“Immanence: A Life…”: An Educational Formula?

Abstract

Shortly before his death, Gilles Deleuze penned the rather enigmatic essay titled “Immanence: A Life...,” which became a kind of philosophical riddle. One of the most compelling attempts to come to terms with this riddle can be found in Giorgio Agamben’s essay titled “Absolute Immanence,”1 in which Agamben compares and contrasts Deleuze’s work with Michel Foucault’s “Life: Experience and Science.” Key to Agamben’s reading of these two texts is the philosophically provocative use of punctuation, and, in particular, the colon and the ellipsis. Indeed, Agamben immediately draws the reader’s attention to the peculiar use of punctuation in Deleuze’s title as the key to the riddle of life that both Deleuze and Foucault (in their unique ways) confronted before their respective deaths. Extending and in some sense intensifying the central claims about the relationship between life and immanence found in the concluding gestures of the two quintessential French theorists of the twentieth century, Agamben creates a rich ontology of the punctuation mark as a dislocating move in the history of thought — what might be referred to as a “punctology.”