Table Of ContentOrgans without Bodies
“ For those who thought they could by-pass Deleuze as well as
for the most passionate Deleuzians, O rgans Without Bodies
will be a major revelation. By placing Deleuze into proximity
with his great antipodes—Hegel and Lacan—Žižek endows
Deleuze’s tireless elaboration of the processes of differentia-
tion 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,
Žižek opens up new possibilities of thought beyond the terms
of the current political debates on globalization, democrati-
zation, war on terror. Once again, Žižek has produced an
utterly timely and radically untimely meditation.”
Eric Santner, author of On the Psychotheology of Everday
Life: Refl ections on Freud and Rosenzweig
“With all his usual humor and invention, Žižek—the acknowl-
edged 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
“ As a writer, Slavoj Žižek can translate diffi cult philosoph-
ical positions in a succinct way while maintaining its original
force and insight. . . . And so, O rgans without Bodies is a
provocative and important book for Deleuzians because it
successfully opens a reading of Deleuze that is anti-conven-
tional and moves against the current. . . . What all this points
to is how Žižek is an unconventional thinker with radical
and originary insight. This makes O rgans without Bodies a
worthwhile and necessary read.”
Robert Ramos, Metapsychology Online
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Slavoj
Žižek
Organs without Bodies
On Deleuze and Consequences
With a new introduction by the author
First published in 2004 by Routledge
First published in the Routledge Classics 2012
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Introduction © 2012 Slavoj Zˇizˇek
© 2004, 2012 Routledge
The right of Slavoj Zˇizˇek to be identifi ed as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
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Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be
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identifi cation and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Zˇi zˇ ek, Slavoj.
Organs without bodies : on Deleuze and consequences / Slavoj Zˇ i zˇ ek.
p. cm.–(Routledge classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. I. Title.
B2430.D454Z59 2012
194–dc23
2012001605
ISBN: 978-0-415-51904-5 (pbk)
Typeset in Joanna
by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
C ONTENTS
INTRODUCTION TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION ix
INTRODUCTION: AN ENCOUNTER, NOT A DIALOGUE xix
Deleuze 1
The Reality of the Virtual 3
Becoming versus History 8
“Becoming-Machine” 13
Un jour, peut-ˆ e tre, le siècle sera
empiriomoniste? 17
Quasi-Cause 23
Is It Possible Not to Love Spinoza? 29
Kant, Hegel 37
Hegel 1: Taking Deleuze from Behind 41
Hegel 2: From Epistemology to Ontology
. . . and back 50
Hegel 3: The Minimal Difference 54
The Torsion of Meaning 66
A Comic Hegelian Interlude: Dumb and
Dumber 69
The Becoming-Oedipal of Deleuze 71
Phallus 77
Fantasy 84
RIS 91
viii contents
Consequences 97
1 Science: Cognitivism with Freud 99
“Autopoiesis” 99
Memes, Memes Everywhere 105
Against Hyphen-Ethics 110
Cognitive Closure? 120
“Little Jolts of Enjoyment” 126
2 Art: The Talking Heads 133
Kino-Eye 135
Hitchcock as Anti-Plato 140
The Cut of the Gaze 145
When the Fantasy Falls Apart 149
“I, the Truth, am Speaking” 151
Beyond Morality 157
3 Politics: A Plea for Cultural Revolution 163
A Yuppie Reading Deleuze 163
Micro-Fascisms 167
Netocracy? 171
Blows against the Empire 174
On the Permanent Actuality for Revolutionary
Cultural Politics of President Mao Ze Dong’s
Slogan “Long Live the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution” 180
NOTES 191
I NDEX 207
IN TRODUCTION TO THE R OUTLEDGE
C LASSICS E DITION
I HEGEL, LACAN, DELEUZE
The most succinct defi nition of Deleuze’s late philosophy would have been
that it is a “Fichteanized Spinozism”—and we should just bear in mind that
Fichte was (or perceived himself as) the absolute anti-Spinozist. The purely
virtual self-referential creating moves at infi nite speed, since it needs no
externality in/through which to mediate its self-positing movement:
I nfi nite speed thus describes a movement that no longer has anything to do
with actual movement, a purely virtual “movement” that has always reached
its destination, whose moving is itself its own destination.1
This is why Deleuze insists that desire has no object (whose lack would trigger
and sustain its movement): desire is “a purely virtual ‘movement’ that has always
reached its destination, whose moving is itself its own destination.” This is the
thrust of Deleuze’s reading of masochism and courtly love—in both cases, not
logic of sacrifi ce, but how to sustain the desire . . . According to the standard
reading of masochism, the masochist, like everyone, also looks for pleasure;
his problem is that, because of the internalized superego, he has to pay for his
access to pleasure with the pain, to pacify the oppressive agency which fi nds
pleasure intolerable. For Deleuze, on the contrary, the masochist chooses pain in
order to
d issolve the pseudo-link of desire with pleasure as its extrinsic measure.
Pleasure is in no way something that can only be reached via the detour of
pain, but that which has to be delayed to the maximum since it is something
