Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences

Rating:
Summary: Anti-Deleuze
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Anti-Deleuze
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: philosophy fighting
Review: First, I think there is always something to say about someone who provokes such "tension" in the intelligentsia (or the want-to-be intelligentsia). The main problem with today's intelligentsia is that it forgets the "fundamental" problems of the ubiquitous monster of capitalism. People who are smart can easily forget what it means to be smart in a late capitalist society (which is our historically-specific Symbolic order). They can forget their relationship to society at large so easily because of one simple fact - the Unconscious and its dynamic workings. There is one thing that the most intelligent person in history will have in common with the stupidest - their subjectivites are barred ($). If you don't know what that means and you are writing a review about Zizek, forget about it. Now, for those Deleuzians who really wanted to see a fantastic synthesis happen in this book, there are two things to say. One, read more closely - Zizek "cops out" of this kind of book right from the get go when he tells you this is not a "dialogue," but rather an "encounter." Big difference here. What's so great and exciting about this book is that it leaves room for us, that means you and me - apprentices in philosophy - to go ahead and contribute to this "great discussion." Here's the problem, however. If we haven't read Lacan and understood just how radical his work is, just how much it makes us have to examine our own intellecualism for its pretentious and capitalistic traces, we will get nowhere. We won't even be able to recognize that writing reviews that first ask you to rate something with 5 stars sets an association in our mind to refer to an intellectual thinker as a "rock star," without thinking twice about it. Zizek is no rock star of theory or philosophy. Such terms should be in contradiction, but we'd rather raise these names - "Deleuze" "Zizek" - to the position of authority. We'd rather they gain cultural capital than realize they could be the answer out of this barbaric mess called capitalism. Because if you can't realize you are part of a problem, you're anything but innocuous. Philosophers who understand capitalism shouldn't be fighting against each other...their words will fade into an apocalyptic night.

Rating:
Summary: Not to rely on deconstruction but...
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Zizek rescues the "becoming revolutionary" energies/agon
Review: of Delueze-beyond-Deleuze: thinking Deleuzian antagonisms, blockages, and lines of flight and mongrel-becoming through the limits and forms of global capitalism, unlocking a virtualizing yet consequential Deleuze who is close to Spinoza-Hegel-Lacan and the self-abolishing sublimity of "Vertigo" and "Fight Club" (but linked to the becoming-guerilla cultures of Mao, Saint Paul, and Lenin as well). This book is an intricate provocation and traumatic dialogue much needed during the shock-and-awe reign of Empire when the discourse of "dumb and dumber" abound in the subjects presumed to know and spectacles of global domination like Gladiator, Last Samurai, Cold Mountian, and Hero refunction the retro-fitted self-abolishments of fascism as some kind of romantic movie-going pleasure to go along with CNN and pop corn.

Rating:
Summary: Zizek rescues the "becoming revolutionary" energies/agon
Review: of Delueze-beyond-Deleuze: thinking Deleuzian antagonisms, blockages, and lines of flight and mongrel-becoming through the limits and forms of global capitalism, unlocking a virtualizing yet consequential Deleuze who is close to Spinoza-Hegel-Lacan and the self-abolishing sublimity of "Vertigo" and "Fight Club" (but linked to the becoming-guerilla cultures of Mao, Saint Paul, and Lenin as well). This book is an intricate provocation and traumatic dialogue much needed during the shock-and-awe reign of Empire when the discourse of "dumb and dumber" abound in the subjects presumed to know and spectacles of global domination like Gladiator, Last Samurai, Cold Mountian, and Hero refunction the retro-fitted self-abolishments of fascism as some kind of romantic movie-going pleasure to go along with CNN and pop corn.

Rating:
Summary: An Attack on Deleuze or on Zizek's Idea of "Deleuze"
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Haven't Read the Book Yet
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Haven't Read the Book Yet
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Deleuze Half-Buggered
Review: Zizek announces his intent to bugger Deleuze as Deleuze claimed to have buggered the philosophers HE wrote on. . .Unfortunately, Zizek disregards Deleuze's crucial clause that the offspring of this buggery should be fully the buggered's OWN. Zizek maintains the same unreasoned contempt for Deleuze's work with Guattari which has become a commonplace in the academic world, and accordingly limits his interpretation of Deleuze almost exclusively to: The Logic of Sense, Cinema 1 & 2, and (as straw man) Anti-Oedipus. This is bad enough, but what is worse is that Zizek hardly ever quotes or cites passages even from this limited sub-set of Deleuze's massive oeuvre. Zizek will say, in a paragraph or less, what Deleuze's idea is, then so quickly translate it into Hegelian or Lacanian terminology, one is never sure why he thinks the link is justified. What, for instance, is the relationship between the Deleuzian notion of movement vision and the Lacanian notion of the gaze as object, and what justifies the priority of the latter? In the end, one is left with the impression of legerdermain--Zizek seems to be forcing Deleuze into boxes he's not really shaped for, but he does it with such finesse, and making so many independently interesting philosophical points along the way, one does not know EXACTLY which aspects of his reading are and are not justified.
Despite all these flaws, I give the book 4 stars because AS PHILOSOPHY rather than a history or interpretation of Deleuze's thought, or even really a very thorough critique of it, the book does succeed in suggesting interesting (if vague) RELATIONSHIPS between Deleuze and other thinkers, and updating some Deleuzian problems to meet the demands of the cognitivist and biogenetic milieu of current Anglophone philosophy. There are also many concepts which have an interest independently of their failure to bear on Deleuze's thought. . .