AT THE END of his life, Deleuze maintains that only philosophy is truly in touch with the virtuality of the plane of immanence because it operates with concepts, which are made up of immaterial, pure events. If the plane of immanence is photonic, and as such both actual and virtual (the plane of immanence as the plane of consistency and vice versa), only philosophy can be witness to, or adequate to, the virtual aspect of the plane of immanence. Thought at the point-at-infinity: the virtual wave of thought. Philosophy at the moment of a-philosophy; the moment it creates diagrams of the plane of immanence in its aspect of pure, anonymous life and pure, anonymous consciousness. The moment a differentiating philosophy is born from indifference, but that trails this indifference behind. In 1995, two months before his death, Deleuze writes a short text, ‘Immanence: A Life’, which is published on 1 September. Deleuze dies on 4 November. Like ‘The Actual and the Virtual’, the text has the feel of both a testament and a legacy. Symptomatically, in the text Deleuze refers to two other late philosophies; those of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Maine de Biran. (See also Kerslake 2009: 257–64.) The text shares with ‘The Actual and the Virtual’ the stress on the notion of two anonymous multiplicities made up of actual and virtual elements respectively. While ‘The Actual and the Virtual’ stresses the creation of crystals, however, ‘Immanence: A Life’ stresses the complementary process of de-crystallization.

The text opens with a question that at first seems very uncommon for Deleuze: ‘What is a transcendental field?’ (PI: 25). Deleuze's answer involves a final philosophical reversal; perhaps his most radical one. The transcendental, Deleuze states ‘doesn't refer to an object or belong to a subject’ (25). Rather, it is ‘a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self’ (25).