Introduction: The Event of Death

Let us start ‘Albumen B’ with two acts – two deaths, in fact. First, the day Seneca died. In 64 ce Seneca was caught up in the Pisonian conspiracy, which was ‘a plot to kill Nero and replace him with the ringleader, C. Calpurnius Piso’. Although Seneca was most likely not involved, since his nephew Lucan was, Nero thus took the opportunity to eliminate his old advisor once and for all, and so ordered Seneca to commit suicide. Rather than complain, Seneca affirmed his fate, found a blade, and cut an artery on his arm in order to bleed to death. But since he was old and frail his arteries were weak. Death would not be easy for Seneca. So he cut the arteries first on top of his legs and then behind his knees, yet even this did not kill him. Eventually, mirroring Socrates’ famous death scene, Seneca asked for the hemlock, revealing yet more Stoic perversion: hemlock was insufficient for death. Perhaps finally realising that willing was insufficient, Seneca gave himself over to others: ‘he was then lifted into a bath, suffocated by the vapour, and cremated without ceremony’. The second death is the suicide of Gilles Deleuze. On Saturday, 5 November 1995, after years of pain and suffering, Deleuze leapt from the window of his third-floor apartment on avenue Niel in Paris's seventeenth arrondissement. The effects of a lifelong respiratory illness, a tracheotomy, and repeated attacks of suffocation, which left him ‘chained like a dog’ to an oxygen machine, had exhausted Deleuze. In those last few months, he could barely speak, or even hold a pen. Defenestration was the evental form of his death.