by Daniel Smith
It is not difficult to ascertain how Derrida and Deleuze position themselves rather definitively on either side of this orthodox divide. Derrida was, early on, seen to have a kind of “elective affinity” with what was known as “negative theology,” which insisted that God in his absolute substance or essence can only be defined negatively, according to strict rules of transcendence. Meister Eckhart, for instance, preferred to say “God is not” rather than “God is,” because “x is” is a statement that is said of beings like you and me, whereas God is eminently superior to Being, beyond Being.21 This allows God to appear in his “supra-substantial” or “hyper-essential” eminence, as far from all negation as he is from any affirmation. In negative theology, one goes beyond affirmations (God is good) via negations (God is not good in the human sense of the term), and beyond both affirmations and negations to attain God's eminence (God is good with an “incomparable” or “ineffable” Goodness, a goodness that transcends all goodness, that is beyond goodness). Or, as Derrida says, what is “proper” to God is to have no properties as such, or to “be” “nothing.” The logical formula of transcendence is to say that something “is” neither x nor not-x, because it is beyond them both.22 Derrida, by his own admission, adopts this formula of transcendence in his analyses of différance. Différance, he says,
“is” neither this nor that, neither sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither superior nor inferior, neither active nor passive, neither present nor absent, not even neutral, not even subject to a dialectic with a third moment, without any possible sublation (Aufhebung). Despite appearances, then, it [différance] is neither a concept nor even a name; it does lend itself to a series of names, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even the order and the structure of predicative discourse. It “is” not and does not say what “is.” It is written completely otherwise.23
It is true that Derrida is not “doing” a negative theology, in so far as the latter seems to reserve, “beyond all positive predication, beyond all negation, even beyond Being, some hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being” which would perhaps be given in some sort of “intuition or vision.”24 But although Derrida refuses to assign any content to this transcendence, what he retains from the tradition is its formal structure: différance is that which is never present as such, is absolutely other, discernible only through its trace, whose movement is infinitely deferred, infinitely differing from itself, definable, at best, in terms of what it is not. This is why Derrida can write: “I trust no text that is not in some way contaminated with negative theology, and even among those texts that apparently do not have, want, or believe they have any relation with theology in general.”25 There is no text of the metaphysical tradition that is not “contaminated” with this formal structure of transcendence, or this movement of différance.
When Deleuze, for his part, injects himself into the divine names tradition, he is equally critical of both analogy and negative theology, and explicitly aligns himself with the tradition of univocity (first formulated by Duns Scotus, and which Deleuze sees extended in Spinoza and Nietzsche). The reason is clear: the sole raison d’être of negative theology is to preserve transcendence (we have to negate all predicates or properties of God, because God transcends them all), whereas univocity is the position of immanence pushed to its most extreme point. As formulated by Duns Scotus, it says that the term “Being” is always used univocally; in other words, when I say that “God is” or “Man is” or “A cat is” or “A flea is,” the word “is” is being used in one and the same sense in all these sentences. In other words, God does not have a different mode of being from other creatures—that is, a transcendent mode of being that could be accessed (or not) only through negation or analogy. The univocity of Being entails the radical denial of any ontological transcendence, and for this reason was a highly heterodox—and often heretical—position because it hinted at pantheism or even atheism. Deleuze suggests that the tradition of univocity was continued in Spinoza, for whom God and Nature are one and the same thing, and then in Nietzsche. In this sense, univocity can be read as the medieval ontological version of the “death of God.” Difference and Repetition is, among other things, an attempt to follow through on the ontological—and not merely theological—implications of univocity. Tellingly, to my knowledge, Derrida never mentions the tradition of univocity in his writings. This example from the history of philosophy exemplifies the broad differences between the ontologies of Deleuze and Derrida: in Deleuze one finds an ontology that seeks to expunge from Being all remnants of transcendence, whereas in Derrida one finds an ontology that seeks to trace the eruptions and movements of transcendence within Being.
THE FIELD OF EPISTEMOLOGY
We turn now to the third context in which the immanence–transcendence distinction has played an historically important role, which is found in Kant and is oriented primarily toward epistemology. At one point, Kant describes the entire project of the first critique in terms of the immanence / transcendence distinction: “We shall entitle the principles whose application is confined entirely within the limits of possible experience, immanent, and those, on the other hand, which profess to pass beyond these limits, transcendent.”26 In a famous image, Kant portrays the domain of the understanding as a demarcated “territory” or island (immanence) surrounded by a vast ocean of metaphysical illusion (transcendence).27 When I use a concept such as “table” or “chair” to synthesize my intuition or perceptions, I am operating immanently within the bounds of possible experience. But when I use a concept like the “soul” or the “world” or “God,” I am going beyond the bounds of possible experience, transcending them. Following Plato, Kant will call these concepts that transcend experience “Ideas.” The Idea of the world, for example, as the totality of what is, has no intuition or perception that could ever correspond to it. To use the famous Kantian distinction, we can think the World, but we can never know it; strictly speaking, it is not an object of our experience. Hence, we are led into inevitable illusions when we ask questions about the World as if it were an object of experience. For instance: Did it have a beginning in time, or is it eternal? Does it have boundaries in space, or does it go on forever? The same holds for our Ideas of the Soul and God: Soul, World, and God are all transcendent Ideas. In the “Transcendental Dialectic,” the longest section of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant analyzes the nature of the paradoxes or aporias that reason is led into because of these illusions: the paralogisms of the Soul, the antinomies of the World, the ideal of God. Kant called his project a transcendental philosophy because it sought immanent criteria that would allow us to distinguish between these legitimate and illegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In this sense, the “transcendental” is opposed to the “transcendent”; the aim of Kant's transcendental philosophy is the critique of transcendence, and hence the search for immanent criteria of critique—that is, immanent to reason itself. A transcendental critique is a purely immanent critique.
The Kantian formulation of the distinction between immanence and transcendence is useful to our purposes for two reasons. On the one hand, Kant defines his project in immanent terms as a critique of transcendence, and thus functions as a precursor to Deleuze. On the other hand, Kant none the less resurrects the transcendent Ideas, in the second critique, as the necessary postulates of practical reason, thereby assigning to Ideas an important regulative role, and in this respect functioning as a precursor to Derrida. Indeed, the notion of an “Idea” is an explicit touchstone for both Deleuze and Derrida. Deleuze devotes an entire chapter of his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, as one might expect, to developing a purely immanent theory of Idea (as a multiplicity). Derrida, for his part, repeatedly flags the fact that many of his notions—such as the gift, opening, democracy, etc.—have a status that is “analogous” to transcendent Ideas “in the Kantian sense.”28 For instance, in his analyses of the gift, Derrida says that a pure gift, a pure giving, is an impossibil
ity, because when I say “Thank you,” or even accept the gift, I start canceling the gift, since, in a movement of reappropriation, I am proposing a kind of equivalence between the giving and my gratitude. The transcendent logic of the pure gift is thereby incorporated into an immanent economy of exchange and debt. But this, says Kant, is the very nature of transcendent Ideas. Whenever we speak of something “pure” or “absolute” or “infinite,” as Derrida often does (the “pure gift,” “absolute responsibility,” the “infinite other”), we are in the realm of transcendence, since we never encounter the pure or the absolute in our experience; it is never something that can be present to our experience. The Idea of a pure mother, for instance, would be the idea of a mother who would not be something other than a mother—not a daughter, not a lover, not a wife. We can think this Idea, but we do not encounter it in experience. (The Christian Idea of the “Virgin Mary,” as the mother of God, might be said to approximate this Idea of a pure mother.) The same holds for the logic of the pure gift, of justice, of democracy, and so on. Indeed, in his book Aporias, Derrida explains that, when he was shopping around for a term to describe the formal status of his concepts—or rather his “quasi-concepts”—he initially thought of adopting the Kantian term “antinomy,” but finally decided to use the Greek term “aporia” instead.29 The reason is that he wanted to distance himself from Kant, since their respective problems, as he explains, are analogous but not identical (the difference, in part, lies in their temporal structure). The fundamental aporia or antinomy, for Derrida, is that the “condition of possibility” for, say, a “gift” or a “decision,” is its very impossibility, which is why he describes his list of quasi-concepts as “so many aporetic places or dislocations.”30
But if the notion of the “pure gift” is by definition a transcendent Idea, the immanent concept that corresponds to it is, precisely, debt (since any gift that is given is immediately incorporated into the cycle of exchange and indebtedness). This is in fact what one encounters in Deleuze's work: an immanent analysis of debt, and not a transcendent analysis of the pure gift. In this, Deleuze follows Nietzsche, whose own immanent critique of morality—the Genealogy of Morals—was grounded in an analysis of debt. It was in the debtor–creditor relation, Nietzsche writes, “that one person first encountered another person, that one person first measured himself against another.”31 In this regard, a certain compatibility exists between Derrida and Deleuze. Deleuze would no doubt agree that the condition of possibility for the “pure gift” is its impossibility, and that the gift itself has an “aporetic” status. But this simply points to the transcendence of the concept, and the need for an immanent analysis of gift-giving in so far as it is always enmeshed in the immanent relations of exchange and debt. Derrida and Deleuze each modify Kant's notion of “conditions of possibility” in formulas that sum up their philosophical projects. Derrida defines deconstruction as the experience of the possibility of the impossible—that is, the (impossible) possibility of the impossible “marks an absolute interruption in the regime of the possible.”32 Such is the formula of transcendence. Deleuze, for his part, defines his philosophy as a search, not for the conditions of possible experience, but rather the conditions of real experience. Such is the formula of immanence.
This distinction between the two different theories of Ideas one finds in Deleuze and Derrida is necessarily carried over into two different theories of desire. Plato had already linked Ideas to the theory of desire (Eros). In Kant, the Critique of Practical Reason is presented as an analysis of a “higher” faculty of desire that is determined by the representation of a pure form (an Idea)—namely, the pure form of a universal legislation, or the moral law. This same linkage is carried over in Deleuze and Derrida. For a certain period of time, Deleuze was characterized (at least in France) as a “philosopher of desire,” in part because one of the aims of Anti-Oedipus (1972) had been to develop a purely immanent conception of desire. For our purposes, however, it is perhaps more useful to examine Deleuze's analyses of the contrasting transcendent conception of desire, since it anticipates, mutatis mutandis, the theory of desire one finds in Derrida. The transcendent theory of desire can be summarized in three distinct moments. First, if I desire something, it is because I lack that something. Whereas need is a relative lack that is satisfied as soon its object is attained, desire has traditionally been defined as an irremediable ontological lack which, by its very nature, is unrealizable—precisely because its object is transcendent, or absolutely other (the Good, the One, God, the Moral Law). From Plato and Augustine to Hegel and Freud, desire has been defined, ontologically, as a function of a field of transcendence, in relation to transcendence (as expressed in an Idea). Desire thus presents us with a “tragic” vision of humanity: as humans, we are incomplete and riddled with deficiencies, and ontological desire is the sign of our incompleteness, of our “lack of being.” The “moral” of this vision, in turn, is that we need to acquire our being. In Plato, for instance, we need to make our desire coincide with the order of the Good, an order which desire itself furthers (Symposium). In St. Augustine, desire aims at God, an impossible desire (in this life) which accounts for the perpetual “restlessness” of the soul (caritas versus cupiditas). Hence, finally, the “dramatic” dimension of desire as expressed in the theme of the quest, the incessant search; the initial postulate of our lack of Being is pregnant with a series of intermediate postulates that lead to the ultimate postulate of a recovered Being.
But there is a second and third moment to this transcendent theory of desire. If desire aims at a transcendent object that is by nature unattainable, then what is it that comes to satisfy this desire? The answer: what satisfies this transcendent desire, and gives it a kind of immanence, is akin to what we call a state of pleasure. But this pleasure is, alas, a false immanence, a pseudo-immanence, a kind of delusion or illusion. Desire is calmed for a moment—but then begins again. In Freud, for instance, desire is experienced, energetically, as a disagreeable tension, a kind of “charge.” To get out of this disagreeable state, a discharge is necessary, and this discharge is experienced as a pleasure. Humans will then have peace, their desire will be calmed—but only for a moment, for desire is reborn, and a new discharge becomes necessary. Pleasure, at this level, becomes the only immanent unit capable of measuring desire. The final moment: if desire is an “intentionality” that aims at what it lacks, and is measured in terms of a unit (pleasure as discharge) that is not its own, then we must say that these states of pleasure—such as orgasm or ecstasy, whether mystical or otherwise—only provide illusory or apparent satisfactions to desire; its “true” satisfaction is never present, but is perpetually delayed, indefinitely deferred. The irreducibility of desire to states of pleasure must be reaffirmed under another mode: it is the relation (as Lacan puts it) between an “impossible jouissance” and death. In other words, as long as desire is defined as a function of transcendence, as a desire for the other, then the condition of possibility for desire is its very impossibility (it can never fill its lack). In Deleuze's analyses, then, the transcendent theory of desire comprises three moments:
1. desire is the mark of our “lack” of being, since the object of desire is transcendent
2. one can only hope for illusory discharges of desire in acts of pleasure; and thus
3. desire is pursuing a jouissance that is ultimately impossible.33
In this manner, says Deleuze, the theory of desire is completely ensnared in a field of transcendence.
This is a quick summary of the analysis of desire presented in Anti-Oedipus, but it is not difficult to ascertain the degree to which Derrida participates in this tradition, and indeed pushes it to its limit. Not only does Derrida conceptualize a purely formal structure of transcendence under the guise of the “absolute other” or the tout autre (moreover, if the absolute other is irreducible to a concept, or a word, for example, it is because it transcends the orders of conceptualization, or language); he also undertakes a p
ersistent exploration of the experience of this transcendence, which he often expresses, in terms almost identical to Deleuze's analysis of desire, as an “interminable experience,” “the experience of the impossible,” a “double bind.” What does it mean to “live” the aporias of the gift or justice? Can one “experience” the impossible? Derrida replies: yes.
If the gift is another name for the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it. We intend it. And this even if or because or to the extent that we never encounter it, we never know it, we never verify it, we never experience it in its present existence or its phenomenon.34
What, then, is the nature of this “experience of the impossible”? Derrida replies: a double bind. The Idea of justice is not deconstructable, for Derrida, because it is an infinitely transcendent Idea that is unknowable; it provides no knowledge, and is independent of any determinable context.35 This means, on the one hand, that we can only experience the Idea of justice practically as a call, as a call to justice, as an absolute demand for justice; but it also means, on the other hand, that the Idea of justice provides us no rule for determining when a decision is just or unjust. Hence the double bind of the aporetic experience: the condition of possibility for acting justly is grounded in the impossibility of ever knowing when or if an act is just. And as Derrida comments, “a double bind cannot be assumed; one can only endure it in a passion.”36 What, then, is the “passion” or “desire” specific to the experience of the impossible? It is a desire for the absolute other, and hence a desire that is infinitely suspended, whose fulfillment is infinitely deferred:
