Abstract
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze died by suicide at the age of 70. His suicide occurred amidst a chronic struggle with a worsening respiratory illness that made daily life difficult. Because his suicide can be so directly connected to his diagnosis, even established organizations like the American Psychiatric Association would view it as a reasonable, nonpathological end to a life “no longer worth living.” There is, then, no need to look further for “clues” or to ask “why” regarding his death. Further, Deleuze himself believed that to read the work of counterculture authors and seek out “anguish, solitude, guilt […] the whole tragedy of interiority” represents “decadence and degeneracy,” signaling the “masochistic impulses of the academic.” In this chapter, therefore, I seek out in his work clues for managing a suicidal subjectivity. I argue that within his conceptualization of rhizomatic lines of flight with Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, as well as within three posthumously published volumes that offer further elaboration of the relationship between his life and his philosophy, Deleuze makes space for suicide as an exit from contemporary power relations. By offering the suicidal subjectivity opportunities for not-being and contextualizing feelings of madness, Deleuze offers tools for self-analysis that enable one to work through feelings of suicidality without being stigmatized or pathologized.
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Notes
- 1.
Although it is not my project, I must take a moment to briefly note how Deleuze’s contemporaries attempted to reconcile his suicide with his philosophy. For the most part, attempts were made by journalists and philosophers to rationalize his suicide within his works. Beaulieu and Ord (2017) push back against this history and against arguments that Deleuze’s death by suicide is a contradiction to his philosophy. They argue that his suicide is, instead, an affirmation of life and vitalism: Deleuze manifesting the infinite. I am inclined to align with interpretations of his suicide such as that presented by Colombat, which assert that that for Deleuze, death comes from the outside, “because the act of living is necessarily opened to the outside, on new becomings and metamorphoses. Suicide itself can be, in this specific context, a very positive, concrete and philosophical act of assertion, a ‘vital aphorism’ and an ‘anecdote of thought.’ At the moment of death, the individual rejoins the ‘empty shape of time,’ the ‘perpetuum mobile,’ the ‘aleatory point’” (1996, p. 246). I also argue, in line with others, that there is much that Deleuze’s philosophy can teach about suicide (e.g., Woodward, 2007), while regarding his own suicide as simple matter-of-fact.
- 2.
Particularly to the end of one’s measurable, biological life. This is distinct from the Deleuzean notion of “a life,” which is indefinite in its immanence: “a life” exists beyond the life of the individual and is populated by singularities that constitute the event known as life (Deleuze, 2005).
- 3.
Indeed, data consistently show that those diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are more likely to die by suicide (Schmutte et al., 2021).
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Parks, A. (2023). “Lines of Flight”: The Deterritorialization of Gilles Deleuze. In: Ros Velasco, J. (eds) The Contemporary Writer and Their Suicide. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28982-8_9
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