2

Nonhuman Life
Ashley Woodward

‘You have tasted of death now,’ said the Old Man. ‘Is it good?’
‘It is good,’ said Mossy. ‘It is better than life’.
‘No,’ said the Old Man: ‘it is only more life. – ’
George MacDonald, ‘The Golden Key’ (1867)

Deleuze, vitalism and Lebensphilosophie

It is a simultaneously well-known and typically repressed fact that

philosophy has from its inception concerned itself with wisdom: it has
understood itself as a practical activity – a way of life, defended by a
theoretical discourse.1 The contemporary philosophical scene is one in
which most of the terminology and concepts for thinking (and prac-
ticing) philosophy in this way have been vitiated: we can no longer talk
of the human, of the subject, of existence, of life, of value, of meaning
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

and so on, without encountering a whole history of critical reservations

regarding the philosophical usage of such terms (Heidegger’s critiques of
value and of existentialism, structuralism’s – and especially Foucault’s –
critique of the human, and so on). To some extent this is the result
of scientific, theoretical, and cultural changes which have made the
old categories through which we understand ourselves questionable.
To some extent this is also the result of philosophy’s proper work of
examining its own presuppositions. In these respects the current state
of affairs cannot be lamented. However, to the extent that substantive
reasons and arguments have been forgotten and such terms have become
simply unfashionable, this is a failure both of philosophical thought
and its vocation as existential activity. One term which has, surprisingly,
once again been floated in contemporary academic circles as an index of

25
 26 Ashley Woodward

existential concerns is ‘life’. This is due, primarily and perhaps solely, to

the work of Gilles Deleuze.
The surprising aspect of the contemporary currency of ‘life’ is due
to two currents with which it was associated in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, along with which it fell into disrepute:
vitalism and Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy). Vitalism was a move-
ment in biological science which opposed purely mechanistic under-
standings of life by asserting that there is something unique that living
beings possess, a ‘life force’. Thus, biology was thought not to be reduc-
ible to physics and chemistry.2 Now largely forgotten, Lebensphilosophie
was once a popular philosophical trend in Germany, from roughly 1870
to 1930. In the words of Jason Gaiger, Lebensphilosophie was ‘a philos-
ophy which asks after the meaning, value, and purpose of life, turning
away from purely theoretical knowledge towards the undistorted full-
ness of lived experience. ... [It] typically oppose[d] rigid abstractions with
a philosophy based on feeling and intuition’ (1998: 487). Moreover,
it posited ‘life’ as an irrational metaphysical principle at the basis of
thought and existence, and established normative criteria for both
philosophical thought and cultural critique on the basis of the distinc-
tion between the ‘healthy’ and the ‘sick’ (Schnädelbach 1984: 141, 145).
Lebensphilosophie had its origins in Schelling’s late philosophy, and
took Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson as its primary influences.3
Lebensphilosophie connected itself with vitalism, and used the model of
a living organism to understand phenomena not obviously organic in
nature, such as Spengler’s analysis of human societies as organisms with
a life-cycle of growth and decline (1932).
Vitalism has long since lost its scientific credibility and has no currency
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

in contemporary biology, where living organisms are understood simply

as complex arrangements of inorganic matter, and no vitalist principle
of ‘life’ is thought to be a necessary explanans. Lebensphilosophie had
an even more ignonimous fate, its celebration of biological health and
vigor, privileging of physiological strength over weakness, and critique
of culture based on these values having fed National Socialist ideologies.
Lebensphilosophie was banished with the de-Nazification of Germany.
The fates of vitalism and life-philosophy, then, make it particularly
surprising that the popularity of Deleuze has allowed a revival of interest
not only in the term ‘life’, but in philosophical forms of vitalism, in
association with two of the three main philosophical progenitors of
Lebensphilosophie, Nietzsche and Bergson.4
If ‘life’, as bequeathed to us by Deleuze, has been able to enjoy
some contemporary currency, it is arguably because his construal has
 Nonhuman Life 27

managed to clearly avoid the dangerous pitfalls that vitalism and

Lebesnsphilosophie ran into. That is, it has avoided any narrow biolo-
gism and organicism.5 Deleuze has done this precisely by construing life
as something nonhuman. In order to illustrate the relevant contrast, we
can take Oswald Spengler’s Man and Techincs (1976; originally 1931) as
an exemplary life-philosophical text which construes life in such a way
as to give the human privilege within a hierarchy of organisms, with
dangerously fascistic implications.6
Following the range of meanings embedded in the German Technik,
Spengler understands ‘technics’ as encompassing both the invention
and use of tools and machines, and techniques which do not necessarily
involve tool-use (for example, strategy). For him, ‘technics is a tactics of
living’ (Spengler 1976: 9, emphasis in original) and life is understood as
fundamentally conflictual, a battle for survival and dominance between
living organisms. In his words, ‘[t]his battle is life – life, indeed, in the
Nietzschean sense, a grim, pitiless, no-quarter battle of the Will-to-
Power’ (1976: 11). In the battle of life, Spengler establishes a hierarchy
with man (the human) at the apex. This hierarchy is determined by the
criterion of mobility, itself specified in terms of the ability to will and to
choose. Forms of life are ranked from lowest to highest as follows: first
vegetal, then animal, divided into herbivores (lower because their action
is primarily defensive flight from predators, thus not self-determined)
and carnivores (higher because their actions are self-determined and
‘offensive, hard, cruel, destructive’ [1976: 14]). Man is situated with and
beyond the carnivores, exalted as a beast of prey:

The animal of prey is the highest form of mobile life. It implies a maximum
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

of freedom of self against others, of responsibility to self, of singleness

of self, an extreme of necessity where that self can hold its own only
by fighting and winning and destroying. It imparts a high dignity to
Man, as a type, that he is a beast of prey (14, emphasis in original).

More than this, however, the human is given the privileged place in
the hierarchy of living organisms because he is the inventor of tech-
nics ‘proper’: that is, techniques which are not simply species instincts,
but freely determined by the individual’s capacity to consciously will and
choose.7 The human is thus the freest and most dominant form of life,
but is also condemned to prey on his fellow humans. While eschewing
biological notions of the superiority and inferiority of races, Spengler
nevertheless sees racial and cultural groups as locked in a global struggle
over resources, and laments the fact that the ‘white’ races have sold the
 28 Ashley Woodward

secrets of their technologies to the ‘colored’ races, a decisive factor in

what he sees as an inevitable end to the ‘Faustian culture’ of the West
(1976: 38–40).
Deleuze’s construal of life as a vital power separates itself from this
vision of the violence and domination of human groups by reading the
same sources as life-philosophers such as Spengler – Nietzsche, in this
case, but Bergson as well – in a significantly nonhuman fashion. Where
Spengler has developed Nietzsche’s oppositions of reactive and active,
Slave and Noble into types of living organisms, with the consciousness
characteristic of human beings determining its highest place in the hier-
archy of life, Deleuze develops the same concepts in a different direc-
tion, with different consequences. For Deleuze, the active and reactive
characterize preindividual forces: the will to power is not a contest
between organisms but a metaphysical differentiating principle, human
consciousness is placed on the side of the ‘nihilistic’ becoming-reactive
of forces, life itself is construed as a fundamental metaphysical principle
of difference associated with the temporality of the eternal return, and
Nietzschean ethics are understood as the capacity not to dominate the
weaker, but to affirm life as becoming (see Deleuze 1983).
The distinction of Deleuze’s notion of ‘life’ from those of vitalism and
Lebensphilosophie perhaps appears to be of little more than historical
interest today, though it is still important to note in understanding the
potential problems that such a concept might fall into if it is reified
around ‘the human’. More recently, however, a new series of challenges
have arisen against the philosophical notion of life, in which Deleuze
features as a primary target. The most audacious, and also the most
rigorous and significant of these has taken the form of an alternative
discourse of the nonhuman: Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound (2007).8
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

Vigor mortis?: Brassier

While Brassier’s core concern is to develop the prospects of a specu-

lative realism, Nihil Unbound is clothed in the polemic of an affirma-
tion of nihilism. Brassier sees nihilism primarily as a concomitant to
the Enlightenment disenchantment of the world, ‘a necessary conse-
quence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating
vector of intellectual discovery’ (2007: xi). Correspondingly, nihilism
is ‘the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a
mind-independent reality’ (xi). He notes that the interests of living and
the interests of thinking do not necessarily coincide, and sides with
the latter against the former. In short, for Brassier, ‘[n]ihilism is not an
 Nonhuman Life 29

existential quandary but a speculative opportunity’ (xi). However, there

is more at stake in Brassier’s project than simply changing the defini-
tion of nihilism. For as this short summary should already indicate,
Brassier’s opting to take the speculative opportunity comes at the (for
him, unavoidable) expense of exacerbating what others have seen as an
existential problem. Consequently, he sets out to destroy the forms of
philosophical thought – such as Deleuze’s concept of life – which might
respond to this problem.
Brassier’s project is ‘nonhuman’ insofar as he takes ‘the manifest image
of man’ (a concept taken from Wilfrid Sellars – see 1963) as a limiting
barrier to the kind of speculative thought he advocates, and posits the
destruction of this image and its corollaries as a necessary propedeutic to
speculative thought’s achievement of its aims. These corollaries include
an ontological privileging of time over space, and the vitalist privileging
of organic life over inorganic death. For Brassier, thought illegitimately
bounded by ‘the human’ is essentially what Quentin Meillassoux (2008)
has defined as correlationism; in short, the Kantian and post-Kantian
view that thought cannot access the real in itself, since what it accesses
is always already inside a correlation of thought and its supposed
outside. Brassier develops his investigation of the possibilities of specu-
lative realist thought (a thought which would move beyond the impasse
of correlationism and be able to think the real in itself) by moving
through the works of Meillassoux, Alain Badiou, and François Laruelle.
He notes their important gains but also criticizes the insufficiencies of
each. What is at stake, for him, is the ability of thought to think the
real without thought itself co-determining it. According to his reading,
Meillassoux correctly identifies the problems with correlationism, but
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

his attempted realism relies on a notion of intellectual intuition which

ends up making the real dependent on thought. Badiou circumvents
this problem, and enacts a valuable disenchantment of ontology by
passing it from phenomenology to mathematics, but he ends up with
an equally problematic idealism of inscription, according to which the
thought of the real requires the exemption of mathematics in its mate-
riality from its own ontological purview. Only Laruelle, Brassier argues,
gives us the resources for a properly speculative realist thought. Yet
Brassier qualifies what he takes from Laruelle for his own project: he
argues that Laruelle’s virtue is in using the resources of transcendental
philosophy against idealism, but that he ends up compromising too
much with this transcendental philosophy. Nevertheless, according to
Brassier, Laruelle demonstrates the viability of realism by construing
the real not on a substantial model, but as ‘a discontinuous cut in the
 30 Ashley Woodward

fabric of ontological synthesis’ (Brassier 2007: 149), and discovers a new

method of philosophical thought by which the object may be understood
to seize thought and force it to think it: a non-dialectical logic of negation
called ‘unilateralization’.
After this discovery of the possibility of a speculative realism, in the
third part of Nihil Unbound (‘The Truth of Extinction’) Brassier tackles
three major philosophers whose thought has typically been taken as a
challenge to philosophical humanism: Heidegger, Deleuze, and Nietzsche.
In each case, he seeks to show that they remain caught in humanism
(and in correlationism) in some significant sense: both Heidegger
and Deleuze ontologize time in a way which ultimately depends on a
thinking subject (undermining the capacity to think time and space as
irreducible objective features of the real), while Nietzsche’s affirmation
of life reduces ontology (becoming) to a function of thought. Brassier’s
strategy is typically both internal and external: he undertakes an imma-
nent critique of the philosopher he is dealing with, showing that their
project contains inherent contradictions or problems and fails on its
own grounds, and then he also shows an insufficiency in relation to
his own project, typically arguing that the philosopher’s works remain
‘human, all-too-human’ – bounded by human subjective thought.
This combination of internal and external critique might also be
trained on Brassier’s own work: as I will argue, Brassier’s project in Nihil
Unbound cannot ground itself in its own terms, and ultimately fails to
give us any reasons for assenting to its arguments. Significantly, Brassier
fails to show that it is necessary (as he claims it is) to embrace nihilism,
and to seek out and destroy all traces of vitalism, in order to think
objective realism. As such, the very raison d’être for wearing his dark
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

polemical cloak drops away. Deleuze suggests that Nietzsche completes

the Kantian critical project by questioning the values which underlie
philosophical claims (1983: 1–3). It is this questioning I wish to train on
Brassier.9 I will argue that it cannot, or at least, that Brassier fails to do so
in Nihil Unbound. The question is this: why should we choose specula-
tive thought over existential concerns? Why privilege thought over life?
In other words, what is the value of the speculative realist thought that
Brassier thinks more important than life itself? We have already seen
that, in Brassier’s introduction, he specifies such thought as an invig-
orating vector of intellectual discovery. So speculative realist thought is
‘sold’ to us as ‘invigorating’. A further justification for the ‘value’ of such
thought is given in the concluding chapter of the book, in terms of an
account of the motivating force of speculative thought – in Nietzschean
terms, of ‘the will to know’.
 Nonhuman Life 31

In his critical treatment of Nietzsche, Brassier notes that Nietzsche

associates the will to knowledge with the will to nothingness, and quali-
fies it as a modification of the will to power, where the later is understood
as a vitalist metaphysical force. So for Nietzsche, life precedes knowl-
edge, and the later is construed as a nihilist, decadent modification of
the former. Brassier inverts this order of privilege through a reading of
Freud’s death drive, in which this drive is identified as the motivating
force of thought. Through an analysis of sections of Freud’s Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (2001), he argues that the death drive gives us the key
to understanding what ‘drive’ in general means for Freud, such that all
animate, organic life can be understood as motivated by a drive which
originates in an aboriginal scission between life and death, the organic
and the inorganic, and which seeks to return to the inorganic. Freud
in fact declares that ‘the aim of all life is death’ (quoted in Brassier
2007: 235).
Freud thus speculates that the drive animating every living organism
is to return to the inorganic state from which it originally developed.
The original individuation, the scission of life and death, creates a kind
of trauma – an excitation, an excessive influx of energy – which the
organism tries to ‘bind’, to incorporate into its psychic functioning, by
repeating. But this binding is impossible, since the trauma was never
experienced (the organism did not yet exist) so cannot be successfully
repeated, and cannot be experienced (since it involves the return to an
inorganic state). As such, the trauma remains constitutively unconscious,
and compulsively repeats in a way which can never achieve satisfaction
for the living organism. This is the motive force of the death drive –
the retrospective attempt to bind a trauma – which gives rise to a trace
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

in the organism, which is conscious thought. So in this way, following

Freud, Brassier posits that thought itself is fundamentally motivated by
the death drive. In gesturing towards this drive, he gives at least a partial
answer to the question, why think? It is not an answer in terms of reasons,
but in terms of motivation (understood in a sense which is not ‘folk-
psychological’, but material).
Things become more complicated when we ask the question, what
does speculative realist thought achieve? The short answer would be
that it achieves a thinking of the real, which Brassier specifies as a gain;
specifically, ‘a gain in intelligibility’ (2007: 238). But what is the value
of intelligibility? What does such intelligibility achieve? In seeking
an answer to such questions, we discover that Brassier equivocates, or
perhaps changes his mind, between two presentations of this argument:
one in the last chapter of Nihil Unbound, and one in an earlier essay
 32 Ashley Woodward

which covers much of the same ground: ‘Solar Catastrophe: Lyotard,

Freud, and the Death Drive’ (2003). In both, Brassier proposes that the
extinction of all life in the cosmos, indicated by contemporary physi-
cists’ prediction of a ‘heat death’, has a transcendental force: it obliter-
ates all ‘humanist’ orientations of philosophical thought according to
a future horizon which might imbue it with some direction, meaning,
and value. If thought has no future, it is as if everything is dead already.
Faced with the prospect of future obliteration, no matter how distant,
nothing will ultimately have made any difference, so nothing we do
or think now makes any difference either. Brassier construes this as a
trauma on the cosmic scale which mirrors the aboriginal trauma of
organic individuation in Freud. Such a thought wipes away all horizons
(understood as orientations for thought), not just the horizon of God, or
the terrestrial horizon (Nietzsche’s injunction to ‘Be true to the Earth’),
but the cosmic horizon as well. Brassier’s question here is, can thought
go on without a horizon? Phrased another way, the question is: can
thought think its own death? This dramatizes the problem of the possi-
bility of realist thought, beyond the correlation, since it is equivalent to
asking, can thought think that which exists outside, beyond, or without
thought itself?
In the ‘Solar Catastrophe’ essay, Brassier maintains Laruelle’s distinc-
tion between philosophical and non-philosophical thinking,10 and spec-
ifies that it is philosophical thought which is motivated by the trauma of
the death drive, and which he asserts cannot go on without a horizon.
He writes: ‘I believe it cannot and can only continue to oscillate –
perhaps indefinitely – between two possibilities: the claim that there is a
horizon of all horizons, if not the earth then some other candidate, and
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

the claim that we can keep changing horizons indefinitely’ (2003: 429).
However, drawing heavily on (largely unexplained) Laruellean concepts,
he asserts that non-philosophical thought can bind the trauma of death –
‘consummate rather than obviate the death-drive’ (2003: 429) – and thus
continue without need of a horizon. Brassier specifies that this means
that thought effectuates a non-human subject of the death drive, which
he calls the ‘subject-(of)-death’ (428–29).
In the later Nihil Unbound, however, Brassier criticizes Laruelle’s
distinction between philosophy and non-philosophy,11 with the impli-
cation that such a distinction can no longer characterize his conclu-
sion. It is still philosophical thought which is described as being driven
by the motive force of the death drive in its compulsion to repeat, but
constitutive inability to bind, the aboriginal trauma of death. Yet it is
 Nonhuman Life 33

also then simply philosophical thought which, it is proposed, is able to

successfully bind this trauma. What happens when this binding takes
place? Brassier writes: ‘In becoming equal to it, philosophy achieves a
binding of extinction, through which the will to know is finally rendered
commensurate with the in-itself’ (2007: 239). Yet this is only possible,
he concludes, if the subject of philosophy recognizes that he or she is
already dead, and philosophy itself is the organon of extinction. The
equivocation here, it seems, is this: the motive of thought, its attempt to
become equal to the in-itself (the real), is defined as the inability to bind
trauma, yet the conclusion of speculative realist thought is specified as
a successful binding, in which thought ‘is finally rendered commensurate
with the in-itself’. Now Brassier specifies this as an adequation without
correspondence between the objective reality of extinction and the subjec-
tive knowledge of the trauma to which it gives rise (2007: 239), yet this
would seem to constitute the binding of trauma, obviating the motive
for thought itself. Thus, in achieving its aim, it seems that Brassier’s
speculative realism, far from invigorating thought, ultimately voids it of
all motivating and animating force.
Considered from the perspective of the problem of nihilism as it has
been thought in the philosophical tradition, Brassier’s project appears
radically under-determined. It is not at all clear that nihilism, under-
stood as the feeling or judgment that existence is meaningless, neces-
sarily follows from objective realism, nor from the destruction of the
manifest image of man, nor from the ‘cosmic nihilism’ instituted by
solar catastrophe. In fact, this is radically challenged by the attitudes of
various ancient philosophers of ‘wisdom’, as well as more recent philos-
ophers. For Pyrrho of Elis, for example, Skeptical philosophy involves
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

so radically altering our view of ourselves and our way of life that it
involves ‘stripping off man completely, or liberating oneself entirely
from the human point of view’ (Hadot 1995: 112–113), and for Stoics
and Epicureans a kind of ‘cosmic consciousness’ is embraced for its ther-
apeutic value: seeing the meaninglessness of human life from a cosmic
scale liberates us from our trivial day-to-day worries and brings peace
of mind. Second, as Brassier acknowledges in passing (2007: xi), the
earliest philosophical use of the term ‘nihilism’ is typically identified as
Jacobi’s ‘Letter to Fichte’, in which he insists that nihilism follows from
a radical subjective idealism (in which the Ego can know nothing but
itself and its own ideas). There is nothing a priori more nihilistic about
objective realism than about subjective idealism. It is interesting to
note, too, that Spengler embraces a cosmic nihilism similar to Brassier’s,
 34 Ashley Woodward

yet manages to integrate it with his life-philosophical humanism. He

writes:

Intrinsically it is a matter of no importance what is the destiny, among

the swarms of the ‘eternal’ stars, of this small planet that pursues its
course somewhere in infinite space for a little time; still less impor-
tant what moves for a couple of instants upon its surface. But each
and every one of us, intrinsically a null, is for an unnamably brief
moment a lifetime cast into that whirling universe. And for us there-
fore this world-in-little, this ‘world-history’, is something of supreme
importance. (1976: 11)

Nihilism, as Nietzsche insists, is ambiguous. It is a historically contingent

matter that ‘the disenchantment of the world’ has evolved nihilistic
consequences as a result of Enlightenment rationalism (and objective
realism as one manifestation of that). Specifically, it would seem to have
such consequences in relation to the Christian worldview, the collapse
of which is the focus of Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism as a contempo-
rary malaise. In short, contra Brassier, ‘meaning’ or significance, under-
stood in an existential sense, is necessarily tied neither to the manifest
image of man, nor to some kind of subjectivism. Rather, the really inter-
esting problems of philosophy surrounding nihilism are those which
have been pursued by philosophers such as Deleuze, who have tried
to rethink ‘meaning’ under the conditions which follow from ‘disen-
chanting’ science; to think the possibility of enchantment without disa-
vowing the Enlightenment disenchantment of the world; to follow the
luminous traces of life into nonhuman regions.
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

Nonhuman life: Deleuze

Despite the problems I have outlined above, there is a sense in which

Brassier’s nihilist book is invigorating. Yet this invigorating force is
better explained by Deleuze’s vitalism than in Brassier’s own terms.
Throughout his work, Deleuze repeatedly offered surprising interpreta-
tions of artists and writers whose works were typically seen as sick or
degenerate, or as representing pessimistic interpretations of life (Sacher-
Masoch, Artaud, Kafka, and so on). Part of Deleuze’s genius was to offer
a speculative metaphysical explanation for why we can experience such
works as the heightening of the feeling of life, rather than the reverse. It is
this same effect which allows us to understand the invigorating power of
Brassier’s Nihil Unbound. The clearest explanation of this effect is found
 Nonhuman Life 35

in Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon. Here he notes a useful distinction

that Bacon makes in one of the published interviews between cerebral
pessimism and nervous optimism. Bacon explains that ‘[o]ne’s basic nature
is totally without hope, and yet one’s nervous system is made out of
optimistic stuff’. And in the same passage: ‘If life excites you, its oppo-
site, like a shadow, death, must excite you’ (in Sylvester 1987: 78, quoted
in Deleuze 2003: 181, note 6).
This distinction allows Deleuze to develop his argument for a vitalism
underlying Francis Bacon’s painting. Moreover, it responds in a key way
to the Nietzschean problem of nihilism understood as a distinction
between the intelligible and the sensible, with the former privileged over
and devaluing the latter. It is significant that Brassier understands ‘the
human’, in line with Sellars’ manifest image, as defined by the concept
of a person as possessing rational purposive agency (Brassier 2007: 6).
Deleuze’s way of responding to nihilism through a deployment of a
nonhuman conception of life takes the side of the sensible by plunging
into bodily forces and sensations, escaping the overtly rationalist ‘mani-
fest image of man’.
As is of course well known, Bacon’s work has typically been given a
‘pessimistic’ interpretation: his distorted figures are damaged, broken,
traumatized; he paints the horrors of life. Yet Deleuze challenges this,
presenting Bacon as a vitalist painter who, far from inspiring us with
nihilistic judgments against life, intensifies it:

the horror of life becomes a very pure and very intense life. ‘Life is
frightening,’ said Cézanne, but in this cry he had already given voice
to all the joys of line and color. Painting transmutes this cerebral
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

pessimism into nervous optimism (2003: 52).

The key to understanding this move is precisely that aspect of Deleuze’s

philosophy which concerns us directly here: his understanding of life as
a force which is primarily, and perhaps fundamentally, nonhuman and
nonorganic.
‘Life’ is deployed in Deleuze’s early works on Bergson and Nietzsche
by effectively showing that an answer to the Nietzschean problem of
nihilism is to be found in the Bergsonian notion of duration. Deleuze
understands nihilism as a judgment against life which denies difference
in its modalities as multiplicity and becoming.12 The metaphysical tradi-
tion has perpetuated this nihilism through concepts which deny differ-
ence: unity and being. Deleuze finds in Bergson an explanation of how
notions of unity and being emerge from a more fundamental multiplicity
 36 Ashley Woodward

and becoming, act to nihilistically deny them, yet may be transformed

by an affirmation of what they deny. This rests on the distinction in
Bergson between the fundamental metaphysical understanding of time
understood as a changing succession of qualitatively different states, and
the tendency to spatialize these states by breaking them into discreet
units and measuring them according to fixed quantities. Two principles
of difference are associated with qualitative time and quantitative space:
the former involves an internal difference between pairs of forces which
act to determine their qualities, while external difference is that which is
understood to exist between constituted objects with fixed properties
(which are ‘spatialized’ and ‘quantified’). In short, Deleuze associates
Bergson’s pairs of forces with Nietzsche’s active and reactive, Bergson’s
internal difference with Nietzsche’s will to power (which he calls ‘the
differential and genetic element of forces’), and the eternal return with
the affirmation of duration as the fundamental dimension of reality.13
In this way, Deleuze finds a solution to Nietzsche’s problem of nihilism
in the Bergsonian understanding of reality as temporal becoming (dura-
tion). This does justice to at least one major aspect of Nietzsche’s under-
standing of the problem of nihilism, as stemming from the denial of the
full reality of change as part of life (for example, in Plato’s exaltation of
unchanging Eidos).
Deleuze develops these ideas further in Francis Bacon: The Logic of
Sensation, where life is understood as a force, or collection of forces,
which operates on a level below and preceding the forms of ‘the
human’ and ‘the organism’. These forms themselves, while expressions
of life, also serve to contain and dampen its intensity. Life is therefore
intensified by figural distortions of these forms, their unbinding or
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

deconstruction. If one understands life on an essentially human or

organic model – taking these images as the minimal, necessary condi-
tions for any form of life which might be affirmed as valuable – then
the kinds of distortions we see in Bacon’s figures will appear only as
trauma, damage, and the expression of pessimism and nihilism: life
disfigured.14
Deleuze, however, argues that there is a more fundamental level of the
body at which the forces of life operate, the body without organs (BwO).
Several passages in Francis Bacon give us perhaps the most illuminating
account in Deleuze’s oeuvre of this infamously elusive concept. This is the
intensive body, operating underneath and prior to the phenomenological
lived body. The BwO is traversed by intensive forces which are prior to
and give rise to the organism, that is, the organized body. The BwO is
not opposed to organs, but to the organism, that is, to a determinate
 Nonhuman Life 37

organization of determined organs: a particular arrangement of forces

in the body which imprisons life. This understanding of life is bound
up with Deleuze’s analysis of sensation. Sensation is produced when the
forces which flow over the body (at the nonorganic level) encounter an
external force. For Deleuze, sensation exceeds the bounds of the organic
body because it is registered at a level prior to the organization of the
organic body and its organs. Sensation is not representational (as it is,
for example, for Leibniz, for whom sensation is understood as a repre-
sentation more distinct than a bare perception but less distinct than a
conscious thought), but bodily. Deleuze describes it as having a spiritual
impetus – insofar as it moves away from organic representation – but
this is a spirituality of the body, inclining towards that which is prior to
or beneath the organic body, rather than what is thought to transcend
it (2003: 46–47).
Deleuze describes the BwO in terms of provisional organs, which are
determined through an encounter with an external force, producing a
sensation. The organism will change if the encountered force changes.
However, the BwO is finally determined, Deleuze tells us, by the tempo-
rary and provisional presence of determinate organs. That is, organs are
determined by the encounters of the forces flowing over the body and
external forces, but are subject to change with changing encounters
with other external forces. Of course, Deleuze does not have in mind
here the organs as they are physically defined and specified by empirical
science (which he calls the fixed organs), but the arrangements of force
we can feel ‘under’ the organic body, of the organization of the fixed
organs. Thus, the BwO is a flux of changing forces. These forces consti-
tute ‘a powerful nonorganic life’ (2003: 46). It is in this sense, then,
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

that Deleuze develops a notion of nonorganic life: life is understood as

the flow of those forces which operate transversally to the organism,
giving rise to it, flowing over and through it, impacting it from outside
and creating sensations understood as the differential meeting of forces
in the BwO and forces from the outside. These forces are basic physical
forces – ‘pressure, inertia, weight, attraction, gravitation, germination’
(2003: 57) – but also forces of desire, and of sensation understood as
both affect and percept (see Deleuze and Guattari 1994, chapter 7).
These forces, registered as sensation, are manifestations of life insofar as
they are countermovements to nihilism, understood as the devaluation
of the sensible by the intelligible, and of becoming by being.
As is well known, Deleuze asserts that the problem of art is not to
represent or invent forms, but to capture forces. For painting, this means
to render visible forces which are not themselves visible (2003: 56).
 38 Ashley Woodward

Deleuze proposes that the value of Bacon lies in his having proposed
one of the most important solutions to this problem in the history
of art, through his ‘figural distortions’. Yet it is not forces themselves
which are captured in painting, it is sensation – the way the force is
felt and registered. The body wrestles with the external force, and it is
this wrestling through which the sensation ‘raises itself to its condi-
tion’ (that is, the external force) and makes the invisible force visible.
In short, Bacon captures forces in painting through sensation: that
is, the meeting of the body’s own forces with external forces, which
are registered as forces of deformation in relation to the organic body.
So for Deleuze, representation captures life in organic forms, while
deformations – such as Bacon’s deformations of figures – express and
release the life which traverses the organic. It’s in this way that what
appears to others only as a pessimist negation can appear to Deleuze
as a vitalist affirmation, and he is able to explain why representa-
tions of horror and death can at the same time harbor and release
forces of life. If Brassier’s polemical invocations of nihilism, death, and
destruction excite, it is arguably because they disrupt the rigid forms of
thought into which even the most avant-garde concepts tend quickly
to congeal. Yet, exciting as they are, Brassier’s realist speculations fail
to explain why they excite as well as does the Deleuzean metaphysics
of life he rejects.
This chapter has been motivated by a conviction which is the oppo-
site of Brassier’s, and which animates the thought of Nietzsche and
Deleuze (among many others): namely, that the task of philosophy is
to affirm life and invent reasons for believing in this world (Deleuze
2005: 172). This is a task it must pursue by raising itself to the chal-
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

lenges of new developments in science, art, and philosophy itself. These

developments – and I agree to this extent with Brassier – legitimately
take place autonomously, without concern for their existential implica-
tions. Yet it is the nature of the existential vocation, which is at least one
important part of philosophy, to then reflect on such developments and
their implications for meaning and value. Deleuze’s remobilization of
the concept of ‘life’ is one strategy for doing this. The attempt to hunt
out and destroy every residue of vitalism is not only to mistake, but is
in bad faith with respect to the relations between thought and the vital.
Not only is there no necessary relation between objective realism and
the voiding of ‘life’, but the very passion for extinction operating at the
level of conceptual thought is a vital force operating at the level of the
nervous system. My aim in this chapter has been to liberate Deleuze’s
thought about life from this critique, in order to keep it in play as a
 Nonhuman Life 39

philosophical resource for combating contemporary nihilism. This is no

‘sop to the pathetic twinge of human self esteem’ (Brassier 2007: xi), but
a radically nonhuman force of invention.15

Notes
1. This is the thesis of Pierre Hadot (1995, 2002).
2. Notable proponents of vitalism included the embryologist Hans Driesch,
Wilhelm Ostwald, Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius and Hans Vaihinger.
3. Some major philosophers associated with the life-philosophy movement
include Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages, Oswald Spengler, Wilhelm Dilthey
and Theodor Lessing.
4. Despite the undeniable importance and influence of Deleuze’s Nietzsche
and Philosophy (1983), there were other important studies of Nietzsche (for
example, Bataille’s and Klossowski’s in France, Kaufmann’s in the United
States, Müller-Lauter’s in Germany) which would likely have ensured him a
renewed interest in any case. The same cannot be said of Bergson, for whom
Deleuze’s responsibility would appear to be sole in renewing attention to this
once most famous of French philosophers. See Deleuze 1991, 2004.
5. As Ansell-Pearson (1999) has argued, Bergson already in fact avoided the
narrow conception of vitalism which centers on organic life, and today few
would see the life-philosophical readings of Nietzsche as in any way decisive.
However, Deleuze has to be given credit for allowing us to see these elements
of their works.
6. In fact Spengler, like many of the life-philosophers, had a difficult relation-
ship with the National Socialist Party and the proximity of his work to Nazi
ideology can only adequately be understood if its dissonances with Nazism,
as well as resonances, are taken into consideration.
7. Spengler writes: ‘Technics in man’s life is conscious, arbitrary, alterable,
personal, inventive. It is learned and improved. Man has become the creator of
his tactics of living – that is his grandeur and his doom. And the inner form
of this creativeness we call culture – to be cultured, to cultivate, to suffer from
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

culture. The man’s creations are the expression of this being in personal form’
(1976: 18).
8. Also of note are Eugene Thacker’s After Life (2010) and the conference To Have
Done with Life: Vitalism and Antivitalism in Contemporary Philosophy, Zagreb,
June 17–19, 2011 (http://donewithlife.mi2.hr).
9. This might appear question-begging insofar as it relies on a category – value –
which Brassier seeks to disqualify (especially if understood as Heidegger does,
as necessarily implying a positing by a subject). Yet, as I am suggesting here,
we could pose the question in another way simply by asking if his project
of endorsing nihilism can adequately ground itself – that is, justify itself in
its own terms. Moreover, this argument is not simply a version of Patricia
Churchland’s ‘bad vitalist argument’ (Brassier 2007: 17), since the claim for
‘invigoration’ is not an assumption – it is Brassier’s own claim.
10. Laruelle contends that all philosophy is structured by a ‘decision’ to posit a
divide between immanence (the real) and transcendence (thought), and then
to mix or synthesize immanence and transcendence in philosophical concepts,
 40 Ashley Woodward

which aim to think the real, to capture it in representations. For Laruelle, this
is an ‘idealist pretension’ insofar as philosophy imagines it can ‘at least co-de-
termine the Real’ (1999: 139). By contrast, non-philosophy begins with the
radical immanence of the real (the One), and aims to let thought be determined
by it, to think from the real with a procedure Laruelle calls ‘vision-in-One’.
Non-philosophy continues to use philosophy as ‘material’, but aims to divest
it of all transcendence and of the pretension to represent the real in concepts
which synthesize transcendence and immanence. Determining exactly how
such a non-philosophical thinking is possible is the object of Laruelle’s prolific
conceptual and terminological inventions, and frequent revisions.
11. Brassier argues that, like Heidegger’s reduction of the entire history of philos-
ophy to a single essence, ‘Laruelle has conflated the critique of a certain kind
of philosophizing with a critique of philosophy tout court’ (2007: 121).
12. Deleuze writes: ‘What nihilism condemns and tries to deny is not so much
Being, for we have known for some time that Being resembles Nothingness
like a brother. It is, rather, multiplicity; it is, rather, becoming. Nihilism
considers becoming as something that must atone and must be reabsorbed
into Being, and the multiple as something unjust that must be judged and
reabsorbed into the One. Becoming and multiplicity are guilty – such is the
first and the last word of nihilism’ (2001: 84).
13. These associations have convincingly been argued by Giovanna Borradori
(1999 and 2001). She underlines the significance of Deleuze’s early essay
‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’ (2004), as well as Bergsonism (1991) and
Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983).
14. Arguably, such a view of life, indexed on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological
description of the lived body, is what explains Paul Virilio’s inability to see
twentieth century avant-garde art as anything but the traumatic symptom of
the century that witnessed the Holocaust (Virilio 2006).
15. I have argued elsewhere (Woodward 2013) that Deleuze fails to provide
the conceptual resources for successfully overcoming nihilism, a suspect aim
in any case. Yet the claim that there are useful resources in his work for
confronting, combating, or negotiating nihilism is a different matter entirely,
and supported by my previous work.
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

Works cited
Ansell-Pearson, Kieth (1999) Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze
(London and New York: Routledge).
Borradori, Giovanna (1999) ‘On the Presence of Bergson in Deleuze’s Nietzsche’,
Philosophy Today 43: 40–145.
—— (2001) ‘The Temporalization of Difference: Reflections on Deleuze’s
Interpretation of Bergson’, Continental Philosophy Review 34: 1–20.
Brassier, Ray (2003) ‘Solar Catastrophe: Lyotard, Freud, and the Death Drive’,
Philosophy Today, 47(4) (Winter 2003): 421–430.
Brassier, Ray (2007) Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Houndmills,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Deleuze, Gilles (1983) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London:
Athlone).
 Nonhuman Life 41

—— (1991) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New

York: Zone Books).
—— (2001) ‘Nietzsche’, trans. Anne Boyman in Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life
(New York: Zone).
—— (2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London
and New York: Continuum).
—— (2004) ‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’, trans. Michael Taormina, in
Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e)), 32–51.
—— (2005) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(London and New York: Continuum).
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press).
Freud, Sigmund (2001) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, ‘Group Psychology’, and Other
Works, ed. James Strachey. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 18. (London: Vintage).
Gaiger, Jason (1998), ‘Lebensphilosophie’, in The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, vol. 5, ed., E. Craig (London: Routledge).
Hadot, Pierre (1995) Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford:
Blackwell).
—— (2002) What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press).
Laruelle, François (1999) ‘A Summary of Non-Philosophy’, trans. Ray Brassier.
Pli 8: 138–148.
Meillassoux, Quentin (2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency,
trans. Ray Brassier (London and New York: Continuum).
Schnädelbach, Herbert (1984) Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933, trans.
E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Sellars, Wilfrid (1963) ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’, in Science,
Perception and Reality, ed. Robert Colodny (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul).
Spengler, Oswald [1918] (1932) The Decline of the West, trans. C. F. Atkinson
(London: Allen & Unwin).
Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.

—— [1931] (1976) Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, trans.

Charles Francis Atkinson (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press).
Sylvester, David (1987) The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962–
1979, 3rd edn. (New York: Thames & Hudson).
Thacker, Eugene (2010) After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Virilio, Paul (2006) Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose (London and New York:
Continuum).
Woodward, Ashley (2013) ‘Deleuze, Nietzsche, and the Overcoming of Nihilism,’
Continental Philosophy Review 46(1): 115–147.