by Daniel Smith
This is what makes Organs without Bodies a bit of a disappointment, as well as a sharp departure from Lacan's own relationship to Deleuze. It is not so much that only about a quarter of Žižek's book (if that) is actually devoted to Deleuze, and the rest is Žižek doing his own thing. It is not even so much that he misreads Deleuze on this or that point; Deleuze wrote that “encounters between independent thinkers always occur in a blind zone,” and this is no less true of the encounter between Žižek and Deleuze than the encounter between Badiou and Deleuze.3 The disappointment is that, even though Žižek describes Organs Without Bodies as “a Lacanian book on Deleuze” (OB xi), he winds up saying nothing whatsoever about Deleuze's own work on Lacan. This, perhaps, is just a thwarted expectation; I had hoped to find in Žižek's book a kind of guide through the complexities of the Deleuze–Lacan encounter, yet nothing of the sort appears in the book. Instead, early on, Žižek quickly and curtly dismisses Anti-Oedipus as “arguably Deleuze's worst book” (OB 21), and immediately turns his attention elsewhere.
In this, Organs Without Bodies bears a strange resemblance to Alain Badiou's 1997 book Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Badiou had seen Deleuze as his primary rival in developing an “ontology of the multiple,” and he opens his book by expressly declaring that the source of his controversy with Deleuze was their differing philosophical conceptions of “multiplicities.”4 Yet as one reads on, one quickly discovers that the book does not contain a single discussion of Deleuze's theory of multiplicities; it ignores the topic entirely. Instead, Badiou is content simply to reiterate the dubious claim that Deleuze is really just a thinker of “the One”—almost like a politician avoiding reporters’ questions by doggedly sticking to his talking points. Žižek admits that he relied “extensively” on Badiou's reading of Deleuze (OB 20n), and he rather slavishly adopts its theses and winds up reproducing a number of its errors regarding “univocity” and “vitalism” (Deleuze, Žižek dutifully repeats, is “the last great philosopher of the One,” OB 121; cf. 28). But the resemblance to Badiou is stylistic as well as substantive, since one finds a similar strategy of avoidance and displacement in Žižek's book—a “Lacanian” book on Deleuze that does not contain a single discussion of Deleuze's reading of Lacan. Taking up Deleuze's own image, Žižek claims that he is engaging in a kind of “Hegelian [and, one might add, Lacanian] buggery of Deleuze” (OB 48). The ultimate aim of his book is to show us that Deleuze is “much closer to psychoanalysis and Hegel” (OB xi) than we might have expected—in other words, that Deleuze is really a kind of Žižekian avant la lettre (OB 69). As a result, Žižek's reading of Deleuze, at its most positive, is often little more than a transcription of Deleuze's concepts into Žižek's own Lacanian (and Hegelian) terminology. One does not grudge Žižek his project—he is certainly one of the most engaging and prolific thinkers alive today—but then one wonders why the detour through Deleuze was necessary at all, except as a kind of exercise in playful pop-Hegelian sublation.
None the less, there is a serious reading of Deleuze taking place in the midst of all the buggery. Žižek issues his perfunctory dismissal of Anti-Oedipus (1972) in order to elevate Logic of Sense (1969) to the status of Deleuze's pivotal work (no doubt, once again, in deference to the master, since Lacan discussed both Coldness and Cruelty and Logic of Sense in his seminar sessions). Deleuze himself summarized the fundamental question he was attempting to address in the Logic of Sense in the following manner:
How can we maintain both that sense produces even the states of affairs in which it is embodied [sense as a principle of the production of beings], and that it is itself produced by these states of affairs or the actions and passions of bodies [sense as an impassive effect of material causes]?5
Žižek feigns a certain surprise that no one (before him) had perceived this tension (production versus effect) that lies at the heart of Logic of Sense, and he claims that it in fact holds the key to Deleuze's entire work (OB 21). The “conceptual edifice” of Deleuze's philosophy, Žižek argues, oscillates between these two “logics” of sense (or of the event), which are “fundamentally incompatible” (OB 20). “Is this opposition not that of materialism versus idealism? In Deleuze, this means: The Logic of Sense versus Anti-Oedipus” (OB 21). Put summarily, one finds two competing ontologies in Deleuze, one good, the other bad and naive: “sense as effect” is the good ontology, “sense as production” is the bad ontology. Sense as “effect” is good because it is Lacanian: the event is the irruption of the Real within the domain of causality (produced by a “quasi-cause,” which Žižek revealingly identifies as both “the exact equivalent of Lacan's objet petit a” [OB 27] as well as Deleuze's “name for the Lacanian ‘phallic signifier’” [OB 93]—thereby seeming to conflate the two poles of Lacan's theory of desire that Deleuze kept separate). “The basic premise of Deleuze's ontology [in Logic of Sense] is precisely that corporeal causality is not complete. In the emergence of the New, something occurs that cannot be described at the level of corporeal causes and effect” (OB 27). This something is the event: that is, “the point of non-sense sustaining the flow of sense … [which] fills in the gap of corporeal causality” (OB 28, 27). This gap entails a “positive notion of lack, a ‘generative’ absence” (OB 35), “an irreducible crack in the edifice of Being” (OB 41). This gap is the true domain of politics, since it marks out the difference between “the explosion of revolutionary Events” and the “‘objective’ material / socioeconomic processes taking place in reality” (OB 32). Hence the dualism that Badiou establishes between “being” and “event.”
For this reason, the sole interpretive question that arises for Žižek is this: How and why did Deleuze move from the beautifully Lacanian Logic of Sense to the misguided and non-Lacanian Anti-Oedipus? The response to this question initially seems ad hominem: the culprit is the Félix Guattari virus that infected Deleuze's thought. Like many others (Derrida, Badiou), Žižek makes a rather easy distinction between the “good” Deleuze (the solo Deleuze) and the “bad” Deleuze (Deleuze with Guattari). Guattari's influence was partly political; the solo Deleuze, Žižek claims, was “a highly elitist author, indifferent to politics” (OB 20). Deleuze himself admitted that Anti-Oedipus had indeed marked a profound transformation in his work: “For my part, I made a sort of move into politics around May 68, as I came into contact with specific problems, through Guattari, through Foucault, through Elie Sambar. Anti-Oedipus was from beginning to end a book of political philosophy.”6 But behind the ad hominem musings there lies a more substantive claim: “The only serious philosophical question is what inherent impasse caused Deleuze to turn toward Guattari?” (OB 20). According to Žižek, the impasse was precisely the tension between the good ontology and the bad ontology: “Was Deleuze not pushed toward Guattari because Guattari represented an alibi, an easy escape from the deadlock of his previous position?” (OB 21). The easy escape was the abandoning of a good Lacanian ontology (event as effect) for a bad Guattarian ontology (event as production and becoming): “Deleuze deploys the One-Substance as the indifferent medium of multitude” (OB 33). Such, in short, is the upshot of the story that one finds in Žižek's brief engagement with Deleuze: a good Lacanian moment in Logic of Sense is immediately betrayed by Anti-Oedipus and the evil Félix Guattari. If Deleuze had stuck with the insights of Logic of Sense, he would have been able to enter into a becoming-Žižek, and not wandered off into the desert of Guattari.
But would it be possible to follow Lacan himself and read Anti-Oedipus as something other than Deleuze's worst book? How can we understand Lacan's own positive reaction to Anti-Oedipus? Is there perhaps a fidelity to Lacan's thought in Anti-Oedipus that is more profound than the rather easy appropriation found in Logic of Sense? Žižek is certainly correct to sense a shift in Deleuze's thought between Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus. “The surface–depth problem [of Logic of Sense] no longer concerns me,” Deleuze remarked in 1973. “What interests me now are the relations between a full body, a body without org
ans, and flows that migrate” (DI 261). And Žižek is also correct to sense that this shift had something to do with Deleuze's association with Guattari. Deleuze later explained:
Oddly enough, it wasn't me who rescued Félix from psychoanalysis; he rescued me. In my study on Masoch [Coldness and Cruelty], and then in Logic of Sense, I thought I'd discovered things about the specious unity of sadism and masochism, or about events, that contradicted psychoanalysis but could be reconciled with it. Félix, on the other hand, had been and was still a psychoanalyst, a student of Lacan's, but like a “son” who already knew that reconciliation was impossible. Anti-Oedipus marks a break …. (N 144)
But what Žižek does not seem to realize (as Lacan obviously did) is that Deleuze's break with psychoanalysis was brought about by none other than Lacan himself. Anti-Oedipus is, among many other things, a reading of Lacan, and no doubt it would have had Lacan's name in the title had not so much else been going on in the book. Lacan is often presented as having effected a linguistic and structural reinterpretation of Freud. For Deleuze, however, this is not where Lacan's significance lies.
It's all very well to say to us: you understand nothing, Oedipus, it's not daddy-mommy, it's the symbolic, the law, the arrival of culture, it's the effect of the signifier, it's the finitude of the subject, it's the “lack-of-being” [manqué-à-être] which is life. (D 81)
Lacan's significance, rather, lies in the way in which he was able to push psychoanalysis to the point of its auto-critique, and it is precisely this Lacanian critique of psychoanalysis that Deleuze and Guattari take up and pursue in Anti-Oedipus.
There are problems that troubled Freud toward the end of his life: something is not right with psychoanalysis, something is stuck. Freud thought that it was becoming endless, the cure looked interminable, it was going nowhere. And Lacan was the first to indicate how far things had to be revamped. (DI 234)
Despite its reputation, Anti-Oedipus does not contain a single negative comment about Lacan, although it is occasionally critical of the direction his thought was taken in by certain of his disciples, and the orthodoxy that grew up around him.
This is all the more reason to regret the fact that Žižek, as a Lacanian, chose to overlook the Deleuze–Lacan encounter, and to dismiss Anti-Oedipus in a way that Lacan himself did not. Perhaps, someday, a reader with the competence to do so will analyze the outlines and the consequences of this encounter.7 Lacking that competence, I can at least list a number of points that might be relevant to such an analysis, some of which Žižek has touched on, at least in passing, in his book.
1. Immanence and Transcendence. Deleuze has presented himself, famously, as a philosopher of immanence, and his critique of psychoanalysis takes place from the perspective of immanence. What is Philosophy? identifies three types of transcendence that have been constant temptations away from immanence: contemplation, or the transcendence of the Idea (Plato); reflection, or the transcendence of the Subject (Kant); and then a third type, which we might call the transcendence of the Breach or Rupture. “In this modern moment,” Deleuze writes, “we are no longer satisfied with thinking immanence as immanent to a transcendent; we want to think transcendence within the immanent, and it is from immanence that a breach is expected” (WP 47). In other words, it is from within immanence itself that one now seeks to locate “inconsistency” or the “void” (Badiou), or from which one seeks to find a “gap” or “rupture” within immanence, the “irruption” of the Real (Žižek). Whatever the terminology, Deleuze suggests, it is always the same model—“making us think that immanence is a prison from which the Transcendent will save us” (WP 47). Žižek candidly admits that this modern model of transcendence is his own model: “‘Transcendence’ is the illusory reflection of the fact that the immanence of phenomena is ruptured, broken, inconsistent” (OB 61). This new conception of transcendence, he notes, no longer refers either to a Beyond (God) or a Subject, but rather to “the gap within immanence” (OB 62). Immanence is what is given, what is actual; we therefore need to discover the breach, the rupture, the gap, the torsion or twist, that will save us from the actuality of the immanent (Being as multiple) through an irruption of the new (the Event, the transcendence within immanence). Žižek then asks the necessary question: “What if this gap in immanence is what Deleuze cannot accept?” (OB 61). And Žižek is indeed correct: Deleuze does not accept this modern appeal to transcendence in psychoanalytic thought.
How many interpretations of Lacanianism [Deleuze asks] overtly or secretly pious, have in this manner invoked … a gap in the Symbolic? … Despite some fine books by certain disciples of Lacan, we wonder if Lacan's thought really goes in this direction. (AO 83, 53)
In other words, it is out of fidelity to Lacan's thought that Deleuze rejects the appeal to a gap in immanence.
2. The Status of the Real. How, then, does Deleuze break with this model? In certain respects, what is at stake in this question is the status of the Real, in the Lacanian sense, and Žižek recognizes this. “What matters to Deleuze is not virtual reality but the reality of the virtual (which, in Lacanian terms, is the Real)” (OB 3). In fact, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly characterize Anti-Oedipus as being, from start to finish, a theory of the Real.
We were unable to posit any difference in nature, any border line, any limit at all between the Imaginary and the Symbolic … The true difference in nature is not between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, but between the Real machinic element, which constitutes desiring-production, and the structural whole of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which merely forms a myth and its variants. (AO 83)
The aim of the book, they tell us, is “to renew, at the level of the Real, the tie between the analytic machine, desire, and production” (AO 53). In their language, the Real = desiring-production. The unconscious “is neither Imaginary nor Symbolic, it is the Real in itself, the ‘impossible real’ and its production … The machines of desire … constitute the Real in itself, beyond or beneath the Symbolic as well as the Imaginary” (AO 53). (Deleuze and Guattari will none the less insist that “the real is not impossible; on the contrary, within the Real everything is possible, everything becomes possible … It is only in the structure [the symbolic] that the fusion of desire with the impossible is performed, with lack defined as castration” [AO 27, 306]). What allows Deleuze to link the Real with the theory of desire in this manner (desire = production)?
3. The Kantian Theory of Desire. Anti-Oedipus can be said to find its primary model in the Critique of Practical Reason, since it was Kant who first defined the faculty of desire as a productive faculty (“a faculty which, by means of its representations, is the cause of the actuality of the objects of those representations”).8 We know why Kant defined desire in terms of production: the problem of freedom concerns the operation by which a free being can be the cause of something that is not reducible to the causal determinism of mechanism. Of course, Kant was aware that real objects could be produced only by an external causality and external mechanisms; in what he called “pathological” productions of desire, what is produced is merely a psychic reality (having a fantastic, hallucinatory, or delirious object) (AO 25). None the less, this was Kant's Copernican Revolution in practical philosophy; desire is no longer defined in terms of lack (I desire something because I do not have it), but rather in terms of production (I produce the object because I desire it). The fundamental thesis of Anti-Oedipus is a stronger variant of Kant's claim, Kant pushed to his necessary conclusion: “If desire produces, its product is real,” and not merely a fantasy (AO 26). “There is no particular form of existence that can be labeled ‘psychic reality’” (AO 27). Indeed, Deleuze states this conclusion in explicitly Lacanian terms: “The objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself” (the subject itself is a product of desire) (AO 27).
4. Desire and Immanence. But Deleuze is clearly not a Kantian in any straightforward sense. For Kant, the fundamental question concerns the higher form (non-pathological) of the faculty
of desire: a faculty has a higher form when it finds within itself the law of its own exercise, and thus functions autonomously. The higher form of desire is what Kant calls the “will”: desire becomes will when it is determined by the representation of a pure form (the moral law), which is the pure form of a universal legislation (the categorical imperative). In Kant, however, freedom, as the “fact” of morality, requires as its postulates the three great transcendent Ideas of the Soul, the World, and God. It is precisely the transcendence of the Moral Law that renders its object unknowable and elusive. Was this not what Lacan himself showed in his famous essay “Kant with Sade,” to which Deleuze admits his indebtedness?9 Anti-Oedipus can thus be said to have effected an immanent inversion of Kant (though it is no longer concerned with the synthesis of consciousness, but with the synthesis of the unconscious). In the first two chapters of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze provides a purely immanent characterization of the three syntheses of the unconscious—connection (which forms a counter-Self, and no longer a Soul), conjunction (which forms a “chaosmos,” and no longer a World), and disjunction (which exchanges it theological principle for a diabolical one)—and shows how desire (as the principle of production) constitutes the Real by tracing out series and trajectories following these syntheses within a given social assemblage. “The Real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses that engineer partial syntheses of desire as auto-production of the unconscious.”10