I take that to be the shortened rhetorical version of the two aspects of death that Deleuze identifies in Blanchot on pg. 112 and 113. We actually stumbled across this question way back in the introduction when we wondered why repetition was somehow related to death and terror. Death is always going to be a question of identity. Who dies? Which begs the question: who am I? At this point, we now have an entire framework for thinking about how our identity might arise as a second principle, through a repetition of difference. Which is to say that we are no longer taking our identity for granted at the outset. Hence the questions. If my identity is produced through a process of repetition -- a process that we've seen is structurally equivalent to the unfolding of time, its cleaving into the qualitative difference of before and after (the process, you might say) -- then what is lost when this identity disappears?
Deleuze points out that the answer to this question depends on what we mean by identity. If we mean my particular identity as a personal I or ego, then of course everything is lost in death. It is the negation of my existence. If, however, we mean my 'identity' as that repeated process of unfolding, well ... then there is no I to die. Nothing can be lost because there is nothing to lose. Or we might equivalently say that I am dying all the time. Though the I that is dying here is not a particular identity but a process that produces a whole series of identities. Death is the symbol of precisely this process, or rather, the paradoxical way that this process can take itself as an object or 'identity', and hence repeat the empty form of time. All that is lost in this sense of death is the first form of identity.
Thus there are two types of death, which correspond to two ways of identifying ourself.
The first signifies the personal disappearance of the person, the annihilation of this difference represented by the I or the ego. This is a difference which existed only in order to die, and the disappearance of which can be objectively represented by a return to inanimate matter, as though calculated by a kind of entropy
The other death, however, the other face or aspect of death, refers to the state of free differences when they are no longer subject to the form imposed upon them by an I or an ego, when they assume a shape which excludes my own coherence no less than that of any identity whatsoever. There is always a 'one dies' more profound than 'I die', and it is not only the gods who die endlessly and in a variety of ways; as though there appeared worlds in which the individual was no longer imprisoned within the personal form of the I and the ego, nor the singular imprisoned within the limits of the individual - in short, the insubordinate multiple, which cannot be 'recognised' in the first aspect.
We can see in this quote anther concept that reminds me of another connection made in the introduction that it seems we never discussed. Death is related to liberation, to freedom.
If repetition makes us ill, it also heals us; if it enchains and destroys us, it also frees us, testifying in both cases to its 'demonic' power.
How can this game be related to the death instinct? No doubt in a sense close to that in which Miller, in his wonderful book on Rimbaud, says: 'I realized that I was free, that the death I had gone through had liberated me.'
What we are freed from in the second version of death is the imprisoning limits of our particular identity. And we are freed to experience the multiple as the power a singularity (like death) has to repeat itself. A singularity that has a type of (non)-being or ?-being that repeats, and that contains a multiplicity within itself, is the central paradox of Deleuze's idea of repetition.
To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. And perhaps this· repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular. This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an 'unrepeatable'. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the 'nth' power.
I can't leave this topic without mentioning that the second conception of death seems to me as good an explanation of Nirvana as any I have heard. A "blowing out" or a "quenching". A "cessation" that liberates one from a cycle of desiring. An idea at least closely related to non-self (maybe the same thing). In other words, an ending that keeps on happening. Somehow at once singular and related to time and change, as if it were frozen but vibrating internally. We could multiply analogies here, but I'm not sure it would help convince any skeptic of their striking connection; one could always wonder whether all paradoxical things are ultimately the same.
What's more interesting to me than trying to convince anyone of the merits of the comparison is the way Deleuze's description can perhaps guide my meditation practice. He provides a whole mechanism for how the 'nirvana instinct' arises, the key piece of which seems to be the way the self folds back on itself and takes itself as the perpetually displaced virtual object that circulates through all our desires. Somehow this circularity is meant to dissolve us and liberate us at the same time, as if we become identified with the question, "who am I?" rather than identifying ourself with any of the answers.
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