Bewilderingly, Forcefully: Drawing the Line Outside

There is something unsettling about the suicide of Gilles Deleuze, not in a social, historical, or religiously moral sense, judging the act itself, but rather in a philosophical and a singular sense, his suicide in particular, Deleuze's act. It is perhaps troubling specifically to those who think with his philosophy, a philosophy as much of life as for life. The trouble arises immediately from the difficulty in readily assimilating what appears to be an obvious paradox in general--a suicide and a philosophy of life. Nor is one immediately able to resist what seem to be natural impulses of synthesis and identification (not to go as far as interpretation): Deleuze the man and Deleuze the philosopher, Deleuze as an act of death and Deleuze as thought of life. And yet, these are unsynthesizable poles particularly because of the ways in which Deleuze conceptualizes suicide, because of the function or the figure of suicide in his philosophical movements. Unlike Michel Foucault, whose words have been, in one way or another, used to "explain" acts in which he allegedly engaged and have been made to equal a "death drive," (1) Deleuze appears to treat suicide unambiguously and consistently as a failed line of flight, as a botched experiment. Nevertheless, when he invokes Foucault's thought in "A Portrait of Foucault," (2) Deleuze conceptualizes the figure with intensity closely akin to an embrace, though cautious and resistant to its draw. His thinking through the line Outside, through drawing the line, is particularly compelling and illuminating to an inquiry into one of the significant theoretical divergences between the two thinkers, namely their conceptions of desire and pleasure. My essay extends this inquiry not in order to settle but rather to mobilize the figure of suicide as a line of flight, souci de soi, in terms of desire and pleasure. (3) It is rather a movement towards engaging Foucault's and Deleuze's conceptions of suicide through the significance of the notion to their philosophies of living. While it is the drawing of an interlocution, it is also an effort to desubjectify suicide and speak of it, in a way, between Deleuze and Foucault, as a movement, an acceleration, and a techne. To ask "what is suicide" presents an ontological query that perhaps is not the appropriate approach to the question vis-a-vis Foucault's program. But, literally and conventionally, in terms of common sense, how does one think the concept suicide? More often than not, it finds itself integrated in the medical discourse (though its itinerary meanders through religious and legal discourses), linked with morbidity, clinical depression, despair, renunciation, an obsession or fascination with death or a death-drive, a loss of interest in or value of life, even with a lack of morality. (4) In a variety of ways, James Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault, considered to be one of the four major biographies of the thinker, (5) seems to both draw and build on these connections, interpreting and deducing Foucault, the subject of his portrait, from shards of thought and fragmented utterances. This approach reinforces the commonplace opposition of suicide to life, a dichotomy that Foucault collapses. Deleuze approaches the "portrait" of Foucault through affects and percepts, experimenting and thinking with, which allows for an opening and a drawing of new plateaus. In the same sense, I seek to let Foucault break "suicide" open, especially by considering his question "How had the subject been compelled to decipher himself in regard to what was forbidden?" (6) It is a question that permits an unfolding of the way in which the line of flight is implicated in suicide, suicide in the "art of life" and both in politics. In a curious text titled "The Simplest of Pleasures," Foucault envisions a gun store clerk who helps a person select the most apposite style of suicide for them. He commences the text by denying that he would be yet another to debate the making of suicide either legal or moral, but the text seems to both subvert and perhaps on a certain level do just that. …