Abstract

Part of a series on the question of what is the good life, the essay is structured as a montage. Part 1 contests the received notion that death is exterior to the work of Deleuze. To this end, it gathers together a telegraphic collection of examples – ‘corpses’ in his corpus – that invariably show up whenever the question is raised. Part 2 attempts a Deleuzian move: it puts death to work. If death is not nothing, it argues, it must be productive of something absolutely new. Drawing upon Blanchot's seminal essay, ‘The Two Versions of the Imaginary’, it makes the case that this creation is the cadaver: the first time-image