Abstract

This article examines the cases of Jahi McMath and Poe’s M. Valdemar to reconceptualize the idea of undeath from a Deleuzo–Guattarian perspective. It builds upon the ambiguity existing in defining a body in the state of ‘brain death’ after permanent loss of consciousness to analyze how the brain, as Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘partial object,’ facilitates the construction of the mind as a transcendent entity. Evaluated by the presence/lack of consciousness, this transcendent entity becomes the factor defining the health of a body on life-support. In combining aspects of medical science with theoretical abstraction, this article aims to change the negative conception of an ‘undead body’ as an abjection that disrupts the boundary between the binaries of life and death. Instead, it will re-evaluate such bodies as ‘undead assemblages’ that exist in liminal spaces of constant flux and possess the potential to be affected by the environment that sustains them. We will further explore how the minor identities of such bodies affect their treatment within the medical community and set off the process of becoming-minor and becoming-patient, as Jahi and Valdemar’s marginalized bodies transform into Deleuzian events that challenge the boundaries of life, death, and identity within medical and cultural systems.