Quasi-Cause in Deleuze

In his recent book Organs Without Bodies (2004), Slavoj Žižek raises an objection to Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the body without organs as desiring machine. Žižek accepts the concept, but argues that the right way to think about it is rather its inversion, organs without bodies. Žižek 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 Žižek shows, invokes the Lacanian Real. This essay takes its clue from Žižek’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari, but rather than directly engaging with Žižek, 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 well 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 quasi-cause, which is the case in the Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. I outline the sharp turn of Anti-Oedipus—the 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: Is 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 contend that, with the Logic of Sense, Deleuze moves away from classical theories of the Kantian transcendental field, of identity, of external representation, and cause/effect, away from the biologism, or even the socio-biologism in Freud/ Lacan he moves into intensities. But there is nothing to suggest that the Logic of Sense suffers from phenomenological or essentialist tendendies—at least not in the main concepts of interest to us, the body without organs and quasi-cause.

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