5 - Suicided by A Life: Deleuze, Terror and the Search for the ‘Middle Way’

Summary

The Interval

Any critical assessment of a philosopher must begin with the question of what they are afraid of. What constitutes the traumatic core that the thinker registers and repudiates (Verleugnung), only to evacuate from the site of the writerly? The oeuvres of Deleuze and Guattari enchant and enthrall in their indefatigable commitment to a politics of radical affirmation, one which aspired, in a systematic manner, to rid philosophy of its dark spot, of dialectics and of negativity tout court. Yet in the protracted line of flight that shoots through their corpora, one evinces how they inexorably strained, with the grimmest of determination, to occupy the plane of immanence (the axiomatic concept) and joyously proliferate its landscapes with all that emphatically proclaimed ‘yes’ to ‘A Life’. However, forever poised to pervert the plane of immanence and its pre-subjective singularities is the hauntology of the negative – those ambient traces of psychic, epistemological and all too real forms of terror (all that which ‘makes tremble’). Stated otherwise, a death is a death and much more than, to pastiche Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, a mode of decomposition, or rest, in the flux of the composite assemblage of simple bodies and substance.

Deleuze’s desire to liberate us from the cult of death and the sad passions is among the noblest of contemporary philosophical enterprises. But it was one which was ill equipped to engage with all that resonated under ‘A Life’, or rather the tragic dimensions of life itself, our lives and ‘theirs’. As Maria Nicheterlein and John R. Morss remark, ‘for Deleuze May 68 was an example of how reality cuts through the ideologies’ (2017: 5). What interests us is how, on the one hand, recent cycles of terrorism and violence demonstrate how ‘ideologies’ invade and obliterate ‘reality’, and, on the other hand, how transcendental empiricism, desiring politics, schizoanalysis et al. must grapple with innocent suffering, and the realities of the catastrophe and the catastrophe to come. Nonetheless, we remain Deleuzian. We too side with ‘A Life’. We too side with becoming over Being. We too refuse to join the ranks of those who Terry Eagleton excoriates as those ‘acolytes of the Real … liminal creatures, pure incarnations of Thanatos’ (2009: 152).