There are many ways to characterize the point at which a space-time configuration becomes alive. From one side of the dialectic, life involves maintaining a space-time configuration and death is its dissolution. From the other side, life is spacetime flexibility and death is its rigidity. In either case, death is the destruction of spacetime continuity. Space-time subjects die three deaths: they die first from space-time itself, they die again upon impact, and they die again in free fall.

We begin with a definition of motion based on the mutual indifference of space and time (260). The indifference of space is time. There is nothing about any point in space that determines the content of the points around it. Therefore, the spatial point is indifferent to where one moves in the next temporal moment. Over time, any concrete place will become ‘‘a now which has been’’(ibid.). Each place is therefore ‘‘external to itself,’’insofar as the place of the now is always in ‘‘another place’’(261). In this way, the specificity of places depends on the possibility of motion. And since motion is the displacement of one place into another place, motion appears as mobile matter. Matter is not extrinsic to space and time, but is the movement of space-time itself. 4