"It is very easy for us to die without ever having known … our life." – M. Proust
He sits on the sofa and looks at their wedding pictures. It was three years ago. Not even three years, he thinks. They both looked so happy. Drunk. Elegantly wasted, as they had been so many times before. And later. Everything was later for them, postponed. For nearly thirteen years they had been together. That’s a long time. At such an age, most kids would be baptized.
Was it too long?
Read the rest of my short story in Daedalus Magazine.
“For me, philosophy is a way of living and not an academic discipline that requires you to swallow a certain amount of information to pass. Most great novelists are philosophers. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said that literature in order to become philosophy must become fiction. I like that. It also shows that the distinction between philosophy and literature is rather new—perhaps stemming from Kant—but does it matter if Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, and all the others are classified as philosophers or writers?”
Read the rest of the interview in Under the Gum Tree.
In the twilight of Søren Kierkegaard’s life, he begins to question his own philosophical fundament. He did not plan this. Actually, he would prefer to avoid it. But it is happening. While lying for nearly five weeks at the Royal Frederiks Hospital certain images, memories, and ideas surface.
Some of these trouble him.
He inscribed himself at the hospital after suffering from a blackout in the middle of the day. The purpose for this inscription is not recovery. Although he is only forty-two years old, he knows that this is a last preparation for the inevitable fact of life: that it ends. Soon he will meet his only master: God.
What he didn’t expect were the questions now emerging.
Read the rest of the short story here
Who Killed Gilles Deleuze? is a novel about one man’s obsession with the purported suicide of a famous French philosopher.
When a young Danish man, who has just arrived in Barcelona, meets the Spanish writer Rodrigo, he becomes a witness to a four-day-long monologue about philosophy, identity, love, and life and its possible limits.
Rodrigo scrutinizes the suicide of Gilles Deleuze with as much passion as if his own future depended on it. For several years, he has devoted all his time and energy to solving this mysterious death, which he is convinced, is a murder. His own life has been on pause.
How can a life-affirming philosopher kill himself? How can a person who believed that each self is already a multiplicity kill himself without letting any self survive? Is there any part of Deleuze living on the run in hiding in the US?
The Spanish writer approaches this suicide with the methods of a detective elaborating different theories of who to blame and not blame, describing how the philosopher’s fall from his apartment could have happened; he casts doubt on the assumption that Deleuze killed himself due to illness.
The meeting between the young Danish man and Rodrigo takes place in the fabled streets of Barcelona, where Rodrigo draws on the Spanish city’s characteristics and history of political struggles to exemplify the enigma of Deleuze. After four days, Rodrigo disappears, leaving the young Danish man bewildered and with only one choice: to take on Rodrigo’s investigation as his own or risk becoming obsessed as well.
Who Killed Gilles Deleuze? is the young Danish man’s story of his meeting with Rodrigo, whose only reason for living was Deleuze, whose only reason for killing himself was not to die at all.
Who Killed Gilles Deleuze? is 86 pages long and written in Danish by Finn Janning. It was released on the 17th of June 2016. See here.
Or see my essay Happy Death of Gilles Deleuze.
FINN JANNING 