The latest book by the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek takes the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as the beginning of a dazzling inquiry into the realms of politics, philosophy, film, and psychoanalysis. This is a polemical and surprising work. Deleuze, famous for his Anti-Oedipus (written with Felix Guattari), emerges here as someone much closer to the Oedipus he would disavow. Similarly, Zizek argues for Deleuze’s proximity to Hegel, from whom the French philosopher distanced himself. Zizek turns some Deleuzian concepts around in order to explore the "organs without bodies" in such films as Fight Club and the works of Hitchcock. Finally, he attacks what he sees as the "radical chic" Deleuzians (he names, among them, Hardt and Negri’s Empire), arguing that such projects turn Deleuze into an ideologist of today’s "digital capitalism." Admired for its brilliant energy and fearless argumentation, Zizek sets out to restore a truer, more radical Deleuze than the one we thought we knew.
