Apoptosis and How to Begin

 “Apoptosis” is the term the Greeks used “to describe the ‘dropping off’ or ‘falling off’ of petals from flowers, or leaves from trees” (OED).    In modern usage, it is a medical term for “resolution, relaxation, or loosening of something.”  In biology, it refers to the “death of individual cells” (OED).  It is the manner in which a normal cell acts after it has served its purpose or in order to preserve the cellular order needed for healthy human life.  Natalie Angier, in Natural Obsessions, describes it as the process that occurs “when a cell essentially ‘decides’ to die for the good of the body around it, and initiates a sequence of molecular events to literally blow itself apart.”  Angier calls it a cell’s “suicide program” (xvi). 

I have chosen apoptosis as the title for this Digital English course blog.  It is a word of import from an aspect of my policy issue, which I have I not yet written about here—although my header image refers to it.  The word, its etymology, its metaphors, its relationship to the thing it defines, is just a title that I think will become relevant to apects of the task of this course: to create a philosophical concept for thought in image-dominated contemporary society, just as the Greeks created a new apparatus for thinking when they moved from an oral to a literate culture.  My own presence in this process of invention, on this blog, is what Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? call a “conceptual persona.” I will be part of the concept that I discover in this course in a fundamental way, through my proper name, as a sort of signatory of the values and influences in contemporary culture (and all the cultures that preceded it) that have shaped the way I feel and think in society.   My proper name is a “mask[] for other becomings and serve[s] only as [a] pseudonym[] for more secret singular identities” (Deleuze and Guattari 24) which will emerge in different ways, within and outside of my control, on this blog. 

According to Deleuze and Guattari, my concept already exists potentially.  It will have roots and associations that will partially or wholly spread back to the Greeks, and if I trace these forward or backward, to or from my moment in time or beyond, they will borrow, add to, or take away from components of concepts or whole concepts “signed” by other philosophers.  This stage of my concept is a space, a plane, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, of immanence.  This is/will be a space of invention and possibility (heuretics).  I think I’ve been here before, or close to it, differently, with Derrida, with Saussure, perhaps, with Spinoza, Kant, Heidegger,  Kierkegaard, Fichte, Schlegel, Benjamin and others.  Here, it is a starting point, though.  It is not a new beginning, but (potentially) a small part of a new stage in the history of thought.