ABSTRACT
Ž ižek’s most famous engagement with Deleuze takes place in Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. Žižek seeks to parse there both the theoretical and practical components of Deleuze’s philosophy from a Lacanian perspective. Žižek values Deleuze as a critic of psychoanalysis, a fi gure supplying theoretical underpinnings for materialist and anti-capitalist activism, and an all-around staple of leftist academic thought. In Organs without Bodies, Žižek challenges some fundamental assumptions about Deleuze’s materialism, namely the tensions within his oeuvre regarding the nature of becoming. Žižek insists that there are two Deleuzes. e more accepted Deleuze champions the multitudinous nature of becoming in Anti-Oedipus. However, the second Deleuze is much more aligned with Lacanian and Hegelian thought. e title of Žižek’s book is meant to expose those aspects of Deleuze’s thought that situate him, ostensibly, on the ideologically suspect side of contemporary digital capitalism. Žižek claims that in his intellectual privileging of fl ows of pure becoming Deleuze prefers the reality of the virtual to the reality of the material: potential trumps actual in this system. Reality for Deleuze, Žižek contends, is actualized through an “infi nite potential fi eld of virtualities” (OWB: 4). is is not unlike Lacan’s notion of the sinthome, defi ned as “traces of aff ective intensities” (OWB: 5). For Žižek, aff ect is the key concept that aligns Deleuze with Lacan. In drawing an ontological distinction between being and becoming, Deleuze ascribes a transcendental quality to the process of becoming. Becoming, then, is closely aligned with repetition (another concept deeply signifi cant to Lacan’s system of thought), for only in the repetition of becoming can the new emerge. In addition, by being anti-Hegelian, Deleuze essentially repeats Hegel by supplying an antithesis that results in a dialectical production of something new. To Žižek this mode of repetition indicates Deleuze’s similarity to Hegel, in that both stress becoming through repetition. By becoming-other to Hegel, Deleuze ironically supports and augments his philosophy.
