When you pass over to the country of the Dead, you also leave behind your symbolic vestments and investments. In some perverse sense, you enter the human community. This is one point of intersection between philosophers and the Dead. If the Dead no longer have anything at stake in the social order – pragmatic interests, concerns about status, symbolic and actual capital, then this should also be the position of the philosopher. For the philosopher is or should be someone who has removed himself, albeit not entirely, from the symbolic community of which he or she had been part. Its laws, habitual practices, its customs masked as nature. Deleuze again [on Spinoza]:
[The] full meaning of the philosopher’s solitude becomes apparent. He cannot integrate into any milieu; he is not suited to any of them.The philosopher can reside in various states, he can frequent various milieus, but he does so in the manner of a hermit, a shadow, a traveller, or boarding house lodger.
He or she is a kind of supernumerary figure.
What is called life is always, of course, implicated in a cultural and social order. Life cannot, or except at a great price, flourish or express itself outside the codes and conditions of this cultural and social order. Nonetheless, life is never synonymous with those codes and conditions. There is always a surplus, a surplus vitality. Perhaps, then, it is this surplus which passes over into the country of the Dead, when the symbolic integuments are shed. Perhaps it is this surplus to which the philosopher - the Deleuzian philosopher - is also attuned.
Mark Bowles, 'The Dead and Philosophy' at the reborn Charlotte Street