The Desiring Machines do not die: Impersonal Death and Feeling of Eternity

As the starting point for the theory of the unconscious, Deleuze and Guattari posit that the body without organs maintains an ambiguous relation of attraction/repulsion with the working pieces, the partial objects. The condition of the machinic unconscious is the death that desires, the body without organs as the immobile motor forcing us to dismantle organs, but the functioning of this very same unconscious is the life that desires, the reappropriation of miraculous organs on the body without organs itself. The great health of the cycle of desiring machines is this passage, this conversion where the movement goes in both directions: sometimes the rise from the catatonic state where intensity is at its level zero to the experimentation of intense becomings and feelings, sometimes the fall from every intensity towards death which is enveloped by it and which gives birth to it. The paper elucidates the complex theory of the double death, of death as model and death as experimentation that Deleuze and Guattari borrow from Blanchot. How does the genuine death untie and release the subject by leading it to its origin, towards the body without organs? Which is this death that has nothing to do with me and on which I have no power whatsoever? In what respect is this annihilation very different from the passive nihilism where one wants to disappear and to drown into the abyss of indifferentiation? More specifically, we take very seriously the affirmation that desiring machines do not die, and pay attention to the bond which can be formed with Spinoza’s idea of the feeling of eternity. In what Deleuze calls the ethical test (l’épreuve éthique), I can constitute an adequate idea of myself by distinguishing my eternal essence and my existence in duration. It must hence be said that death is indeed necessary, but it is a necessity of accidents that come from without. In some tremendous pages containing great power of consolation, Spinoza invites us to cease thinking of death as inner, since it only decomposes the “I” produced by extensive parts that define my existence in duration; it does not concern either our singular eternal essence or our relations in themselves. If a free man thinks of nothing less than of death, he nevertheless has constantly to convert the death that rises from within into the death that comes from the outside in such a way that Anti-Oedipus participates in the old tradition according to which to philosophize is to learn how to die. The more we form adequate ideas, the more we experience active joys, the greater is the part that persists and remains active, and the least the part that dies and is touched by bad affects.