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"Deleuze articulates a different line of thinking, though, which does not organise itself around a constitutive lack. This line of thought would include such thinkers as Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, Klossowski and, of course, Deleuze, who was the first to tell this alternative history of philosophy. It is my hope that in following this alternative line, particularly Deleuze, we can begin to think about death differently.
In order to illustrate what is at stake in Deleuze’s history of philosophy, let’s look at Spinoza’s conception of desire. Desire is one of the three fundamental emotions for Spinoza, the other two being pleasure and pain. All other emotions are combinations of these three and differing external objects. These three fundamental emotions are also grouped according to activity and passivity. Both pleasure and pain are passive emotions, while desire is an active emotion. This distinction between active and passive rests on whether one is the adequate cause of the emotion. Thus, even though pleasure is an increase in a mode’s power of acting, it is dependent for that increase on something outside of it. Take love, for example. For Spinoza, ‘love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause’. Insofar as the cause is external, the mode is passive with regard to it.
Desire, on the other hand, is active, or those modifications of which we are the adequate cause. It is ‘the endeavour, where with everything endeavours to persist in its own being, [and] is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question’. Desire for Spinoza, then, is the way in which we seek to be the adequate cause of our own preservation and expansion. It is because Spinoza defines desire in this way that he can equate virtue and power. ‘By virtue and power I mean the same thing; that is virtue, in so far as it is referred to man, is a man’s nature or essence, in so far as it has the power of effecting what can only be understood by the laws of that nature’. Thus, desire, virtue and power are all equivalent terms for Spinoza. What he imagines is the complex interactions of the modes of a singular substance each of which seeks to increase its power or its ability to preserve its existence. The best way to achieve this increase in power is to join with other like-minded individuals.
Note that Spinoza’s argument for a social contract is neither predicated nor maintained by fear, as it is in most other social contract theorists. Rather, the joining together of modes is a means by which each can increase its power and endeavour to persevere. More importantly, the desire that drives this joining together does not arise from a lack in any of the modes. Each mode is finite, but in joining together with other like-minded modes, each is not seeking to re-form a lost unity or correct an imperfection. Rather, desire is the means by which we continually make new connections in an attempt to produce something new, something more powerful than we were before – in short, something that works.
This conception of desire that does not seek to overcome a lack, but is itself productive, continually producing new forms, is what Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus call ‘desiring-production’. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s argument in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus is that our current psychic and social organisation wildly restricts most forms of desiring-production. Desire is normalised within the confines of Oedipal sexuality, on the one hand, and capitalist consumption on the other.
Using Deleuze’s and Guattari’s analyses I would like to examine anew the question of death, particularly as it is articulated by Heidegger and Hegel. For all of their differences and opposition in articulating death, each presupposes a constitutive lack that desire seeks to overcome. The type of desire that underlies both philosophies and leads to their conceptions of death is beholden to a particular type of psychic and social organisation. It is for this reason that I will argue that both sides of the Hegel/Heidegger antinomy are false with regard to death.
Furthermore, insofar as the type of psychic organisation that restricts both Hegel and Heidegger in their accounts of death is precisely the one that Freud articulates so compellingly, it is no accident that the way in which each accounts for the constitutive lack at the heart of their philosophies can be captured in the Freudian categories of mourning and melancholia. This is not to say that Freud invented the dominant type of psychic organisation in the West; rather he discovered and described it. The book thus has three main parts. In the first part, ‘Melancholia’, I examine Heidegger’s account of death and his dependence on the constitutive lack that grounds experience. I argue that Heidegger’s conception of death is fundamentally melancholic and as such leads
Heidegger into insuperable difficulties in accounting for community. As Freud notes, melancholia is fundamentally narcissistic. In the second part, ‘Mourning’, I examine Hegel’s account of death from the Phenomenology of Spirit and the connection between the development of consciousness and negation. I argue that Hegel’s dependence on negation as the engine of consciousness’ development is fundamentally mournful. This conception of death leads to Hegel’s notorious difficulty in accounting for the singular. In the final part, ‘Beatitude’, I examine Deleuze’s account of desire as productive in an effort to propose a new way of thinking about death." (pp.11-13)
-Brent Adkins, Death and Desire in Hegel, Heidegger and Deleuze, Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
