Living the Eternal Return as the Event: Nietzsche with Deleuze

Author(s): Keith Ansell Pearson

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 14, Eternal Recurrence (Autumn 1997), pp. 64-97
Published by: Penn State University Press
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*
Living theEternal Return as theEvent: NietzschewithDeleuze
Keith Ansell

It's the failure to live thatmakes

one

Pearson

ill, and humiliates

one

(Lawrence

1995:

125).
Subjectivity

is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual.

(Deleuze 1985: 110; 1989: 82-3)

There

is a profound

link between

signs, events,

life, and vitalism:

nonorganiclife...(Deleuze 1990: 196; 1994: 143).

the power of

what kindof thought

It isby nomeans an easyor simpleaffairtodetermine

Nietzsche's

doctrine of eternal return is.

Is it the thought of an incommunicable

butof thoughtitself(of the

experience?Is itan experiencenot simplyof a thought
simulation

and dissimulation

'of thought, of the semination

and dissemination

'of

or a thoughtthatis in some
thought)?As towhetherit is a philosophicalthought

sense

'outside' philosophy a great deal obviously depends on the conception of

and its history we have. If, for example, we imagine, perhaps too

philosophy

thatphilosophyhas been governedin itshistoryby principlesof

inattentively,

one might wish to contend that a

identity, self-sameness,
self-presence, etc., then
Whatever
form or character we
thought such as this is indeed outside metaphysics.
choose to bestow on it,however, the thought of eternal return does not cease to lose
its uncanny character or any of its demonic force. It remains monstrous
itwork
and no doubt because of, our vain attempts to tame it and make

in spite of,
for us. It is

theghostof a thoughtthatcontinuesto liveon longafterone has confronteditand

believes oneself tohave leftitbehind. It isperhapsthethought
par excellenceof

simulacra, of originary difference or heterogeneity, and of reality as virtual. Its

and
experiment operates on many levels, both theoretical and practical, cosmological
ethical. There is also the question of its status as a thought-experiment within the
encounter with history, with what man is and may still
as the great undetermined animal, the sick animal whose repetitions provide
itwith a futurity, the animal whom nature has invented in order to enjoy and endure

wider

context of Nietzsche's

become

But in thinking
thepromiseof life(thepromisewhich can only reside infuturity).

we need to ask: is this

through its relation to the over-man, the being of promise,
overhuman an intensification of man, an enhancement of this curious species, or is the
a mode of evolution that heralds
change of concept so dramatic that it denotes
more than, the human? This question never
something wholly other to, rather than
texts, rather one finds different configurations
gets fixed inDeleuze's
to theFoucault
book on The Death
it (see, for example, the appendix

and stagings of
of Man and

of living
Superman', where le surhomme is taken to denote not the disappearance
human beings and as requiring much more than a simple change of concept, and
where the eternal return is construed as the 'Superfold' (Surpli) that offers an

'unlimited
finity').In thetextsof thelate 1960sat leastDeleuze takesseriously
64

as a 'great cultivating
presentation of the eternal return
thought', that is, as
a thought of culture and a paideia of thought. It thus plays a crucial role in his
or praxis of philosophy as an attempt to think 'beyond' the
conception of the art
'human condition', where such a 'beyond' denotes the acquisition and cultivation of a

Nietzsche's

nature humaine superieure)

1968: 114; 1990:
(Deleuze
'higher human nature' (une
the eternal return provides the human with this experience of
129). For Deleuze

TDeyond', in effect, a mobile

thinking of the overhuman as an intensification
enhancement of the human condition that is always implicated in...'a life'.

and

a new relation to time, a new thought of time

involving the undergoing of time, then surely the thought is also critically related to,
I would mention three as being of special
and informed by, the times of modernity.
significance: the time of capital, the time of entropy, and the time of the death-drive
If the doctrine of eternal return demands

(times of the eternal return of the same without becoming or the invention of the
event). As the author of a crucial postwar text on difference and repetition Deleuze
noted himself that such a thinking emerges at a fairly precise moment in history when
and stereotypical repetitions appear to have overtaken life
themost mechanical

Such a thought is
altogether and subjected it to a law of homogeneity and sameness.
to
be
both
critical
and
clinical.
In
this
I
focus my
shall
therefore,
essay
designed,
to repeat (the compulsion of the overhuman and
attention on the 'superior' compulsion
locates inNietzsche's
of the differential future) thatDeleuze
eternal return, superior,
that is, in relation to the entropic model
death-drive.

of the repetition-compulsion

which

informs

Freud's

isdesigned tofillsomany holes and fulfilsomany roles it isperhapsin

The thought

we with it.' The pressures it intends to

danger of collapsing under its own weight, and
bear on us are so immense thatwe are crushed by it. All that remains is to continue
the encounter with its 'ethical' dimension.
the task of its strange encounter, especially
InNietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze made the innovation of reading the eternal
return as an ethical and selective thought which could be imaginatively worked
through in relation toKant's categorical imperative since itprovides thewill with a

new practical

rule and a practical

synthesis that heralds

the 'becoming-active

of forces'

of theeternalreturnin relationto
(1962: 77-81; 1983:68-71). This workingthrough
Kant is takenup again in theopeningpages of DifferenceandRepetitionwhere

Deleuze

seeks to show that the formalism of Nietzsche's

doctrine overturns Kant on

his own ground. Itdoes thisbydivorcingrepetition

fromthemoral lawandmaking
itselftheonlyformof a new law thatisbeyondmorality.At thispointwe
repetition
attain the 'suspension of ethics' and a thought that is heyond good and evil' (Deleuze
1968: 14-15; 1994: 6-7). In this essay, however, Iwant to examine the role this

thinking of an 'ethics' of the event.2 It is

experiment in thought plays inDeleuze's
necessary to note that there is no contradiction here between a 'suspension' of ethics
and an 'affirmation' of ethics. The suspension refers to the 'law' of the human
condition, while the affirmation appeals to the 'event' of the overhuman. As may
there is no other way to think ethics - the arts of living and
become clear, for Deleuze
dying except in terms of the event. On this reading of the thought, therefore, one
65

could
open

- claim with an
authority that is always open to contestation,
legitimately claim
- that
the eternal return is the ethical
to themovement
of a superior justice

to conceive
it as such is in terms of an
thought par excellence, and that the only way
encounter with the event. I want to stage an exploration of the nature of this strange
encounter in this essay.

Encounters

Transcendental

The specifictaskDeleuze set forphilosophyinThe Logic ofSense, and continuingup

to his 1993 piece on 'Immanence', was
transcendental as a field of immanence

to think, inhumanly and transhumanly, the

and to articulate from the insights into life

gained an ethicsof theevent.This isa taskthatinvolvesforDeleuze emancipating

of
theeventfromboth 'everyday
banality'(la banalitequotidienne)and the 'sufferings
de lafolie) (1969: 290; 1990:248). These are thetwo
madness*(les souffrances
extremes, on the one Hand becoming

subjected

to the banalities

of consciousness

with

and on theotherhanddescending
itsfixationon theephemeraland thesuperficial,
into an undifferentiated

abyss from which nothing can

'return'.

andmarkedby itsattempt,inspiredchieflyI
Deleuze's thinkingis distinguished
would arguebyBergson,3to thinktheintenselifethatisbothgerminaland
nonorganic:
...not all Life
which
more

is confined to the organic strata: rather, the organism is that

life sets against itself in order to limit itself, and there is a life all the
intense, all themore powerful for being anorganic. There are also

nonhuman

Becomings

of human beings

that overspill

the anthropomorphic

stratainall directions.(Deleuze andGuattari 1980:628; 1988: 503).

Althoughthenotionof nonorganiclife isnotfoundineitherDifferenceand
Repetition

or The Logic

of Sense,

it could be argued that these books

are devoted

to

nothingotherthanthemappingout of sucha life. It isBergsonwho definesthetask

of philosophyas one of learningto think
beyond thehumancondition.Deleuze
as
follows:
To
this
task
open us up to theinhumanand thesuperhuman
configures
or superiortoourown), togo beyond thehuman
which are inferior
(durations
condition:This is themeaningof philosophy,in so faras our conditioncondemnsus
to liveamongbadlyanalyzedcomposites,and tobe badlyanalyzedcomposites
Deleuze's
ourselves'(Deleuze 1966: 19; 1988:28). Indeed,Iwould suggestthat
as an ethics of the event
reading of the eternal return

Deleuze's

contribution

is of Bergsonian

to a new way of thinking and existing

resides

inspiration.4

in theway

in

which he approachesquestionsof lifeand death,seekingto removethemfrom the

restrictive economy of an existentialist or personalist ethics (an ethics of the T and the
in order to open up the human to the ?ver-human.
This 'beyond' of
self, Je and Moi)
the human denotes for Deleuze
nothing transcendent but is implicated fully in the
superior durations

that characterize

the plane of immanence.

Deleuze's

avowed

aim is

toproducean 'artof living',inwhich thelineuponwhich lifeand deathexist in

66

movementcan bemapped out in termsof thelogicof the

and complicated
implicated
'Outside'(Deleuze 1990: 149-151; 1995: 110-111). It is theforcesof the 'outside'
which

impinge and impact upon us, upon what we

thinkwe are and what we

think we

arecapableofbecoming,offering
thepossibilityof livingdangerously,

It is the peristaltic movements

of the outside which
experimentally and 'ethically'.
serve to destratify fixed and stable identities and produce through doubling processes
new possibilities for an intenser and more creative existence. The double is never,

therefore, a projection of the interior, so that the process involves not a 'One' but a
redoubling of the 'Other', not a reproduction of the same but a repetition of difference,
not the radiant emanation of a possessive T but the immanent production of a non
self: 'It is never the other who is a double in the doubling process, it is a self that lives

me as thedoubleof theother'(Deleuze 1986: 105; 1988:98). Thismeans thatinan

it is never a question

encounter

of meeting

oneself on the outside but only ever the

otherwithintheone thatisalwayscaughtup indoublingand foldingprocesses

(Deleuze compares the process to the invagination of tissue in embryology and to the
act of doubling in sewing that involves twisting, folding, stopping, repeating, and so
on). The 'outside' denotes a field of immanence inwhich, strictly speaking, there is
is
neither an internal self nor an external one (T and 'not-I'). The 'absolute Outside'
devoid of selves 'because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence in

which theyhave fused'(Deleuze andGuattari 1980: 194; 1988: 156).

and
aim of this new art of living is not to identify with the line, though madness
always exist as a risk, since thiswould be to destroy all thinking and life.
in
Rather, the task is to both 'cross the line' and make it endurable and workable;
The 'outside'
short, this is the line of life cracked by death and conceived as germinal

The

suicide

is the line of life that links up random and arbitrary events in a creative mixture of
and necessity. A new thought of the outside, and a new way of living on the
outside, involves drawing new figures and mapping new diagrams, in short, a general
chance

andvital topology
of thought
thatfoldstheoutside intotheinside.The
intensive

passion

of the outside

entropic containment

is the passion of germinal life, releasing

and opening them up for a time to come.

the forces of life from

ofgerminallifecan onlybe fullyappreciatedto the

of thisthought
The significance
movement beyond a philosophy of the subject has
and this requires, in tum, some understanding of his engagement

extent that the nature of Deleuze's

been understood

withKant's founding
projectof philosophicmodernity.InTheLogic ofSense
Deleuze

seeks to develop

a new

conception

of the transcendental philosophy

by

by theT, thecogitoor thesynthetic

approachingitas a topologicalfieldnot inhabited
butpopulatedbypre-individual
thatconstitutea
unityof apperception,
singularities
machine' (Deleuze 1969: 130-1; 1990: 107). It is this
'Dionysiansense-producing
made upofpopulations(multiplicities
'surfacetopology'
thatare not simplya
of theone and themany) and preindividualsingularities
combination
which
the 'real transcendental field'. Singularities refer to 'ideal events' (ideal in
the sense that they exist or endure beyond their specific individual manifestations
and
significations), such as bottlenecks, knots, points of fusion, processes of
condensation, crystallization, and boiling. This surface topology cannot be restricted

constitutes

67

to the determinations of a centred subject (consciousness

or natural perception);
it is
rather the surface of a 'skin' that acts as a membrane which allows for an interior and
exterior to take shape and communicate,
transporting potentials and regenerating
even biologically,
it is necessary to understand that "the deepest

polarities: Thus,

theskin,M
the
(ibid.: 126; 103). Deleuze does notpretendthatdetermining
transcendental field

is an easy task.

In The Logic

of Sense

he accepts

is

that Sartre's

unityof apperceptionare
objectionstoendowingthisfieldwith theT or thesynthetic
toSartre's
decisive (a pointhe repeatsin the 1993piece on 'Immanence',
referring
Before examining inmore detail the character
essay The Transcendence
of the Ego).
encounter with Kant, it is important to note that the attempt tomap the
of Deleuze's

fieldas a fieldof pre-individualsingularities

resiststhepositionwhich
transcendental

would

claim

that unless

of the real object of knowledge are conceived

of knowledge,
then transcendental philosophy becomes
have to establish autonomous
conditions for objects and

the conditions

as the same as the conditions

impossible since itwould

thereby be forced to resurrect the old metaphysics.

Deleuze

to accept

thus refuses

that

theonlyoptionavailable tous is tochoose betweeneitheran undifferentiated

ground

(an abyss without

Form.
In Kant

differences)

the transcendental

or a supremely

individuated Being

and a personalized

turn is the only secure way of refuting the skeptical

claims

forknowledgein termsof both its

of empiricismand securingsolid foundations

universality and necessity. The transcendental denotes the unity of self-consciousness

The unity is in our own minds, it is not
but not qua a merely personal consciousness.
our
can never give us
of
from
them. Experience
the
of
knowledge
objects apart
part
or necessary.
If knowledge
remains empirical
anything thatwould be either universal

and arbitrary.In applyinga priori knowledgeto

itcan onlyeverbe contingent

experience

we are already going heyond',

notes Deleuze,

what

is given

in experience.

Now althoughthismomentbeyond thegiven is alreadypresentinHume it isonly

withKant thatthismovementbeyond isprovidedwith transcendental
principlesand
in other words, the principles which take us beyond the
In Hume,
arguments.
given
are merely principles of human nature, that is, psychological
principles of association
that concern our own representations of, and designs upon, theworld.
In Kant,

of principlesis notan empiricalor psychological

however,'thesubjectivity
buta "transcendental"
(Deleuze 1963:21; 1984: 13).
subjectivity'
subjectivity,
notes thatexpressionslike 'transcendental
unityof self
Hegel frequently
consciousness'

have an ugly air about them, suggesting,

he says, that there might be

'a

monster'lurking'inthebackground'(Hegel 1974: 150).This ispreciselywhat

of thetranscendental
inbothDifferenceand
Deleuze will locate inhis reworking
of themonstrousand one that
RepetitionandThe Logic ofSense, namely,a thought
mustbecomemonstrousitself(as a thinking
of difference'and'repetition).This
involvesforDeleuze, whetherone is speakingof thesetextsof thelate 1960sor the
latertext
What isPhilosophy! of 1991and theshortessay of 1993on 'Immanence',
the transcendental field from the perceived stranglehold it
emancipating
undergoes
whether this consciousness
the hands of consciousness,
be psychological
or
is committed to the seemingly extravagant and
Deleuze
phenomenological.5
disorienting

idea that all phenomenology

is eprphenomenology,

68

since, his argument

at

it fails to penetrate themore profound individuations that are implicated in a

life, or creative evolution, of difference and repetition. This concern with the virtual
actualization of pre-individual
singularities through themediation of individuation

goes,

serves to explain Deleuze's

'continental
atypical for a so-called
preoccupation,
of difference, with biology and itsmapping of modes of individuation

perhaps

philosopher'

(whichisalso clearlyinspiredby theexampleofBergsonandheavilymediatedby the

influence of Simondon).

What is an individualand how does itbecomewhat itis ina fieldof individuation

structured by intensities and singularities? Deleuze's
argument is incredibly complex
and convoluted, and I can only here present a synoptic version of it, seeking to bring
out those features that are pertinent to the concerns of this essay.
If the individual is
a
to determine more precisely the character of
inseparable from world it is necessary
this 'world'. A world
which

actualizes

can be viewed

and incarnates

from two perspectives,

that of an individual
the singularities which 'evolve' through

in its body

which
formsof folding(envelopment,
etc.),and thatof thesingularities
development,

to persist and subsist over and above their particular incarnations and
actualizations within an individuated body and self. There is, therefore, a 'continuum

continue

fromtheindividualsthatenvelop it invariabledegrees
thatisdistinct
of singularities'

of determination.

The world,

is not only actualized

says Deleuze,

but also expressed,

andwhile itis thecase thatsucha worldonlycomes intobeing inand through

individuals, inwhich it exists only as a predicate, it is equally true to claim that it

'as an event or a verb, in the
subsists in a highly different manner, namely,
singularities which preside over the constitution of individuals' (1969: 135; 1990:

terms: the singularities enjoy a virtual existence, and

111) (expressed in Bergson's
the actualization does not
although they are actualized, and must be actualized,
ever
exhaust their powers of invention, and neither do the contours of an actualization
These insights will become crucial
resemble the potential that has been realized).
when we approach the eternal return as a thought and willing of the event (how one
becomes

what one is as an event of becoming,

through a counter-actualization).

becoming

the event of one's own

actualization

The error of attempts to define the transcendental with consciousness

for Deleuze

is

thattheyget constructedin theimageof that

which theyare supposedtoground,
theempirical (Deleuze 1969: 128; 1990:
runningtheriskof simplyreduplicating
105).Metaphysicsand transcendental
philosophyareonlyable to thinksingularities

by imprisoning

them within

the confines of a supreme self (unMoi

supreme)

or a

T (unJe superieur)(Deleuze 1969: 129; 1990: 106). InTheLogic ofSense

superior

is transmuted into a free, anonymous, nomadic singularity which is said to

'traverse' humans, plants, and animals. This 'nonorganic' life does this by being not
dependent on thematter of the particular individuations and the forms of their
the subject

constitutes the universe of Nietzsche's

personality. This transversality, says Deleuze,
'overman' (1969: 131; 1990: 107).
In later work this transversal field is identified as
the plane of immanence, which, starting with Descartes
and running from Kant to

'Immanence is supposed to be
gets treated as a field of consciousness:
to a thinking subject' (Deleuze and Guattari
immanent to a pure consciousness,
1991:
the employment of transcendent Ideas he
47-8; 1994: 46). So, while Kant denounces

Husserl,

69

at the same time, Deleuze

discovers

contends,

the 'modem way of saving

towhom immanence

subject (the subject

through the auto-productive
gets attributed and which is treated as an efficacious power).
transcendence'

The

character of Deleuze's

transcendentalism

peculiar

can be perhaps

further clarified

by examiningthediscussionofKantwhich figuresin thechaptercalledThe Imageof

inDifference

Thought'

and Repetition.

In rethinking the 'image' of thought - the

becomes andgoes astray-Deleuze arguesthatit iswithin

imagebywhich thought

our conception of thought that the empirical and the transcendental get distributed
related. He is concerned to show how within Kant and phenomenology
the
is never made

transcendental

truly transcendental.

What

does

thismean?

itsucha problemthatphilosophyfailstogetrighttheinstallation
of the

and

And why

is

Deleuze's
the
argument is that although it is Kant who discovers
powers of the transcendental he never escapes, in spite of his immense
labours, to free transcendental structures of thought from the empirical acts of a
We only have towitness in this regard, says Deleuze,
consciousness.
psychological
transcendental?

prodigious

themoves

taking place between

the first and second editions

of the Critique

of Pure

Reason, and thefactthatalthoughpsychologismisbetterhidden itstillcannotbe

preventedfromexposing itself.The reasonwhy thisis such a problemforDeleuze is
in effect, that philosophy fails in theKantian revolution to emancipate
itself fully, if at all, from the domain of doxa, and which is always for him constituted
by the two halves of common sense and good sense (we may also recall at this
that itmeans*

juncture that forDeleuze

critique must always be violent and never at peace with
established powers, a conception of philosophy which informs his reading of

Nietzsche as thetruephilosopherof critiqueinhis book onNietzsche) (1962: 102-6;

here isquite specific,and needs tobe cited in itsdetails:
1983:89-93).6His argument
No doubtphilosophyrefuseseveryparticular
doxa; no doubt itupholdsno
or common sense. No doubt it
particular propositions of good sense
in
it retains the essential aspect
Nevertheless,
particular.
recognises nothing
of doxa
namely, the form; and the essential aspect of common sense, namely

of thefacultiesgroundedin thesupposedly
themodel itself(harmony

thinking subject and exercised

as one only abstracts from the empirical

universal

upon the unspecified object)...so

long
content of doxa, while maintaining

which correspondsto itand implicitly

theoperationof thefaculties
retainsthe

essential

aspect of the content, one remains

175-6; 1994: 134).

Deleuze

seeks

imprisoned

by it (Deleuze

1968:

to undermine

the idea of knowledge

that is implied in the
of modern metaphysics, which, he argues, is a model and form
is unable to open itself up to
in these terms philosophy
Construed

transcendental model
of recognition.

that
which exceeds itsfacultiesand thenorms itimposeson theiroperation(the

the fiizzy, the indiscernible,

aberrant, the anomalous,
refuses to distinguish the transcendental
thatDeleuze

and so on). It is for this reason

form of a faculty from its

The
transcendent exercise must not be traced from the
transcendent application:
it apprehends
thatwhich cannot be grasped from
empirical exercise precisely because
the point of view of common sense' (ibid.: 186; 143). Ultimately,
thismeans
that the
transcendental must be answerable
the empiricism

of common

to a 'superior empiricism', which is obviously

sense but that of another
'logic of sense'

and good

70

not

the empiricism of the unknown, the demonic, the anarchic, etc. There is
this something is not to
in
theworld thatforces us to think. For Deleuze
something
become an object of recognition but rather assume the form of a 'fundamental
- as in
encounter* (rencontre) (ibid.: 182; 139). It has to be an encounter with demons
encounter with the demon who offers him the fateful and fatal task of
Nietzsche's
on the
undergoing the thought-experiment of eternal return, of taking up and passing
1974:
The
the
over-human
section
of
over-human
task
and
(Nietzsche
335).
gift
altogether:

and thereduction
of
exceeds establishedphilosophicalmodes of recognition
in the world

becomings

to perceptual

and affective cliches.

Ethics after Individuation

are littlemore than
goes on to argue that the T and the 'Self (Je and Moi)
indices of the species, in particular of 'man'. By contrast, individuation is thatwhich
It is individuation conceived as a field of
them possible.7
precedes species and makes

Deleuze

intensive factors which

move

informs Deleuze's

rethinking of ethics 'beyond* the subject,

and to open it up to the inhuman and
and delirious world, a world of free and

to

the 'human condition'

thought beyond
overhuman. The abyss of this Dionysian
unbound energy, is not, Deleuze
insists, an impersonal or abstract Universal beyond
break with
individuation. For him this is precisely what defines Nietzsche's

Schopenhauer(seeDeleuze 1969: 131; 1990: 107). It is rathertheT and theselfthat

are abstract universals which need

in relation to the individuating

'What cannot be replaced is

to be conceived

forces that both constitute and consume

them:

individuation
itself(Deleuze 1968:332; 1994:258). This is to thinklifenotas the
expression

of a determined

world

but as a possible one, replete with diffuse

The 'life' of the individual always exceeds

and virtual actualizations.

potentialities
that of the species,

but the individuating

factors that are implicated

in a process

of

assumeneithertheformof theT nor thematterof theself (if theformer

individuation

its psychic
represents the psychic determination of the species, the latter expresses
The formation of the T is inseparable from a form of identity, while
organization).
the self is always constituted by a continuity of family resemblances.
'Individuation',
Deleuze

writes,

'ismobile,

strangely supple, fortuitious and endowed

with fringes and

what it is' theselfis

margins'(Deleuze 1968;331: 1994: 257). In 'becoming
implicatedindissolutionand theT findsitselffractured:'Forit isnot theotherwhich
isanotherI,but theIwhich is an other,a fractured
T (ibid.: 335; 261). Death can be
situatedfromthislifeof thedissolved selfwithinthefoldsof an involution.In the
and
becomingof anysystemdeathhas a double face: a faceof implication
involvement, a face of involution, and a face of explication and evolution, a face of
entropy. The most powerful face of death is thatwhich is hidden, almost noumenal.
It is the death which acts as the agent of dissolution and decomposition,
being that
internal power' which frees the process of individuation from the form of the T and
thematter of the Self

inwhich life has become imprisoned.

Every death, therefore,
to be double, being both a cancellation of large differences through
entropic extension, and the liberation of those little differences which swarm through
an intensive involution.
can be deemed

Deleuze

always considered

it superficial

to regard the late Foucault

71

as making

a naive

return to the subject.

There

are only for Foucault,

Deleuze

argues, processes

of

and relationsof self to selfthatinvolverelationsof forcesand

subjectification

foldings of forces (intensities, densities,

etc.). The

'ethical subject' exists only as the

being thatproblematizesitself itdoes notknowwhat it is and allows itselftobe

withina fieldofproblems(Deleuze 1986: 126; 1988: 118). Ethics
constituted
concernstheproductionof new creativelinesof lifethatdependon how one foldsthe
forces,producingnota new subjectbuta 'workof art'(Deleuze 1990: 127; 1995:92).
What getsproducedin thisartof livingis a fieldof forces(electrical,
magnetic,
speaking of an individuation that evolves and involves through weak and
strong intensities and through active and passive affects. The subject on this model is
divested of both inferiority and identity, transformed into an 'event' of individuation,
so that a self always exists as a mode of intensity, never simply as a personal
subject
kinetic),

The cracked line is,more often that not, deadly, moving fast
(ibid.: 134-5; 98-9).
and violent, transporting us into 'breathless regions'. The task, however, is never to
simply surrender to the lethal character of the line, but to always seek to extract some

so as to pass
something on thatwill
surplus value from its productivity and fecundity,
'You write with a view to an unborn people that doesn't
continue to exist germinally:

yethave a language'(Deleuze 1990: 196; 1995: 143).

to thismode of thinking
Deleuze's commitment
beyondan activeor phallic subject is
such thatit leadshim tomaking a rigorousand strictseparationof themovementof
is 'on
'desire', which is always transversal, from the experience of 'pleasure'.' Pleasure
the side of strata and organization',
serving only to interrupt the purely immanent
1997a: 189-90). He insists that desire does not have
process of desire (Deleuze
austere reading, to
pleasure as its 'norm' because pleasure always wants, on Deleuze's

of affectstoa subjector person,actingas a

attributetheproductionand distribution

for the person to find himself or herself again in a process that overwhelms
them and which ensures that the act of repetition is always undergone again and again

means

(Deleuze 1977: 119; 1987:99-100). Inmaking thispointDeleuze is, inpart,

in his incisive attack on the great errors of psychology.

following Nietzsche
out
that our inability to allow for new experiences
and new
Nietzsche
points

existenceby always tracingtheunknown

sensationslies in thetendencytostratify

back

and familiar, producing for ourselves effects that are

and
'moreover a feeling of power'.
giving ourselves
soothing,
gratifying,

into what

alleviating,

is already known

of truth'
This, he notes, is 'Proofbypleasure ("bypotency")as criterion
(Nietzsche

or the yet-to
the unexperienced,
1979b: 51). The result is to exclude from experience
as well as the strange, the uncanny, and the new and the
be experienced,
immeasurable.9

ofFreud'spositingof a 'beyond'of thepleasure

This explainswhy inhis reworking
grants primacy to the phenomenon of repetition. The death-drive
principle Deleuze
needs to be related not so much to destructive tendencies and aggressivity, but more
to phenomena
of repetition. If the pleasure principle is tied inextricably to a
psychological

principle,

that of the 'beyond' is linked necessarily

to a transcendental

principle(Deleuze 1968:27; 1994: 16). It isnot somuch a questionof drawing

something

new from repetition as more

a matter of
making

repetition a novelty,

that

is, liberatingthewill fromall thatbinds itbymaking repetitiontheobjectofwilling:

72

once more and innumerable

question in each and every thing: "Do you desire this
1974:
times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight' Nietzsche

The

of thiswilling ineternalreturnis thefield

section341). On thisreadingthe 'subject'

of intensities and singularities,

chance

encounters

and fortuitous circumstances,

that a

selffindsitselfimplicatedin, Inotherwords, thesubjectisnot theself (thespeckof

dust), but thismoonlight,

world to which itbelongs
into the event.10 As
transformmere
cultivate

that is, it is the haecceity and the

this spider, thismoment;
and which itmust turn, along with its singular becoming,

question invited by the eternal return seeks to

into the event of a world, that is, it seeks to
cites the following important passage from a

such, the demonic

action

in theworld

the event ('a life'). Deleuze

piece byKlossowski:

the vehement oscillations which upset the individual as long as he seeks only
his own center and does not see the circle of which he himself is a part; for if
to an individuality
these oscillations upset him, it is because each corresponds

he takes as his own from the point of view of the

center. Hence, an identity is essentially fortuitous [the
innocence of becoming
KAP] and a series of individualities must be traversed
by
1969: 209;
the
that
order
each, in
fortuitymake them completely necessary. (Deleuze
other than thatwhich
undiscoverable

1990: 178).

as it is in Freud, simply implicated

The experience of repetition is never forDeleuze,
to repeat which determines the death-drive)."
in a 'regression' (such as the compulsion

This would entailreducingdeath to themodel of a purelyphysicalormaterial

calls a merely 'brute repetition'. The reason why Freud

repetition, towhat Deleuze
has to construe the death-drive in terms of the step backwards, a desire to return to
inanimate matter, is because of his cornmitment to a conception of the personal unity
and integrity of the organism. On thismodel death must, therefore, always be
conceived as a negative splitting and falling apart, a 'regressus' involving reactive,

of a self on itself, for it is full of self-loathing and self

and
expresses ressentiment towards what perceives to be outside itself and
contempt,
In the repetition of return,
alien to it (the stranger, the unfamiliar and the uncanny).12
internalized violence

however, we are exposed to 'demonic power' that ismore complicated,

living between
life and death, at the border, on the edge of chaos: 'If repetition makes us ill, it also
1968: 30; 1994:
heals us; if it enchains and destroys us, it also frees us...' (Deleuze
19).13 Deleuze
always insists on thinking beyond the death which is apodeictic
(our sense of themortality of the self is both empty and abstract, he
knowledge
and places the stress on the importance of coming to know the 'event' of
maintains)
death that always enjoys an open problematic structure ('where and when?')
(Deleuze

1969: 170-1; 1990: 145). ForDeleuze it is theeternalreturn

which createsthetime

of the event through which the vital powers and unbound energies thatmake possible
sense can be emancipated
'creative evolution' inBergson's
from the containment of a
closed

system.

This will

now be explored

in the next major

The Eternal Return and theHeredity of theCrack

In a meditation

section of the essay.

on Zola and the 'crack-up' that appears as one of the

to The
appendices
Deleuze
draws a distinction between two types of heredity: the one
Sense
Logic of
small, historical, and somatic; the other epic and germinal. A heredity of the instincts
73

and a heredity of the crack or fault-line. The somatic

heredity might include a
such as alcoholism being passed down the generations from one body

phenomenon

to

another(theexamplegivenbyZola himselfinLa BeteHumaine whenwritingof the

hereditary crack). This kind of transmission reproduces the return of the same. What
is novel about Deleuze's
reading of Zola is the attempt to implicate the somatic
transmission in a different crack; where one kind of crack transmits something well

is transmitted, the other communicates

in terms of
determined, reproducing whatever
a vital and virtual topology (dealing with thresholds, limits, transformations,
connections and disconnections,
closed and open
implications and complications,
In the case of the heredity of the crack 'it is not tied to a certain instinct, to
systems).
an internal, organic determination, or to an external event that could fix an
object'. It

is thusable to 'transcendlifestyles'(myemphasis).The movementof theheredityof

the crack

is forDeleuze

'imperceptible' and 'silent'. The crack cannot be 'replicated'

of transmission is diffuse and inchoate, it proceeds via an 'oblique line,
1969: 377; 1990:
being ready to change directions and to alter its canvas' (Deleuze
325). The crack transmits only the undetermined crack, capable of changing
directions and transforming its canvas. With the heredity of the crack characteristics
since itsmode

are not simply acquired but have to be invented and are forced to
undergo
The crack 'follows' only itself, like a runaway train destined for
transmutation.
derailment. On the tracks of this germinal train of life there is neither beginning nor

but only thebrokenmiddles that

end,neithera givengenealogynora given teleology,
allow

and unpredictable growths,

intersections, cross-connections,
a cornucopia of good and bad. The crack enjoys a capacity for self
making possible creative 'evolutions', inwhich the creation involved

for novel

constituting

overcoming,
offers not a simple redemption but allows for the germinality of the most destructive
inclinations and tendencies.
'He knew that all his life he had been wrenching at the
frame of life to break it apart. And now, with something of the terror of a destructive

his own destruction'(Lawrence 1995:

child,he saw himselfon thepointof inheriting

221).

But

if one

inherits one's destruction

- as in
Freud's

death-drive

(a principle

of

ofWeismann's thesison thecontinutiy

death throughlife)with its inversion
of the
-how is it
the
death
the
of
life
of
soma)
(a
through
germ-plasm principle
possible for
to be reconfigured as a force of a 'creative evolution'?
It is in
is led to turn to the eternal return as a thought
this question thatDeleuze

this destruction

addressing

and repetition'.
experimentable to thinktheplay of 'difference

In thecrucialchapterof thenovelDr Pascal (thefinalbook ina cycleof twenty)

entitled
The Genealogical-Tree'Zola has thedoctor layout beforehimselfand the

young woman

Clotilde

the entire genealogical

tree of the Rougon-Macquart

family in

lessonin life'(Zola 1989: 109ff).But thistree

ordertopresentherwith a 'terrible
stretches way beyond

and over this particular

family, encompassing

the strata of races

and civilizationsfromthedawn of timeto thepresentand branchingout endlessly

into unknown
human

flourescence of the
126). This is 'thewhole monstrous
this genealogy
is presented in the terms of a
131). Moreover,
erratic, and unpredictable, monstrous descent, a descent subject to, to
and reterritorialization.
2^ola is
terms, perpetual deterritorialization

futures (ibid.:

tree' (ibid.:

highly complex,
employ Delezue's

imaginativeindepictingtheunfoldingof thistreeof human lifein termsof a

complicated

entanglement

of sickness

and health, of death and renewal, a vitality of

74

life that is caught up in destruction,

decay, and degeneration.

Pascal

asks, for

have been openedby theoverflowing

riverof life
example:once thefloodgates
(creative evolution

as monstrous),

and as detected by the emergent

science of heredity

thenis itpossible tosay thatamong the

(as thescienceof difference'and'repetition),
weeds and flowerson thebanks therealsomingles and floatsby - gold? (ibid.: 132).

is, says Pascal, a world 'beyond good and evil'. The chapter concludes by asking
whether it is necessary to bum the tree of genealogy or whether this can only be a
matter of the future as itsmatter.
This

presents Doctor Pascal's work on the new science of heredity

the peri-genesis of Emst
confused theory of pangenesis,
through Darwin's
the eugenics of Galton
(also
(whose works were avidly read by Nietzsche),
finally arriving at an intuition ofWeismann's
major thesis
keenly read by Nietzsche),
on the continuity of the germ-plasm
in which a portion of this 'delicate' and 'complex'
In the novel Zola

moving
Haeckel

substance is held in reserve and passed on without variation or mutation from

Pascal, however, does not stop there, which is
generation to generation (ibid.: 36).
what makes his case especially interesting. He propounds his own theory which he
calls 'the failure of the cells theory', which consists in granting a high degree of
freedom and novelty to plasmic evolution.
'perpetual change', the change that denotes

It is not atavism that Pascal privileges but

'...an increasing transformation, due to that
transmitted strength and effort, that perturbation, which imbues matter with life, and
which is, indeed, life itself in an abstract sense' (ibid.: 38). In short, there is no

and itat thispoint that

Zola isable toresistthebiologicalnihilismof
plasmicfinality
is
continuity thesis. It is in terms of such a nihilism thatWeismann
appropriated inHardy's tragic fiction where the anomalous and the aberrant (the
'unfit') are not allowed to survive but must face extermination (Tess, Jude the

Weismann's

Obscure,

etc.). This biological nihilism amounts, in short, to repetition without

to the eternal return of the same, since the germ-plasm is posited as
'crack'), and it
completely independently of external perturbations (Deleuze's

difference,

evolving
is certainly free of any endogenous

powers

the organism might possess

itself.

In his reading of literature, therefore, Deleuze

is proposing a vital reworking of
not
which
it
is
shown
that
it
is
in
heredity,
heredity that passes through the crack,
which would
Hence

fix desire

the claim:

to a morbid

'In its true sense,

ancestry, but that heredity is the crack itself.

the crack (la felure) is not a crossing for a morbid

and themorbid in itsentirety'

(Deleuze 1969: 373;
heredity;ita lone is thehereditary
of this
1990:321). ForDeleuze everything
dependson graspingthesignificance
paradox, confusing this heredity with its vehicle, that is, the 'confusion of what is
transmitted with its transmission' (the transmission which transmits only itself). This
is what he means

when he declares

the 'germen' to be the crack and nothing but the

crack.
links the heredity of the crack up with the death-instinct is crucial
The way Deleuze
since itwants to implicate death in the dimension of 'difference and repetition'. This
and monstrous
role Nietzsche's
eternal return
accounts, therefore, for themomentous
plays

inDeleuze's

re-working of the death-drive,

subjecting all questions

of descent

and heredity(originandgenealogy)todeterritorialization.
InFreud thedesireof the
75

organism

to return to inanimate matter assumes

maintains

that Freud's

that there is an original model

of

of death). As such, thedeath

death tobe returnedto (theOne death,thesingletruth
drive is a desire foridentity
(Nirvana).This iswhatDeleuze means when he
'bare repetition'

positing of the death-drive is caught up in a 'brute'model of

So far as
(repetition without simulacra, without originary difference).

thepossibilityofdifferenceenjoyingitsown concept,as opposed tobeing laidout

of a concept

a founding
that already presupposes
of
the
return
eternal
amounts
to something of
thought-experiment
a 'Copernican revolution'.
Identity now operates as a secondary power and speaks
true subject of the
only of differences qua differences (it speaks of repetition). The
under the dominion

in general

identity, Nietzsche's

are the intensities and singularities which refer to

cannot be contained within a self, and inwhich
that
factors
individuating
does not return (that which aspires to recentre the acentred or decentred circle

eternal return', Deleuze

contends,

themobile
theOne

of desire).

Rather, what

convulses

a world where

returns is the divergent

series and inclusive

'In

disjunctions:

thecircleofDionysus,Christwill notreturn;theorderof theAntichristchases the

otherorderaway' (1969: 348-9; 1990:300-1). The systemof theAntichrist
the identity of the self is lost - 'not to the benefit of of the

of theOne or theunityof the

Whole, but to theadvantageof an intense
identity

multiplicity and a power of metamorphosis...'

'essential relation' to be encountered between

(ibid.: 345; 297). Thus

eternal return and death

if there is an
the

it is because

repetition of eternal return implies the death of thatwhich is one 'once and for all*.
if itenjoys an essential relation with the future it is because
the future is the
Likewise,
of themultiple, the different, and the fortuitous, 'for
explication and complication

themselvesand "forall time'" (Deleuze 1968: 152; 1994: 115). The eternalreturn

thus selects against the One, against thatwhich will not select. A great deal of
commitment to a conception of univocal Being which
confusion surrounds Deleuze's
is regarded as implying a commitment to the 'one'. The erroneous nature of this

can be readilydemonstrated
characterization
by appealingtowhat is at stake in the
the
affirmation
eternal
of originary
differenceand the
the
of
return,
namely
repetition

play of simulacra.14

It is the eternal returnwhich

articulates

the nature of univocal

of theeternalreturnis theaffirmation
of all chance ina single
Being. The affirmation

and Being as the unique event, 'one Being and only for all forms and all
1969: 211; 1990: 180). On Deleuze's
times' but always as 'extra-Being' (Deleuze
the eternal return provides nothing less than a 'new image of thought*, of the
model
birth of thought and the thought of birth. It is the 'phantasm' that constitutes the site of
moment

and thethought
of a
theeternalreturn,
endlesslymimickingthebirthof a thought

birth, beginning

*anew desexualization,

sublimation,

actof bringingabout thisbirth'(ibid.:256; 220).

Deleuze

and symbolization,

caught

in the

appropriation of work on heredity, which identifies the

a homologous
and determined heredity and a dissimilar or

utilizes Zola's

'difference' between

transformational
heredity,inordertorenderimpossibleany stabledualityof thethe

concedes that the small type of heredity may

hereditary and the acquired. Deleuze
well indeed transmit acquired characteristics, simply because
the formation of
But in the case
instincts is inseparable from a social field and historical conditions.
of the grand heredity the acquired characteristics are brought into a quite different
we are dealing with a 'diffuse
relationship since here
potentiality' (ibid.: 377; 325).
76

Moreover:
...if it is true that the instincts are formed and find their object only at the edge
of the crack, the crack conversely pursues its course, spreads out itsweb,
in each body in relation to the instincts
changes direction, and is actualized

which open a way for it, sometimes mending it a little, sometimes widening
two orders are tightly joined together, like a
up to the final shattering...The
a larger ring, but they are never confused,
within
(ibid.)
ring
- 'the
death instinct'
The crack is simply the emptiness, the great void, it is death

it,

(ibid.: 378; 326). For all the the 'noise' theymake, the swarming
(I'Instinct de Mori)
instincts cannot hide the fact that they belong to thismore profound silence from

When deathhappensthestillnessin
which theyburstforthand towhich theyreturn.
the room is such that one can hear a 'Fly buzz'; it is 'like the Stillness in theAir
'not
instinct
is
The
death
1969:
of
Storm'
theHeaves
Between
merely
(Dickinson
31).
one instinct among others, but the crack itself around which all of the instincts

the final
ibid.).15 On thismodel of life entropy is not allowed
congregate* (Deleuze,
word or the last say; rather, its 'transcendental illusion' must always be exposed.
Deleuze wants to argue that the death-instinct constitutes the complicated
'grand

concerns revolutionary
heredity' of the crack (it's not tragic but epical, since it
But the death-instinct is retrieved from any global entropic
movement).
determination or telos: 'Is itpossible, since it [the death-instinct or drive] absorbs
every instinct, that it could also enact the transmutation of the instincts, turning death

create instincts
Would itnot thereby
whichwould be evolutiverather
againstitself?
than alcoholic,

erotic, or financial...'

(1969:

385;

1990: 332).

'a little', 'thatwe are able to be at

it is enough thatwe dissipate ourselves
the surface, thatwe stretch our skin like a arum', liberating singularities that are
neither general nor individual, neither personal nor universal, from their containment

For Deleuze

in the self and the T: AH of this is traversed by circulations, echoes, and events
which produce more sense, more freedom, and more strength than man has ever
In Freud the 'daemonic power' of
dreamed of, or God ever conceived'
(ibid.: 91; 73).
to repeat that characterizes
the *beyond' of the pleasure principle (the compulsion
is too readily domesticated by being reduced to an
and the death-drive)
masochism
Oedipal

and articulation, namely the influence of early infantile

are invariably used to explain the apparent 'malignant fate' we
us, driving us on and tormenting our minds. Deleuze's
reading of Zola

determination

experiences
possesses
endeavours

which

feel

to remove the death-instinct from the tragic model Freud traps it in order
it up to the pagan space of the epos. The crack comes from the future as a
sign of the future. In the 'exaggeration' of life as composed by the great writer or
to us that
artist, inspiration comes not from the logos but the epos, which discloses
we can never go far enough in the direction of 'decomposition',
'since it is necessary to
go as far as the crack leads' (ibid.: 385; 332). Art is, therefore, implicated in
to open

degeneration.
Degeneration

is haunted by its discontents and malcontents.

Civilization
and decay not only disclose signs of the future but show that the future

isonlypossible to theextentthatitgrowsout of thegreathealth(thehealththathas

incorporated the crack as that which allows for repetition and difference). Zola's
'putrid literature is a literature of the future: 'Zola's optimistic literature is not
anything other than his putrid literature.

It is in one and the same movement...'

77

on this
model is nota
(Deleuze 1969: 385; 1990: 332). The death-instinct

of buried repressed desires, a primeval lust formurder, but is to be read

as signs of the future, of new life, new affects, and new bodies of desire.

manifestation

In learning towill

a 'volitional

the Event one undergoes

intuition and transmutation'

wills terminally\
(ibid.: 176; 149). One does notwill exactlywhatoccurs,but rather
willing

something

'in thatwhich

occurs'

and as 'something yet to come', namely,

the

concealed and revealedEvent. This is a willingof lifethatisone 'withthestruggleof

thinking of the eternal return as the time of the event seeks to

much of the paradoxical
therefore,
aspect of the doctrine, such
comprehensible,
as how, for example, it involves an affirmation of everything as it is but yet entails no
I willed
it!' is above all, on Deleuze's
Stoic resignation. Zarathustra's Thus
reading
of the past but a battlecry, bearing witness to the event of 'a
not a mere acceptance
free human beings'.

make

life', and the highest affirmation of the arrival of the future in its difference.
We

have yet, however, to think trulymadly deeply about the nature of the event.
the crucial question pertaining to the actualization of the event concerns

For

Deleuze

the

possibilityof sustainingitsnon-actualization:Is itpossible towill theeventwithout

also notwilling itsfullactualizationina corporealmixture? Is itpossjble tomaintain
the 'inherence' of the incorporeal

crack while

not incarnating

it in the depth of the

noisybody? Is itpossible,Deleuze asks,andrisksasking(takingtheriskofmaking

oneself
crazy',

'a little
fool), to live, love, and die 'a little alcoholic',
appear as a philosophical
'a little suicidal'?
It is to addressing these difficult questions
that I now turn.

Staging theEvent ofReturn

eternal return, Deleuze

argues, is not a theory of qualities but of pure events.
themeaning and significance of this claim we need to
Before we can comprehend
understand better both the conception of ethics and the notion of the event he is
The

working

through.

'Either ethics (la morale) makes no sense at all', Deleuze

writes, 'or this iswhat it
and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us' (1969:

means

of the
174-5; 1990: 149). This, saysDeleuze, is ethical lifebeyondtheressentiment

event, in which we use moral

notions like just and unjust, merit

by rendering them personal. The event is greeted by resentment
is no
whatever happens to us as unjust and unwarranted. There
Deleuze
says, than this revenge against time itself, time's 'itwas'.

and fault, immorally

whenever we treat
other illwill',
The

event is the

event of time (the moment)

that both happens to us and which lives beyond us
'The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs,
(eternity):
It signals and awaits us' (ibid.). Learning to live the crack (and
the purely expressed.

inheritance, both its

crack-up) as the event requires perfecting one's complex
misfortunes and its promises, becoming what one is as a piece of necessity and fate.
Every event can be said to have a double structure. On the one hand, there is
of its actualization:
the present moment
the event 'happens* and gets
necessarily
in a state of affairs and in an individual ('the moment has come'). Here
embodied
time of the event, its past and future, are evaluated from the perspective of this

definitive present and actual embodiment.

On

78

the other hand, the event continues

the
to

'live on', enjoying its own past and future, haunting each present, making the present
return as a question of the present, and free of the limits placed upon it by any given
state of affairs. The event both happens to an individual and lives on beyond the

or person. My life appears as too weak forme,

subject
slipping away at the present
instant, or I appear as too weak for life, the life that overwhelms me, the life that
scatters singularities all around me without any relation towhat I take to be me myself

akin to Blanchot's death that has two faces, the death

I (this is the life, says Deleuze,
that has an extreme and definite relation tome, grounded inmy mortal coil, and the
death that has no relation tome at all, being incorporeal and impersonal, grounded
only in itself).

The concept of the event is not to be confused with any actualized state of affairs, but
rather refers to the 'shadowy or secret part' that can always be subtracted from or
as an 'infinitemovement' which gives life consistency. This
added to an actualization

is the 'virtual'; not a chaotic virtual but one that has acquired consistency. And while
transcendent to the state of affairs towhich it relates, itmust be
the event may appear
to be an entirely immanent movement
conceived
('L'evenement est immateriel,
incorporel, invivable: la pure "reserve"').
Ironically, it is the state of affairs in which
that is transcendent, as well as 'transdescendent'.
the event becomes actualized
The
time that is implicated in the becoming of the event is not that of the determination
isolable points or themeasure of discrete instants, but that of the 'meanwhile' (un

of

entre-temps), the duree of the interval or 'dead time'. The event names not the passing
of time but the vectorial passage of time: 'When time passes and takes the instant
to restore the event' (Deleuze
and Guattari 1991:
away, there is always a meanwhile
that
150; 1994: 158). The germinal life enjoyed by the event refers to a becoming
takes the battlefield and thewound as components and variations that live in excess
the subject's own body, including its rapport with other bodies and the physico

of

them.16 The 'dignity' of the event is lived, unlived,

by philosophy and its ethic of amor fati on account of the fact that
philosophy becomes equal to the event by being able to 'disembody' it as a state of
it is only through this
affairs, that is, to free it for a germinal existence. Paradoxically,

mathematical

field that determines

and over-lived

disembodiment

that the event can become

how, for example, it is possible

to a scientifically determinable

truly embodied (ibid.: 150-1; 159). This is

to 'treat' death as an event: 'Death may be assimilated
state of affairs, as a function of
independent variables

or even as one of the lived state, but it also appears as a pure event whose variations
are coextensive with life...' (ibid.: 153; 161). Such a concept of death - death as event
is only possible to the extent that one has gained, and won, a conception of germinal
life. Death is ungraspable not simply because
it does not correspond to the order of

thehumandesire formeaningand itsfulfilment

but
(anorderof representation)

itbelongs to the Event, even and especially

'one's own' death: the event can
never be owned by (the) one, just as there cannot be a death that can be owned as my

because

death. If theeventof death isalways too late(seeCritchley1997),17it ispreciselythis

constitutes on Deleuze's
conception
'Death is...the last form of the problematic,

which

of the event the basis

for an affirmation:

the source of problems and questions,

the
every response, the "Where?" and "When?"

sign of their persistence over and above

which designate this (non)-being where every affirmation

1968: 148; 1994: 112).

79

is nourished'

(Deleuze

'Nothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what
happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become an offspring of one's
own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one's
carnal birth...'(Deleuze
1969: 175-6; 1990:
149-50). The play of different kinds of
heredity can now be configured in terms of a play between actions and events. In
becoming what one is' the task is to become the offspring of one's events, not one's

of theevent.This is the
actions,since theaction isproducedonlyby theoffspring

actor who belongs to the incorporeal time of Aion, not the

lives in the eternal present, where the circle is complete to itself, where no
transformation and transmutation are possible
'Aeon' captures
(the time of Chronos).
life of the cracked

eventful
God

who

the indefinite time of the event, a floating line which travels via speeds, continually
dividing, always too-late and always too-early, never quite on time (the excess of time
or time of excess).
Inhuman time. Chronos
signifies the time of measure,
always the
forms and
right time, a time which corporeally situates persons and things, developing
Human
and
time
Guattari
1980:
1988:
(Deleuze
320;
262).
determining subjects.
inwhich only the present exists in time and gathers
is the time of presence,
together both past and future into a unity. The 'unlimited Aion', by contrast, names a
past and a future that inhere in time and which divide every present into an infinite
Events are of the order of Aion: not living presents but infinitives,
becoming.
that in dividing itself infinitely in two directions at once - past
heralding a becoming
and future must always elude the gathering of the present.

Chronos

wants to know, as already

In his encounters with Fitzgerald and Artaud, Deleuze
tomaintain
the silent trace of the incorporeal crack at
indicated, whether it is possible

where it is lostforeverina black

thesurfacewithout lettingitdescend completely,

thickness of the noisy body.

hole, into the coagulating
Surely ifwe are to go to the
outer limits we must go all theway and never come back? Does
the philosopher
not
the
find himself or herself dancing close on the edge of ridiculousness,
from
speaking

safetyof theshore?Why notjust takegallonsof alcohol and have donewith all this
ofFitzgerald
futilephilosophizingonmattersof lifeand death? Does not thetruth
ofArtaud speak from
speak fromthedepthsof alcoholic excess anddoes not thetruth
and theabysmalpit andpendulumof schizophrenia?
thedepthsof self-mutilation

However,
madness

to take just the one case, it is not a question of saving Nietzsche

from
saved himself from complete descent into its
for the reason thatNietzsche

black hole, giving himself

be born posthumously.

over

to a future germinal

life by making

sure that he would

of theevent isgraspedonly iftheevent is also inscribedin

The eternaltruth
theflesh.But each timewe must double thepainfulactualizationby a
counter-actualization
it.We

(contre-effectuation) which limits, moves, and

must accompany ourselves
first, in order to survive, but

transfigures
then even when we die. Counter-actualization

to a
is nothing, itbelongs
and pretends to have the value of what could
have happened.
the true
But, to be themime of what effectively occurs...like
actor and dancer, is to give to the truth of the event the only chance of not
It is to give the crack the
being confused with its inevitable actualization.
chance of flying over its own incorporeal surface area, without stopping at the

buffoon when

itoperates

alone

bursting within each body;

it is, finally, to give us the chance

80

to go farther than

we would

have believed possible, (ibid.).

it is not simply a question of asking how one can choose not to be free,
but of pointing out that the freedom chosen and artificially selected bears the greatest

For Deleuze

weightas theburdenof germinallife.The pointDeleuze makes is thatit is

of the
impossiblesimplytoopt forthegood healthylifewith itsdenigration

consuming passions of bodily life. Attention must be drawn to the confusion of lines,
'the central point of obscurity
of flight and death, of paranoia and schizophrenia,
which raises endlessly the problem of the relations of thought to schizophrenia and
1969: 243-4; 1990: 209). All life involves a process of
(Deleuze
depression...'
demolition,
monstrous,

even and especially

the speculative
life. Which
is greater, themore
extreme, themore experimental
corporeal, individual life

themore

(somaticlife)or theincorporeallifeof theevent (germinallife)? It'sa questionof

being superficial out of profundity, which involves having the courage, Nietzsche
says, to stop at the surface, at the fold. The depths are always to be navigated in terms
life' it 'is a
of a geography of thought and existence, for in the 'entire biopsychic
question

of dimensions,

axes, rotations, and foldings. Which

projections,

way

should

one take?On which side is everything

going to tumbledown, tofoldor unfold?'
(ibid.:272; 222-3). Germinal lifedoes not liveanddie in thenameof victims,of the
rather it gives them the living line as a broken
tortured, oppressed, and depressed;
line. In dying we come to know that 'death is neither the goal nor the end, but that, on
life to someone else' even in destruction, murder,
the contrary, it is a case of...passing

and theworst (Deleuze 1977:76-7; 1987: 62).

return to the question of eternal return as a theory of pure events. The problem of
one of knowing how an individual is able to
a 'logic of sense' is, says, Deleuze,
'transcend' its form and its syntactical link with a world so as 'to attain to the universal

To

of events' (which involves affirming disjunctive syntheses that are

mere
beyond
logical contradictions).18 This involves the individual learning to
as just like everyone else
recognize itself as the fortuitous case,
(perhaps as all the
communication

in history). This would amount to the individual recognizing themselves solely

as the event, the event that is 'actualized within her as another individual grafted onto
names

her' (1969: 209; 1990: 178). The taskof theeternalreturnis toeffectthis

transformation of the individual

its qualities

and actions

- into the event:

'we raise

each event to the power of the eternal return in order that the individual, bom of that
which comes to pass, affirm her distance with respect to every other event. As the
she follows and joins it,passing through all the other
a
implied by the other events, and extracts from it unique Event which is
once again herself, or rather the universal freedom' (ibid.). This is themoment of
or immutability sought by the person but the
'eternity', not the eternity of immortality
and a ghost of time, never
eternity of the event that lives on, like a spectropoiesis
individual

affirms the distance,

individuals

ceasing

to divide

Conclusion:

into the already past and the always yet to come.

Deleuze

Beyond

Weismann

('How One BecomesWhat One Is')

number of questions concerning this thinking of the

could ask an overwhelming
ethics of the event, questions at once naive, unwise, and unphilosophical
and
'
Not
Is it faithful toNietzsche?
impudent. Is this life'? Is it 'a life' that is live-able?

One

81

but to his 'spirit'? Of course, Deleuze's

thinking makes
live on in an incredibly beautiful, intense, and powerful way. No other
ghost. It raises the stakes of
reading could, in fact, be more faithful toNietzsche's
selection to an extraordinary level of intensity. It betrays life a certain life, a
life
of
the
consciousness
and
its
banalities
for the sake of
life,
ephemeral
particular
to the letter of Nietzsche

Nietzsche

life, the intense life of the nonorganic

another

and of the event. What

could be more

'Nietzschean'?
too much to life. This is an
it has been remarked, conceded
extraordinary
It communciates what is truly other and alien
remark, and a profound complaint.
and what perturbs many who encounter him. Deleuze
is a philosopher
about Deleuze

Deleuze,

to life,including
who ends up givingeverything
death,also suicide,druguse and
abuse,

alcoholics,
which

or subjects who become addicts,

- the
'toomuch' seeks tomeasure
lend itself tomeasurement
'sense' when
only makes

and the people

schizophrenia
But this concession
schizophrenics.

alcoholism,

does not, in actuality,

that

in the context of Deleuze's

thought of the event. One can only
comprehended
to life the event (precisely that which cannot be calculated once and for all).
concede
Deleuze

has reconfigured theWeismannian

legacy that informs biophilosophical
such as Derrida,
running from Bergson and Freud to our contemporaries

modernity,

in

a particularand highlynovelway. The germinallifeis not fixedto thecontinuity

of
the germ-plasm, but allows for cracks and fissures through which new life is possible
life is fundamentally anti-entropic in relation to both
and given a chance. Germinal

rendition
of thegerm-plasm)that
theentropyof theriverofDNA (thecontemporary
is immune

to external perturbations and the entropy of the Freudian death-drive (both,

is key inDeleuze
of closed systems). What
is the stress on the

in effect, examples

thatallows forthevitalpowersof lifetoexpress

fieldof pre-individualsingularities
themselves

beyond

entropic containment.

In this way he fundamentally

reconfigures

Weismann and inventsa philosophyof lifethatexistsbeyond theoppositionof

absolute lifeand absolutedeath,beyond theoppositionofEros andThanatos,and
beyondgood and evil. Germinal lifeis thelifeof thefold,of implication,
explication,
to it the neo
Of course, one can still deploy in connection
and complication.
Darwinian
language of vehicles and replicators (organisms and genes on the well
In Deleuze's
known model of Richard Dawkins).
conception of germinal life, for

organisms become vehicles for the transmission of intensities and

The event does not relate the lived to a transcendent
singularities or haecceities.
= Self, he writes, T^ut, on the
contrary, is related to the immanent survey of a
subject

example,

fieldwithoutsubject...'(Deleuze andGuattari 1991:49; 1994:48) (thenotionof self

surveyis takenfromthework of theFrenchphilosophicalbiologistRaymondRuyer).
Deleuze

to the end, for example, that a singular haecceity, a life of pure

that is neutral and beyond good and evil, is only prevented from

maintains

immanence

becomingwhat it isby thesubjectthatincarnatesitandmakes itgood orbad.

in this logic of life, then, become bearers of singularities and intensities,

Subjects
they are both created by them and destroyed by them.19 Living for the event does not,
and intensities
however, amount to affirming the nihilism of the subject. Singularities
do not subordinate the continuity of life to a simple 'reproduction' of the same. The
logic of the event

is a logic of nuances,

of co-implication
82

and co-evolution

between

and the field of individuation it is implicated in,while the continuity is

heterogeneous,
involving the repetition of vital differences, their living on and
always
not their 'living off (Freud). This is Bergson, for example, working out the relation
between his conception of creative evolution and the legacy ofWeismann:
the organism

is no doubt

that life as a while

is an evolution, that is, an unceasing

life can progress only by means of the living, which are
Innumerable living beings, almost alike, have to repeat each
its depositaries.
other in space and in time for the novelty they are working out to grow and
does not only transmit characters; it transmits also the
mature...Heredity
There

transformation.

But

impetus in virtue of which

the characters

are modified,

isvitalityitself(Bergson 1962:232; 1983:231).

and this impetus (elan)

The best way to think of the ethics of return as an ethics of the event (an ethics
is in terms of the central paradoxical
formulations Nietzsche
'beyond' the subject)
surrounds his doctrine on

what one is' with, such as: (a) one must

'is' (one is a 'becoming', understood inDeleuze's
sense of the fractured T and the dissolved
self, which refers to the death-drive that is

not have

'how one becomes

the faintest idea what one

to the eternal return), and (b) one wants only to love everything that has
happened to one, wanting nothing to be different (an event thatmakes all the
insists, than catching sight of
difference). There can be no greater danger, Nietzsche

peculiar

oneself with the task of becoming what one is (necessity, a piece of fate). There only
event of becoming.
Perhaps it is in the thought of the event thatwe can
persists the
discover and invent themeaning of Nietzsche's
cryptic formulation that in order to
understand anything at all of his 'Zarathustra' one must have one foot beyond life
not, I would

suggest, one foot in the grave but one foot in the event.

expresses the fatality of a non-heroic life in the form of a riddle, a riddle

that captures what is at play inDeleuze's
heredity of the crack: as one's father one is
one
as
to live and grow. This dual
mother
while
one's
continues
dead,
already

Nietzsche

the heredity of life, offering the chance and necessity of

inheritance complicates
from
'freedom
1979:
party in relation to the total problem of life' (Nietzsche
attaining
is putting to the test here,
38). It is a critical and clinical modernity thatNietzsche

requiring the subtle sense and sensibility 'for signs of ascent and descent' in which one
- both.
This dual task requires the complex art
knows both for one is and becomes
of seeing with more than one pair of eyes, it requires an enhanced perspectivism:

towards healthier concepts and values, and again

looking 'from a morbid perspective
conversely to look down from the abundance and certainty of rich life into the secret
labour of the instinct of decadence...1
has shown us better than
(ibid.: 39-40). Deleuze
I believe, what this 'secret' labour refers to and
any other reader of Nietzsche,

involves. This is the secret labour of inventing oneself as an event, 'mixing up

nothing, "reconciling" nothing...the art of dividing without making inimical...a
the opposite of chaos...' (ibid.: 65).
tremendous mulitiplicity which is nonetheless

is growing inside one until one day capacities and powers

'in their final perfection'. Living life - and death - as the event
requires living 'beyond intention'; there is only the 'mere waiting' so that one enters
'of exalted and delicate things' (ibid.: 42). Such a life
involuntarily into theworld

One

does not know what

'leaps forth' ripe

we learn to become physicists of the higher human nature, of those that

requires that
we are, stylists of nature, and creators of concepts of life that enjoy and affirm the
83

a lifethatenjoys
beatitudeof thelivingbeyond'. This is a lifebeyondephemerality,
the eternity of the event and its eternal return. Living the event means
living those
'superior durations' beyond the human condition, it 'is' a life of immanence20:
We

can not foresee, we must

take risks and endure

the longest possible

time,

we must not lose sightof thegrandhealth(Deleuze 1969: 188; 1990: 161).

This

essay

forms part of a book

I am working

on that bears

the working

title

GerminalLife: TheDifferenceand RepetitionofDeleuze, andwhich one daymay see

the light of day as its special dawn or daybreak.
great deal tomy dialogues with James Williams
event, and matters of life and death.

84

to this essay owes

about thematter of Deleuze,
the

The denouement

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Rosset, C. (1993), Joyful Cruelty. Toward a Philosophy

of the Real, ed. & trans. D,
F. Bell, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Sartre, J. P. (1972), The Transcendence
of theEgo. An Existentialist Theory of
New York, Octagon Books.
Consciousness,

Serres, M. (1975), Feux et signaux de brume: Zola, Paris, Grasset.

?
(1977), La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece, Paris, Les
Editions de Minuit.
?
to Zola', in Serres, Hermes.
(1983), 'Language and Space: From Oedipus
ed. J.V. Harari & D. F. Bell, Baltimore, John
Literature, Science, Philosophy,
Hopkins University Press, pp. 39-54.
Simondon, G. (1995/1992), L'individu et sa genese physico-biologique,
Grenobel,
Jerome Millon
(original d.o.p. 1964); trans. 'Genesis of the Individual' (Introduction
only), in J.Crary & S. Kwinter, Incorporations, New York, Zone Books, pp. 296
320.
Smith, D. W.
Duality',

theKantian
(1996), 'Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming
A Critical Reader, Oxford, Basil Blackwell,
in P. Patton (ed.), Deleuze:

pp.
29-57.
Spinoza, B. (1955), The Ethics, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, New York, Dover Press.
Zizek, S. (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology, London, Verso.
?
London, Verso.
(1997), The Plague of Fantasies,
Zola, E. (1954), Germinal, Middlesex,
Penguin.
?
(1962), Therese Raquin, Middlesex,
Penguin.
?
Stroud, Alan Sutton Publishing.
(1989), Doctor Pascal,
?
trans. R. Pearson, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
(1996), La Bete Humaine,
F. (1996), 'Six Notes on the Percept (On the Relation Between
the
Zourabichvili,

87

Critical

in P. Patton
and Clinical'),
pp. 188-217.

(ed.), Deleuze:

Blackwell,

88

A Critical

Reader,

Oxford,

Basil

that the thought figures little in

It is often noted correctly by commentators
an almost
it does
and when
it enjoys
appear
writings
published
status. The Nachlass
notes, however, clearly reveal the weight of
incommunicable
transformation Nietzsche placed on this thought, including theweight of a great politics,

Nietzsche's

of a cultivating thought that aims to ensure that all other modes of thought
a new, non-Darwinian
selective principle that is to be
perish, and the weight of
of strength and barbarism (see Nietzsche
the
1968: 544ff).
in
service
placed
the weight

will

I fear that in this essay it is only possible to give an 'impression' of what itmight
to think the eternal return as the event, since my deployment of Deleuze's
concepts
is highly condensed (the event itself, but also 'individuation', 'intensities', 'singularities',

mean

the 'virtual', and so on).

In The Logic

of Sense Deleuze

deploys

the thought of the event

a readingof Stoic doctrine,aswell as thephilosophyofLeibniz, inwhich it

through

serves to denote neither an attribute nor a quality of subject but rather the incorporeal
predicate of a subject of the proposition (so instead of saying 'the tree is green' one would
say 'the tree greens'). In his book on Leibniz (The Fold, 1988/1993) he attempts to unfold
the 'meaning' of the event once again in terms of Leibniz's chief principles, namely, the

reasonand theprincipleon theidentity

He seeks
of indiscernibles.
principleof sufficient
to show that the predicate
is above all a relation and an event.
Predication
is not
attribution but rather a movement and a change: That the predicate is a verb...irreducible
to the copula and the attribute, mark the very basis of the Leibnizian
conception of the

Such a conception of thought and event

(Vevenement)' (1988: 71; 1993: 53).
necessarily leads to a dramatic reworking of the notion of substance, since it no longer
denotes the subject of an attribute but rather the inner unity of an event and the active
unity of change. This is precisely how Bergson conceives of the substance 'of duration:
event

'There are movements,

1965:

147). This

but there is no inert or invariable object which moves...'

what is at stake inNietzsche's

is relevant to comprehending

(Bergson
attack on

durationin 'ReasoninPhilosophy'inTwilightof theIdols.What Nietzsche is attacking

that there is a substance

behind duration (as in the
(an essence)
a doer behind the deed). But if the
of
superstition
metaphysical
only substance is the
movement
to duration (no subject of a predicate, only predication)
then
peculiar
are in total agreement on this point. For further
Nietzsche's
thinking and Bergson's
there is the idea

concept of the event see: the helpful remarks in Paul Patton's

insight into Deleuze's
introduction to his Deleuze Critical Reader
(1996: 12-14), the superb and critical essay
incisive essay (1994: esp. 105-6). On 'intensity' see
(1994), and Boundas's
by Badiou

Bergson

1960: chapter

1, and also Kant Critique

of Pure Reason

A169/B211;

and, in

relationtoKant andBergson,Deleuze 1968: 286ff; 1994:222ff: 'Everything

which

correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature,

happens...is
1994,
pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity'. On 'singularities' see Badiou

89

and the fifteenth and sixteenth series

In Creative

Evolution

(1907)

inDeleuze's

Bergson

Logic

of Sense.

construes

life as like a current passing

from germ togerm throughthemediumof a developedorganism[(Bergson 1962: 27;

1983: 27). Life appears in theformof an organismas if theorganismwere only an
to continue itself
'excrescence, a bud caused to sprout by the former germ endeavouring
in a new germ' (ibid.). Such an insight, however, should not be taken to indicate that the
*
invention 'of the organism is not treated seriously by Bergson. For him an organism is
a complex ensemble that does not
simply 'adapt' to its environment but actively 'replies'.

Here

his

associated
anticipates many of the moves
approach
in biology, notably in complexity theory.

with

contemporary

developments

Of all the recent commentators

insight when

he notes

that for Deleuze

it is Badiou

who

the event denotes

comes

this
closest to making
'an immanent activity over a

a creation,a noveltycertainly,
but thinkable
withintheinteriority
backgroundof totality,
of the continuous.
see

Deleuze

Un elan vita?

1997:

101ff.,esp.

(1994:
113-116.

60).

For Badiou's

reading of eternal return in

is stated by the banal propositions

of
'Contrary to what
on
the
thinks
of an unconscious...'
basis
only
(1968: 257; 1994:
thought
does not, however, involve erecting an opposition
199). This demotion of consciousness
between thought and the unconscious
drives and affects. Deleuze
is quite explicit on this
Deleuze

writes:

consciousness,

point:

The model

implies no devaluation

of Thought

relative

toExtension,

but merely

a devaluationofconsciousnessrelativeto thought(Deleuze 1968:236; 1990:257). The

that informs Deleuze's
revaluation
Bergsonian-Nietzschean
critique of consciousness
here rests on the insight that consciousness
a faculty for
is merely
superficial,
regularizing and homogenizing
experience, making equal what is different, and making
can only experience
effects, not 'causes', and it
general what is singular. Consciousness
makes
Nietzsche

the double

mistake

every proposition

of then identifying these effects as causes

to
(according
of religion and morality contains this error). It is concerned

with theworld of thefamiliarand thenormal,and often findsitselfassaultedby the

strange and the uncanny
the 'genius of the species'

It is, says Nietzsche,

by what is 'outside' normal experience.
translated into themorality of the herd (Nietzsche
1974: section

indeed, one could argue that it lives more intensely,

354). Thought still lives inDeleuze;
of consciousness
and
productively, and inventively than itdoes in the overt philosophies
self-consciousness
which have characterized most of philosophic modernity.

In his essays of 1993 gatheredtogetheras Critique et Clinique Deleuze will

even more unorthodox in his reading of the history of thought,

claiming Spinoza
to be the true founder of critique and then naming his four successors as: Nietzsche,
Artaud, Kafka, and Lawrence
158).
(1993:
become

90

links together Simondon's

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze
reworking of
thesis
individuation (1964) with Darwin's
thinking on the origin of species, Weismann's
on the continuity of the germ-plasm, and the embryology of von Baer.
For detailed
analysis of the links Deleuze

ismaking

see my forthcoming Germinal

Life (Routledge

1999).
8

distances himself
It is at this point thatDeleuze
In an essay
from Foucault.
last
in 1994 on 'Desire and Pleasure' Deleuze
tells of the time he and Foucault
published
met, with Foucault
'desire', and with Deleuze
saying he could not 'bear' the word
1997a: 189).
replying that he found theword 'pleasure' almost intolerable (Deleuze

InDifference and Repetition, however, Deleuze

does advance at one point in the
that the reason why pleasure is
text a very precise conception of pleasure, maintaining
able to serve, after Freud, as a principle of thought, and not simply as an element in our
that characterizes
the sub
life, is because of its role in the contemplation
psychic

'evolution' of the larval self. He argues that if we accept that an

representational
in its receptive and
is a sum of contractions, retentions, and expectations
as well as in its viscera, then pleasure can be construed on this
perceptual dimensions,
model as thebeatitude' associated with the passive syntheses that inform the becoming
organism

'...we are all Narcissus

we
in virtue of the pleasure
(auto-satisfaction)
we
from
though
contemplate
experience
things quite apart
- the
ourselves...We must always first contemplate something else
water, or Diana, or the
- in order to be filled with an
of
ourselves'
woods
(1968: 102; 1994: 74-5).
image
of the 'self:

in contemplating,

and even

10
Deleuze
the philosophical writings of Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308)
acknowledges
as the source for the word 'haecceity', where it names 'individuating difference' (Duns
Scotus 1987:4 & 166). The word can also be found deployed inLeibniz's
'Discourse on
Metaphysics'

of 1686, where

it names

individual

substances

that can only be known

in

theircompletevirtualformbyGod (Leibniz 1973: 19). InDeleuze ithas no reference

to either subject or substance; on the contrary, it endeavours

to deprive both of these
notions of their efficacy in order to grant primacy to a mode of individuation which is not
that of a definite person, determined subject, or a formal substance. This mode
is the
which

concerns

and rest between

relations of movement
longitudinal
and latitudinal capacities of affect and affectedness. These absolute
molecules/particles
individuals or haecceities refer to degrees and intensities that combine with other degrees
and intensities, and which, although irreducible to a subject, nevertheless compose an
haecceitas

a degree of heat is an individuated warmth that is distinct from

'subject' that constitutes it. Similarly, times and lengths of day are not
actually extensions but rather degrees or modulations.
individual. For example,

the so-called

11
'...the Freudian
as a return to
of the death-instinct, understood
conception
inanimate matter, remains inseparable from the positing of an ultimate term, themodel
of a material and brute repetition, and the conflictual dualism between life and death'

91

contendsthat
Freud'smodel ofdeath
(Deleuze 1968: 137; 1994: 103^). Deleuze further

It concerns a
suffers from being individualist,
subjective,
soiipsistic and monadic.
'difference', that of the ego or self (the One), which only deserves to perish. He will go
on to insist that the unconscious
is not governed by either degradation or contradiction,

which leads him toproposingan entirelydifferent

conceptionof theworkingsof the
not involved in limitation and opposition and conflict but rather informed
unconscious:
He is thus able to declare: The celebrated phrase
by 'questioning and problematising'.
"the unconscious
knows no negative" must be taken literally' (ibid.: 143; 108).

12 GillianRose
arguesthatdeath,likerepetition,
enjoys twomeanings inFreud: on

to repeat, and amounts to a

it is linked, negatively, with the compulsion
blocked memory and a passive relation to death; on the other hand it is linked, positively,
to the risking of one's life, the 'daring death' that heralds a 'perfect memory', an 'active
1992: 104, 109). But what
relation to death' and a positive repetition forwards
(see Rose
this distinction between two deaths fails to appreciate is the extent towhich for Freud the
the one hand

active desire fordeath, throughtheriskingof life (one's own and thatof others), is
equally

implicated

in regression

and the latent destructive

of the instincts

tendencies

oneselffordeathmeans, saysFreud in the1915essay, taking

(enduringlifebypreparing
'the backward

step')

(Rose

recognizes

this in the case

of the Beyond

the Pleasure

Principle'essay but restrictsitto thispiece). I thinkthereasonwhyRose ismisguided

she pays insufficient attention to what is at
in her reading of Freud on death is because
in Freud's
1915 essay. Freud writes the essay in order to 'overcome', or work
the onset of war among
which has accompanied
through, the sense of disillusionment
can the
and cogs in the huge machine
of war. How
those who are not combatants

stake

How could the

civilization?
the worst, happen in themidst of European
'world-dominating nations of the white race' regress to such tribal instincts and brutality?
The aim is to learn something ancient and buried about death from this destructive
unexpected,

war gives way to dis-illusionment

only because
experience. We are to discover that
is the result of fundamental illusion regarding the real character of life, a truth hidden

it
to

us by the veneer of civilization. In thisessay Freud does not simplydeclare the

to be ignorant of death, but rather ascribes to it a lust for annihilation and
the one hand, the unconscious, Freud says, does not believe in its own death but

unconscious
war. On

The deepeststrataof ourminds thatismade up of only

considersitselftobe immortal.
'instinctual

so-called

impulses'

is said to know

'nothing negativc.no

negation'

(Freud

1987:85). In thisdenialofdeathdeepwithinourunconsciousthereresides,speculates

houses
Freud, the 'secret' and illusion of heroism. On the other hand, the unconscious
towards strangers
the desires of the ultimate paranoid monad that is full of death-wishes
In our unconscious
and outsiders.
impulses we thus 'daily and hourly get rid of anyone
who

"Devil take him!"...which

"Death
stands in our way...The
expression
really means
a serious and powerful death wish' (ibid.: 86). Our
is in our unconscious

take him!",

unconscious,
says Freud, murders over trifles and can be compared to theAthenian code
of Draco which knows only death as the punishment for some perceived crime (in this
It is such an 'insight'
case, the crime of being strange, a stranger, to the 'unconscious').

to declare that 'ifwe are to be judged by our unconscious

wishful
we ourselves are, like primeval man, a gang of murderers'
(ibid.). It is on the
impulses,
basis of these claims that Freud then arrives at his so-called
'positive' or affirmative

which

leads Freud

92

conception of death. War, Freud tells us, strips away from us the 'later accretions of
so laying bare before each and every one of us our real primeval self.
civilisation',
it 'compels us to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death; it stamps
Moreover,

(ibid.: 88). The

strangers as enemies, whose death is to be brought about or desired...'
issue for Freud, therefore, is not one of abolishing war but, on the contrary, adapting
it
ourselves to its inescapable and positive reality and affirming the primeval pleasures

risks lifeto indulgein,notablythedestruction

ofwhat isoutsideand
allows theselfthat

strange to itself hence his affirmation in this essay of thewar between nations as a war
of strangers. This, Freud notes with due cruel irony, amounts to a positive regression
(war brings about an 'involution', ibid.: 74), one which at least has 'truth'on its side. The
illusion thatwe can live life without us all being, at some point in time,mass murderers
life intolerable, Freud challenges.

is what makes

13
In a recent reading of the death-drive, as it figures in Freud and Lacan, Zizek
takes the drastic step of divorcing it from the unconscious
altogether, marking it as the
site of the symbolic order. On this reading the drive is not to be defined in terms of a
simple opposition between life and death since its space is occupied by, on the one hand,

split within life itself between ordinary or normal life and 'horrifying
life', and, on the other hand, thatwithin death between the ordinary dead and
and Guattari
to
Like Deleuze
in Anti-Oedipus,
the 'undead' machine.
Zizek wishes

the monstrous
"undead"

but
separate the Freudian death-drive from any Heideggerian
'being-towards-death',
maintains that, although the drive itself is 'immortal, eternal, "undead" (the annihilation
limit of man qua
towards which the death drive tends is not death as the unsurpassable

For
finite being'), death belongs, along with mortality, to the domain of consciousness.
there is no death-anxiety
since such anxiety belongs
the
unconscious
only to
remarks on the death-drive
consciousness
(Zizek 1997: 89; see also Zizek's Lacanian
- in
it is not a biological
fact but 'defines la condition humaine..'
1989: 4-5; and
Zizek
on its complex

14
power

The

relation to the symbolic order, ibid.: 131-6).

simulacrum', Deleuze

(puissance

positive)

which

'is not a degraded copy. It harbors a positive

the original and the copy, themodel and the
Furthermore, it 'is not even enough to invoke a

writes,
denies

(1969: 302; 1990: 262).

reproduction'
model of theOther, for no model can resist the vertigo of the simulacrum'

1990:262).

(1969:

303;

15

InDeleuze's
well-known distinction between the two
reading of Zola Weismann's
plasms, soma and germ (a distinction that fully informs Freud's positing of the duality of
life and death-drives inBeyond thePleasure Principle), operates as a distinction between
a love or a body which dies and a movement which creatively 'evolves'
through germinal

intensity. This is a movement from the organized body of the organism to the 'body
involves the releasement of singularities and intensities from
without organs' which

(Deleuze 1969: 384; 1990: 331). But thetwoexistin implication

entropiccontainment
and complication;thisis lifeand death livedand died from'withinthefolds'or 'onthe
train' as inZola's

La Bete Humaine

(published

93

in 1890 as the seventeenth

of the twenty

novels

functions as the
up the Rougon-Macquart
cycle), where themachine
instincts or temperaments no longer occupy the essential
The
instinct:
the train, but the train itself is the epic
They swarm about and within

thatmake

pure death
position.

representation of the death-instinct' (ibid.). In the novel the train is undoubtedly depicted
in terms of the demonic power of a death-drive: '...the trainwas passing, in all its stormy

violence, as if itmight sweep away everything that lay in its path...It was like some huge
a giant creature laid out on the ground...past
it went, mechanical,
triumphant,
to the rest
rigour, determinedly oblivious
hurtling towards the futurewith mathematical

body,

of human

life on either side, life unseen

and yet perennial, with

its eternal passions

and

itseternalcrimes' (Zola 1996: 44). Unlike themurderof thehusband inTherese

Racquin, committed by Therese and Laurent simply because he stands in their way and
was to link murder with an ancient
is an inconvenience, Zola's aim inLa Bete Hwnaine
to show the
layers of civilization,
hereditary impulse buried over by the sedimented
'caveman' dwelling deep within the civilized man of modernity, as he put it in a letter to
a Dutch journalist.
In the novel the 'hereditary crack' is not simply a matter of ill-health
but is said to be involved in those 'sudden losses of control' that lie deep within our being
'like fractures, holes'

through which

the self seeks escape,

losing itself 'in themidst

of a

outof shape' (Zola 1996:53). At suchmoments

kindof thickhaze thatbenteverything
as these, where

of one's muscles

the self is no longer themaster of its own body but the obedient servant
and the 'rabid beast within', one is forced into paying back an ancient

'...paying for the others, for the fathers and grandfathers who had drunk, for the
was the corrupt
the pirce of
issue...paying
generations of drunkards, of whose blood he
a gradual poisoning, of a relapse into primitive savagery thatwas dragging him back into
the forest...' (ibid.).

debt:

Zola's
novel, with its stress on a hereditary regression and
instincts, anticipates both Freud's conception of death (1915) and his positing
is indeed remarkable. On Deleuze's
of the death-drive (1920) by several decades
reading,
investment of the erotic instincts in destructive ones -Zola's
however, the complicated
novel was read in the precise terms of this complication on its publication
expresses not
The

extent to which

atavistic

but ratherthesilent
caughtup in an involution
simplythenoise of primal instincts

of a repetition that drives us ever on forward and upward. This is why for him
the key actor or agent in the novel is the train itself (a field of action, a body without
organs distributing intensities and producing transformations). The train is a creation of
echoes

modern

civilization

'great health' which

but it is also
lives on

the crack which

in humanity

derails

(the dissolutions

sure that it is the

it,making
of the novel, it should be

noted,takeplace againstthebackdropof thedyingdaysof theSecondEmpire). Michel

in detecting in Zola's epic series of novels with its cycle of destruction,

towards death, disorder and degeneration,
irreversible ebbing
dispersion,
a
Hwnaine
veritable
in
La
Bete
around
thermodynamics of the train, an 'epic
revolving

Serres is incisive

waste,

of entropy'(see Serres 1975: 78; see also 1983: 39ff.).Such an insight,however,

reading only half of the story. Deleuze's
conception of germinal
that entropy is never the final word.
always
Thermodynamics
the single
needs to be linked up with good sense since it shares the same characteristics:
direction, that this direction go from themost to the least differentiated, from the singular

discloses

on Deleuze's

life aims to demonstrate

to the regular, and from the remarkable to the ordinary, so orienting 'the arrow of time
from past to future, according to this determination'
(1969: 94; 1990: 76).

94

16

Does

thewound

thewound

exist apart from its becoming and itsmemory?

Is memory both
of thewound? As Deleuze
notes, 'A scar is the sign not

and the overcoming

a past wound but of "the present fact of having been wounded'"

1969: 105;
(Deleuze
1995b: 261:
'But why
1994: 77). On thememory of wounds see Lawrence,
especially
thememory of thewounds and the death? Surely Christ rose with healed hands and feet,
sound and strong and glad? Surely the passage of the cross and the tomb was forgotten?
A small
But no always thememory of the wounds, always the smell of grave-cloths?
was
Resurrection, compared with the Cross and the death, in this cycle'. See also
thing

in the foreword to Twilight of the Idols: 'Amaxim whose origin Iwithold from
learned curiosity has long been my motto: increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus' ('the
spirit grows, strength is restored by wounding').

Nietzsche

17

In facing the event of death with a great refusal Very Little, Almost Nothing
account of, and testimony to, the profound limitedness
provides a powerful and eloquent
of the human condition.

18

toDeleuze, Nietzsche's
According
perspectivism operates as an art of inclusive
a
not
in
which
is
is not
divergence
disjunctions,
principle of exclusion and disjunction
a means of separation;
'is now a means
of communication'
rather, incompossibility
1990: 174).
Deleuze
stresses that in the case of inclusive
1969: 203;
(Deleuze
a conjunction;
it is not a question of making
the disjunction
rather, it
disjunctions
that continues to bear on divergence:
remains a disjunction
'But this divergence
is
affirmed in such a way that the either...or itself becomes a pure affirmation. Instead of
a certain number of predicates being excluded from a thing in virtue of the identity of its
concept, each "thing" opens itself up to die infinity of predicates through which it passes,
as it loses its center, that is, its identity as concept or as self. The communication
of
events replaces the exclusion of predicates' (ibid.). The 'schizo' experience or becoming,
for example, 'is and remains in disjunction', not reducing two contraries to an identity of
the same, but affirming their 'distance as thatwhich relates the two as different' (Deleuze
and Guattari

a
on Deleuze's
1984: 76-7).
Perspectivism,
reading, is not
truth would vary according
to the subject in question;
rather,
the conditions within which 'the truth of a variation appears to the

1972: 96;

relativism,

in which

perspectives

denote

subject'(Deleuze 1988:27; 1993:20).

19

the astute remark by Francois Zourabichvili

in this regard:
there is no life, and therefore no health, without a minimal organism.
Life is non-organic, but its relation to the organism is one of reciprocal presupposition:
a house standing
it builds a house in order to take flight from it, it is House-Cosmos,
One

should consult

'Yet nevertheless,

against the cosmos, tuned in to the cosmos, haunting as much as inhabiting it' (1996:
should also note the extent to which Bergson's
198). We
thinking of the matter of a
'creative evolution' is governed by the play between the solidified life of the organism

and the excessive

life of the germ and nonorganic

95

forces.

20
In short piece entitled 'Immanence: A Life...', written in 1993, Deleuze
argues
out as a 'life' that involves neither
that the transcendental field needs to be mapped
whose very activity
subject nor object but rather 'an absolute immediate consciousness

no longerrefers
back toa beingbut ceaselesslyposits itselfina life*(Deleuze 1997b:4).
is the immanence of the late Fichte (the text Deleuze
of Fichte's
says, Deleuze,
referred to isDie Anweisung
zum seligen Leben, oder auch die Religionslehre
of 1806,
a la vie bienheureuse).
It is the impersonal but singular
appearing in French as Initiation

This,

iifeof theindividuating
haecceity(theTjeatitude'in thetitleofFichte'swork). This is

a germinal life since it is not positing life in a 'simple moment' confronting a 'universal
'in all themoments'
death' but rather a life that is 'everywhere', contained
that a 'living

a life of virtualities, events, and singularities (ibid.: 5).

subject passes through',
should locate in the later Fichte a renaissance of
It is odd, however, that Deleuze
'Spinozism' given Fichte's own declared hostility towards Spinoza and his influence (see
could not have believed
Fichte
in his own
1994: 98-99, where he argues that Spinoza
in this series of popular
but could only have 'thought' it). Nevertheless,
philosophy,
immanent substance as that
lectures Fichte does present Being in terms akin to Spinoza's
'which is absolutely through itself, by itself, and from itself...a self-comprehensive,
self

and absolutelyunchangeableUnity (Einerleiheit)'(1962: 53; 1848: 48-9).

sufficient,

is a Being
of blessedness

This

that 'ex-ists' outside of Time

is the life filled with

and outsideof

The spiritual life

Becoming.
It is
love, and self-enjoyment.
its operations
that consciousness
creates a

consciousness,

through the laws of reflection which govern

system of separate and independent individuals and so confronts itself with numerous
paradoxes concerning the reality of time and change. It should be noted thatFichte's text
itmakes with classical metaphysics,
up in the moves
notably the distinction
a 'trueworld' (life/blessedness)
and an 'apparent world' (death/unblessedness).
is a distinction thatFichte presents as one between themerely sensuous world and

is bound
between
This

the higher suprasensuous

world

that is available

to, and attainable

only by, Thought.

It

is lecture
VUJ thatis themost philosophicallyseriousandwhich iswould be thedecisive

one for staging an encounter between Bchte and Deleuze

(ibid.: 122ff; 144 ff). See also
death
1987: 9Iff., where beatitude is related to the achievement of supersensible
'in life and through life..!, which speaks of the praxis of a rational self as its peculiar

Fichte

life of the spiritual is one inwhich the universe

'sublime vocation'. The self-expressive
can no longer be thought in terms of the circle 'returning to itself, that endlessly repeating
game, thatmonster which devours itself so as to give birth to itself again as it already

was'; rather, there is 'constant progress to greater perfection in a straight line which goes
on to infinity'. This
is because
'All death in nature is birth...in dying does
the
is not death which kills, but rather a more living
augmentation of life visibly appear...It

lifewhich,hiddenbehind theold life,beginsand develops*(ibid.: 122).My deathcan

It is not, therefore, for Fichte a question of living 'according

only be a festive passing.
to nature' simply because
this is not even what nature does. The only 'law of life' is, in
On the world as a 'monster of
almost Fichtean language, 'self-overcoming'.
Nietzsche's
energy', 'without beginning or end' but as ceaseless

transformation, a world

of repetition

and difference
(the 'joyof thecircle'as theonlygoal), compareNietzsche 1968: 1067 (in
German,

Nietzsche

1987, volume

11, pp. 610).

On beatitudesee alsoDeleuze's 'big'book on Spinoza (Deleuze 1968:282ff ; 1990:

308ff).

Clement

Rosset

has argued

that beatitude

96

constitutes

the central and constant

thought -1 would willingly say the only theme' (Rosset 1993: 26).
informs the entire endeavour of 'gay science'
expression of a beat-philosophy
(Nietzsche 1974: sections 276-7), with its commitment, in the eternal engagement with/to
life (especially its gloom and doom), to the 'artof cheerfulness' (Heiterkeit). Itwould be

theme of Nietzsche's
Nietzsche's

of beatitude,
instructive to determine the difference between types and expressions
or Stoic. Clearly Nietzsche's
whether Spinozist, Fichtean, Nietzschean,
challenge resides
in the attempt to think theodicy without God, a challenge most evident in his reading of
1968: sections 411,419,
Leibniz (see Nietzsche
1019) (this is a move which, according
-more
toRosset, makes Nietzsche more Leibnizian
cheerful - than Leibniz),

97