Securitized Death AC

I affirm
Western metaphysics is wrong there is no stable object or concept to begin
moral analysis with. Massumi
Massumi, Brian. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT,
1992.
http://monoskop.org/images/e/e6/Massumi_Brian_A_Users_Guide_to_Capitalism_and_Schizophrenia_Deviations_from_Dele
uze_and_Guattari.pdf
Saussure openly describes language as a reductive mechanism. language is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. What it classifies is the "confusing mass" of things we experience in the world, what he disdainfully calls the "heteroclite."
Language in its Saussurian functioning provides a unity ("whole") for that which by nature has no unity, and in relation to which unity must always stand apart ("self-contained"). The unity of language exists on a level of pure abstraction ("language is a form,

a sign is understandable only in opposition to what it is not. Man is

not-Woman Woman is not-Man, Adult is not-Child None of these terms have
positive content. They are empty categories forming an oppositional grid
not a substance'') at which there is only negative difference:

cleansed of the heteroclite. For Saussure language is still

referential, if arbitrarily so. A category conventionally designates a thing (the celebrated tree diagrams). In a Deleuze-Guattarian framework, one would be tempted to reverse that formulation and say that bodies (as defined above: as indeterminate energetic
matrixes) are designed for the categories, and in the process are constituted as things (determinate. socially manipulable objects) that language is prescriptive rather than referential. It's a boy! Determination. Prescriptive equivalence. Well make a man

The body
gains value
but loses,
the particularity of
what is unreproducible in it. These fall away in
favor of what it has in common with other similarly prescribed bodies
An
equivalence is imposed between two orders that lifts a body out of its uniqueness and places
it in a system of difference (not that) in which it is reduced to the Same (one in a class of
not thats). This process of linguistic perception
is identification
Identification is arbitrary in the
sense that there is no natural connection between a body and its category, but necessary in
the sense that society nevertheless demands that the link be made
of him, even if it kills him; it is hereby ordained that the body before us shall, with all due haste, leave one order, the heteroclite, to join another, deemed difference. Oppositional difference.
its entry into an officially recognized system of meaning. It
society's determining perspective,

(both in the linguistic sense and in the sense of utility or prestige in the dominant cultural order),

is negativized as the price of

from

its time and of its space;

: membership in a class.

(in our strong sense as a material grasping)

(a bodys advent to

personhood through incorporeal transformation; in the private sphere, a body's negative difference. or social value, is called personality).

(on the basis of anatomy)."

This means that the only coherent ethical action is resistance

of repression through an affirmation of life to achieve the
possibility of value. Jun
Jun, Nathan. "Deleuze, Values, and Normativity." Deleuze and Ethics (2011): 89-106. Web.

The process of creating value

requires an eternal revolution against the forces of
repression
It lacks any kind of
end goal, since there is always a microfascism lurking at the heart of every system of personal value-construction which
will, reterritorialize and overcode that system.
. It is not the case, therefore, that we ought to oppose what is anti-life, but
rather that we must if we are to ever achieve value at all .
In the end, there may be no ultimate means by which to distinguish
one way of living from another, but it is precisely our inability to secure such a
means which necessitates an ongoing commitment to ethical life.
therefore

wherever and however they arise.

telos or

can,

and often

Again, such a micro-fascism is every bit as instrumental in producing value as, say, the desire

for freedom

The fact that the discovery of value is always provisional, tentative, and

contingent is hardly a reason not to pursue it.

But death is not antithetical to life, it is an ongoing process in

which the physical death of an organism produces new forms
of life. Attempts to securitize ourselves against the physical
death of a single organism are futile and life-denying they
manage and striate the body to maximize utility and foreclose
the possibility of becoming through repression. Colebrook,
Parr and Baugh
Parr, Adrian, and Bruce Baugh. The Deleuze Dictionary. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Web.
<http://ghiraldelli.pro.br/wp-content/uploads/The_Deleuze_Dictionary-1.pdf>.

Death is
when a bodys parts, through external causes, enter into a
relation that is incompatible with that bodys continued existence
many things: a state of affairs,

; an impersonal event of dying, expressed through

an infinitive verb (mourir, to die); the experience of zero intensity that is implicit in a bodys feeling or experience of an increase or decrease in its force of existence; a model of immobility and of energy that is not organised and

. A body exists when its parts

compose a relation that expresses the singular force of existence
of that body,
and ceases to be when its parts
enter into a relation that is
incompatible with its own. Death
always comes from outside and
is both
fortuitous and inevitable: it is the necessary and determined result of a bodys
chance encounters with other bodies, governed by purely mechanical laws of cause
and effect.
Death, as the decomposition of a bodys characteristic relation, forms
the basis of the personal and present death of the Self
the event of dying
expressed in the infinitive verb to die and in
the predicate mortal.
express
meanings that extend over the past and future , which are never physically present
in bodies and things,
The death
of the Self or I is when it ceases to die and is actually dead: when its vital relations
are decomposed, and its essence or power of existence is reduced to zero intensity
impersonal dying makes death lose itself in itself, as the decomposition of
one living body is simultaneously the composition of a new singular life, the
subsumption of the dead bodys parts under a new relation
put to work; and finally, the death instinct, capitalisms destruction of surplus value through war, unemployment, famine and disease

or essence

are determined by outside causes to

in this sense

as such

Since every body interacts with other bodies, it is inevitable that at some point it will encounter bodies that decompose the vital relation of its parts, and cause those parts to enter into new relations,

characteristic of other bodies.

or ego. To this death, as founded in the personal self and the body, Deleuze

contrasts

, which is impersonal and incorporeal,

Dying is not a process that takes place in things, nor is mortal a quality that inheres in things or subjects. Rather, the verb and the predicate
but

even though the death of a body effectuates or actualizes this dying. In impersonal dying, one dies, but one never ceases or finishes dying.

Yet, at this very instant,

. During its existence, bodies experience increases or diminutions of

their power or force of existing. Other bodies can combine with a body either in a way that agrees with the bodys constitutive relation, that results in an increase in the bodys power felt as joy, or in a way that is incompatible with
that relation, resulting in a diminution of power felt as sadness. Power is physical energy, a degree of intensity, so that every increase or decrease in power is an increase or decrease in intensity. When the body dies, and the Self or
the ego with it, they are returned to the zero intensity from which existence emerges. Every transition from a greater to a lesser intensity, or from a lesser to a greater, involves and envelops the zero intensity with respect to which it
experiences its power as increasing or decreasing. Death is thus felt in every feeling, experienced in life and for life. It is in that sense that the life instincts and appetites arise from the emptiness or zero intensity of death. The
model of zero intensity is thus the Body without Organs (BwO), the body that is not organized into organs with specific functions performing specific tasks, the energy of which is not put to work, but is available for investment, what
Deleuze calls death in its speculative form (taking speculative in the sense of financial speculation). Since the BwO does not perform any labour, it is immobile and catatonic. In The Logic of Sense, the catatonic BwO arises from
within the depths of the instincts, as a death instinct, an emptiness disguised by every appetite. In Anti- Oedipus, Deleuze retains his definition of the death instinct as desexualised energy available for investment, and as the source
of the destructiveness of drives and instincts, but argues that rather than a principle, the death instinct is a product of the socially determined relations of production in the capitalist system. Death becomes an instinct, a diffused and
immanent function of the capitalist system specifically, capitalisms absorption of the surplus value it produces through antiproduction or the production of lack, such as war, unemployment, and the selection of certain populations
for starvation and disease. The death instinct is thus historical and political, not natural.

The Western legal tradition has politicized the false dichotomy

of life death and has formed a vested interest in continued life,
this is the politics of death control. Hanafin
Hanafin, Patrick. "Rights of Passage: Law and the Biopolitics of Dying." Deleuze and Law: Forensic
Figures (n.d.): n. pag. Web.
<http://www.academia.edu/3323193/Rights_of_passage_law_and_the_biopolitics_of_dying>.

The liberal social compact is built on the desire to survive

This becomes the be all and end all of life in the shadow of death. Indeed it
becomes the foundation of the modern liberal order with the creation of the social
contract as a means of survival, as a temporary immunity from death
The power to decide is taken
from the individual in the name of an abstract notion of Life. The terminally ill

. In this schema man looks constantly ahead to the moment of his death

and his legacy.

(see further Cavarero, 1995, pp. 5790).

The legal regulation of choosing how one dies reveals that the individuals power to decide how she lives or dies is ignored at best or curbed at worst.

person who desires to die is prevented from doing so by legal obstacles. This is part
of a wider management of individual lives
has termed death control
what we witness is: a forced life for lifes sake agony prolonged at all costs
whether we execute people or compel their survival the essential thing is that the
decision is withdrawn from them
or what Jean Baudrillard

. In this paradigm

you shall not die, not in any old way, anyhow (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 174). I want to look at one legal instantiation of this deathbound

normative narrative. This example, along with many others which have been decided in a similar way, displays a tendency in the western legal tradition to valorise true life, the disembodied life of pure and abstract thought over

the western legal tradition does not

condone a right to die using active means, either in the form of voluntary
euthanasia or indeed physician-assisted suicide .
mere incarnate life. With the exception of a very small number of states (Belgium, the Netherlands, Oregon, Switzerland),

On the other hand, many states allow an individual to make what is commonly called a living will

or advance directive, which permits the withdrawal of artificial feeding and hydration in the event that the person ever finds herself or himself in a persistent vegetative state from which there is no hope of recovery. This model is
based on the Christian ethical tradition which distinguishes active from passive means of euthanasia. The case I want to look at in some detail is exemplary of the legacy of this normative model. The United States Supreme Courts
adjudication in the jointly heard cases of Washington v Glucksberg and Quill v Vacco (521 U.S. 702 (1997)) came about as the result of decisions on the issue of physician-assisted suicide by the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts of

The Second Circuit Court

of Appeal in Quill v Vacco
held that the Equal Protection Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment rendered statutes which prohibit assisted suicide unlawful
Appeal, which gave constitutional protection to physician assisted suicide, one on the grounds of the right to privacy, the other on the grounds of equal treatment.
(80 F.3d 716 (2d Cir. 1996)

Noting that New York legislation permitted a competent person to refuse medical treatment even if this resulted in the individuals death, the Court held that assisted suicide should also be permissible on the ground that like persons

An en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal in Compassion in Dying

v Washington
held that the Washington state statute prohibiting a
physician from assisting a patient to die was unconstitutiona
The Chief Justice delivered two
opinions for the Court in June 1997 overruling both the Second and Ninth Circuits
decisions. In these opinions he was joined by Justices OConnor, Scalia, Kennedy,
and Thomas.
The Supreme Court majority
opinion attempts to compose a narrative of order in the face of these unruly bodies
who attempt to die before their time or out of time. The narrative of the majority
attempts to impose, order through judgment
be treated alike.

(79 F.3d 790 (9th Cir. 1996) (en banc))

l, as it was contrary to the substantive component of the

Fourteenth Amendments Due Process Clause. Both cases were consolidated for hearing by the Supreme Court in January 1997.

However, Justice OConnor filed a separate concurrence joined by Justices Ginsberg and Breyer. In addition Justices Stevens and Souter filed separate concurrences. When reading the case one is

struck by the manner in which the multiple voices in the decision reflect the differing stances on life both as survival and possibility.

(Uhlmann, 1999, p. 139), while the plaintiffs seek an always elusive justice (Uhlmann, 1999, p. 139).

Within the judgment the law attempts to summon forth a living figure and refuses to see the dying or dead figures before it. This calling forth of a living figure in the face of death is even more pointed as the plaintiffs had already
died by the time the Supreme Court justices issued their opinions. Chief Justice Rehnquist commences his observations in Washington v Glucksberg in defensive rhetorical mode and, in so doing, evinces the laws failure to recognise
those who would wish to die otherwise than in the legally sanctioned way: our laws have consistently condemned, and continue to prohibit, assisting suicide. Despite changes in medical technology and notwithstanding an increased
emphasis on the importance of end of life decision-making, we have not retreated from this prohibition. Against this backdrop of history, tradition, and practice, we now turn to respondents constitutional claim (521 U.S. 702 (1997)

The individual is bound by the rights which also bind her to an

impersonal or state-mediated death.
719). The backdrop or default is set.

Rehnquist speaks in the rhetoric of warfare: we have not retreated. He goes on to construct a particular legal relation to assisted

death and in so doing reveals a certain conception of community: We now enquire whether this asserted right has any place in our Nations traditions. Here we are confronted with a consistent and almost universal tradition that
has long rejected the asserted right, and continues to reject it today, even for terminally ill, mentally competent adults. To hold for respondents, we would have to reverse centuries of legal doctrine and practice, and strike down the
considered policy choice of almost every state (521 U.S. 702 (1997) 7213). In this passage, the Chief Justice creates the illusion that there is a uniform view on this contested ethical issue. This, however, does not give due
consideration to the several contradictory views and practices which coexist. He is interpreting the Constitution in a manner which would give the appearance of unity. Rehnquist appeals to a particular interpretative method and, in

what is
valued most of all is a totalizing transcendent being in common of community
This may help to explain how an inalienable right to
life is undone when the body politic needs to defend itself
against
transgression. This relation to death can be seen as looking to the enforcement of
law and exclusion of mere or embodied life .
.
so doing, is hailing a particular totalizing conception of the nation. The language of Rehnquist posits a particular societal model based on immunity and survival. In this case one could argue that

.3 This relation is

built into the laws normative framework in the natural law model of the sanctity of life.

or one of its citizens

The type of politics implicit in this approach involves discovering the implicit identity of a nation and setting it

to work. This conception of politics as work relies upon and follows from the conception of community as immanent identity

Rehnquist creates the textual illusion of a united homogeneous community. In his judgment he creates the

textual boundaries which enclose the citizen in the state. In this regard the law can be seen as a stabilising instrument, a means of suspending in abstract ghostly form identifiable citizens who are simultaneously citizens with an

the text of law creates or provokes a symbolic unity where none exists in
order to secure the state in its territorial and textual space. This illusory wholeness
or togetherness is permanently under siege in the paranoiac discourse of the state
and of law.
identity. In other words

Rehnquists exclusion of physician-assisted suicide from the domain of rights might be explained by his regarding such deaths as an instance of worklessness. For him such deaths add nothing to the

survival of his imagined community. They are pure excess, deaths which do not sublate into building community. In this model, ironically, state executions and killing in time of war are approved of because they appear to uphold the

In the decision of the majority in this case what

is eclipsed is the actual choice facing the individual who goes before the Court to
obtain recognition of his desire to die with dignity
In this model the individuals plea goes unheard
integrity of the community. They maintain societal solidarity, binding it together against the intruder.

. This process is well described by William Connolly as the sedimentation of an ethos into

corporeal sensibilities (Connolly, 1999, p. 179).

The Western stigmatization of death stems from the

valorization of utility, and dead bodies are considered to have
none, marking them as the original excluded body. Robinson
Robinson, Andrew. "Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism & the Exclusion of Death." Ceasefire
Magazine. N.p., 30 Mar. 2012. Web. <https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/>.
Symbolic exchange or rather, its suppression plays a central role in the emergence of capitalism. Baudrillard sees a change happening over time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and
related) are replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same). Ceremony gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence. Baudrillards view of capitalism is derived from Marxs analysis of value.
Baudrillard accepts Marxs view that capitalism is based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any commodity. In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract
labour-time is itself an effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared. Capitalism is derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from the rest of life. It turns
economics into the reality-principle. It is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic level. It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the Other to an eternal return of the Same.

Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the

production of value. To be accepted by capital, something must contribute value.
This creates an immense regime of social exchange .

However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic exchange. It

ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation.

capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition of death. Capitalism

tries to abolish death through accumulation .
General equivalence the basis of capitalism is itself the ever-presence of
death. The more the system runs from death, the more it places everyone in
solitude, facing their own death. Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent. The
attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly.
According to Baudrillard,

It tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated with life). But this is

bound to fail.

Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress,

and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living. According to
Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis. For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be concealed to be preserved otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive
consumption. Value is produced from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-value all come from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value.
Capitalist exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of equivalential exchange or calculation. And capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a nonreversible aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other. It is also this regime which produces scarcity Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins argument. Capitalism produces the Freudian death
drive, which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise the separation of the domains they study the economy and the unconscious. It is the
separation which grounds their functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code. Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire comes into
existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous
groups do not claim to live naturally or by their desires they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect of the symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the
liberation of desire. He thinks that such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active. Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the
unconscious in metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere. It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with
the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so they can eventually
reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound. What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility. Capitalism continues to be haunted by the
forces it has repressed. Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its repression. This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and
threatening. It becomes an image of the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening. It becomes the obscene, which is present in
excess over the scene of what is imagined. This is different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillards remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange. Modern culture
dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The energy of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder. Our culture is
dead from having broken the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West continues to perpetrate genocide on indigenous groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first destroying its own indigenous
logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and instability.
Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system. This is not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or exodus. It is because it counterposes a different principle of sociality to that of the
dominant system. According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay. The affective charge of
death remains present among the oppressed, but not with the properly symbolic rhythm of immediate retaliation. The Church and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of
Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude and death. He sees the Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on symbolic exchange. Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of
the state and capitalism retained some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the imaginary of the social contract was based on the idea of a sacrifice this time of liberty for the
common good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I havent seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of
the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy. Art, theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power. It is the reason older orders did not suffer the particular
malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillards work. But on closer inspection, this seems to be a
misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is nostalgic for the return of symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-

what we have lost above all

in the transition to alienated society is the ability to engage in exchanges with
death.
alienated social groups. Death Death plays a central role in Baudrillards theory, and is closely related to symbolic exchange. According to Baudrillard,

Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an event affecting a body, but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value

which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on. But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations, the death of
the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to fusion and communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction
carries shades of death because one generation replaces another. Baudrillards concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtins concept of the grotesque. Death refers to metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social
change, subjective transformation, as well as physical death. According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death as social, not natural or biological. They see it as an effect of an adversarial will, which they must absorb. And they
mark it with feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death from becoming an event which does not signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard,

the wests idea of a biological, material death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring
the sociality of death
the problems of the present are rooted in the
splitting of life into binary oppositions.
After this first split, a whole series of others have been created, confining particular
groups
The definition of the normal
human has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or
another marked or deviant category. The original exclusion was of the dead it is
defined as abnormal to be dead .
This first split and exclusion forms the
basis, or archetype, for all the other splits and exclusions along lines of gender,
disability, species, class, and so on.
The modern view of death is constructed on the model of
the machine and the function. A machine either functions or it does not. The
human body is treated as a machine which similarly, either functions or does not .
. Poststructuralists generally maintain that

For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original, founding opposition on which the others are founded.

the mad, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities, women and so on to particular segregated situations.

You livies hate us deadies.

This discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard suggests that death as we know it

does not exist outside of this separation between living and dead.

For

Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death. The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the story it tells. This
requires an idea of death as an end. It is counterposed to the immortality of social institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the dead. But institutions
try to remain truly immortal. Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer know how to die or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves. The internalisation of the idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from
our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner would say, between the category of man and the un-man, the real self irreducible to such categories. It also individualises people, by destroying their actual connections to
others. The symbolic haunts the code as the threat of its own death. The society of the code works constantly to ward off the danger of irruptions of the symbolic. The mortal body is actually an effect of the split introduced by the
foreclosure of death. The split never actually stops exchanges across the categories. In the case of death, we still exchange with the dead through our own deaths and our anxiety about death. We no longer have living, mortal
relationships with objects either. They are reduced to the instrumental. It is as if we have a transparent veil between us. Symbolic exchange is based on a game, with game-like rules. When this disappears, laws and the state are

For
instance, westerners invest the Third World with racist fantasies and revolutionary
aspirations; the Third World invests the west with aspirational fantasies of
development. In separation, the other exists only as an imaginary object. Yet the
resultant purity is illusory. For Baudrillard, any such marking or barring of the other
brings the other to the core of society. We all become dead, or mad, or prisoners,
and so on, through their exclusion. The goal of survival is fundamental to the birth
of power.
The social repression of death
grounds the repressive socialisation of life. People are compelled to survive so as to
become useful
In modern societies, death is made invisible, denied, and placed
outside society.
, elderly people are excluded from society. People no longer
expect their own death. As a result, it becomes unintelligible.
Western society is arranged so death is never done by
someone else, but always attributable to nature. This creates a bureaucratic,
judicial regime of death, of which the concentration camp is the ultimate symbol
invented to take their place. It is the process of excluding, marking, or barring which allows concentrated or transcendental power to come into existence. Through splits, people turn the other into their imaginary.

Social control emerges when the union of the living and the dead is shattered, and the dead become prohibited.

. For Baudrillard, capitalisms original relationship to death has historically been concealed by the system of production, and its ends. It only becomes fully visible now this system is

collapsing, and production is reduced to operation.

For example

It keeps returning as nature which will not abide by

objective laws. It can no longer be absorbed through ritual.

. The

system now commands that we must not die at least not in any old way. We may only die if law and medicine allow it. Hence for instance the spread of health and safety regulations. On the other hand, murder and violence are
legalised, provided they can be re-converted into economic value. Baudrillard sees this as a regressive redistribution of death. It is wrested from the circuit of social exchanges and vested in centralised agencies. For Baudrillard,
there is not a social improvement here. People are effectively being killed, or left to die, by a process which never treats them as having value. On the other hand, even when capitalism becomes permissive, inclusive and tolerant, it
still creates an underlying anxiety about being reduced to the status of an object or a marionette. This appears as a constant fear of being manipulated. The slave remains within the masters dialectic for as long as his life or death
serves the reproduction of domination.

The figure who demands the right to die is the ultimate

challenge to a legal order constructed around death control
vote aff to insert dysfunction into the fabric the law. Hanafin 2
Hanafin, Patrick. "Rights of Passage: Law and the Biopolitics of Dying." Deleuze and Law: Forensic
Figures (n.d.): n. pag. Web.
<http://www.academia.edu/3323193/Rights_of_passage_law_and_the_biopolitics_of_dying>.

The figure who refuses is a

troubling one for law. Such a figure engages in a
refusal to submit to the biopolitical order. One such is the terminally ill who
states that they would prefer not to live.
particularly

figure

person

This gesture expresses what Gilles Deleuze has termed the mode of being as if already gone (Boutang, 1995). To be as if

already gone is to accept death and not allow it to become the limit of thinking. This is a living with, or being with death, which sees it not as an intruder but as that without which we cannot live. Those who have exhausted their end
seek the right to die with dignity. This is a choice to die, which allows the body to speak its end rather than have that end dictated by the voice of an expert, legal or medical. The person who seeks to die is, to paraphrase Foucault,
the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage (Foucault, 1967, p. 11). This notion of a passenger on the way to death bespeaks our existence, prisoners of our being, passing towards death. When an individual

. It is vital from the point of view of

legal and political elites that the insubordinate citizen is seen to be managed. The
ultimate threat to a legal order built on death control is the individual who refuses to
accept laws prohibition and seeks to self-style her death
In selfstyling ones death one is choosing to affirm ones life and the desire not to live a
degraded existence
This majoritarian politics of
survival or vita politics attempts to arrest death by composing a narrative which
valorizes Life
the states interest in preserving life becomes the interest in
preserving the life of the state. The state attempts to put death to work in the
service of life
goes before the law to claim this right not to live, judges, in a futile effort to put death on hold, talk, animatedly and excitedly, about life

. She refuses to be styled by laws speech.

. 1 This act is lost on those blinded by a conservative morality which opposes death to life.

. In other words,

. However, as Lars Iyer reminds us, every attempt to put death to work is contested by dying itself, that is, by the other Lazarus who refuses to rise and come towards us (Iyer, 2004, p. 153).

Allow the event of death to be a moment of becoming

paradoxically, the right to die is the ultimate affirmation of life
as decomposition and recomposition: life is not bracketed by
'birth' and 'death', but is a cycle of becoming. Shildrick
Shildrick Margrit Deciding on Death: Conventions and Contestations in the Context of Disability
Bioethical Inquiry (2008) 5:209219 DOI 10.1007/s11673-007-9074-1

all that has been discussed has positioned the debate within
conventional bioethics where it is taken for granted that individual life
is a matter of overriding importance
My point is that

so far

the confines of

human into other species

even where it may diverge from the

. Bioethical questions concerning the value of life, and the implicit expectation that it will be maintained,

often devolve on instances of technologically dependent life. Well-known and much debated, though unresolved, cases include those involving coma or persistent vegetative state, as with Anthony Bland, and Terri Schiavo, both of
whom died after the apparent absence of a viable self justified the cessation of all treatment, or the prolongation of life, as in the case of Angela Carder, whose vital functions were maintained despite end-stage cancer to ensure

.
And what underlies the humanist privileging of the individual capacity for selfdetermination is an all but unchallengeable belief that the supreme importance of
life resides primarily in its manifestation in each person. The death, then, of any one
of us
is an insult to life as such .
In place of the western
predisposition to unproblematically attribute value to life as something held by
living individuals
might it be possible to rethink the parameters of
the debate in terms of a wider understanding of life as a non-personal vitalist force
that exceeds the unique interests of each individual
the sustainable, albeit unsuccessful, delivery of her foetus. The term sanctity of life may not be overtly used, but in western societies at least and those with a history of monotheistic religions, [But]the notion is usually present

but particularly those who most exemplify the valued attributes of life

I want now to break with the usual parameters of bioethical

consideration where concepts such as the value of life are taken as given, and move instead to a radical reconfiguration of what might be meant by life as such.

, which is extinguished at their own deaths,

[30]. I am not suggesting a turn to spiritualist ideology here of whatever form, but rather

as Braidotti does an exploration of Deleuzes philosophy of becoming other/imperceptible [31] in which the differential being of any subject is always in a process of unravelling through an acknowledgment of the multiple webs
of connections that constitute becoming. In place of a predetermined and relatively unchanging subject as the lifetime holder of rights, life is not defined by an essential form or by the bookends of birth and death, and neither is
individual existence the centre of ethical concern. The purpose is not to offer a scholarly reading of Deleuzes understanding of life and death, but to push the stalled bioethical debate onto ground whose very unfamiliarity may
provoke renewed movement. In a telling reversal of the more familiar use of the term, Braidotti [30] proposes zoe to delineate the sense of life as something that far exceeds any particular instances of it, thus challenging the implicit
value distinction made by Agamben [32]. As used by Agamben, the concept of zoe is marked as bare life stripped of all that bestows value on the individual, while its counterpart bios delineates personal life, socially and politically
contextualised. Certainly Agamben deplores the modern separation of the two elements, for the second cannot exist without the first, but he nonetheless clearly privileges bios. In a recent paper, James Overboe [33] claims that,
according to Agambens schema, bare life is exemplified by the disabled body, which thus occupies a state of exception, a condition of being excluded from the polity and deprived of rights. Although Overboe is primarily concerned
with beginning of life decisions that seek to eliminate genetic abnormality, he concurs with Braidotti in identifying liberal individualisation as a major force in delineating just how normative life is valued, and seeks alternative ways
forward in the work of Deleuze. What is very different, however, is that, unlike Braidotti (or Deleuze as I shall argue), Overboe remains concerned with the individual, rejecting the notion of the self only insofar as it is territorialized
by the concomitant of able-bodiedness ([33], p. 230). What he calls for is a reaffirmation of bare life as simply a variant expression to be valued in its own right, and in speaking of his personal condition, he writes of the
vivaciousness of cerebral palsy as a life affirming force ([33], p. 221). I believe this is an extraordinarily valuable approach, but I want to go further in problematising liberal humanism, and in rewriting zoe, not as bare life reclaimed

. In its original Greek

manifestation, zoe indicated what was indestructible, eternal, and it is in that sense
that it both contests individual expression and moves away from the negativity
implied by bare life.
If life
is
marked by potentiality, by connection and the processes of transformation, how are
we to understand death, and indeed his own death by suicide? The starting point is
to recognise that
life in the broad sense is a continuing project, not a discrete
essence bounded at the beginning and end by non-existence. It is a plane of
immanence
a nontemporal and unstructured locus of coalescence of creative
forces,
those bodies are simply part of
the cycle of becoming
As such, the death of a human being marks both the
moment of final dissolution of a single existence, and the point at which the
individual actualisation of life moves back into the impersonality of what Braidotti
understands as zoe
to personal, social and political meaning, but as an alternative way of thinking about the significance of the finite life course of individual existence

When Deleuze insists on the rhizomatic nature of life by which he means its proliferation in ever-new forms along multiple and unpredictable pathways he decisively breaks

with the notion of an atomistic subject, and signals a state of becoming in which the will to live is a prepersonal and non-organic power that goes beyond any individual lived experience.

for Deleuze

in Deleuzian terms,

([34], p. 168),

and although it is continually actualised in the individual body, human and otherwise, that can represent personal value,

. In the same way, although the course of human life is marked by discrete events where things happen, in another sense, events are also incorporeal forces and

intensities, what Deleuze calls singularities, that have no anchorage in time.

: Its organisms that die, not life ([7], p. 143). Certainly, my death signals the decomposition of my bodily relations and the cessation of my self or ego, but it is not the absolute

closure that liberal humanism anticipates. Although the being represented as I is reduced to what Deleuze would call zero intensity, the event of dying is a further opening, another moment of becoming. As Deleuze puts it: With
every event, there is indeed the present moment of its actualisation...the moment we designate by saying here, the moment has come.But on the other hand, there is a future and past of the event considered in itself...beingfree
of the limitations of a state of affairs, impersonal and pre-individual.Death has an extreme and definite relation to me and my body and is grounded in me, but it also has no relation to me at all it is incorporeal and infinitive,

, individual ownership of life and death is subsumed in the

intensity of the irreducible and dynamic force of becoming that has no beginning or
end. In that sense, the individual instance of dying continues to celebrate the flux
and flow of life, and death itself is negated
what matters is that the
power to affirm life
should remain strong This speaks to
sustainability
the
capacity to enhance ones potentials through pleasure and pain alike
. Although never
fully self-determining in the liberal humanist sense, the Deleuzian subject must
strive to become the quasi-cause of what is produced within the individual life;
she must will the event as both misfortune and splendour as her own .
The task of the individual, then, is to embrace
impersonal, grounded only in itself. ([35], p. 151) In other words

. In terms of personal existence,

both in its uncontested moments of joy and in its endurance

of transcendence as a way of overcoming bodily disarray and in any case Deleuze was uninterested in functional efficacy as such but to what Braidotti has called

not

the strategy

([30], p. 29),

. It is significant that Braidotti writes

eloquently of alcoholism and drug-taking in this context, for it belies any easy recourse to choosing death simply because personal life fails to follow a comfortable and normative course

Events, says Deleuze, invite us

in and signal that (m)y wound existed before me, I was born to embody it ([35], p. 148).

without ressentiment all that occurs, a disposition that Deleuze approvingly relates
to the Stoic ethic: Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and
has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us
([35], p. 149). The good life is one that

overflows and transforms itself in the face of adversity, always opening up new possibilities of becoming other than itself. And for Deleuze, like Braidotti, what a body can take far exceeds normative expectations.

Nonetheless, the corollary of such an understanding is that life may be affirmed not
only through personal living, but precisely through the self-suppression of an
individual existence that blocks the expression of joyous endurance. If one believes
that the decomposition of the individual life, the event of dying, is simultaneously
the recomposition of life under new relations of sustainability, then suicide and
euthanasia need no longer be ethical or social failures .
we can see it as a final
expression of the positivity of life and the point at which the self-centred existence
willingly becomes other than itself. In Deleuzian terms, the event
speaks clearly to the intimation that I am not the owner of life, but merely one
strand of its multiple and indestructible becomings
We may still wonder whether in the face of rapidly failing health any one of us

might have chosen to affirm life through our own persons for longer than Deleuze did, but we cannot reasonably claim that his suicide is to be deplored. Rather,

real and painful though it is as a moment in time

Traditional education homogenizes students and churn them

out to be productive and unquestioning laborers. The role of
the judge should be as an educator facilitating nomadic and
rhizomatic learning to encourage fluidity, multiplicity, and
possiblility. Reilly
Reilly, Mary Ann. "Between the By-Road and the Main Road." : We Are Pando: Rhizomatic Learning*.
N.p., 27 Sept. 2011. Web. <http://maryannreilly.blogspot.com/2011/09/we-are-pando-rhizomaticlearning.html>.

The traditional view of education

situates schooling as a function of transference of expert-determined content from
teacher to student.
a rhizomatic learning
community is a fluid collective where participants dwell in the middle of things and
where learning emerges informed by a blend of explicit and tacit knowledge
For more than a decade, I have been considering how the rhizome might function as metaphor and model for education.

U.S. school systems tend to rely on hierarchy as the privileged school organization method used to distribute content and pedagogical practices, most often in the form of

sanctioned programs developed by external experts and then purchased for teachers who are told to transfer the content to students. In contrast

. In conceiving of

rhizomatic learning, it helps to think of learners resembling a sea of "middles, who are continuously formed and reformed based on alliances determined by needs, interests, directions, questions, redirections, assessments, and
commitments. Unlike the design of many traditional schools, a rhizomatic learning space is based on joining and rejoining. In rhizomatic learning, thinking resembles the tangle of roots and shoots, both broken and whole. Problem
framing and decision-making rest with all learners. Again, Driscolls description of rhizomatic learning is important. She writes: Break the rhizome anywhere and the only effect is that new connections will be grown. The rhizome

when confronted with student

achievement concerns, there has been a tendency to tighten control in an effort to
increase learning largely because what has counted as knowing has been limited to
a perceived set body of content
this learning : as a series of
steps to be mastered, as if students were
machines being programmed to accomplish tasks. The ultimate endpoint of a
mechanistic perspective is efficiency: the goal is to learn as much as you can, as
fast as you can
In this mistaken schema, knowledge has been
consistently situated as stableas that which can be listed in a set of standards and
given to teachers to transfer. But we know that knowledge is not stable
models the unlimited potential for knowledge construction, because it has no fixed pointsand no particular organization (p. 389). Historically,

. Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) describe

being taught how to operate a machine or even, in some cases, as if the students themselves were

(Thomas & Brown, Location 327 of 2399).

(Schon, 1983; Thomas & Brown,

2011). Thomas and Brown state, "[m]aking knowledge stable in a changing world is an unwinnable game (Location 503 of 2399). Knowledge actually has never been stable, but given the disruptive power of the Internet, what
counts as knowledge is a shifting matter that is more easily recognized, especially by those holding power whose concept of knowing in the past was often situated as truth. One only has to think of the Great Chain of Being to
understand how the sanctity of knowing was often a matter of power. In contrast to such certainty, Thomas and Brown posit that there is a new culture of learning informed by a massive information network that provides almost
unlimited access and resources to learn about anything[and] a bounded and structured environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment with things within these boundaries (Location 63 of 2399). This new

Tacit knowledge--knowing more than

one can tell--requires a decidedly different type of learning environment than what
is currently favored at school where knowledge transfer is the privileged method.
Tacit knowledge is not acquired from other; it requires learning through mind, body
and senses and is facilitated by experimentation and inquiry.
culture of learning is inherently rhizomatic as it orients itself horizontally, not vertically, requiring us to value tacit knowledge.