Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, with its vigorous rejection of every appeal to the beyond, is often presumed to be indifferent to the concerns of religion. Daniel Barber shows that this is not the ...case. Addressing the intersection between Deleuze’s thought and the notion of religion, he proposes an alliance between immanence and the act of naming God. In doing so, he gives us a way out of the paralysing debate between religion and the secular. What matters is not to take one side or the other, but to create the new in this world.
To understand the making of Christianity, it is necessary to understand the problem to which its making was a solution—that is, the problem of establishing a community named Christianity, of ...determining how (or whether) a set of individuals named as Christian can constitute, or be constituted as, a community.4 This is to observe that a key problem faced by “early Christianity” (the term is already anachronistic) was whether Jews and Gentiles—or, more broadly speaking, a variety of “ethnicities,” indexed by the central difference between Jews and non-Jews—could belong to one community. ...when Christianity was faced with humans who failed to actualize or who deviated from their definitive ontological potentiality of properly belonging to Christian community, it was able to account for this failure or deviance by way of particularity. The enactment of damnation is not the delimitation of transit; it is the making absent of that which could support the possibility of transit.8 In view of this genealogical detour, the question of diaspora’s autonomy from the logic of transitivity gains precision: to assume such transitivity is to assume the establishment of—or the terms established by—Christianity; to articulate diaspora as intransitive demands nothing less than becoming adequate to, or acceding to, excommunication. Yet the obstacles and forms of domination that are thereby associated with Christianity do not simply arise with Christendom: while the actual power gained through Christendom makes these obstacles and forms of domination apparent, they are bound to a certain logic (LUP) that emerges as the very establishment of orthodox or standard Christianity (prior to the rise of Christendom).
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Along these lines, the failure of the secular to fulfill its claims concerns the division and concomitant gap between, on one hand, the claimed capacity of the secular to establish a condition of ...equality and, on the other, the evident perpetuation of inequality- that is, Western domination-in the name of the secular. The field of possibility that emerges between these divided-apart moments of no-longer and yet- to-be, of past and future, is the world toward which Deleuze calls and thereby directs belief.26 As object of belief, world-the world likewise named via Christianity and the secular-wards off (a belief bound to) the vertigo entailed by immanence, by the absence of any transcendent term of orientation (such as the world).
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Deleuze's immanence, though it is shorn of the referents of God, attributes, and modes, keeps faith with a Spinozist inspiration whereby existence (and this includes the possibilities of existence as ...well) turns on the reciprocal, mutually constitutive relation between an infinite power and the determinate expression of this world. ...Deleuze's attack on the true and the good belongs to a spiritual antagonism. The belief we are lacking is not one oriented around the true-good world—in fact, it is our investment in the true-good that has rendered us incapable of believing in this world. ...it is not a matter of "believing in another world, or in a transformed world" (172). ...when belief in this world denies the true-good world, it gives affection back to us.
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Immanence and Creation Barber, Daniel
Political theology : the journal of Christian Socialism,
20/3/6/, Volume:
10, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This essay investigates the claim, advanced by a number of contributors to Theology and the Political, that the potential for political transformation requires an analogical ontology. I argue that ...this is not the case, and that an ontology of immanence, as found primarily in the work of Gilles Deleuze, provides an alternative and superior paradigm for political transformation. This argument is advanced by examining the manner in which immanence enables a novel approach to creation. Such immanent creation is distinct in that it departs from analogy's dependence on the transcendent as well as from capitalism's dependence on communication.
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This paper addresses the capacity of François Laruelle's non-philosophy to evade the difficulties produced by the mediation of religion. Specifically, it looks at how religion is mediated through ...philosophy under the heading of "philosophy of religion.; While such a heading indicates a gesture seeking to unify what is divided ; namely philosophy and religion ; it actually depends upon and thus maintains this division. The philosophical mediation of religion amounts to the division produced by the thought of religion. Conjoining this claim to a brief genealogy of the concept of religion, I argue that the modern, secular gesture of philosophizing about religion continues a much longer tradition of religion's divisive mediation. What Laruelle's non-philosophy offers, I contend, is a means of escape from the conceptual architecture on which the mediation of religion depends. This is the case specifically insofar as he enables us to conceive a One that would be outside any divisive or mediatic relation to the many. Furthermore, the fact the Laruelle's thought makes use of (what gets named as) religious material enacts a refusal of the division between religion and philosophy. In this regard, however, I argue that his use of religious material still remains imbricated in the division between Christianity and Judaism. Hence, even as Laruelle escapes the conceptual divisions that enable the mediation of religion, his peculiar use of religious material leads him to redeploy divisions central to religion's genealogy.
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This paper takes up the Heideggerean question of difference. I argue that while Heidegger raises this question, his response to the question remains ambiguous and that this ambiguity pivots around ...the question of time. The bulk of the paper then looks at how Derrida and Deleuze respectively attempt to advance beyond Heidegger's ambiguity regarding the questions of difference and time. Derrida is able to demonstrate the manner in which time—as delay—is constitutive of any attempt to think difference. I argue, however, that his innovative articulation of “différance” maintains an extrinsic rather than intrinsic relation to difference in‐itself. To achieve an intrinsic relation, it is necessary to turn to the work of Deleuze, particularly to his discussion of “nonsense” and “singularity.”
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Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological ...problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity.
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