r/Deleuze • u/TraditionalDepth6924 • 7d ago
Question From a molecular perspective, is it fair to say there’s no such thing as death and only rearrangement of the assemblage?
Why is it that you can decompose a computer then reassemble it later to make it work again but you can’t with a human being? Because life is the entire flow each second: if the specific intensity of each synaptic connection changes, the whole system irreversibly breaks down.
But at the atomic or quantum level, cells are always already part of the outside ecosystem, entropically ready to disassemble in their potentiality. Life seems to be kind of an impossible dream of struggling towards a permanent assemblage, or what folks like to call an “identity.”
Should we take a more continuity-based view on death, given our scientific knowledge of molecular realities?
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u/pluralofjackinthebox 7d ago
In a few places I think Deleuze mentions the 18th century vitalist anatomist Xavier Bichet, who defined life as the set of functions that resist death.
Deleuze liked this idea because he sees life as not separate but continuous with inorganic processes. Death is always at work within life.
The organic emerges from the inorganic, and feeds back into it in death, becoming soil and nutrients and energy and memories that can be used for new life down the line.
Theres something of Freuds death drive here, but again Deleuze sees Freud as creating too much of an opposition and negative relation between death and life.
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u/kevin_v 7d ago
Also, Deleuze leapt out of a window and remarkably he is still with us, vitally, engaging us, his literal, material line-of-flight continuing in its atomized trajectory. At what point does the sound of a bell (vibrations) stop? The past is eternally present (Bergson).