Doris Lessing"s The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, published in 1982, is the fourth work of science fiction in her series Canopus in Argos: Archives. This novel depicts vividly how the residents of Planet 8 face death collectively. Reading death in the light of Lessing"s oeuvre, we are led to one important question: if, in Lessing"s early novels, she places emphasis on personal fate and death, one is left questioning why she depicts not only personal but also collective death in her later novels, such as The Making, even associating them with colonizing policy. This article investigates Lessing"s purpose in portraying death in The Making. I first explore how the Representatives encounter personal death and transform it into impersonal death, which crystallizes them into a new life-form, a cosmic life-form that connects them with other beings. Deleuze"s extension of Blanchot"s concept of impersonal death into that of "a life" as impersonal can help us understand how death serves as the conduit to impersonal life, forcing the Representatives to think anew and making possible a mystic vision of interconnected life. Next, I explore why Lessing envisions a cosmic life after death. What can this cosmic afterlife teach us? If impersonal deat&h implies the erasure of all the residents" individualities while making them into one collective life-form, will it become another dystopian unity, where differences are eliminated for the benefit of the whole? How can all the dying beings retain th&eir differences while converging into one unity? Deleuze"s concept of "duration" helps us understand the paradoxical relationship between a collective life-form (one) and individualities (differences) as well as how different beings are interconnecte&d in the virtual one and how, in this virtual field, differences are maximized rather than minimized or erased.
