Formulating God: The Ongoing Place of Theology in the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze

Abstract

In spite of common assumptions to the contrary, the debt to religion found in Deleuze's philosophy is undeniable when one considers his use of the concept of univocity, which he takes primarily from Duns Scotus and finds at work in Spinoza. It seems to be generally accepted, however, that this concept is abandoned in Deleuze's later career along with many of the religious overtones that necessarily accompanied this concept in his earlier work. Given that the general doxa around Deleuze is that God's only place in Deleuze's latter work is as the source of judgements we must resist (an interpretation that owes as much to Nietzsche as to Artaud), this is, perhaps, understandable.  However, this doxa is not fair to the extent of the debt Deleuze owes to theology so, whilst Deleuze scholarship has recently turned its attention to the religious underpinnings of much of Deleuze's thought, in this paper we wish not only to retrace these theological antecedents but to also examine the ways in which a specific concept that is rooted in philosophical theology is unpacked in the very genesis of Deleuze's own thought. In doing this, we will ascertain the extent to which Scotus' conception of univocal predication can be said to infuse Deleuze's entire philosophical project, rather than just a specific portion of it, and how, then, God always inhabits the Deleuzean system even after Deleuze has forsaken an explicitly theological vocabulary.

Notes

¹ Goodchild glosses a similar idea in Deleuze, ‘As in Hume, the idea of God is no longer regarded as an object of belief but as a transcendental principle for the constitution of belief as such’ (2011: 145).

² Barber also similarly invokes this common misconception that Deleuze's ‘thought remains indifferent to the question of religion’ only to refute this claim by saying that ‘while the intuition that Deleuze stands apart from these [theological] debates is correct, I do not think it follows that Deleuze has nothing to say about religion’, instead to ‘consider the distinct … proposition that Deleuze's philosophy does not speak about religion because his philosophy is already religious’ (2010: 38).

³ See the recent special edition of SubStance on the topic of ‘Spiritual Politics After Deleuze’ (Delpech-Ramey and Harris 2010) and in particular articles by Justaert (2010) and Smith (2010).

⁴ We should note that for Goodchild, Deleuze's claim that Spinoza draws heavily on Duns Scotus' concept is ‘not entirely persuasive’ (2011: 153).

⁵ It should be noted that even when recent scholarship, such as Thomas Nail's ‘Expression, Immanence and Constructivism’ (2008), traces Deleuze's use of a Spinozist immanent causality from Expressionism in Philosophy, through Difference and Repetition and on to A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?, the theological weight of this idea still seems to drop out of sight.

⁶ Rather than replay the comprehensive account of this creative power at work on the history of theology through his philosophical interlocutors, a task already carried out by Goodchild and others, in this paper we will examine the ways in which a specific concept that is rooted in philosophy and imported into theology is unpacked in the very genesis of Deleuze's own thought.

⁷ With the transformation exacted upon Being by this Nietzschean moment we should, when considering A Thousand Plateaus, remind ourselves that the double expressivity of attribution is not itself a concept but the logical function by which the concept of immanent causation is made operative. By the same token, double articulation is not itself a concept. Double articulation is the operation that allows us to think about the productivity and evolution of the world such that its operations are eternal (or, to use a Nietzschean term dear to Deleuze, untimely), self-sustaining, and immanent only to itself. In both cases we see a dual-sided operation, which simultaneously generates the actual world and its conditions of existence. And in both cases we see an operation that Deleuze wants to employ to exhaustively account for everything that exists.

⁸ Formal and modal distinctions are real, and numerical distinctions in that real distinctions are never numerical and numerical distinctions are never real (Deleuze 1994: 40). Of course, there is no talk of formal distinction in the Ethics. However, Spinoza does talk about real distinction and Deleuze takes these terms – real and formal – to be synonymous. According to Deleuze, Spinoza uses the phrase ‘real distinction’ because Descartes stripped it of the cumbersome theological baggage that would have accompanied talk of formal distinction in the seventeenth century.

⁹ Following convention, we have used the following abbreviations in referring to Spinoza's Ethics: Roman numeral = Book of the Ethics; P = Proposition; D = Definition; S = Scholium.

¹⁰ For an excellent explanation of how Deleuze elaborates this argument relative to the sense and object of a proposition, see Durie 2002: 173–9.

¹¹ In his earlier work on Spinoza, Deleuze uses the definite and not indefinite article in relation to the concept of the whole since to do otherwise would be in violation of Spinoza's thought in which there can only be one substance. The introduction of the indefinite article designating the possibility of multiple substances, therefore, signals one of the ways in which Spinoza's thought is placed on a line of flight in the becoming of Deleuze's own philosophy.

¹² ‘A coming to terms, or arrangement of a dispute, by concessions on both sides; partial surrender of one's position, for the sake of coming to terms; the concession or terms offered by either side’ (OED).

¹³ It is this extreme care with the thought of others that renders particularly problematic Deleuze's notorious description of philosophy as buggery. In a review of Peter Hallward's book Out of This World, Steven Shaviro (2007) makes a similar point when he notes that this characterisation of Deleuze's engagement with the history of philosophy as ‘approaching philosophers from behind’ and giving them ‘a monstrous child’ tends to obscure more than it explains. For us, what is obscured is precisely the sensitivity of Deleuze's engagement with his predecessors. Indeed, this description – enculage – which is only ever intended as a backhanded response to an arrogant critic, has too often been cited to support the assumption that Deleuze is something of a ventriloquist who puts his own ideas in others' mouths. As should be clear by now, the relation of compromise between Deleuze and his others is rather one of reciprocal exchange or becoming, which is to say that his philosophical project is profoundly collaborative and succeeds only insofar as the history of philosophy allows it to succeed.

¹⁴ We are here close to Goodchild who writes ‘While Deleuze may have discounted a moral, transcendent, creator God, he makes divinity into a power of affirmation and creativity immanent to life itself. The whole of existence comes to seem inspired’ (2011: 163).