De Beistegui- The Vertigo of Inmanence Deleuzes Spinozism

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THE VERTIGO OF IMMANENCE:

DELEUZE’S SPINOZISM

by

MIGUEL DE BEISTEGUI

University of Warwick/Università degli Studi di Milano

ABSTRACT

This paper is an attempt to identify the source of Deleuzian thought, that is, the“plane” or “image” from which it unfolds despite its many twists and turns. This, Ibelieve, is immanence . The thread of immanence appears most clearly in What Is Philosophy?but can be shown to have been at work from the very start. But immanence is not just the plane of Deleuzian thought. It is also, and above all, that of philosophy itselfespecially in its diff erence from religion and onto-theology. This in turn means thatfollowing Spinoza and his univocal ontology, Deleuzian thought can be seen as com-

pleting or realizing the conditions of philosophy itself.

Given the relatively recent nature of Deleuzian scholarship, we still

lack a unified understanding of the significance (and signification) of

that thought. We are still unsure as to what the name “Deleuze” stands

for and what place his thought occupies in the history of philosophy.

Judging by the ever-increasing number of publications devoted to it

this is a thought that is in the process of being canonized. There seems

to be little agreement, however, as to what exactly is entering the

canon. At the same time, and almost paradoxically, Deleuzian thought

seems to be facing a twofold danger. First, to the extent that its con-

ceptuality underwent a series of (often abrupt) changes—the neces-

sity of which Deleuze rarely felt the need or the desire to justify or

clarify—we can easily have the impression of a thought that lacks incoherence and direction. Second—and this only aggravates the first



fragmented nature of today’s epistemological field and of philosophy

itself. That being said, it cannot be a question of minimizing the

significance of the changes that thought underwent: after all, how com-

patible are Deleuze’s early insistence, say, in relation to Proust (1964),that thinking is interpretation, an activity of decoding of signs, and the

later insistence, say, in Capitalism and Schizophrenia , and even in the later

edition of Proust and Signs (1970), that thought has nothing to do with

interpretation but is essentially a process of production and creation?

Can we reconcile the image of the professor at the Sorbonne with

that of the professor at Vincennes, the historian of philosophy of the

early years with the anarcho-désirant of the 1970s? The greatest danger,

then, in the context of the fragmentation and division of Deleuze’s

thought, is one of finding oneself in the situation of having to adopt

one aspect or moment of his thought before having had a chance to

raise the question regarding its unity and inner consistency. This is

the question I wish to explore here, albeit schematically and pro-

grammatically.1

No doubt, it is a delicate task—extracting the consis-tency of a thought always is—made more complex by the extraordinary

diversity and versatility of the thought we are confronted with.

In what follows, I shall try to begin to understand something like

the necessity of Deleuze’s thought, something like that which, at the

most fundamental level, a level that can only remain partially clarified

by the thinker himself, motivates that thought, sets it into motion. I

shall try to identify something like an original impetus or a drivingforce that sustains all of Deleuze’s texts, one that can be identified

even behind the seemingly most abrupt and radical changes his thought

undergoes, behind the boldest innovations it adopts. I am seeking to

find, or perhaps only suggest, a way through a philosophy in its entirety.

Needless to say, this has nothing to do with an attempt to summarize

or synthesize that thought. It has everything to do, however, with the

possibility of extracting its inner coherence.

L t t t b ifi M i i t t t th

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is not to be mistaken for where (or when) that thought actually begins

Rather, it indicates the place from which it flows. It is, as such, always

difficult to locate, and especially so in the case of Deleuze, for rea-

sons that will become apparent. What I wish to do, then, is to askabout what, exactly, orients Deleuzian thought. It is a question o

direction. And if, as we shall see in some detail, following Deleuze’s

own conceptuality, I choose to refer to it as a “plane,” it is precisely

insofar as a plane defines not a surface or a volume, but a direction

or a manifold of directions. That which orients and guides a thought

does not lie only behind it. It is also ahead of it. To follow that thread

is not to carry out a historical, genealogical approach. It is not an

eff ort to trace a thought in its progressive emergence, to identify

influences and to follow their course. “What History grasps of the

event,” Deleuze writes, “is its eff ectuation in states of aff airs or in lived

experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency

its self-positing as a concept, escapes History.”2 Another way of describ-

ing my goal, then, would be to say that what I am seeking to iden-tify is the event of Deleuzian thought. And if Deleuze himself is indeed

at times and in certain ways a historian of philosophy, it is precisely

in the sense in which he is engaged in extracting the event or the

becoming that belongs to a given thought. My concern, then, will not

be that of the historian. In many ways, it will be more tentative and

less secure. Potentially, it is philosophically more fruitful. Taking my

clue in Deleuze’s later work, I will look back at his thought in itsentirety and formulate a hypothesis regarding its trajectory. Naturally

the hypothesis in question would need to be put to the test of a series

of close readings of Deleuze’s most significant texts—something that I

am not in a position to do here. Ultimately, though, it will be a ques-

tion of asking whether there is something like a singular philosophica

intuition, a single problematical horizon, behind the proliferation of con-

cepts with which we have come to associate his thought. In order to

id tif th f th ht it i t h t l it

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I

What is Philosophy? is a text in which uniquely and retrospectively

Deleuze tries to identify the driving force (the source) behind his thoughtas a whole. This is a text of maturity in the strongest and best sense

of the word, that is, a crucial testimony—a philosophical testament

almost—in which, among other things, Deleuze is concerned to iden-

tify the nature and ultimate significance of the enterprise he has been

involved in all his life. Besides the general tone of the text, which

remains as jolly and humorous as usual, besides its (still) experimen-

tal nature, there is a certain serenity, I would not be afraid to say acertain wisdom, that prevails. Most of all, though, this is a text that

has the virtue of isolating the thread that, I believe, runs through the

whole of his work. This is the thread of immanence. But, as we’re

about to see, this concept is complex and highly problematic. In fact,

we shall have to wonder whether it is a concept at all. We shall have

to wonder whether immanence can itself become an object of thought,

can be turned into something that, from its position of withdrawal and

presupposition, thought could hold up before itself and clarify completely

In a way, all I shall be doing here is to probe the ambiguous and

problematic nature of immanence as the project that philosophy in

general, and Deleuzian philosophy in particular, is made to stand for.

What is Philosophy? puts forward a thesis—now famous—according

to which philosophy is the creation of concepts. Philosophy, Deleuzeand Guattari tell us, begins with the creation of concepts. And con-

cepts, we are told, exist only insofar as they attempt to isolate and

solve specific problems. Philosophy is the art of posing the right prob-

lems and developing the concepts by means of which such problems

can be solved. In this respect, concepts are valuable only to the extent

that they allow us to designate specific problems, and not mere gen-

eralities. They must allow us to delimit and define situations that arethemselves singular. Nothing is—or should be—more concrete and

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as Kant thought, the a priori categories of a faculty of understanding

used in connection with a faculty of intuition.

Let me leave to one side this very brief account of the concept (we

shall return to it) and turn to another thesis of What is Philosophy? intro-duced immediately after the one I have just alluded to. This second

thesis stipulates that behind or beneath every set of concepts consti-

tuting a thought, there is something like an intuition, or a precon-

ceptual, prephilosophical understanding that orients that thought. Take

the example of Descartes’ cogito, which correctly, in Deleuze’s mind

has been understood as designating the first or founding concept of

his thought, if not of modern thought itself. That concept, along with

its various components (doubting, thinking, being), is nonetheless cre-

ated only with a view to making possible what is announced as the

ultimate project or plan of that thought, namely, to establish truth as

absolute certainty, to secure this new conception of truth and this new

point of departure for philosophy. An integral and crucial part of this

process involves the neutralization of all explicit objective presupposi-tions, which philosophy had taken for granted up until that point, such

as the definition of man as rational animal. But even this plan or fun-

damental aim, this project that can be distinguished as distinctly

Cartesian and that involves the elimination of all presuppositions, pre-

supposes something. Even this project of objective presuppositionless-

ness, which so much of modern philosophy up until Hegel will be

concerned to carry out, involves something like a subjective presupposi-tion, a prephilosophical understanding of what it means to think and

of thought’s (intimate and as it were natural) relation to truth. Chapter

3 of Di ff erence and Repetition refers to it as “the image of thought” and

is itself an attempt (one, I would argue, that was subsequently aban-

doned) to produce a thought “without” image.3 In the case of Descartes

the image in question is the presupposition according to which every-

one knows what thinking, being, and “I” mean, and the fact that we

thi ki thi t ll di d i li d t d t th ( h

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of Descartes is concerned, we should say that the cogito is at once the

first concept on the plane of objective presuppositionlessness, the absolute

and unquestionable point of departure for thought, and at the same

time, the result of a subjective presupposition regarding the image ofthought. This image is what indicates, always indirectly, obliquely, what

it means to think, to use thought, to orient oneself in thought.

We began by saying that philosophy is the creation of concepts,

that philosophical thought begins with that activity. We now need to

refine and nuance that statement, insofar as there always seems to be

something that precedes that activity, something of the order of an

image of thought, a preconceptual understanding of what it means to

think. In other words, there seems always to be something prephilo-

sophical at the heart of philosophy, and something that, furthermore,

signals the internal conditions of philosophy. If philosophy indeed begins

with the creation of concepts, the image of thought is where that

thought really originates . The image is what institutes that thought as

the thought that it is, with its concepts and notions. It designates thehorizon from which it thinks, and so something like its unthought. In

What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari refer to it as a plane ( plan )

In that respect, What is Philosophy? seems to mark a shift from a fun-

damental aspect of Di ff erence and Repetition insofar as Deleuze and Guattari

are now claiming that philosophy—including their own—can never

quite shake off or determine entirely its own image: a purely image-

less thought is but an illusion. Contrary to what Deleuze once thought,then, it would seem that thought cannot operate without a certain

image, an image that, furthermore, it cannot quite turn into a con-

cept. If philosophy proceeds by way of concepts, yet in such a way

that the horizon from which it proceeds is itself not a concept, but

indeed something like an image, does it not mean that non-philoso-

phy figures (quite literally) at the heart of philosophy? That the “purest”

of philosophers is always he whose thought is born of a non-philo-

hi l i i d th t hil h i t t ll i i ll i d ibl

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its own image, to approach it asymptotically, as it were. What it could

not hope to do, however, would be to produce the concept of its own

image. Concepts flow and follow from their image or plane, of which

there is no concept.The question, now, would be one of knowing which plane or image—

other than the one I have just alluded to and that runs through much

of the history of philosophy—belongs to Deleuzian thought. In addi-

tion, the question will also be one of knowing whether the source or

the plane of Deleuzian thought coincides with that of philosophy itself

philosophy as such (as opposed to, say, religion). Is there something like

THE plane of philosophy—a plane that, in his own way, Deleuze

would have helped to complete? Does philosophy (finally) reach home

when reaching the shores of immanence?

The French word plan can be heard in many ways—ways that

Deleuze mobilizes more or less explicitly. At this early stage and in a

preliminary, preparatory way, let me simply say that it can suggest

something like a background, an arrière-plan, as in photography or inpainting, in the case of a visual object, or as in story-telling: it is on

the basis of or, more adequately perhaps, from a given background that

the foreground of a picture becomes visible, that the characters of a

story unfold. Likewise, it is on the basis of a distinct plane that philo-

sophical concepts come to life. Yet the plan also suggests something

that is not so much behind, in the background, as it is ahead, ori-

enting and shaping whatever it is the plan of. In that respect, it is aplan, a design, something that is drawn in advance and points for-

ward. The image of thought is a plan in that sense: it provides a

thought with its fundamental direction and its general climate; it ori-

ents it and channels it. So, at this point, let me simply note the fact

that the plan is both behind and ahead, both a background and a

plan, and that thought, as the creation of concepts, unfolds on a stage

that it does not quite construct, or institute. It creates concepts, yet

i t b k d th t it i tit t th it t it d

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Allow me to take this problematic a bit further by raising the fol-

lowing question: if philosophy is indeed instituted (and not merely ini-

tiated) through something that is itself preconceptual, something of the

order of a plane or an image of thought, why does Deleuze charac-terize it further in terms of “consistency” and “immanence”? Consistency

is not mere coherence: whereas coherence, I would argue, has to do

with the relation between concepts, consistency is concerned with the

place or space from which a given thought unfolds. But why “imma-

nence”? Before addressing this question, let me, once again, wonder

as to the extent to which immanence and consistency are indeed con-

cepts, or at least concepts that we could situate alongside the many

concepts Deleuze creates. Inasmuch as they are associated with the

very plane of thought, should we not view them as quasi concepts

operating on a diff erent plane, indexes of that which in every thought,

yet always diff erently, asserts itself, ultimately pointing to the horizon

of thought itself, to the very condition of philosophical thought as such

which Deleuze wants to extract, over and beyond that of classical, rep-resentational thought? The (quasi) concepts of “plane,” “consistency,”

and “immanence” point to the conditions of thought itself. The plane

of immanence, Deleuze and Guattari state very clearly in What is

Philosophy? , “is not a concept that is or can be thought.”4 Why? Because

it is not a concept to begin with. Or if it is a concept, it is one that is

of an altogether diff erent kind from the concepts that make up the

fabric and the distinct color of a given thought. But what is it, then?An image, precisely: the plane of immanence is “the image of thought

the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use

of thought, to direct oneself in thought.”5 From the start, and irre-

ducibly, concepts find themselves indebted to something that is itself

not conceptual, to a horizon from which they emerge and that deter-

mines the meaning of thought. This horizon, this plane, is precisely

the one that Deleuze’s concepts attempt to make room for, to inti-

t ith t th b i ti f t i it i t

84



by way of thought (thus resisting the temptation to locate the condi-

tions of philosophy outside philosophy, in history, for example, or

anthropology), in wanting to bring out the horizon or the plane on

the basis of which philosophy unfolds, but which it itself does not insti-tute. Is there not an intrinsic difficulty, possibly a necessary incom-

pleteness, built into the attempt to name, to conceptualize that on the

basis of which concepts are generated, once the two most influentia

ways of addressing that problem—the Cartesian (and Platonic) way

which stipulates that concepts or ideas are not generated but innate

and the Hegelian way, which stipulates that concepts are indeed gen-

erated, yet from within, from the most immediate and abstract to the

most mediated and concrete—have been explicitly rejected?

For what is Deleuze’s own image of thought, what is the intuition

that traverses it, and that makes him anti-Cartesian and anti-Hegelian?

It is characterized by a twofold trait. First, thought is external to what

it thinks: its ideas, its concepts are not generated from within, but from

without, as a result of an encounter, a shock, which comes from thesensible. Thought is irreducibly of the sensible, generated by and directed

towards it. It is set into motion, generated by something that provokes

it—not as a result of some natural inclination and good will, then, not

in the excitement of a taste for thinking, but under the impulse of a

shock.6 Thought happens as a result of an encounter with the outside

It is a response—a creative response—to something that has taken

hold of us. What does this mean? It means that we do not think nat-urally, that we are not naturally disposed towards thought and truth

that our faculty of thought does not of itself accord with our faculty

of intuition; it means that our ideas are not innate, and so are pre-

cisely not ours (all so-called “good” and “original” ideas are precisely

not our own), that the conditions of thought are not within thought

itself, that thought is not its own ground, and so certainly not that of

the intelligibility of the real.7 This is the extent to which Deleuze is

i i i t At th ti th ht i id t b ti l i

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and “common sense,” of Eudoxus and orthodoxy): to assume that thought

identifies and recognizes its object, and so is in a state of natural

affinity with the world, is to assume the exact opposite of what it

means to think for Deleuze. This image of recognition, or this con-ception of thought as a disposition shared by all, produced by the con-

cordance of all the faculties, and naturally disposed towards its object

(truth), is the most stubborn of all, and one that Deleuze associates

with virtually the whole of philosophy. Such is the reason why, in

Di ff erence and Repetition, he did not hesitate to speak of the Image of

thought as constituting the “subjective presupposition of philosophy as

a whole.”8 Such also is the reason why, in that text, Deleuze called

for a thought without image. Thinking without image means under-

standing thought as having nothing to do with representation. But this,

as I have already suggested, and still need to show in detail, does not

mean that nonrepresentational thought is a thought without a plane.

We need to distinguish between two senses of image, one of which

refers to the dominant image of thought in philosophy, which Deleuzedescribes as doxic, or representational. The second refers to the thought

without image, or to the plane of immanence. Ultimately, I would

suggest that Deleuze’s move beyond Di ff erence and Repetition was a direct

eff ect of the need to go further in the direction of a thought without

image, further in the direction of immanence. At the same time, how-

ever, I would also want to suggest that immanence itself, by virtue of

not being a concept, proves to be a singularly elusive and highly prob-lematic theme.

Because immanence is not just of the order of the concept, thought

cannot be grounded in the concept, but (only) ungrounded in the

image (without image) of thought. Any attempt to ground thought,

and to establish thought as its own ground, will amount to a rein-

scription of transcendence, to making immanence immanent to thought

What the recognition of the diff erence between image and thought,

b t l d t i i th l tl d l d

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other concepts. Such is the reason why that thought comes to be asso-

ciated with that quasi or non-concept only retrospectively, at a meta-

level as it were, when it is finally possible to ask, with a certain distance

as Deleuze does in What is Philosophy? : What exactly has been insist-ing all along? What exactly has been trying to find its way through

this series of texts and this creation of concepts? Could it have been

this desire to bend philosophy backwards, as it were, in the direction

of its absolute presupposition and, in so doing, to establish it as pure

immanence? “Perhaps,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “this is the supreme

act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as

to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in

this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external out-

side and the non-internal inside—that which cannot be thought and

yet must be thought.”9

So far, three diff erent types or levels of presuppositions have emerged

When speaking of a given thought, there is, first of all, its beginning (or

its point of departure), that is, its desire to do away with what Deleuzecalls all objective presuppositions, such as Descartes’ implicit rejection

of the definition of the human as the rational animal. There is, sec-

ond of all, what Deleuze calls the remaining subjective presuppositions

which always orient the identification of the objective ones, and which

he sees at work in the whole of modern philosophy. This is what he

calls the Image of thought. We could also refer to it as the plane from

which its concepts unfold. I referred to such an image, or plane, asthe origin of thought. There is, finally, a third level of presupposition

which would characterize philosophy itself, and which Deleuze would

have set out to extract, thus making it absolutely presuppositionless and

realizing its own vocation.

Evidently, Deleuze and Guattari claim in What is Philosophy? that the

Greek, the modern, and the contemporary planes of thought are not

identical. The quest for the absolute, self-foundation of thought I was

ll di t t h b th i f th ht f

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of philosophy—as the history of the various images of thought—against

the background of the infinite reality of what we could call THE image

of thought? Must it be at the cost of (re)introducing something like a

philosophy of history, or an epochality of immanence? Must the ques-tion of the “origin” or the becoming of thought be supplemented by

that of its history?

There seems to have been, Deleuze and Guattari suggest in Wha

is Philosophy? , something like a historical (and geographical) point of

departure for philosophy in Ancient Greece. This was nothing like a

destiny, or indeed a necessity, but an entirely contingent event: some-

thing took place, a number of elements came together and crystallized

into what turned out to be a very significant event. There is, Deleuze

insists, nothing intrinsically “Greek” about philosophy (most philoso-

phers in Greece were foreigners and émigrés). At the same time, how-

ever, it is undeniable that a new modality of thought, if not thought

itself, emerged in the context of the newly created Greek polis in the

sixth century .. Two decisive traits can be highlighted. First, in con-trast with the highly ordered, vertical, and hierarchical societies of the

Mycenaean kingdom and the civilizations of the Middle East, the Greek

city-state understood itself as a society of friends, that is, as a society

of free and equal beings (Homoioi , similar; Isoi , equals). In other words

something like a phenomenon of social and political aplanissement , or

flattening, occurred: suddenly all men (the definition of “man” here is

highly selective, as it excluded many types of males and all women)appeared on the same plane. Second, and following Vernant, we can

identify the following two decisive traits that determined the emer-

gence of philosophy in Greece: the constitution of a domain of thought

external and foreign to religion (the physicists from Ionia); the idea of

a cosmic order that no longer relied, as was the case in traditional

theogonies, on the power of a sovereign god, on its monarchia , its basileia

but on a law that is immanent to the universe, on something like a

l f di t ib ti ( ) th t i lit i d ll th

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the world as such and as a whole constituted a unified and homoge-

neous universe that coexisted all on one plane.11 What was common

to both the social-political order and the cosmic order was the prin-

ciple of equality (ison ), the idea of an order ruled by equality (isonomia ). The two aspects are of course linked, Deleuze stresses, insofar as

only friends can set out a plane of immanence (tendre un plan d’imma

nence ) as a ground from which idols have been cleared. Philosophy

replaces a plane of transcendence with one of immanence, and the

figure of the Philosopher challenges that of the Priest or the Wise

“Whenever there is transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State in the

sky or on earth, there is religion; and there is philosophy whenever

there is immanence, even if it functions as an arena for the agon and

rivalry.”12 From a historical perspective, and inasmuch as it amounts

to an event that crystallized in Ancient Greece, immanence is best

described as a “milieu.” As such, it is precisely not a historical deter-

mination, but a geographical one: it designates a set of geographical

contingencies, a place and a source, and not a destiny.Immanence turns out to be what distinguishes philosophy from

mythology, religion, and various forms and practices of wisdom. It is

the “cornerstone” of philosophy. At the same time we should note that

for a number of reasons, which will turn out to be very complex

indeed, philosophy always falls short of total immanence. It is always

somewhat tainted with transcendence, especially (but not exclusively

with Judeo-Christian theology. Time and again, instead of being imma-nent (or univocal), ontology becomes onto-theology (and analogical)

As an event and a task, philosophy does not quite coincide with its

history. Yet, to use Alliez’s words, the history of philosophy is “the

hypertext where the affirmation of immanence and the illusion of tran-

scendence ceaselessly oppose one another”—and, I would argue, where

philosophy ceaselessly compromises with transcendence. Speaking of

the diff erence between the Greeks and the Moderns, and with direct

f t Höld li ’ f l tt t Böhl d f d t d 4 D b

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transcendence. In short, in its past form the concept is that which is not

yet. We today possess concepts, but the Greeks did not yet possess them

they possessed the plane that we no longer possess.13

And so, today, we must strive to regain the plane of immanence, which

we have lost. In the light of such a task, however, we must learn to

use our concepts diff erently and to reinvent them so as to free them

from their onto-theological heritage.

II

In our eff ort to regain immanence, we would do well to follow in the

footsteps of Spinoza. Why? Because it is with Spinoza that the goal

of philosophy is completely realized for the first time in modern times

In Spinozism, we have a concept of immanence that coincides com-

pletely (and not just partially) with that of God, or Being. Allow me

to introduce the significance of Spinoza’s thought for Deleuze by turn-

ing once again to What is Philosophy? and to what ultimately serves asa justification for the characterization of Spinoza as the “prince of

philosophers” or as the thinker who has achieved immanence, thus

bringing philosophy into its own, reconciling it, as it were, with its

own presupposition. With him, in a way, there is no longer a diff erence

between the plane of immanence and the concepts of thought, between

the horizon of thought and thought itself: thought has become truly

immanent and infinite. Up until Spinoza, Deleuze claims, immanence

was always at work in philosophy, but always as a theme that could

never quite be fulfilled. Why? No doubt because it was the most dan-

gerous theme: when God begins to be envisaged as an immanent cause,

there is no longer any possibility of distinguishing clearly between it

and its creatures, between the cause and the eff ect. In the whole his-

tory of heresies, the accusation of immanentism was the most damn-ing, the confusion of God and the creature the most serious fault. The

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substance that possesses all attributes, then they must exist or be con-

tained in the attributes of the substance. The immediate consequence

to which we shall return, is the leveling (or the ironing out) and the

flattening—the aplanissement and aplatissement —of a vertical and hierar-chical structure, of a sequence of concepts: there is no hierarchy, no

sequence between the attributes, or between thought and extension

but a single fixed plane on which everything takes place. This is what

Deleuze calls the plane of immanence. This is a plane that is at work

from the start and always, as the presupposition and aim of philoso-

phy, as its horizon, as it were. At the same time, however, it must

always be instituted, drawn, or established. It is always there, but never

as a given, always as something to be constructed, to be made. Concepts

are the tools with which this construction, this machine, is assembled

Deleuze’s concern with immanence emerges explicitly within the

context of his thèse complémentaire of 1968 that, as a thesis in the his-

tory of philosophy, is concerned to inscribe Spinoza within a histori-

cal perspective.14

Yet already, the choice of Spinoza is highly significantespecially when considered alongside the other, more systematic the-

sis ( Di ff erence and Repetition ). In other words, there is a broader contex

and a more systematic problematic that frames the historical work in

question. This is the problematic concerned with identifying the rea

and immanent conditions of experience, a goal that requires the inven-

tion of philosophy as transcendental empiricism and the defense o

ontology as univocity. Spinoza is understood as a decisive stage alongthe path of univocity. As such, he is not “just” a figure in the history

of philosophy. In the thèse complémentaire , the theme of immanence is

introduced through the classical problem of causality and through the

concept of the immanent cause.15 This is a type of causality that ulti-

mately has the advantage of reconciling the Aristotelian and Scholastic

efficient causality, still at work in Descartes, with the Neo-Platonist

“emanative cause,” which it extends and transforms. How?16

I h t 11 f Spi d th P bl f E p i D l

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that Deleuze raises at the outset of the chapter is the following: What

are the logical links between immanence and expression? And what is

the historical link between the two concepts? In order to answer these

questions, we first need to establish the link between immanence andemanation. This takes us back to the Platonic problem of participa-

tion, understood in the following ways: to participate is to take part,

but it is also to imitate, and also to receive a demon. As a result, par-

ticipation is interpreted at times materially, at times imitatively, and

at still other times “demonically.” But in each case, the principle of

participation is located in the participating party. Participation is some-

thing that merely happens to the participated; it is something of the

order of a violence to which the participated is subjected. If partici-

pation is a matter of taking part (literally, as it were), then the par-

ticipated can only suff er from such an intrusion, division, or separation

If participation involves imitation, then there is the need for an artist,

who takes the Idea as his model. The role of the intermediary, whether

artist or demon, is to force the sensible to reproduce the intelligible, butalso to force the Idea to be participated in by something contrary to its

own nature.

Now what Neo-Platonism does is to reverse the problem by seek-

ing to identify a principle that makes this participation possible, but this

time from the point of view of the participated. The Neo-Platonists

no longer begin with the characters of the participating (multiple, sen-

sible, etc.) in order to ask about the type of violence under which par-ticipation becomes possible. Rather, they try to discover the internal

principle and movement that ground the participation in the partici-

pated itself. In reality, it is not the participated that passes over into

the participating. The participated remains within itself. It is partici-

pated insofar as it produces , and it produces insofar as it gives . But it

needs to go outside itself in order to produce or give. It is this demand

that Plotinus’ project stands for, by arguing for the need to start with

th hi h t lit t b di t i it ti t i d ti

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Because everything emanates from this principle, because it gives

everything, it is itself not participated: as Proclus claimed, there is par-

ticipation only through a principle that is itself unparticipatable, yet a

principle that gives to participate. In Plotinus’ words: the One is higherthan its gifts as well as its products and is participatable on the basis

of what it gives.

What do the immanent cause and the emanative cause have in

common? The fact that, in order to produce, they do not need to

externalize or step outside themselves. Spinoza himself makes the con-

nection between the two causes in the Short Treatise .17 They diff er, how-

ever, with respect to the way in which they produce. The emanative

cause remains within itself, but the eff ect that it produces does not

The emanative cause produces on the basis of what it gives, but it is

beyond what it gives. In the end, then, the eff ect leaves the cause, exists

only by leaving the cause, and determines its existence only by return-

ing to the cause from which it came. There is a residual transcen-

dence there. A cause is said to be immanent, on the other hand, whenthe eff ect is itself “immanated” (“immané ”) in the cause, and not when

it “emanates” from it. What defines the immanent cause, then, is the

fact that its eff ect remains within it, no doubt as in something else

but within it nonetheless. As a result, the diff erence in essence between

the cause and the eff ect will never be interpreted as degradation or a

fall. From the point of view of immanence, the distinction of essence

does not exclude, but implies an equality of being: it is the same beingthat remains within itself in the cause and in which the eff ect remains

as something else.

When Plotinus says that the One has “nothing in common” with

the things that come after it (Enneads , V, 5, §4), it is to emphasize the

fact that the emanative cause is higher than, not the eff ect alone, but

also that which it grants the eff ect with. And this is precisely the rea-

son why the One, and not Being, is identified as the primary cause

i it t ll b i ith th i b i it i il b d b i

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diff erence; each term is, as it were, the image of the higher term that

precedes it and is defined according to the degree of remoteness that

separates it from the first cause or the first principle.

A further fundamental diff erence between the two causes begins toemerge. While immanence implies a pure, positive ontology, or a the-

ory of Being for which the One is not even an attribute or a univer-

sal of Being (or the Substance) but only one of its many characters,

emanation is a theology, or an onto-theology, for which the One is

necessarily beyond Being. Its ontology is, as a result, negative and ana-

logical. Pure immanence, on the other hand, requires the principle of

an ontological equality, or the positing of a Being-equal: not only is

Being equal in itself but also it is equally present in all beings. Similarly,

the cause is equally close everywhere: there is no remoteness of the

cause. Beings are not defined according to their rank within a hier-

archy; they are not more or less close to the One. Rather, each is

directly dependent on God, each participates in the equality of Being,

receiving all that they can receive within the limits of their essence.In its pure state, immanence requires a univocal Being, and one that

constitutes a Nature that consists in positive forms (which Spinoza calls

attributes), forms that are common to the producer and the produced,

to the cause and the eff ect. In immanence, there is indeed a superi-

ority of the cause over the eff ect (Spinoza retains the distinction between

essences), but this superiority does not imply any eminence, that is,

does not imply the positing of a principle beyond the forms that arethemselves present in the eff ect. The cause is superior to the eff ect

but not to that which it grants the eff ect with. In truth, it does not

“grant” the eff ect with anything. The process of participation must be

understood entirely positively, and not on the basis of an eminent gift

Immanence is opposed to any eminence of the cause, any negative

theology, any method of analogy, and any hierarchical conception of

the world.18

A l it i ll k i t d d t id th i k f th

94



according to the analogy of proportionality, God possesses formally a

perfection that remains extrinsic in the creatures (the divine goodness

is to God as human goodness is to man). Spinoza reverses the prob-

lem by claiming that it is analogy, and equivocity, not univocity, thatis guilty of anthropocentrism. Every time we proceed analogically, he

claims, we borrow certain features from the creatures and attribute

them to God either equivocally (formally) or eminently. In his view

attributes are forms that are common to God, whose essence they con-

stitute, and to the modes or creatures, in which they are implicated

The same forms are affirmed of God and his creatures, despite the

fact that God and his creatures diff er both essentially and existentially

In other words, creatures diff er from God in both essence and exis-

tence, and yet, at the same time, formally, God possesses something in

common with the creatures, namely, the attributes. The modes impli-

cate or envelop the attributes, whereas God is explicated in them

Attributes are univocal forms of being, forms that do not change in

nature when changing “subjects.” This means: their sense does notchange, whether we predicate them of infinite being or finite beings

of the substance or the modes, of God or the creatures. To that extent

Spinoza is the inheritor and follower of Scotus. Yet univocity in Scotus

was compromised by the desire to avoid pantheism. The theological

and this means creationist, perspective forced him to conceive of uni-

vocal Being as an indiff erent, neutral concept, indiff erent to the finite

and the infinite, the singular and the universal, the perfect and theimperfect, the created and the uncreated. In Spinoza, on the other

hand, univocal Being is perfectly determined in its concept, as that

which is said in one and the same sense of the substance that is in

itself, and the modes that are in something else. With Spinoza, uni-

vocity becomes an object of pure affirmation. It is the same thing that

formaliter , constitutes the essence of the substance and contains the

essences of the modes. What the idea of the immanent cause does

th i t t d th t f i it lib ti it f th i diff

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substance and the created substances, of the substances and the modes,

etc. It is only by analogy with the efficient cause that God can be

said to be causa sui . By contrast, Spinoza’s causa sui cannot be said in

a sense other than the efficient cause. On the contrary: it is the efficientcause that is said in the same sense as the causa sui . God produces or

creates exactly as it is or exists. Spinoza’s remarkable achievement is

to have developed an ontology that is opposed to all negative theolo-

gies and ontologies as well as to all methods that proceed through

equivocity, eminence, and analogy. But he does not remain satisfied

with denouncing the introduction of the negative in Being. He also

criticizes all the false conceptions of affirmation (Aquinas, Descartes)

in which the negative survives.20 Closer to us, and after Spinoza, it is

of course Hegel who is targeted here, especially what we could call

his false immanence, this immanence that is only simulated by turn-

ing the negative into the engine and the soul of the positive, that is,

of the production of the real. In Hegel, there is no longer a trace of

equivocity, analogy, or eminence, except for that of the negative—themost tenacious of all, and the most delicate to extirpate.

Having contrasted immanence and emanation to that extent, how

can we justify their association from a historical perspective? And what

does this association have to do with “expression” envisaged as the

decisive concept in the constitution of immanence? This association

can be justified by turning to Plotinus’ first emanation, or hypostasis

This is the hypostasis that concerns the Intellect, or Being, whichemanates from the One. Now it is not the case that there is a mutual

immanence between Being and the intellect only, for the intellect con-

tains all intellects and all intelligibles in the same way that Being con-

tains all beings and all kinds of being.21 And it is the case that yet

another hypostasis emerges from the intellect. However, the intellect

can operate as an emanative cause only to the extent that it reaches

its point of perfection, a point that it is able to reach only as an imma-

t B i d th i t ll t till th O b t th O th t

96



tion and shows the multiple to be gathered, concentrated, comprised

and comprehended in the One, and the One explicated in the many.

Such is the origin of a pair of notions that will become increasingly

important in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: complicare-explicareand that, Deleuze argues, anticipates the concept of expression. Boethius

applies the terms comprehendere, complecteri to eternal Being.22 The pair

of susbtantives, complicatio-explicatio, or of adverbs, complicative-explicative

takes on a great importance among the commentators of Boethius

notably in the school of Chartres in the twelfth century. It is with

Nicholas of Cusa and Bruno, however, that these concepts acquire

their rigorous philosophical status.23 All things are present in God, who

complicates them. God is present to all things, which explicate and

implicate him. So, what is crucial is that the successive and subordi-

nated emanations of Neoplatonism now give way to the co-presence

of two correlated movements. Things remain in God as they explicate

or implicate him, just as much as God remains within himself to com-

plicate things. The presence of things to God is called “inherence,”and that of God to things “implication.” The equality of being has

now been substituted for the hierarchy of hypostases; for it is the same

being in which things are present and which is itself present within

them. Immanence is defined as the configuration of complication and

explication, of inherence and implication. Things are inherent in God

who complicates them, in the same way that God remains implicated

by the things that explicate him. God is this complicating principlethat explicates itself through things: “God is universal complication

insofar as everything is within it; and it is universal explication, inso-

far as it is in everything” (Of Learned Ignorance , II, chapter 3). To return

to our initial problem, that of participation, and its connection with

the problem of expression in Spinoza, we can now say that partici-

pation finds its principle not in some emanation of which the One

would be the source—with varying degrees of closeness—but in the

i di t d d t i f b l t B i th t

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that establishes the principle of immanence for philosophy. In doing

so, he follows Koyré’s thesis, for whom the category of expression is

the one that best captures what is distinct about the philosophy of the

Renaissance, as establishing the priority of the immanent cause overemanation.24 That being said, what is conquered de jure is constantly

threatened by the demand that the transcendence of the divine being

be secured and guaranteed. Such is the reason why, in the Renaissance

and modern times, philosophy is constantly charged with immanence

and pantheism, and why philosophers themselves are so eager to avoid

this accusation. And, for the most part, the way in which the tran-

scendence of a creator God is saved is through an analogical con-

ception of Being, or at least through an eminent conception of God

that limits the consequences of Being as equal. In actual fact, the prin-

ciple of equality of Being is itself interpreted analogically: it is the

same God, the same infinite being, that is affirmed and explicated in

the world as immanent cause, and that remains inexpressible and tran-

scendent as the object of a negative theology that negates everythingthat was affirmed of its immanence. There, immanence appears as a

limit-theory that is contained and attenuated through the perspective

of emanation and creation. For Deleuze, so long as immanence is not

accompanied by a full conception of univocity, or by a complete

affirmation of univocal Being, it cannot be fulfilled. The themes of

creation and emanation cannot do without a minimum of transcen-

dence, which stops “expressionism” from going all the way to theimmanence it implies. Immanence is precisely this philosophical ver-

tigo that is inseparable from the concept of expression. With the con-

cept of expression, philosophy is once and for all free of emanation

and resemblance: the things produced are modes of the divine, that is

to say, they implicate the same attributes as those that constitute the

nature of this divine being. They are not imitations, and the ideas are

not models or paradigms. With Spinoza, immanence is established as

i i l d th l f i it i d f t d f hil

98



is no such thing as the end of philosophy, there may be something

like its completion, so long as we understand by that the appropria-

tion of its own internal conditions, of the diff erence that makes it pos-

sible, and to which its concepts testify. This, perhaps, is the paradoxof immanence: it is given from the start, and yet it always remains to

be made. This means: it is never given as such, but only as that which

must be established in thought. Immanence is what befalls thought

what befalls it de jure . But its task is also always to make immanence

to turn this de jure into a de facto, in a gesture forever renewed. The

plane of philosophy may have been drawn in Greece once and for

all. In that respect, it may be taken as a given. Yet it is given in such

a way that it must be reinstituted time and again, for everyone and

at every level, in what amounts to the endless and infinite—yet entirely

joyful—task of thought. Naturally, we would need to show how Deleuze

realizes immanence for himself and whether he succeeds in his task

We would need to reveal his Spinozism not just through his inter-

pretation of Spinoza, as we did (and only partly), but through a closeexamination of his most significant texts, from Di ff erence and Repetition

(1968) to Logic of Sense (1969), Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus

(1980). But this is a task that cannot be carried out here.

NOTES

1. The pages that follow are part of a larger project devoted to the thought of GilleDeleuze, an initial version of which was presented as a series of lectures at theCollegium Phaenomenologicum, Città di Castello, Italy, in the summer of 2003I would like to thank its director, Len Lawlor, for his generous invitation.

2. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), 106. Henceforth cited as QP , followed by page number.

3. Di ff érence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). Henceforth citedas DR

4. QP , 39.

5. QP , 39–40.6. DR , 173.7 The project of the self-foundation of thought and the foundation of the real in

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plane. The entire difficulty of course is one of knowing how these two planes ortypes of planes relate.

11. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les origines de la pensée grecque (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1995), 10112. QP , 46.

13. QP , 97. See also, E. Alliez, La Signature du monde: ou qu’est-ce que la philosophie de Deleuze et Guattari (Paris: Cerf, 1993), 14.

14. Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Minuit, 1968). Henceforth citedas SPE , followed by page number.

15. See Spinoza, Ethics , in Complete Works , edited by Michael M. Morgan and trans-lated by Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), I, prop. XVIII.

16. See ibid., I, prop. XXV.17. Spinoza, Short Treatise on Man, God and His Well-Being , in Complete Works , I, chap. 3, 218. On Spinoza’s critique of eminence, see Ethics , I, prop. XV, scolie, and prop. XVII

cor. II, scolie.19. SPE , 58. See also Ethics , prop. XXXIII, scolie II.20. SPE , 150.21. See Plotinus, Enneads , trans. A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), V, 1, §7, 30.22. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, bk. 5, prose 6, in The Theological Tractates; The

Consolation of Philosophy, trans. H. F. Steward, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, LoebClassical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).

23. Deleuze’s main source of inspiration on Cusa is Maurice de Gandillac, La Philosophiede Nicolas de Cues (Paris: Aubier, 1942).

24. See A. Koyré, Mystiques, spirituels, alchimistes du XVI éme siécle allemand (Paris: ArmandColin, 1947).

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