Quasi-Cause in Deleuze

In his recent book Organs Without Bodies (2004), Slavoj Zizek raises an objection to Deleuze and Guattari's work on the body without organs as desiring machine.Zizek accepts the concept but argues that the right way to think about it is rather its inversion, organs without bodies.Zizek argues that a change in the conceptualization of causation and desire, from the concept of quasi-cause in the early Deleuze of The Logic of Sense (1969) to the late work of Deleuze and Guattari on the body without organs in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1974), is responsible for a certain rigidity and reification that reduces desire to production as product, rather than leaving it open, as process.The vector on which the body without organs rides and which gives it its direction-the direction in which the actual virtualizes-in fact involves organs without bodies, which, as Zizek shows, invokes the Lacanian Real.This essay takes its cue from Zizek's critique of Deleuze and Guattari, but rather than directly engaging with Zizek its focus extends beyond his particular critique and moves on its own to explore some of the related problems of ontology and ethics in Deleuze and Guattari as weil as Lacan.It is not possible here to address in full the underlying connection of ontology and ethics that is at stake in this discussion.The focus is restricted to the problematic shift in Deleuze's notion of the body without organs.The shift concerns whether the body without organs must include a relation to quasi-cause, which is the case in the early Deleuze of The Logic of Sense, or whether it can be treated independently of quasicause, which is the case in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus.I outline the sharp turn of Anti-Oedipus, a breaking away from the connection between body without organs and quasi-cause, in order to set up the ethical question emerging out of this shift.15 the shift in Deleuze and Guattari economizing on the otherness of this body?Is Anti-Oedipus, in proposing a reductionist ethics of pure production, in need of a further critique?At the end of this discussion, I point out some affinities that Deleuze and Guattari miss between the Lacanian Real and the structuring of the Kantian transcendental field (in ways that make it homologous with the real).I begin with a brief general exposition of the concept of desiring machines, that is, the body without organs, in Deleuze and Guattari.I then trace the shift in the concept of the body without organs through an analysis of relevant passages of The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus.I

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