by Daniel Smith
THE FIELD OF ONTOLOGY
A second model for thinking about the immanence / transcendence distinction is related, not to the question of subjectivity (the field of consciousness), but rather to the question of ontology (the field of Being). Put simply, an immanent or pure ontology would be an ontology in which there is nothing “beyond” or “higher than” or “superior to” Being. By contrast, the fundamental ontological categories of transcendence would include the “God” of the Christian tradition, the “Good” in Plato, the “One” in Plotinus5—all of which are said to be “beyond” Being, “otherwise” than Being (“transcendent” to Being), and are thereby used to “judge” Being, or at least to account for Being.6 On the question of Being, Derrida and Deleuze—like all contemporary thinkers—are clearly indebted to Heidegger, who inaugurated the renaissance of ontology in twentieth-century thought (which is why Heidegger rightly functions as the lynchpin in Agamben's classification). Yet it is equally clear that Deleuze and Derrida take Heidegger's ontological project in two very different directions: Deleuze attempts to develop an immanent ontology, while Derrida's deconstruction necessarily operates on the basis of a formal structure of transcendence.7 On this score, we can make use of several rubrics to help map the divergent ontological trajectories of Derrida and Deleuze: their respective relation to metaphysics, their different concepts (or “quasi-concepts”) of “difference,” and their contrasting uses of the history of philosophy (using the “divine names” tradition as an example).
1. The Status of Metaphysics. Early in his career, Derrida took over, in his own manner, the Heideggerian task of “overcoming metaphysics,” while Deleuze, for his part, would later say that “the death of metaphysics or the overcoming of philosophy” had never been an issue for him (WP 9). It would not be an exaggeration to say that it was their respective adoption and rejection of this Heideggerian problematic that initially set Derrida and Deleuze on their divergent trajectories of transcendence and immanence. In Derrida, metaphysics is determined by its structural “closure,” and deconstruction is a means of disturbing this closure, creating an opening or an interruption. The notion of metaphysical closure itself depends on a movement of transcendence: that is, an “excess over the totality, without which no totality would appear.”8 Since one cannot transcend metaphysics as such—there is no “outside” to the metaphysical tradition—one can only destructure or deconstruct metaphysics from within. The project of “overcoming metaphysics,” in other words, is an impossibility, but it is this very impossibility that conditions the possibility of deconstructing the philosophical tradition from within. Rather than trying to get outside metaphysics, one can submit “the regulated play of philosophemes” in the history of philosophy to a certain slippage or sliding that would allow them to be read as “symptoms of something that could not be presented in the history of philosophy.”9 Immanent within metaphysics, there lies a formal structure of transcendence that can never be made present as such, but that none the less functions as the condition (the “quasi-transcendental” condition) of metaphysics itself. Derrida thus situates his work, he says, at “the limit of philosophical discourse,” at its margins, its borders or boundary lines.10 The border he straddles is the border between the closed and immanent totality of metaphysics, with its exhausted concepts and philosophemes, and that which exceeds that totality: that is, a formal structure of transcendence that is, as it were, everywhere at work in metaphysics, though it can never be made present as such.
Derrida attempts to think this formal structure of transcendence through concepts such as différance (which is, then, at best a “quasi-concept,” since the notion of a concept is itself metaphysical). If metaphysics is defined in terms of presence, then différance is that which marks “the disappearance of any originary presence,”11 that which thereby exceeds or transcends metaphysics, and thereby, at the same time, constantly disrupts and “destabilizes” metaphysics. Commenting on Heidegger's notion of the “ontological difference,” Derrida writes that
there may be a difference still more unthought than the difference between Being and beings … Beyond Being and beings, this difference, ceaselessly differing from and deferring (itself), would trace (itself) (by itself)—this différance would be the first or last trace if one still could speak, here, of origin and end.12
The long series of notions developed in Derrida's work—not only différance and the trace, but also text, writing, the hymen, the supplement, the pharmakon, the parergon, justice, messianicity, and so on—are all traces of this formal structure of transcendence, marked by their aporetic or antinomial status, their possibility conditioned by their impossibility, and so on. Deconstruction thus operates in interval between the closed totality of metaphysics and the formal transcendence of différance (or as he says in “Force of Law,” the interval between the deconstructibility of law [droit] and the undeconstructibility of justice).13
Deleuze, by contrast, has a very different and non-Heideggerian relation to metaphysics. He described himself candidly as a “pure metaphysician” in the mold of Bergson and Whitehead. “I feel myself to be a pure metaphysician,” he said in a late interview, “Bergson says that modern science hasn't found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interests me.”14 He consequently saw himself as “the most naïve philosopher of our generation … the one who felt the least guilt about ‘doing philosophy’” (N 88–9). If one is critical of traditional metaphysics, or metaphysical concepts such as identity or essence, he suggests, then the philosophical task is not to attempt to “overcome” metaphysics, but rather actively to construct a different metaphysics. This is why one does not find, in Deleuze, any general pronouncements concerning the “nature” of “Western metaphysics” (as “logocentric,” or as a “metaphysics of presence”), since, as Derrida notes, the only position from which one could make such a pronouncement is a position of transcendence, which Deleuze rejects. Consequently, there is no concept of closure in Deleuze either (since closure likewise depends on transcendence). From the start, Deleuze defined structures as such—whether mathematical, philosophical, or otherwise—as fundamentally “open,” and he saw metaphysics itself as an open structure, which is far from having exhausted its “possibilities.” This not only means that the “creation of the new” is possible within metaphysics, but also that one can retrieve or repeat—to use Heidegger's term—avenues of thought in the history of metaphysics that were once opened, only to be quickly closed off again (for instance, the concept of univocity). Deleuze sees his work as being strictly immanent to metaphysics; creation and transformation is possible within metaphysics, and there are virtualities in past metaphysics that are capable of being reactivated, as it were, and inserted into new contexts, and new problematics. Metaphysics itself, in other words, is dynamic and in constant becoming.
2. The Concept of Difference. Put crudely, then, if Derrida sets out to undo metaphysics, Deleuze sets out simply to do metaphysics. The results can appear to be very similar—after Deleuze died, Derrida wrote, in a short memorial text, of the “near total affinity” he saw between Deleuze's work and his own—but in fact the context of their work is very different: a horizon of transcendence in Derrida (overcoming or going beyond metaphysics), and a function of immanence in Deleuze (doing metaphysics).15 This difference may appear to be slight, but its very slightness acts like a butterfly effect that propels Derrida and Deleuze along two divergent trajectories that become increasingly remote from each other, to the point of perhaps being incompatible. Nowhere is this more evident than in Deleuze's own theory of difference. Deleuze and Derrida are both seen—rightly—as philosophers of difference. Derrida's essay “Différance” and Deleuze's book Difference and Repetition both appeared in 1968, and Heidegger's notion of the “ontological difference” between Being and beings was one of the primary impetuses (though not the only one) in their development of a theory of difference. But Derrida moves immediately in the direct
ion of transcendence. What he was seeking, he tells us, is a difference “beyond Being and beings,” and this is precisely how he characterizes différance: “a difference still more unthought than the [ontological] difference between Being and beings.”16 In Difference and Repetition, by contrast, Deleuze proposes an interpretation of the ontological difference that radicalizes it in the direction of immanence.
In accordance with Heidegger's ontological intuition [he writes], difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator [a Sich-unterscheidende] by virtue of which difference is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy, or opposition. (DR 117)
The project of Difference and Repetition, in other words, is to provide an immanent analysis of the ontological difference in which the different is related to the different through difference itself: Being must not only be able to account for the external difference between beings, but also the fact that beings themselves are marked by an “internal difference”; and the ontological difference must not only refer to the difference between Being and beings, but also the difference of Being from itself, “an alliance of Being and itself in difference” (DR 231). The concepts of difference that Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition—“difference in intensity, disparity in the phantasm, dissemblance in the form of time, the differential in thought” (DR 145)—have a very different status than the notion of difference Derrida develops in his essay “Différance.” For Derrida, différance is a relation that transcends ontology, that differs from ontology, that goes beyond or is more “originary” than the ontological difference between Being and beings. Deleuze's aim, by contrast, is to show that ontology itself is constituted immanently by a principle of difference (and is thus a “concept,” in the Deleuzian sense of the term, and not merely a “quasi-concept”). Deleuze is not often thought of as a Heideggerian, but Difference and Repetition can be read as a direct response to Being and Time from the standpoint of immanence; for Deleuze, Being is difference, and time is repetition.
3. The History of Philosophy. Deleuze has himself provided a way of assessing the status of Derrida's quasi-concept of différance. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari present a rather summary typology of three general strategies by which transcendence has been introduced into philosophy. The first, and no doubt paradigmatic, type is the one found in Platonism and its variants: the field of immanence is a simple field of phenomena or appearances, which only possesses secondarily what is attributed first of all to the anterior unity of the Idea (or in later variants, to the “One beyond Being” in Plotinus, or to the transcendence of the Christian “God”.17 Modern philosophy effected a second type of transcendence: beginning with Descartes, and then with Kant, the cogito made it possible to treat the plane of immanence as a field of consciousness, which was attributed, as we have seen, no longer to the transcendence of the Idea, but rather to the transcendence of the Subject or the Ego. Finally, the third (and contemporary) form of transcendence—which is the one that concerns us—was introduced by phenomenology and its successors. When immanence becomes immanent to a transcendental subjectivity, it is from within its own field that the mark of transcendence must appear.
Husserl conceived of immanence as the flux of lived experience within subjectivity [write Deleuze and Guattari], but since this lived experience, pure and even primordial, does not belong completely to the self that represents it to itself, it is in the regions of non-belonging that the horizon of something transcendent is reestablished. (WP 46)
Deleuze and Guattari do not name names here, but one can easily imagine examples. Levinas, for example, founds ethics on the infinite transcendence of the “Other” which challenges the status of the reflective subject and undoes the primacy of the Same.18 In a different manner, Habermas attempts to ground ethics on the privileged transcendence of an intersubjective world populated by other selves, and regulated by a “communicative consensus.” Whatever form it takes, in this contemporary moment of transcendence one no longer thinks of immanence as immanent to something (the Idea, the Subject), but on the contrary “one seeks to rediscover a transcendence within the heart of immanence itself, as a breach or interruption of its field” (WP 46). One seeks, in other words, a transcendence within immanence.
Derrida, in his own manner, clearly belongs to this contemporary (and post-phenomenological) tradition of transcendence. This is evidenced, moreover, in his many readings of texts in the history of philosophy, which attempt to uncover, within the immanent and manifest movement of traditional philosophical concepts and their “binary oppositions,” a latent and transcendent movement of différance that is never present as such in the text but constantly serves to disrupt and destabilize it. This way of treating the history of philosophy raises a question that is intrinsically linked to the ontological theme of transcendence and immanence. What Heidegger bequeathed to contemporary philosophy was not only a rejuvenation of ontology, but also, concomitant with that, a certain treatment of the history of philosophy under the double theme of the “destruction” of the history of ontology as well as the “retrieval” or “repetition” of that history. Indeed, for the generation to which Deleuze and Derrida belonged, the philosophical training one received in the French university was oriented almost exclusively toward the history of philosophy. Deleuze and Derrida's contrasting relation to metaphysics is thus reflected in their contrasting relation to the history of philosophy. In this regard, we can consider, as a precise historical example, an aspect of the medieval philosophical tradition in which Heidegger took a strong interest—the theological tradition of the “divine names.” Heidegger himself first formulated his ontological question in the context of these medieval debates, and in taking up these debates for their own account, Derrida and Deleuze have each moved in clearly differentiated directions: Derrida in the direction of “negative theology” (transcendence) and Deleuze in the direction of “univocity” (immanence).19
Heidegger wrote his doctoral thesis on Duns Scotus, who was engaged in a rather lively thirteenth-century debate concerning the nature of Being. Being is said of beings, but in what sense? The Scholastics used three precise terms to designate the various ways of resolving the problem: equivocity, univocity, and analogy. To say that Being is equivocal means that the term “Being” is said of beings in several senses, and that these senses have no common measure: “God is” does not have the same sense as “man is,” for instance, because God does not have the same type of being as man. By contrast, to say that Being is univocal, as Duns Scotus affirmed, means that Being has only one sense, and is said in one and the same sense of everything of which it is said, whether it be God or man, animal or plant. Since these positions seemed to lead to scandalous conclusions—equivocity denied order in the cosmos, univocity implied pantheism—a third alternative was developed between these two extremes: Being is neither equivocal nor univocal but analogical, and there is indeed a common measure to the forms of Being, but this measure is analogical, and not univocal. This was the position of Aristotle, which Heidegger discusses in the opening pages of Being and Time: Being is said in several senses, and these senses are the categories, which are related to Being, and to each other, by means of analogy. Christianity famously transposed this ontological problem into a theological problem, which was concerned less with the relation of Being to being than the relation of God to his creatures (hence the Heideggerian thematic of “onto-theology”). Medieval theology had developed a syncretic solution to the immanence / transcendence problem: it insisted on the requirement of immanence—that is, the ontological requirement that the first principle (God) be a being; but it also insisted on the more powerful requirement of transcendence—that is, the requirement that the transcendence of God be maintained as t
he One beyond Being. What came to be known as the “divine names” tradition was situated at the nexus of these two requirements. The problem was: How can the traditional divine attributes—such as goodness, love, wisdom, power, and so on—which are finite and immanent, be predicated of God, who is infinite and transcendent? It was Thomas Aquinas who, following Aristotle, developed the Christian interpretation of analogy. Positive qualities can indeed belong to God substantially, but only in so far as they are treated “analogically”: either in terms of an ordered relationship between two proportions (for example, the divine goodness is to God as human goodness is to man—the “analogy of proportionality”); or by reference to a focal meaning or “prime analogate” (for example, “Goodness,” which God is said to possess eminently and creatures only derivatively—the “analogy of proportion”).20 In France, Neo-Thomists such as Étienne Gilson were the great defenders of analogy, which attempted to straddle the immanence / transcendence tension in theology.
