Deleuze and Philosophy of Religion

 

            It is a challenging task to consider Deleuze and religion together. First, Deleuze did not write much about religion. And whenever he did, he often took a harsh stance on the subject. In Having Done with Judgement, Deleuze condemns religion for subjecting human to an unpayable debt and endless servitude in its doctrine of judgement.[1] Second, although he draws heavily from philosophers with strong interests in religion, such as Dun Scotus, Leibniz, and Spinoza, Deleuze never shows interest in their religious content. For instance, in his discussion on Spinoza, he is only concerned with the conceptual framework that Spinoza uses to ontologically prove the existence of God. Whether Spinoza’s argument for the existence of God is valid or invalid is of little concern to him.[2]

However, in recent years, his thoughts have been of great interest to both theist and atheist philosophers of religion, notably those found in the collection of essays, Deleuze and Religion (2001),[3] and Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Religion (2016).[4] This essay seeks to describe the significance of Deleuze’s thought in the philosophy of religion and offers a sketch on the major developments within this field.

 

Deleuze’s Philosophy of Immanence

            Since the early history of philosophy, the idea of transcendence has dominated the way we perceive our world. It first appears as the Platonic Forms in the early Greek, then as the transcendent God in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and then as human subjectivity since Descartes’ work in the Modern era.[5]

            However, Deleuze argues that transcendence is an illusion that has to be relinquished.[6] The idea of transcendence leads to two inevitable outcomes. First, it introduces a dichotomy to being. The idea of transcendence instils the existence of two types of being with an unpassable gap in between them: Forms, God or human subjectivity in opposition to the material world.[7] Second, it introduces a hierarchy between the two beings. Forms, God and human subjectivity are superior in value and power over the material world.[8] The result of this is that the world is degraded and constrained to the dominant power of the transcendent.

            According to Deleuze, Duns Scotus first provides the possibility of discarding the transcendent through the concept of the univocity of being.[9] Although Scotus proposes a univocal relation between the transcendent God and the world, they remain distinct to each other. The only thing that both God and the world share is a common, neutral and univocal being.[10]

Spinoza then makes great progress in developing this concept by identifying the univocal as a unique substance. He also proposes that the gap between the substance (God) and the modes (world) is mediated by the attributes that are common to both.[11] In Spinoza’s conception, a univocal being is no longer neutral. It becomes an affirmative object: a unique substance, a power of expression that expresses itself in the modes.

However, Deleuze recognizes the danger in Spinoza’s concept of the univocity of being. Although Spinoza proposes the ontology of immanence between the substance and the world, the substance remains as a single source of dependency on which all modes affirm their beings. This poses a risk that the transcendent may be smuggled back in.[12] For Deleuze, the pure ontology of immanence is accomplished only by Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return. Through this concept, being is not viewed as a single cause but as difference itself. What returns in each expression of the modes is not the unique identical substance but the differentiation of being.[13] All beings are affirmed as different from others. Thus, the univocity of being is no longer dependant on one substance acting as a transcendent cause. That is, univocity is no longer equal to identity. Rather, beings are said to be univocal in the sense of what they are immanently: difference.[14] Through the notion of univocity, being is now liberated from transcendence.

 

Reception of Deleuze in Philosophy of Religion

            Deleuze’s thoughts have been used by both theist and atheist philosophers of religion to develop oppositional ideas. The main question behind this division is: how do we make sense of Deleuze’s immanence in religion? Is it a theological concept explicating God? Or is it an absolute deterritorialization of God? In other words, is immanence a theological or a secular concept?[15]

            There are three basic strategies in responding to the aforementioned questions. On one end of the spectrum, a group of thinkers conceptualise immanence in atheistic terms. Two notable thinkers advocating such a view are Keith Ansell Pearson and LeRon Shults. Pearson argues that the task of thinking is to think of immanence in absolute terms: the non-human, the Earth. It is to restore our belief in this world and to give birth to new modes of co-existence with all forms of life within this world.[16] Shults similarly interprets Deleuze’s immanence in an atheistic term, as an iconoclastic theology that hammers the images of transcendence. It is called theology because the atheistic concepts are extracted from religion itself.[17] In its devotion to transcendence, religion is secretly producing atheistic tools that relinquishes itself. God or any form of transcendence is rejected in this absolute sense of immanence.

            On the other end of the spectrum, another group of thinkers take an opposite stance. They reject the idea of immanence to save God. These group of thinkers are mainly confessional theologians that operate within a specific religious tradition. Christopher ben Simpson and Catherine Pickstock are the representative figures in this strand of thought. On the one hand, Simpson appropriates Deleuze’s concepts to give new perspectives to traditional Christian doctrines, such as the Trinity and Salvation.[18] On the other hand, Pickstock utilizes Deleuze to investigate the religious sensibility within modern music, specifically the music of Olivier Messiaen.[19] Although they use various aspects of Deleuze’s concepts to explicate their religious doctrines, they ultimately reject Deleuze due to the absence of transcendence in his work.

For the third group of thinkers, the problem is not to discard transcendence in favour of the immanence or vice versa, but to see both ideas as indifferent to the supposed opposition of theism and atheism. “The question of God is what has become impossible, a matter of indifference.”[20] For them, the central task is to construct new religious discourses that break the opposition between religion and the secular by renaming God immanently,[21] such as life in Philip Goodchild’s thinking life,[22] creativity in Catherine Keller’s relational cosmology,[23] and freedom or potentiality in Clayton Crockett’s radical political theology.[24] Although some have criticized the attempts of blurring the line between religion and the secular, such as John Milbank[25] and Conor Cunningham,[26] Goodchild, Keller and Crockett undoubtedly represent the main voices in this field and have evoked creative discussions on various topics, especially on epistemology, ontology and politics.

 

An Epistemological Quest: What Does It Mean to Think?

            Goodchild is one of the earliest thinkers to explore the spiritual elements in Deleuze’s thought. Traditionally, the task of thinking is to appeal to transcendent forms or God for realizing a meaningful life in the world. In the name of transcendence, life is subjugated to the higher demands of thought.[27] However, with the absence of transcendence in the world of immanence, there is no higher value to be fulfilled in life. The task of thinking is no longer to search for the knowledge of perfection. Life is no longer subjugated to thought. Instead, thought is thrown into life.[28] It is the forces of life that shape our thoughts and conducts. Thus, for Goodchild, philosophy is a spiritual exercise in pursuing a way of life that gives birth to new and liberating thought: it is a spiritual politics.[29] If it was God previously that impels the mind towards God himself, in Goodchild’s reworking, it is now life that takes over the role of God.[30] Kristien Justaert and Joshua Ramey similarly affirm that Deleuze’s immanence is “a practical way of life in which thinking and being are completely intertwined.”[31] In other words, there is an implicit mixture of rationality and spirituality in thought.

Secondly, Goodchild notices that the awakening of thought in Deleuze is a secret and mysterious event that changes one’s capacity to see and think.[32] Joshua Ramey concurs and claims that Deleuze’s thought is esoteric and has its root in the Hermetic tradition.[33] For both Ramey and Goodchild, Deleuze’s philosophy is a call for a renewed conception of thought coupled with its spirituality, and a new vision on the interweaving of spiritual and material forces in life. [34]

 

An Ontological Quest: What is Material?

            Drew University has been an important base in exploring the nature of the material world through publications and annual colloquia, such as ‘Apophatic Bodies’ (2006) and ‘Entangled World’ (2017).[35] One of the main figures in this school is Catherine Keller, who seeks to construct a renewed cosmology that embraces the mystical dimension of the material by synthesizing Whitehead and Deleuze.

            In Face of the Deep, Keller argues that the Bible does not advocate the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Instead, it is a creation out of chaos, out of the mystical depth of tehom.[36] Using Deleuze’s concept of the fold, creation is defined as a process of continuous folding and unfolding of the immanent world.[37] In Cloud of the Impossible, Keller explicates further her tehomic theology through quantum physics. Quantum entanglement (or apophatic entanglement in Keller’s term) affirms that all materials are distinct and yet inseparable: a change in one particle instantaneously affects the state of another particle, no matter how far apart the two are.[38] In Deleuze’s words, the world is like a rhizome entangling all elements of the world. What is interesting for Keller is that this quantum relation that materializes in the world is also apophatically entangled as theology, as the unknowable divine embodied in the material.[39] The world can no longer be seen as distinct and separated but as a multiplicity entangled in a mysterious relation, as the embodiment of the infinite creativity of the divine in the universe.[40] Through the intertwining of mystical unknowing, material indeterminacy and ontological interdependency, Keller constructs a relational world that helps to engage environmental issues in a non-anthropocentric way.

            In his dialogue with Keller, Richard Kearney raises a critical challenge on the problem of evil.[41] Kearney argues that if Keller’s God is in all things, then God will have to be responsible for the evil. Keller responded to this charge by insisting that evil is a human activity. For Keller, no act is simply fully divine and hence, God can never be held in full responsibility. All action is an invitation to the divine, and in this invitation, there is always the possibility of evil that is entangled in the good as the risk of creativity.[42] For Keller, evil is the result of human creations that refuses the call of divine creation and chooses not to belong to God.[43]

           

A Political Quest: What is An Immanent Conception of Sovereignty?

            Many philosophers of religion have utilized Deleuze in their political thinking, such as Kristien Justaert,[44] Philip Goodchild,[45] and Clayton Crockett.[46] The main theme in Crockett’s works is to construct a radical political theology that breaks the opposition between religion and the secular. God was traditionally viewed as a source of power and sovereignty. However, with the absence of a transcendent God, there is a need to reconceptualize the concept of sovereignty as an immanent constitution of power.[47]

             In Radical Political Theology, Crockett appeals to Deleuze’s concept of virtuality to redefine sovereignty.[48] For Deleuze, the virtual is potentiality that is not yet actualized in the actual world, whereas the actual is potentiality that is actualized in the world in a determinate way. Through the pairing of the virtual and the actual, Deleuze subordinates the actual to the virtual and emphasizes the ontological priority of the virtual over the actual. The result of this is that the power relation between the State and the people is reversed. As the actualized form of power, the State is subjugated to the potential power of the people. The source of sovereign power is no longer located in transcendence but in the radical democracy of the people.

            Crockett then proceeds to the key question of democracy, which is the dissociation of sovereignty from law that leads to bio-politics. [49] In this, Crockett seeks to develop a law beyond law that is compatible with his radical democracy. Taking Deleuze’s idea that the event is generated by the unconscious, Crockett proposes a law beyond law that is inscribed into the people by the social unconscious. This unconscious law is beyond the manipulation of bio-politics.

           

Conclusion

            Deleuze offers valuable resources to the philosophy of religion after the death of the metaphysical God. His philosophy of immanence allows us to develop a religious discourse that suspends the discussion about the transcendent God and emphasizes the entwinement of spirituality in our existential life.

On the reception of Deleuze in philosophy of religion, it could be argued that both the theist who discards Deleuze for the absence of transcendence and the atheist who rejects the transcendent God in favour of the immanent world are incoherent with Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence. For Deleuze, immanence is not an ontological claim of being. “Philosophy must be ontology, but … there is only an ontology of sense.”[50] What concerns Deleuze is not the existence of an ontological being but the genesis of sense or event that creates a new hermeneutical horizon. Thus, an immanent philosophy of religion does not posit that the transcendent God does not exist. Instead, it is a hermeneutical claim that our religious discourse is always immanently situated within time and space.

The idea of immanence as an ontology of sense also renounces the accusation against immanent philosophy of religion as idolatry. The renaming of God does not replace God with another thing nor view God as a thing within the world. It merely seeks to reshape our understanding of the world through new hermeneutical perspectives.

Lastly, for theist thinkers, an immanent philosophy of religion should not imply an antagonistic relationship between confessional and non-confessional theology. An immanent philosophy of religion is not ahistorical, non-contextual or non-genealogical. It recognizes its root in the confessional tradition. If it is life that impels us to think and to think anew, as suggested by Goodchild, then our religious tradition as an important part of our life also unavoidably impels us to create a new hermeneutical horizon of the world. Thus, an immanent philosophy of religion sees both confessional and non-confessional theology as valuable resources to uncover new potentials of religion.

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[1] Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 126.

[2] Philip Goodchild, “Deleuze and Philosophy of Religion,” in Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, ed. Morny Joy (London: Springer, 2011), 139.

[3] Mary Bryden, ed., Deleuze and Religion (London: Routledge, 2001).

[4] Lindsay Powell-Jones and F. LeRon Shults, eds., Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Religion (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

[5] Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27–28.

[6] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 49.

[7] May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, 29.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 35.

[10] Ibid., 39.

[11] Ibid., 40.

[12] Philip Goodchild, “Why is Philosophy So Compromised with God?,” in Deleuze and Religion, ed. Mary Bryden (London: Routledge, 2001), 161.

[13] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 42.

[14] Ibid., 36.

[15] Goodchild, “Why is Philosophy So Compromised with God?,” 158.

[16] Keith Ansell Pearson, “Pure Reserve: Deleuze, Philosophy, and Immanence,” in Deleuze and Religion, ed. Mary Bryden (London: Routledge, 2001), 153–154.

[17] F. LeRon Shults, Iconoclastic Theology : Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 1–2.

[18] Christopher ben Simpson, Deleuze and Theology (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012); Christopher ben Simpson, “Divine Life: Difference, Becoming, and the Trinity, ” in Powell-Jones and Shults, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Religion, 59–73.

[19] Catherine Pickstock, “Messiaen and Deleuze: The Musico-Theological Critique of Modernism and Postmodernism,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 7–8 (2008): 173–199.

[20] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 108.

[21] Daniel Colucciello Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God : Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

[22] Philip Goodchild, “Philosophy as a Way of Life: Deleuze on Thinking and Money,” SubStance 39, no. 1 (2010): 24–37; Philip Goodchild, "Thinking and Life: On Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise," in Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life, eds. Katharine Sarah Moody and Steven Shakespeare (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 165–176.

[23] Catherine Keller and Anne Daniell, eds., Process and Difference : Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003); Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

[24] Clayton Crockett, “Post-Secular Spinoza: Deleuze, Negri and Radical Political Theology,” Analecta Hermeneutica 2 (2010): 1–13; Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology : Religion and Politics After Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

[25] John Milbank, “Materialism and Transcendence,” in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, Theology and the Political: The New Debate, eds. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

[26] Conor Cunningham, “The Difference of Theology and Some Philosophies of Nothing,” Modern Theology 17, no. 3 (2001): 289–312.

[27] Goodchild, “Thinking and Life: On Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise,” 166.

[28] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 189.

[29] Goodchild, “Philosophy as a Way of Life: Deleuze on Thinking and Money,” 27.

[30] Goodchild, “Deleuze and Philosophy of Religion,” 163.

[31] Kristien Justaert, Theology After Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2012), 23; Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze : Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 2.

[32] Goodchild, “Thinking and Life: On Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise,” 173.

[33] Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze : Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal, 3.

[34] Ibid., 8.

[35] Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, eds., Apophatic Bodies : Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Catherine Keller and Mary Jane Rubenstein, eds., Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

[36] Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, xvi–xvii.

[37] Ibid., 232.

[38] Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement, 128.

[39] Ibid., 7.

[40] In Keller’s idea of panentheism, the divine (theos) is the creativity that unfolds (en) the world (pan). It is embodied in the material as the creative repetition of difference itself.

[41] Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmermann, eds., Reimagining the Sacred : Richard Kearney Debates God with James Wood, Catherine Keller, Charles Taylor, Julia Kristeva, Gianni Vattimo, Simon Critchley, Jean-Luc Marion, John Caputo, David Tracey, Jens Zimmermann, and Merold Westphal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 47–75.

[42] Ibid., 48–49.

[43] Ibid., 56.

[44] Kristien Justaert, “Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Theology’ : A Liberation Theology or an Ontology for the Western Buddhist?,” Review of Philosophy and Theology of Fribourg 57, no. 1 (2010): 96–110; Kristien Justaert, “Liberation Theology: Deleuze and Althaus-Reid,” SubStance 39, no. 121 (2010): 154–164; Justaert, Theology After Deleuze.

[45] Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002); Philip Goodchild, The Theology of Money (London: SCM Press, 2007).

[46] Crockett, “Post-Secular Spinoza: Deleuze, Negri and Radical Political Theology”; Crockett, Radical Political Theology : Religion and Politics After Liberalism.

[47] Crockett, Radical Political Theology : Religion and Politics After Liberalism, 60–61.

[48] Ibid., 61.

[49] Ibid., 108–125.

[50] Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 15.