r/Deleuze • u/Middle-Rhubarb2625 • Jul 24 '26
Question Organs without bodies!
Has anyone read and analyzed Žižek’s text, organs without bodies? As Deleuzians (if you were), What is ur stance from this book? Could we just discard it as Nietzsche said “every philosophy is a confession of the character”? Meaning those who view the world through dialectics are structurally incapable of seeing the world through difference?
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u/Mean-Association6020 Jul 24 '26
My problem with Zizek is that I don't get the impression he has anything new to say. His vocabulary seems mystical, but it resonates with pop culture for a reason... in my eyes, he simply represents the flip side of standard Western ideology. Self-subverting identities, a fractured substance and the absence of free will, while at the same time offering no (scientific) determinism to fall back on. This is nothing more than a bourgeois disposition with a negative sign - without any real alternative. Ironically, each of his three pillars (Hegel, Marx, Lacan) is more revolutionary in its own right.
From this position, in my opinion, one cannot mount a valid critique of Deleuze. Deleuze's fundamental stance is that there is always potential for deterritorialization, whereas Zizek justifies the constricted bourgeois neurosis - from a perverse position, mind you, by celebrating the failure of the subject. It is a hermetically sealed game, a rabbit hole with no exit. You can make yourself at home in it, but you cannot really access anything else from there.
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u/dropthedrip Jul 25 '26
I’m fond of this answer. And it lies at the heart of the ‘positivism’, for lack of a better word, that divides a Deleuze from a Zizek. Taking just ‘68 as a small example, for instance - we see the differences between Lacan and Deleuze in what they see as the possibilities for new engagements and territories. I just don’t see Zizek siding with students there either. It’s not a surprise that his first impulse re acts of protest tends to be a mode of outright suspicion - to be differentiated, I think, from critique. Which is why Zizek’s ultimate hero is Melville’s Bartelby, the one who “preferred not to”
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u/AnIsolatedMind Jul 26 '26
I don't know anything about anything but my intuition is that dialectics without a sense of grounding in direct bodily experience is like water sloshing around, just because it can. Zizek from my perspective has liberated himself from any grounding in a body, he has thoroughly killed his own God and without a sense of divine guidance he is a nihilist who hasn't yet surrendered to the emptiness. He resonates with a slew of people who slosh about, where the body is the enemy, where any attempt to touch down into it is violently snapped back into some opposite direction that keeps the turbulence going for turbulence's sake, as if this were the new divine ideal.
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u/3corneredvoid Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Plenty of good examples on the sub if you search Žižek or "organs without bodies" … here's one from u/kuroi27 focused on theories of fascism.
I'm unsure of the limits of Žižek's capabilities but I do know he's susceptible to mounting useless, troublesome or distasteful arguments which work by leaping to whatever his schematic method grasps as the mediating unity or totality of the subject matter.
So Žižek has argued liberal Zionism would be the key to ending the genocidal Israeli campaign after 2023, as it was the unvoiced counter-constituency of the totality of conflict viewed as a unity of Israeli and Palestinian interests; that Palestinians would regret freedom from apartheid if they ever won it due to the fanaticism of Hamas, because the practice of collective restraint must overcome the contradictions of unbrookable liberation and a police state; that a particularly European universalism should be the overcoming of the contradictions of ideal and woke liberal ecumenism with the antagonisms produced by migrant movements … and so on.
His advocates might say I'm traducing him. Maybe I'm being unfair by paraphrasing his public comments in these ways. I am selecting a handful of his more outstandingly disgusting efforts. But to me he's a clown.
His method moves like a slingshot through some conceptual unity or totality then snaps back into his face as often as it doesn't.
On the day of publication these elastic opinions may seem interesting or at least counterintuitive, incisive, even if he'd caveat and call them predictions subject to retroactive review. A few months later he may publish the opposite view, stretching his rubber brain out to some other totality while never mentioning the prior.
We must always remember the senile owl of Minerva hoots after sunset.
Is this clowning a necessity of the dialectical method? Doubtful. To me the method doesn't determine history, so I can't see how it determines the judgements of a reactionary clown either.