection of Freud and Lacan: "What Deleuze presents as 'Oedipus' is a rather ridiculous simplification, if not an outright falsification, of Lacan's position." Deleuze and Guattari's criticism of fascism also "indulge in a true interpretive delirium of hasty generalizations". In denouncing "the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior", to quote Foucault's famous preface to Anti-Oedipus, they "distract us from the positivity of fascism's actual ideological functioning, which is one of superego obscene enjoyment".

For Zizek, saving Deleuze from himself involves distancing Deleuze from the pernicious influence of Felix Guattari, and emphasizing what, in himself, is more than himself: "What we are reproaching Deleuze is that he is not Deleuzian enough." Paradoxically, while the "guattarized" Deleuze immediately lends himself to political interpretations, the "true" Deleuze is indifferent to politics. Whereas the ontology of productive Becoming that characterize the first Deleuze "clearly leads to the Leftist topic of the self-organization of the multitude of molecular groups that resist and undermine the molar, totalizing system of power," the other ontology, that of the sterility of the Sense-Event, appears "apolitical". "However, asks Zizek, what if this other ontology also involves a political logic and practice of its own, of which Deleuze himself was unaware? What if there is another Deleuzian politics to be discovered here?" And "What if the domain of politics is inherently `sterile', the domain of pseudo causes, a theater of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality?"

There are basically two ways to uncover this Deleuzian Deleuze and to bring to the fore the radical potential of his (non-)politics. The first is to repeat Deleuze, following the paradox that "something truly new can only emerge through repetition". What is to be repeated is not the letter of Deleuze, remaining within the horizon of his conceptual field, but his 'spirit', the creative impulse that he himself betrayed by not being "Deleuzian enough". For Zizek, "It is not only that one can remain really faithful to an author by way of betraying him (the actual letter of his thought); at a more radical level, the inverse statement holds even more, namely, one can only truly betray an author by way of repeating him, by way of remaining faithful to the core of his thought".

The second way to remain faithful to Deleuze through betraying him is to read Deleuze through Hegel and Lacan. No matter that Deleuze explicitly rejected Hegel and found many things to criticize in Freud's legacy as revived by Lacan. For Zizek, Deleuze's injunction to "forget Hegel" conceals a disavowed affinity. Deleuze perceives Hegel as the philosopher who `filled in' the gaps of the Kantian system and passed from Kant's openness and indeterminacy to the notion's complete actualization. "What, however, if Hegel does not add any positive content to Kant, does not fill in the gaps--what if he just accomplishes a shift of perspective in and through which the problem already appears as its own solution?" This is, according to Zizek, the true meaning of the Hegelian reconciliation: "It is not that the tension is magically resolved and the opposites are reconciled. The only shift that effectively occurs is subjective, the shift of our perspective (i.e., all of a sudden, we become aware that what previously appeared as conflict already is reconciliation)."

I have only a faint acquaintance with Deleuze, and politically I find myself at great odds with Zizek's forays into social critique. There are statements in the book which are meant to shock or provoke the reader and which I found unnecessarily distasteful and outrageous. But reading Organs Without Body was an instructive experience on how to interpret an author through the lenses of another. I hope to be able to come to Deleuze with a fresh angle.

A problematic book from an invigorating yet also uneven thinker. Zizek of course must have eventually criticized Deleuze and Guattari, since they profoundly reject Lacanians and also idealist ontology - viz., Zizek. Conforming to a dubious trend, Zizek ignores Guattari completely, despite G's enormous contribution (see Gary Genosko's very scholarly book on Guattari and also the new _Anti-Oedipus Papers_)
Zizek criticizes Deleuze, appreciates how close he is to Hegel in spite of everything, and attempts to turn him back into a crypto-Lacanian/Hegelian idealist. This is a perverse reading and Zizek was the first to say so. He calls it sodomy of sorts.
But for myself, the one Zizekian observation that I find usefully accurate is in the book's title (and briefly argued within). That is, the famous "BwO" or "body without organs" motif that recurs so often throughout both volumes of _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_, is very weirdly a misnomer, or moreso, it is precisely backwards. Is it really only Zizek who has seen that they should have been calling it "Organs without Bodies" the whole time, since this is actually what their theory entails? Check it out again and see if Zizek isn't right about that.

Meanwhile, a chapter or so in which Z takes up the Anglo-american philosophy of consciousness, cognitive science, and so forth is an interesting and needed intersection between these usually mutually separated discourses of continental Theory and empirical brain/mind philosophy. Whether Zizek has any genuine contribution there is still an open question for me however. The writing is so uneven and eager to entertain, that it becomes difficult to decide whether even he is serious about this.

Question (with A Bit of Background) After reading through 1000 PLateaus and such and Delanda's interpretation Of Deleuze and Guattari, do you folks ever get "scared" that The BwO is just some reified Geist made to do perverse sodomite things and that Deleuze is on his way to becoming the 21 century Hegel? MY GOD!! What will Deleuze's Marx Be Like!?
I will check this book out, bad Reviews or no