The Dead and Philosophy

The philosopher is someone who believes he has returned from the dead, rightly or wrongly, and who returns to the dead in full consciousness. (Deleuze)For philosophers are beings who have passed through a death, who are born from it, and go towards another death, perhaps the same one. (Deleuze)

Deleuze’s image is an idiosyncratic one. It is difficult to imagine J.L. Austin, for example sharing this idea of the philosopher as a figure in transit between two deaths, and for whom death is a condition of his or her possibility. And it is not only death but the dead, as in classical mythology, perhaps, the great numberless collectivity of the Dead.

Thought, for Deleuze, is brought in to being by an encounter with its outside, the presence of something which is not-thought, which is recalcitrant to thought. Something initially unthinkable. Death is perhaps the most immediate form of that Outside that gives rise to thought. An Outside that is also intimate, the death that is present in all of us. It is present in the finitude that organises our experience in the form of hope, expectation, boredom, impatience. All forms of temporal experience are death’s clues and pointers in so far as they are structured by this implicit finitude.

The Dead, conceived as a collectivity are a way of giving body to that Outside. They live on the Outside. Beyond or at the rim and barrier of our experience. If death is present in our finitude, then so too are the Dead present.

There is something covertly utopian about this idea of the Dead, the vast congregation, assembled on the opposite shore. The great collective. For we are not talking about the war dead of a particular nation, invoked for nationalist purposes. The “Fenian dead” invoked by Padraig Pearse to rouse his militia, and countless other examples. If we put aside these uses of the dead, then the Dead have no nationality. They have their own country apart, and the only other country, which they do not oppose, which they do not envy or resent or set themselves against in any way, is the country of the living.

When you pass over to the country of the Dead, you also leave behind your symbolic vestments and investments. In some perverse sense, you enter the human community. This is one point of intersection between philosophers and the Dead. If the Dead no longer have anything at stake in the social order – pragmatic interests, concerns about status, symbolic and actual capital, then this should also be the position of the philosopher. For the philosopher is or should be someone who has removed himself, albeit not entirely, from the symbolic community of which he or she had been part. Its laws, habitual practices, its customs masked as nature. Deleuze again [on Spinoza]: 

[The] full meaning of the philosopher’s solitude becomes apparent. He cannot integrate into any milieu; he is not suited to any of them.The philosopher can reside in various states, he can frequent various milieus, but he does so in the manner of a hermit, a shadow, a traveller, or boarding house lodger.

He or she is a kind of supernumerary figure. 

What is called life is always, of course, implicated in a cultural and social order. Life cannot, or except at a great price, flourish or express itself outside the codes and conditions of this cultural and social order. Nonetheless, life is never synonymous with those codes and conditions. There is always a surplus, a surplus vitality. Perhaps, then, it is this surplus which passes over into the country of the Dead, when the symbolic integuments are shed. Perhaps it is this surplus to which the philosopher - the Deleuzian philosopher - is also attuned.