Brent Adkins_ Paul R. Hinlicky - Rethinking Philosophy and Theology With Deleuze_ a New Cartography-Bloomsbury Academic (2013)

Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the unique advantages provided
by Roanoke College’s commitment to the liberal arts and to its Department of
Religion and Philosophy. We are blessed with colleagues whose competence,
good will, and passion for excellence bring out the best in all of us. At the risk
of singling out just one of our colleagues, Ned Wisnefske was a co-reader and
conversation partner in the several years of study that led us to the writing of
this book. We happily acknowledge our debt to him. Thanks are also due to Bo
Holm of the University of Aarhus, Denmark, who read and commented on the
manuscript, as also to Fritz Oehlschlaeger of Virginia Tech, who engaged mightily
and helpfully with its ideas. Rob Saler, of Christian Theological Seminary, also
provided expert critique and suggestions at numerous points.
Introduction
Assemblages
This book is an experiment in metaphysics. What we have in mind by metaphysics

doesn’t stray too far from Aristotle’s account of metaphysics as concerning
both being as such and the highest being. In the wake of Christianity, being
as such has been parceled out to philosophy, while the highest being has been
the domain of theology. Figuring out exactly where to draw the line between
the two or judging which one should have primacy has been a major concern
in Western thought. With some trepidation we wade into these waters. Our
primary concern is the way in which the distinction between philosophy and
theology has been articulated since Kant. Our claim is that Kant’s fundamental
metaphysical presupposition, which we’ll call discontinuity, results in an
insuperable division between being as such and the highest being, or in Kant’s
terms between religion and reason alone. We think that this metaphysical
presupposition is not Kant’s alone, but is in fact the dominant metaphysical
presupposition of both philosophy and theology in Kant’s wake. Our experiment
is formally analogous to Kant’s Copernican turn. However, instead of reversing
the priority of objects and intuitions, we propose to replace the metaphysical
presupposition of discontinuity with one of continuity. The result of affirming
continuity is a new conception of not only philosophy and theology but also
of religion.
This new conception is simply stated: philosophy, religion, and theology are
assemblages. What it means for each of these to be an assemblage, however,
is not so easily explained. Assemblages do not appear fully formed; they must
be constructed. An assemblage is always constructed out of heterogeneous
components. In each case these components are diverse, appropriated from each
other, politics, culture, and numerous other discourses. The goal of constructing
2 Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze
these assemblages, however, is not merely discursive. It is experimental,

experimental in the precise sense required for responding to Spinoza’s dictum
that “no one knows what a body can do.” Spinoza’s claim was not that bodies
remain forever inscrutable, but that they are so complex that one cannot
deduce a priori what they are capable of. The only solution is an a posteriori
one; one must discover through experience what a body can do. Bodies for
Spinoza, however, are already complex, the combinations of innumerable,
heterogeneous parts. Furthermore, bodies can combine with other bodies to
form new, even more complex bodies. An assemblage is a body in Spinoza’s
sense, and we have created a new assemblage in order to see what it can do.
Our primary experiment involves the theology assemblage. We were not able to
experiment with this assemblage in every way, but we were able to experiment
with it in regard to politics. In particular, we were able to use our new assemblage
to intervene in the debates surrounding revolutionary subjectivity that arise in
the work of Badiou, Žižek, and Agamben.
The first and most obvious question that arises is, what is an assemblage? We
take the term from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, particularly A
Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? One way to think about assemblage
in their work is an answer to the perennial philosophical question, what is a
thing? An assemblage is a singular and temporary coagulation of heterogeneous
forces that achieves consistency. Importantly, though, consistency is not unity or
identity. As an example of the kind of consistency and heterogeneity they have in
mind Deleuze and Guattari use the example of the orchid and the wasp. There is
a species of orchid, the tongue orchid, that so successfully mimics the appearance
of a female wasp that male wasps mate with it. This deception ensures that the
orchid is able to spread its pollen. What interests Deleuze and Guattari about
this, though, is the very combination of heterogeneous elements at play in this
coupling. What Deleuze and Guattari want to emphasize is that all “things” are
assembled out of disparate components, and that these disparate components
are themselves further composed of disparate components. To emphasize
this assembled and heterogeneous nature they use the term “assemblage.”
Additionally, we will see in later chapters that “rhizome” is also an equivalent
term.
Assemblages as heterogeneous consistencies, as with bodies in Spinoza, have
limits that are generated internally by the relation among their various parts.
A human body, for example, is not capable of unaided flight, precisely because
the relation of its parts precludes this capacity. Deleuze and Guattari argue that
every assemblage generates two limits, a limit that tends toward dissolution and
Introduction 3
a limit that tends toward constriction. The limit of dissolution is that point at
which the assemblage is no longer able to maintain its consistency and thus
becomes a new assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari have numerous names for
this limit: immanence, deterritorialization, molecular, smooth space, the body
without organs, and chaos to name a few. The limit of constriction is that point
at which the assemblage becomes calcified. The relation among its parts makes
change impossible. Deleuze and Guattari also have various names for this limit:
transcendence, territorialization, molar, striated space, the full body without
organs, and opinion to name a few. These limits must be thought of as abstract
poles on a continuum. Furthermore, every assemblage must be thought as
containing tendencies toward both of these limits.
The difficulty with most philosophy, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is
that it confuses the thing with its point of maximum constriction. Precisely
because of this confusion, it has become possible to ask the question of the thing
in the form, “What is X?,” which in its very grammar looks for what does not
change and is not subject to change. That is, the very form of the question pursues
eternal essences thought in discontinuity from ever-changing existence. Thus,
for Deleuze and Guattari, the basic question of philosophy is not, “What is?”
but following Nietzsche, “Which one(s)?” The second question does not direct
us to unchanging essences but to a singular set of capabilities in the process of
being exercised to a certain degree. “Which one(s)?” also introduces temporality
and change into the question of the thing. Finally, the answer to the question
“Which one(s)?” is always a concrete assemblage without primitive terms, and
such assemblages always demand experimentation in order to discover what
they are capable of.
In this spirit, our ultimate goal is to experiment with the theology assemblage
in its relation to both the philosophy and religion assemblages. Our first
question, then, became a genealogical one: Under what conditions, and in what
ways has theology been differentiated from philosophy and religion? How do
philosophy and religion differ from one another? Furthermore, what has been
the result of this kind of differentiation? What sorts of assemblages does it result
in? What are these assemblages capable of? The nod to Nietzsche’s genealogical
project is conscious here and guides much of our analysis. Much like Nietzsche,
what we discovered is that many of the assemblages that have been created have
impoverished rather than enriched our lives.
We locate the source of this impoverishment in what we call the denial of the
continuity thesis. While the denial of the continuity thesis has its roots in the
founding of Western thought, we begin with the form that this denial takes in
the work of Kant. It is our conviction that both philosophy and theology remain
completely within the boundaries set by Kant. We’ll return to this at length in
the first chapter, but briefly Kant’s entire critical edifice is predicated on the
discontinuity of concepts and intuitions, or the sensible and the intelligible. They
do not lie on a continuum with one another; they are different in kind. In his
“Inaugural Address” Kant is explicit that this denial of the continuity of concept
and intuition is a return to Plato. Since Kant, both philosophy and theology for
the most part have reinstated this discontinuity in one form or another. The
overwhelming dominance of this form of Kantianism has driven us to look
for resources in pre-Kantian philosophers such as Leibniz and Spinoza and in
post-Kantian philosophers such as Nietzsche and Deleuze in order to create a
new assemblage.
In an effort to clarify what is at stake in this distinction between continuity
and discontinuity, let’s look at a passage from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.
In the first essay Nietzsche is concerned about a historical shift that has
occurred in human values from the “master morality” predicated on “good”
and “bad” to the “slave morality” predicated on “good” and “evil.” Nietzsche
must show the circumstances under which this shift occurred and then ask
whether the results have been beneficial. For Nietzsche the shift from master to
slave morality is generated by ressentiment. Nietzsche illustrates this concept of
ressentiment in his parable of the lambs and the birds of prey. It’s not surprising
that lambs and birds of prey would have different values, but what Nietzsche
finds problematic is that the lambs’ values are seen as prima facie superior.
Nietzsche credits the putative superiority of the lambs’ values to what he calls a
“seduction of language.” As an example of this seduction of language Nietzsche
analyzes the sentence, “The lightning flashed.” The temptation is to suppose that
there are two separable entities here, the lightning and its flash. The result of
this separation, which itself is the basic grammatical separation of subject and
verb, is to constitute a subject as the metaphysical condition for that which is
conditioned. On the supposition of a subject as metaphysical ground arises the
possibility that the subject is free to act or not act. In terms of Nietzsche’s moral
genealogy the absurd conclusion that has been drawn from this seduction of
language is that birds of prey are free not to act like birds of prey and can in fact
act like lambs. Furthermore, insofar as birds of prey act like birds of prey they
are responsible (i.e. punishable) for their actions.1
For our purposes, it is sufficient to look at the ontological implications of
this seduction of language. A linguistic distinction between subject and verb
becomes an ontological discontinuity between being and doing, cause and
Introduction 5
effect, conditions and conditioned. As we will see in the chapters that follow, this
ontological discontinuity authorizes all manner of transcendent schemas that
subtend the majority of philosophies and theologies in the West. The problem
with discontinuity is not that it introduces difference, but that it introduces
difference in kind. However, difference in kind requires an additional account
of how differences in kind are related. There is remarkable consensus on this
issue, at least in the abstract. Differences in kind are related hylomorphically,
as form and content. Furthermore, in an effort to account for the nature of
form and content, some version of the analogy of being is required. Beginning
with Kant we will show the ways in which discontinuity has been taken up in
philosophy and theology, as well as the consequences of discontinuities entailed
hylomorphism and analogy.
While we thought it prudent to engage in some historical ground clearing,
our primary purpose is not critical. Our primary purpose is experimental, to see
what would become of both philosophy and theology if we took continuity as
our starting point, to see if we could avoid the particular seduction of language
that Nietzsche warns us against. What would philosophy and theology look like
if we suppose that lightning is inseparable from its flash, being continuous with
doing, the doer identical with the deed? As with discontinuity, continuity also
has some ontological entailments that we will explore more thoroughly in the
chapters below. First, since there are no differences in kind, only differences
in degree hylomorphism must give way to hylozoism, the idea that matter is
self-organizing. Second, univocity replaces the analogy of being as ontology.
Affirming the continuity thesis also has theological entailments that parallel
the ontological entailments in philosophy. The first is that theology must think
transcendence within immanence. Transcendence can no longer be regarded
as different from immanence in kind. Rather, transcendence and immanence
must be seen as two abstract poles on a single continuum. Every assemblage has
tendencies toward both transcendence and immanence. The difference between
religion and philosophy lies in their different tendencies. Philosophy tends
toward immanence, while religion tends toward transcendence. Importantly,
though, transcendence need not entail a transcendent entity. All that is required
for transcendence is the organization of a field by something that is discontinuous
with the field. Thus, on this reading, Kant’s transcendental categories tend toward
transcendence because they are discontinuous with the sensible manifold.
Christian theology in distinction from religion and philosophy is the attempt to
think both tendencies of transcendence and immanence in a single assemblage.
This is precisely the meaning of the incarnation for theology and precisely its
difference from both religion and philosophy. As a result, Christian theology

is a fragile, paradoxical assemblage, one that is in constant danger of becoming
either bad philosophy or bad religion.
The temptation for theology is to mitigate the offense created by its paradoxical
nature through the use of simile. Simile, as the linguistic expression of the analogy
of being, has two fatal flaws. First, it drains the paradox of its power. As we will
see, there is an enormous difference in meaning between the simile, “Christ is
like one crucified” and the metaphor “Christ crucified.” In an effort to maintain
the paradoxical nature of theology and in keeping with our commitment to
univocity and continuity, we propose that the second theological entailment is
a commitment to metaphor in opposition to simile. The second fatal flaw of
simile from our perspective is that it can only result in an apophatic theology.
While the via affirma and via negativa were traditionally thought to be necessary
complements to one another. The fact is that the via negativa always wins. If,
ultimately, one must negate everything that one affirms of God, in the end one
will be reduced to saying only what God is not. We think that the only way to
have a kataphatic theology is to avoid the via negativa from the outset. Insofar as
our assemblage is kataphatic it must eschew simile in favor of metaphor.
The third theological entailment concerns its method, positive dialectic.
Positive dialectic is set in contrast to the negative dialectics that fuel not only the
work of Adorno but also the work of German Idealism and psychoanalysis. Žižek
is the obvious heir and most subtle champion of this method. In short, negative
dialectics depends on some form of negation or lack to drive it. In extreme cases
as we will see in Žižek this lack is imputed to God. Positive dialectic, on the
other hand, arises out of Agamben’s work on Paul in The Time that Remains.
In particular it focuses on Paul’s use of the verb katargeo to describe the status
of the law in light of the metaphor Christ crucified. As an interesting historical
side note, Luther translates katargeo as aufheben in his translation of Romans.
Luther’s aufheben becomes Hegel’s Aufhebung, but Hegel gets it wrong. Insofar as
Hegel is committed to negation, which follows from his denial of the continuity
thesis, Hegel is forced to take up Aufhebung Gnostically, as the progressive
imposition of formal reason on the content of theology. Žižek follows the same
strategy, although much more recklessly than Hegel, in his utterly kenotic
reading of Christianity. Positive dialectics argues, though, that Paul’s katargeo
and Luther’s aufheben demonstrate God’s own self-overcoming. Crucially, this
self-overcoming does not arise out of a lack or deficiency in God that must
necessarily be overcome, but out of a conception of God that is always, already
Introduction 7
the fully giving self-relation that is commonly referred to as the Trinity. Esse
Deum dare—To be God is to give.
The ontological and theological entailments of the continuity thesis require
not only a genealogy, as we have seen, but also a cartography. The need for a
cartography follows from the fact that assemblages are never isolable, but in
fact maintain their consistency by the ways in which they connect and do not
connect with other assemblages. These connections and blockages are mappable.
However, and this is crucial, a map in this sense is not a scaled representation
of some preexisting reality. Following Deleuze and Guattari, we will refer
to these scaled representations as “tracings.” A map, in contrast, is created
through experimentation, by seeing what an assemblage is capable of. Maps are
continually drawn and redrawn precisely because assemblages are always in the
process of becoming.
The map that we draw here is new because we are experimenting with three
different assemblages, religion, philosophy, and theology in order to see what
they can do. One of the blockages we discovered for each of these assemblages
is the denial of the continuity thesis. As a result, one part of our experiment is
to see how the assemblages change if we reinstate the continuity thesis. What we
discovered in part is that the reinstatement of the continuity thesis requires a
reorientation in thought. Thus, we read Kant through the lens of his essay, “What
Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” One way to think about Kant’s
critical project is to frame it in terms of orientation. Our claim is that Kant’s
entire philosophy is oriented by the axis of discontinuity that runs through every
major work following the “Inaugural Address.” Kant’s project of orientation,
insofar as it is predicated on the denial of the discontinuity thesis, finds him very
concerned with the issue of drawing boundaries. Interestingly, discussion of
these boundaries is articulated in legal and geographic terms. For Kant, the legal
and the geographical mutually implicate one another. In fact, we would go so far
as to say that the very image of thought in Kant equates reason with its ability to
draw appropriate boundaries and that these boundaries can only be thought in
legal and geographical terms. Furthermore, we argue that wherever one finds the
denial of the continuity thesis, one will find an obsession with boundaries. This
denial of the continuity thesis and an obsession with boundaries has been the
dominant trend in Western thought since the time of Kant. We find it repeated
in the work of German Idealism, as well as, phenomenology and psychoanalysis.
What this means for our purposes is that the assemblages of religion, philosophy,
and theology are continually constructed and mapped in the same ways with
the same connections and same dead ends. The work of Heidegger and Derrida,
for example, while markedly different from Kant, still reproduces the same
discontinuous and thereby apophatic account of religion.
We are tired of running into the same dead ends. We would like to remap the
territory marked by the religious, philosophical, and theological assemblages.
We would like to begin with continuity rather than discontinuity. We would like
to build new assemblages in order to see what they can do. As we will see below,
this requires a whole host of new conceptions. It will require new conceptions of
territory and boundary, of God and law. In short it will require new conceptions
of religion, philosophy, and theology. Of course, these new conceptions are very
complex, so we weren’t able to experiment with them exhaustively. Our hope is
that others will take up these new assemblages and experiment with them, too.
The book itself is an assemblage of multiple, heterogeneous parts. To begin with
it is the work of two separate authors, each with his own expertise, a philosopher
and a Christian theologian. Over the course of a decade long and wide-ranging
conversation between us, two things became clear. First, such a book needed
to be written. Second, neither of us could write this book alone. In light of this
we formulated a plan by which we would exchange drafts of chapters in our
areas of expertise and then proceed to the next set of chapters. The original plan
was to alternate the chapters, first philosophy then theology. Over the course of
writing the book, however, and in light of the conviction that theology always
presupposes philosophy as protology, we decided to arrange the book with two
equal parts. The first part begins with Kant and the effect that his denial of the
continuity thesis has on the relation between philosophy and religion. From there
it shows how Kant’s basic starting point is taken up and repeated in Heidegger
and Derrida. Part 1 concludes with a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s work,
particularly as it relates to the question of assemblages and boundaries. Part 2
takes up the basics of this philosophical framework, not in order to reproduce
it, or even baptize it, but to show that the theological assemblage is distinct from
both philosophy and religion. In order to demonstrate this it takes up the question
of God in three distinct ways, as hidden, as incarnate, and as revealed, not only
to show the limits of contemporary theology but also the limits of contemporary
philosophical appropriations of Pauline texts in the work of Žižek, Agamben, and
Badiou. The goal of the second part, as with the first, however, is not primarily
critical, but sees critique as the starting point for creating something new.
1
The Boundaries of the Kantian Problematic
It is impossible to overestimate Kant’s importance for both philosophy and

theology. He is a watershed figure that fundamentally changed the landscape
of thought in the West. Our contention is that part of Kant’s power lies in his
ability to draw boundaries around different types of human endeavor. The
critical project itself is an exercise in drawing boundaries for the understanding,
for reason, and for judgment. Furthermore, Kant is explicit in articulating this
survey in both geographical and legal terms. Our task is to follow these legal and
geographical metaphors to their source in Kant’s Inaugural Address where Kant
first denies the continuity thesis. As we will see, Kant’s denial of the continuity
thesis is precisely what allows him to set these boundaries as well as legislate
their maintenance. We will also see that Kant’s denial of the continuity thesis
is intimately connected to his rejection of hylozoism and an affirmation of
hylomorphism.
Geography and law in the critical project
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant uses both a legal and geographical vocabulary
to establish the proper place of reason. The legal vocabulary is explicit in Kant’s
concern in the “Preface” to the first edition with whether or not metaphysics
deserves to be restored to its title as queen of the sciences. Questions of royalty,
however, are ultimately questions of genealogy. The right to rule must be
confirmed by descent from a royal ancestor. Locke famously calls the queen’s
bloodline into question by arguing that heritage is merely common experience.
Kant takes up the cause of the queen by attempting to show that her claim to the
throne is indeed just. However, Kant is determined that the queen’s rule will not
be despotic. Thus, he must show that queen’s claim is sound but not boundless.1
The attempt to rehabilitate and at the same time delimit metaphysics lies
at the heart of Kant’s critical project. For the rehabilitation of metaphysics
Kant continues to use legal vocabulary. Recent scholarship has shown that the
notoriously difficult “Transcendental Deduction” is in fact modeled on a legal
document that provides precisely the kind of genealogical support required by
someone trying to establish her claims to rule.2 Thus, the question the deduction
seeks to answer in Kant is not a logical question but a legal question. Not, what
are the necessary and sufficient conditions that entail the pure concepts of the
understanding? But, by what right are we justified in using the pure concepts of
the understanding? Do the pure concepts of the understanding have a right to
rule experience, or does experience lie outside their jurisdiction?
For Kant the deduction is a success insofar as it establishes that the pure
concepts of the understanding have a right to rule. However, what he has not
established at this point is the limit of that rule. Over what land does the queen
rule? Where are its boundaries? How will she know where her power begins and
where it ends? To answer these questions Kant turns to geography. In the first
instance he speaks about this negatively, as “denying knowledge in order to make
room for faith.”3 Here the claims of the queen are checked by competing claims.
For Kant the unlimited rule of the queen is identical to dogmatism. Dogmatism
must be reined in by critique. It is only by embracing these limits that the conflicts
between unbelief and morality can be resolved and that metaphysics can be set
on the sure path of science.
Kant gives a positive account of the queen’s land in his discussion of the
phenomena/noumena distinction. For Kant the preceding analysis was not
merely a tour of the queen’s land but a survey, a survey that not only locates but
orients everything in the country. The great discovery of this survey is that the
queen lives on an island “enclosed in unalterable boundaries (Grenzen) by nature
itself.”4 Thus, the queen rightly rules on this island but insofar as the boundaries
are natural she cannot hope to extend her realm any more than she could hope
to turn the ocean into land.
The island is, of course, sensible experience and the ocean is the supersensible
that lies beyond experience. The theoretical deployment of reason must be
restricted to objects of possible experience. Otherwise, it risks being lost on
the stormy sea of the supersensible, forever chasing illusions and chimera created
by the use of the categories of the understanding beyond the objects of possible
experience. What lies beyond the objects of possible experience for Kant is most
The Boundaries of the Kantian Problematic 13
importantly morality, reason in its practical deployment. The delimitation of

knowledge in order to make room for faith is the restriction of the queen to the
island of truth. In order to leave this island, Kant will argue that we must orient
ourselves differently.
The question of orientation comes up explicitly in Kant’s essay, “What Does
it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” Kant notes that the term “orient” in
the sense of locating oneself with regard to the cardinal points of the compass
derives from “finding the sunrise.”5 Within this context one can connect the idea
of orientation with the Copernican Revolution, which profoundly alters the way
in which we position ourselves in relation to the sun. In the first Critique Kant
famously argues that only if we suppose that objects conform to intuitions can
synthetic a priori propositions be possible. This is a reversal of the traditional
way of thinking that supposes that intuitions must conform to objects. Kant sees
a similar reversal in Copernicus’ claim that we can only make sense of planetary
motion if the earth revolves around the sun.
We can further connect the idea of orientation with the longitude problem
that dominated the eighteenth century, and which had only been solved in Kant’s
lifetime. Orienting oneself on land can be done straightforwardly through knowing
one’s latitude and landmarks. Lines of latitude are parallel and equidistant from
one another. Latitude is essentially a spatial problem. Thus, one can always know
how far north or south one is, regardless of the east/west position. At sea, however,
life itself may depend on knowing one’s longitude. The problem with longitude,
though, is that the distance between lines of longitude varies depending on one’s
north/south location. In the case of longitude what is really needed is the time
at one’s home port. By knowing the difference between noon at home and noon
where one is at sea, the distance traveled east or west can be calculated. Longitude
is thus essentially a temporal problem and was not solved until a clock could be
invented that would stand the rigors of a sea voyage.
Kant pays homage to spatial and temporal dimensions in two interrelated
ways. The most obvious way is the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the first Critique,
which argues that space is the form of all outer intuitions and time is the forms
of all inner intuitions. The second way returns us to the phenomena/noumena
distinction. Kant is explicit that the categories of the understanding are only
sufficient to allow us to navigate on the island of the sensible. If we attempt to
use these categories to navigate on the stormy sea of the supersensible we risk
becoming lost or shipwrecked. What is needed is another form of orientation,
not just space but also time, not just latitude but longitude. Ultimately, Kant’s
proposal is that reason in its practical deployment is sufficient to guide us here.
However, before the complete articulation of his practical philosophy, Kant

was pulled into the Spinozist controversy that engulfed German intellectual life
beginning in 1785. It is within this context that we find the essay on orientation
as Kant attempts to find a way to uphold Enlightenment ideals in the face of
increasingly hostile religious and political pressure. In this essay Kant returns to
the distinction laid out in the first Critique between the theoretical and practical
deployments of reason. He argues that reason cannot be satisfied if it is limited to
its theoretical use, which produces knowledge of objects of possible experience.
Reason can only be satisfied if it goes beyond these boundaries, because practical
reason must use judgment, and the presuppositions for moral judgment are God
and immortality. The boundary that reason must go beyond is, of course, the
natural boundary between the island of the sensible and the stormy sea of the
supersensible. To use the navigation principles of the island is sure to result in
shipwreck, but where will these new principles come from? In the orientation
essay Kant speaks of the subjective principle that accompanies all orientation.
He notes that without the ability to distinguish right from left, spatial orientation
is impossible.
What about within reason, though? What is the subjective principle that
makes orientation possible? How, on the one hand, will it guide beyond the
boundaries of sensible experience? And, on the other hand, how will it prevent
enthusiasm, the great danger of both religious and philosophical dogmatism?
The subjective principle that for Kant answers these questions is “rational
faith” (Vernunftglauben). The very construction of the term is an attempt to
respond to the rift created by the Spinozist controversy. In revealing Lessing’s
Spinozism, Jacobi argues that faith and reason are fundamentally opposed
to one another. One may follow reason, but it inexorably leads to Spinozism,
which at the time was equivalent to atheism or Jacobi’s newly coined term
“nihilism.” On Kant’s view, though, Spinozism is not the necessary result of
pursuing reason’s satisfaction. Rather, the problem with Spinozism is that
it is not properly oriented. It crucially lacks that subjective principle that
would guide it beyond the realm of the sensible. As a result, Spinozism makes
theoretical claims about the supersensible and thus finds itself foundering in
enthusiasm. For Kant both Jacobi and Spinoza fell into the error of assuming
that reason could only be deployed theoretically. As a result both risk falling
into enthusiasm, a religious enthusiasm in Jacobi’s case and a philosophical
enthusiasm in Spinoza’s case.
Rational faith is what allows one to negotiate the false dichotomy proposed
by Jacobi. “A pure rational faith is therefore the signpost or compass by means
of which the speculative thinker orients himself in his rational excursion into
the field of supersensible objects. . . .”6 Notice that the excursion into the field of
the supersensible requires the subjective principle of rational faith, precisely as
sea navigation requires the temporal principle of longitude. The implication of
rational faith is that insofar as we presume to know (theoretically) objects that
are not possible objects of experience (i.e. God and the soul) we will lose our way.
However, once we take these objects as necessary for action (i.e. a will positing
the good), we can navigate on the stormy sea of the supersensible. It is only
insofar as we pursue the moral import of supersensible objects that we do not
claim too much for them, as does dogmatism and enthusiasm, nor do we claim
too little for them, as does skepticism.
The claim that Kant elides here, though, and one that in fact places him in line
with Spinoza and other Enlightenment thinkers about religion, is the synonymy
of religion and morality. When Kant claims in the B preface to the first Critique
that he is denying knowledge to make room for faith, it is clear that he has morality
in mind. In the immediately following clause, Kant writes, “dogmatism . . . is the
true source of all unbelief conflicting with morality.”7 Notice that it’s unbelief
that conflicts with morality not faith. Or rather, since the two are synonymous,
either term could have gone there. Kant further bolsters the identity of faith
and morality in the orientation essay. In the same paragraph in which he claims
that rational faith is a compass, he concludes by saying, “but a human being
who has common but (morally) healthy reason can mark out his path, in both
a theoretical and a practical respect, in a way which is fully in accord with the
whole end of his vocation; and it is this rational faith which must also be taken as
the ground of every other faith, and even of every revelation.”8 As we’ll see below,
here Kant anticipates the argument he will make a few years later in his Religion
within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. The important thing about the above
passage, though, is that rational faith is equated with marking out one’s path
with morally healthy reason. Furthermore, and this was precisely the attitude
that would so trouble censors in Berlin, this rational faith was the ground of all
other faiths. In other words, rational faith is nothing other than practical reason,
and practical reason provides the bar by which other faith claims are judged. As
Kant says, “if it is disputed that reason deserves the right to speak first in matters
concerning supersensible objects such as the existence of God and the future
world, then a wide gate is opened to all enthusiasm, superstition and even to
atheism.”9 Reason’s primacy thus guarantees that a proper border is maintained
between reasonable thought and action, on the one hand, and the dangers of
enthusiasm.
Kant pursues (and complicates) this image of proper boundaries in the

Critique of Judgment by distinguishing among the field (Feld), territory (Boden),
domain (Gebiet), and residence (Aufenthalt) of concepts. Both field and territory
are geographic concepts. That is, each surveys a portion of space. In this regard,
Kant speaks about how far our concepts might be extended. The difference
between a field and a territory, then, is precisely the length of that extension. A
field contains all possible objects that our cognition might be related to, while a
territory is “the part of this field within which cognition is possible for us. . . .”10
Knowing the limits of the extension of concepts is, of course, the purpose of
Kant’s entire critical project, which concerns “the investigation of its [pure
reason’s] possibility and boundaries (Grenzen).”11 A field thus has an internal
boundary that separates the possibility of cognition from the impossibility
of cognition. And, presumably for Kant, to breach this boundary would risk
opening the territory to dialectical illusion. Or, if we return to Kant’s image
of the island and sea from the first Critique, it’s as if the island lies below sea
level, and the only thing keeping the sea from washing over the island are the
boundaries set by nature. Enthusiasm, then, isn’t just a danger of the fringes, it
risks overwhelming all of our knowledge. This cautionary note is precisely the
way that Kant concludes the orientation essay.
However, merely solving the geographical problem is not sufficient for
Kant. As we’ve seen, this project has a geographical component and a legal
component. Or, more precisely, the geographical and the legal entail one another
for Kant. For Kant rights are a property and property is a right. Kant makes
this explicit in his discussion of domain and residence. Once the boundary
between field and territory has been determined, the rightful rule of the
territory needs to be determined. Kant calls the rightful rule of a territory a
domain (Gebiet). Rightful rule is determined by whether concepts are legislative
within the territory. That is, cognition of the object of the concept must not
only be possible but necessary. If concepts are not legislative, then they have a
residence (Aufenthalt) but no domain. That is, cognition of the object is possible
but contingent. The distinction that Kant has in mind here is between “concepts
of experience” (Erfahrungsbegriffe), which have empirical content, and the pure
concepts generated by the categories of the understanding. Only pure concepts
generated by the categories of the understanding have a domain, because only
they can be legislative with regard to objects of possible experience.
The legal picture is further complicated by the fact that the same territory has
two domains. Not only are concepts of the understanding legislative for objects of
possible experience, but so are the concepts of reason. Initially, it sounds strange
for a territory to have two domains, but this seems analogous to the situation in
the United States where every state is governed by both state and federal laws.
We could pursue this analogy further by noting that each domain generates a
different legal system with a different set of precedents for judging cases. Thus,
precedents related to state law do not become precedents for federal law and vice
versa. The hope is that each system would govern different facets of life. State
law deals with issues internal to the state, while federal law deals with the state’s
relation to other states and to the federal government. In the same way, Kant
argues that “[u]nderstanding and reason thus have two different legislations on
one and the same territory of experience, without either being detrimental to
the other.”12 Much like the relation between state and federal law, understanding
and reason have two different legislations, because each has a different object.
The object of the understanding is nature, and the object of reason is freedom.
Each legislates differently through different concepts, concepts of nature for the
understanding and concepts of freedom for reason.
The temptation that Kant wants to avoid, though, is that a different domain
entails a different territory. Kant is not arguing that concepts of freedom are
legislative for the supersensible, while concepts of nature are legislative for the
sensible. Rather, Kant is arguing that insofar as humans inhabit the same territory
of experience, there are two ways in which to order it. We order it in terms of
two kinds of causality: conceptual and mechanical.13 These causalities are not
reducible to one another. In fact Kant argues that there is an “incalculable gulf ”
between these two domains. Kant even goes so far as to say that it’s as if these
domains were different worlds. His point, however, is not a claim about the
ontological status of the sensible and the supersensible. His point is the legal
claim that these two legislative domains are incommensurate with one another.
Again, to return to the relation between state and federal law in the United States,
these two legal domains are designed to operate independently of one another,
but do not entail different countries. One is also reminded of Leibniz’s distinction
between nature and grace as a way of accounting for the difference between
efficient and final causality. Kant does note, though, that while the concepts of
nature can have no influence on the concepts of freedom, the concepts of freedom
should have an influence on the concepts of nature. This could also be thought
in terms of the relation between state and federal law. While it is the case that
state laws can in no way impinge on federal laws, state laws must conform to
the US Constitution. That is, if a state law violates the founding principles of the
country, then it cannot be legislative for the territory. With regard to the relation
between the theoretical and practical domains Kant puts it this way, “the concept
of freedom should make the end that is imposed by its laws real in the sensible
world; and nature must consequently also be able to be conceived in such a way
that lawfulness of its form is at least in agreement with the possibility of the
ends that are to be realized in it in accordance with the laws of freedom.”14 To put
this as schematically as possible: Nature cannot influence morality, but morality
should influence nature. At the same time, nature must be conceived in such a
way that it does not preclude the possibility of a causality predicated on freedom,
rather than merely on mechanical causality.
This asymmetrical interrelation between freedom and nature ultimately leads
Kant to posit the ground that makes the transition possible between these two
domains. That is, if both the theoretical and the practical are forms of thought,
what do they have in common as thought? For Kant the answer is judgment, and
the remainder of the third Critique is spent outlining the principles unique to
judgment alone. For our purposes here it is important to note that judgment has
no domain (Gebiet), but it does have a territory (Boden). This is further qualified,
though, by the fact that the principle of judgment is subjective. Judgment does not
have a field of possible objects; rather, it is strictly the principle by which we can
transition between the understanding and reason. From this point Kant wants
to note that while reason and the understanding have corresponding faculties of
desire and cognition, what lies between these faculties is the feeling of pleasure
and displeasure. Feelings of pleasure and displeasure are of course subjective.
However, since they are guided by a principle they can also be universal. They
cannot be legislative, though. In order to be legislative, judgments must subsume
particulars under universals. Kant calls judgments of this type determining.
Judgments that begin with the particular and have no universal to subsume it
under are reflecting. A reflecting judgment cannot be legislative. Thus, judgment
independent of reason or the understanding (and so, only related to the feeling
of pleasure and displeasure) has a territory but no domain.
Even when the metaphor becomes strained in the case of judgment, Kant
continues to articulate the relation among the faculties and the relation of the
faculties to possible objects in both geographic and legal terms. This no doubt
springs from the very idea of a faculty (Vermögen), which points to a capacity
or power. Within this context questions about the extent and proper use of the
faculty naturally arise. The answers that Kant gives to these kinds of questions
always lie at the intersection of property and right. Faculties are situated in a
field, but their territory does not cover the whole field. Furthermore, faculties
may legislate in different ways within a given territory thus producing different
limits on the power of a given faculty.
We can press Kant further here and ask where the final authority lies for
settling these border disputes. Kant answers unequivocally that only reason
can settle these disputes. If one wonders, for example, why metaphysics is not
progressing like other well-established sciences, then the answer that Kant gives
is that it has overstepped its bounds. Metaphysics has been caught in an endless
battle between dogmatists, who maintain a tyrannical civility, and “nomads, who
abhor all permanent cultivation of the soil.”15 The dogmatists build up civil society
and the nomads swoop in and destroy it, only to have the dogmatists rebuild.
The history of metaphysics is thus the history of contested ground. What is
needed to remedy this is a proper setting of boundaries. “It is not an improvement
but a deformation of the sciences when their boundaries (Grenzen) are allowed
to run over into one another.”16 All of the other sciences have properly set their
boundaries and thus are able to make progress. Metaphysics, however, has been
staging mock battles in which no ground is ever gained or lost. Metaphysics
must properly set its boundaries, survey its territory, and establish its proper
right to rule. In order to do this, of course, a critique of pure reason is needed.
A critique that simultaneously narrows the boundaries of the theoretical use of
reason and at the same time opens space for the practical use of reason.17 So,
in order for reason to progress, it must subject itself to critique, at which point
reason will determine its own proper boundaries.
The Conflict of the Faculties as border dispute
For Kant, though, the way in which reason determines its own boundaries has
wide-ranging effects on both politics and religion. In The Conflict of the Faculties,
for example, Kant argues that while the state is within its rights to censor the
higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine that right should not extend to
philosophy. Notice again that the issue here is precisely one of territory and
domain. Kant is arguing that the state’s legislative domain does not extend to
philosophy. Kant prefaces his argument in this book by reprinting the exchange
between him and Wöllner, the censor for King Frederick William II. At issue in
the letters was Kant’s book Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason along
with other unnamed shorter treatises (very likely, “The End of All Things”).
Wöllner writes that this book misuses “philosophy to distort and disparage many
of the cardinal and basic teachings of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity.”18
Shockingly and without even the slightest hint of self-awareness, Wöllner goes
so far as to accuse Kant of corrupting the youth and acting against the state. If
Kant is able to give an account of himself and avoid further displeasing Wöllner
and the king, everything will be fine. “Failing this, you must expect unpleasant
measures for your continuing obstinacy.”19
Kant probably did not fear for his life, despite the fact that the charges brought
against him were identical to the ones brought against Socrates. However, it was
entirely conceivable that he could lose his position at the university as well as
being banished from Prussia. Kant’s solution is ingenious, and it makes clear
precisely why he sees fit to write about the relation between philosophy and
religion again. Kant’s fundamental response to Wöllner is to argue that he is not
evaluating the Bible or Christianity at all. Thus, he cannot be disparaging of it
in any way. But, to completely clear the air and ensure that he is not seen to be
disparaging Christianity or corrupting the youth, Kant vows, “as Your Majesty’s
most loyal subject, that I will hereafter refrain from discoursing publicly, in
lectures or writings, on religion, whether natural or revealed.”20 According to
a footnote that Kant attaches to the phrase “Your Majesty’s most loyal subject,”
he chose the expression carefully, “so that I would not renounce my freedom to
judge in this religious suit forever, but only during His Majesty’s lifetime.”21 In
short, a dead king has no subjects. Kant does not think he is guilty of any of the
charges, but since the king thinks so, Kant will stop talking about religion, as
long as the king thinks so. Of course, once the king is dead, he presumably no
longer has an opinion about whether Kant is damaging the Prussian youth or
Christianity, so Kant considers himself released from the promise and able to
publish on religion again.
Once Kant does publish again on religion, his primary task is to argue that,
while the state rightly regulates theology, law, and medicine, it makes a grave
error if it seeks to regulate philosophy. Kant remains consistent with the position
he held more than a decade earlier in the orientation essay. His warnings in
that earlier essay to Jacobi and his followers went largely unheeded and when
the increasingly reactionary government of Frederick William II came to power,
censorship in Prussia increased dramatically, to the point that even Kant himself
came under fire. Within this context, Kant works through his earlier warnings
in a systematic and institutional form. He returns to his geographic and legal
imagery, and even introduces an economic metaphor, comparing the university
to a factory that handles learning through a division of labor. The economic
dimension reappears at the end of the introduction when Kant draws an analogy
between philosophy and the government and merchants and the government.
In a footnote Kant recounts the anecdote that is supposedly the origin of the
phrase “laissez faire.” A French government official summons several merchants
and asks for ideas on stimulating trade. (Kant is incredulous that the official
would have any idea how to adjudicate among these claims.) At the end of the
meeting, an exasperated merchant simply says, “Build good roads, mint sound
money, give us laws for exchanging money readily, etc.; but as for the rest, leave
us alone!”22 The analogous claim that philosophy would make to the government
is “just don’t interfere with the progress of understanding and science.”23 Since
philosophy does not issue commands (but only follows reason), it should be
free from the commands of government with regard to what it teaches. In fact,
for Kant this is absolutely essential, because without this freedom the truth will
remain hidden and the state itself will suffer.
If philosophy should be free, though, why precisely should theology, law,
and medicine be regulated? In order to answer this question we need to
understand Kant’s view of government. The state has a “felt need” to “influence
people by certain teachings.”24 The first thing to notice here is the echo of
the orientation essay in which Kant argued that the “felt need” of reason to
ground the conditioned in the unconditioned, which is only possible through
rational faith. We must suppose, in the same vein, that an essential condition
for the state is the ability to influence its citizens. Furthermore, Kant argues
that the state has three types of incentives at its disposal in order to effect
this influence: eternal, civil, and physical well-being. That is, the state can
effectively lead its citizens by the promulgation of laws concerning these three
types of well-being. The three types of well-being obviously correspond to the
three higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine. For Kant it is critical
that the teachings of these faculties be based on a code of statutes, rather than
derived from reason. The authority for each of these faculties then derives
from the authority vested in it by the state for the purpose of influencing the
citizenry. The higher faculties only have a derived authority and are completely
dependent on the state for their livelihood. The state, thus, should have no
compunction about regulating any of these faculties.
Within this arrangement, though, it’s possible that numerous
misunderstandings might arise. The great danger that Kant sees is that the
state might take it on itself to regulate both the higher and lower faculties
rather than merely the higher faculties. However, Kant argues that the lower
faculties receive their authority from reason not the state and is thus not
subject to its regulation. In the language of the third Critique, Kant might say
that the state has no domain here. It is also possible that the higher faculties
misunderstand the nature of their authority and instead of teaching the canon
for their given field, they seek to examine the rational bases for the canon. Kant
warns though, “The higher faculties must, therefore, take great care not to
enter into a misalliance with the lower faculty, but must keep it at a respectful
distance, so that the dignity of the statutes will not be damaged by the free play
of reason.”25 In short, the work of the higher faculties must always remain in
concert with the state, while the task of the lower faculties is to pursue reason
wherever it leads.
In the wake of this distinction between the higher and lower faculties, Kant
distinguishes between legal and illegal conflicts of the faculties. An illegal
conflict arises between theology and philosophy when the state and what Kant
calls the technicians or business people of theology (i.e. local parish leaders and
not theological scholars) see and abuse the influence to be had by appealing to
superstition. What Kant has in mind here is the way that cheap grace can be
bestowed as a magic trick through ecclesiastical rites and a contentless faith,
rather than the difficult work of actually changing one’s behavior. In this case
people are led by their inclinations rather than reason. In addition, the power
of the state and theology is increased at the expense of philosophy. In such a
situation, the philosophy faculty will be forced “to counteract them publicly.”26
Ultimately, the reason that this conflict is illegal is that it “would authorize
anarchy itself. ”27
For Kant the charge of anarchy is straightforward and reproduces on yet
another level the bifurcation that runs throughout Kant’s work. To pander to
the fears and superstitions of the public in order to better influence them is to
corrupt the very foundations of law itself. A law, in order to be a law, must be
universal and objective. However, any attempt to make a law that proceeds from
inclination is inherently contradictory. Inclinations cannot become laws. A law
is only possible in the absence of inclination. Thus, a system of law predicated
on inclination would be a law of lawlessness without consistency or order.
The philosophy faculty would have no choice but to publicly denounce this
untenable situation. Of course, Kant notes that a conflict of this sort could be
solved by dissolving the philosophy faculty, but ultimately that would only result
in damaging the state.
In contrast to an illegal conflict of faculties, Kant also articulates a legal
conflict of faculties, which has several principles. First, the conflict cannot
be solved by “agreeing to disagree.” Any conflict of this type requires a final
decision that has the force of law. The judge handing down this decision
is, of course, reason. Second, the legal conflict of faculties is perpetual.
It is perpetual because the statutes promulgated by the higher faculties are
generated by fallible humans. As such, they will always be liable to error, and
it is the philosophy faculty’s duty to be constantly vigilant with regard to these

statutes. Thus, the onus for maintaining the conflict lies with the philosophy
faculty. Third, and this is very important for Kant, the conflict of faculties
is, just that, a conflict of faculties and not a conflict between the state and
philosophy. When philosophy is forced to denounce a particular statute or
teaching because it fails to conform to reason, the object of the denouncement
is the scholarly activity of the higher faculties, not the government itself. In
fact, Kant goes so far as to propose a parliamentary analogy for the relation he
envision between the higher and lower faculties. Insofar as the higher faculties
are the chief organ by which the state influences its citizens, they occupy “the
right side of the parliament of learning.”28 However, if the government wishes
to be fully informed and thus rule on the basis of reason, it requires a loyal
opposition. That is, the government requires a party that is willing to call its
decisions into question on the basis of reason. For Kant, this role is played
by the philosophy faculty, which occupies the left side of the parliament of
learning. Fourth, and finally, Kant ties this process with the progress of the
whole state, which ultimately overcomes the distinction between truth and
influence. In a vein similar to Plato, Kant argues that such a state could better
influence its citizens through truth rather than the state’s own authority.
Notice that for Kant the legal conflict of faculties is found at the intersection
of law and geography. Not only does Kant suppose that there is a proper (legal)
way to conduct intercourse among faculties, but that any particular conflict must
be resolved in the manner of a court decision. Here, Kant imagines reason sitting
as the ultimate judge of any dispute between faculties. This, of course, recalls the
imagery of the tribunal of (and for) reason from the Critique of Pure Reason,
which comes early in the preface to the A edition. It is also interesting in this
regard that here Kant singles out both religion and law as traditionally seeking
to exempt itself from such a judgment.29 Within this context and the context of
Kant’s legal troubles with Wöllner, it is clear that Kant thinks reason is on his
side in the dispute. It is also clear that Kant has not changed his position between
the first Critique and the later writings on religion. Only public examination
by reason can grant “unfeigned respect” for religion and law. As a result, the
state must find a way to incorporate the free pursuit of reason within its end
of influencing the public. The model that Kant uses to argue for this is the
parliamentary model with a right and left side. Not only does Kant organize the
conflict of the faculties in spatial terms, but proper distinction between right
and left harkens back to the subjective principle of orientation with which Kant
begins the orientation essay.
Religion and philosophy—a legal settlement
Kant’s longest discussion of the relation between philosophy and religion occurs
in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Not surprisingly, he relies
heavily on images drawn from geography and law. The very title indicates both
a geographic and a legal distinction. In order to set a boundary, one must know
the spatial limits of a territory as well as having the juridical authority to enforce
the boundary. If for example, one decides to expand the limits of her yard by
reasoning that the boundary extends to some natural feature, say a stream, and
rebuild the fence accordingly, then she will soon find herself in trouble with local
authorities (not to mention the neighbor whose property she steals), since she
does not have the authority to move the boundaries of her property.
Kant’s contention in the religion book is similar. Religion oversteps its proper
bounds whenever it seeks to make theoretical claims about what lies beyond
sensible experience. We might extend Kant’s thinking here through two additional
legal doctrines related to property rights: adverse possession and eminent
domain. The doctrine of adverse possession has its roots in English common
law and states that if someone occupies a property openly and in opposition to
the owner’s rights, the occupier may after a certain period of time petition for
ownership of the property without remuneration to the original owner. Thus,
for example, if the same owner did move her fence and occupied the additional
land for 20 years she could petition to assert her rights over the new land. From
Kant’s perspective, religion has moved the fence and occupied land that it does
not possess the right to. However, religion has occupied this land for so long, that
it has in a sense acquired the right to this new land. Thus, if one were to ask the
average person, which discipline has a right to noumenal knowledge, religion or
philosophy? The likely answer is religion. The purpose of Kant’s critical project,
however, is to show that the question is poorly formed. Strictly speaking, there
is no noumenal (theoretical) knowledge. There is no (theoretical) knowledge
beyond the sensible. Kant is not willing to grant the noumenal to religion, even
if according to long-standing tradition, religion has taken it as its domain.
Kant could respond to religion’s adverse possession of the noumenal by denying
that the criteria of adverse possession have been met. Thus, if I install an invisible,
electronic fence to keep my dog in the yard, my neighbor might argue that my
possession of his property is not sufficiently open and opposed to his rights to
rise to the level of adverse possession. Kant does not use this strategy. Rather,
Kant’s argument is to show that there are rights of possession that supersede
religion’s, no matter how ancient religion’s claims. Kant’s argument, then, does
not take place, as it were, between two citizens submitting their case before the
state’s judgment. Kant’s argument takes the form of eminent domain, which says
that for the purposes of public utility, private property may be appropriated by
the state. While the state has an interest in seeing that the dispute between my
neighbor and me gets resolved justly, it is ultimately indifferent to the outcome.
The state’s indifference lies in the fact that if needed the state has the power
to take some or all of my neighbor’s and my land for the public good. It can
redraw boundaries as it sees fit. This is precisely what Kant is proposing in the
religion book. Religion will now be stripped of whatever right it has acquired to
the noumenal for the public good. The public good is an end to the interminable
bickering caused by religious disputes, and a turning away from the inessential
externals of religion to its essential moral core. Religion’s new boundaries now
lie within reason. Reason, of course, has already undergone its critique, which
laid out its legal and geographical dimensions. Furthermore, as we saw above in
The Conflict of the Faculties, reason remains the ultimate arbiter.
Although Kant wrote Religion in four separate sections over several years, he
maintains that the parts form a cohesive whole. Kant’s primary concern throughout
the book is the problem of evil and its moral (as opposed to its religious) solution.
In fact, Kant is very concerned to show a religious solution to the problem of evil
exacerbates it rather than ameliorates it by fomenting superstition and creating
dependence on meaningless ritual. Kant begins his analysis of the problem of
evil by asking the age old question: Are humans basically good or basically evil?
While there is a great deal of historical and empirical evidence for proponents of
each view, Kant argues that posing the question in this way is misleading. First, a
distinction needs to be made between an action and the maxim or principle that
guides that action. Kant’s claim here is that when speaking of whether people are
good or evil, we can only coherently speak of good or evil maxims. Granting this,
Kant makes the obvious point that people have both good and evil maxims. This
observation, however, doesn’t quite answer the question of whether humans are
basically good or evil. Being basically good or evil would mean that one set of
maxims would predominate, or better, that we would have a propensity for evil
maxims. This propensity for evil maxims is what Kant calls “radical evil.” “This
evil is radical, since it corrupts the ground of all maxims; as natural propensity,
it is also not to be extirpated through human forces. . . .”30 This propensity to
evil is nothing other than our natural preference for happiness, or “self-love” as
Kant most often calls it. This natural preference for “self-love” manifests itself on
the levels of animality, humanity, and personality, and so it is not surprising that
these evil maxims cannot be simply removed.31 Moral action for Kant does not
involve the elimination of these principles of self-love. Moral action is rather the
subordination of evil maxims to good maxims, that is, the conformity of one’s
will to reason. Thus, though humans have a natural and ingrained capacity to
subordinate good maxims to principles of self-love, “it must be equally possible
to overcome this evil, for it is found in the human being as acting freely.”32
Overcoming evil for Kant is nothing other than the subordination of self-love to
good maxims.
It is here that we see Kant’s concern with religion and its proper territory.
On Kant’s reading, religion’s sole concern has always been salvation. Thus, “The
End of All Things” (written at the same time as Religion) distinguishes between
“two systems pertaining to the future eternity.”33 Within this context human
evil becomes an obstacle to achieving a blessed future eternity and overcoming
evil becomes the path to a blessed future eternity. The difficulty for Kant is
that instead of actually focusing on overcoming evil, which is fundamentally a
moral problem, religion has sought to engender fear and enthusiasm through
superstition. The result has been an unwanted expansion of religion’s territory
beyond its proper bounds. The solution, of course, is to rein in the pretensions
of religion and keep it within the bounds of reason. Within these bounds it can
support the moral overcoming of evil without degenerating into superstition
and counterfeit service.
Kant had already outlined the moral solution to the problem of evil ten
years earlier in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, although at the
time Kant wasn’t overtly concerned with the problem of evil. Rather, in the
Groundwork, Kant is concerned with articulating a highest good and a method
by which it might be produced. The task of Kantian morality is the production
of a good will through the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative
is formal test for the conformity of the will to reason. Kant distinguishes the
categorical imperative from the hypothetical imperative, which is also a way
in which the will might be formed. What distinguishes these two forms is the
difference in ends produced by the imperatives. Categorical imperatives are ends
in themselves, while hypothetical imperatives seek an end outside of themselves.
This distinction in ends means that categorical imperatives can be determined
completely a priori, while hypothetical imperatives can only be determined a
posteriori. That is, categorical imperatives can be determined by pure reason
alone, while hypothetical imperatives require empirical conditions in order
to be formed. Thus, in order to know if a maxim is good and thus fulfill the
categorical imperative, Kant argues that only a formal a priori condition must
be met, namely the accordance of the maxim with reason. By contrast, knowing
what will make a person happy, and thus fulfill the requirements of self-love,
is not possible without knowing which conditions actually produce happiness.
This, of course, can only be determined a posteriori. The key to overcoming evil
in both the Groundwork and the Religion book, then, lies in the ability to form a
priori principles of action.
What the later Religion book adds that is not present in the Groundwork,
although it is consonant with it, is the idea of subordination of one type of
principle (good/a priori, evil/a posteriori) to the other. The Groundwork, rather,
speaks in terms of two incompatible motivations, duty and inclination, and spends
most of its time distinguishing these. Ultimately, Kant is concerned to show what
these different motivations look like from the standpoint of pure reason. In the
Religion book, though, his primary concern is the depths of human evil. He is
willing to go as far as to say that humans are radically (but not diabolically) evil.
That is, humans have an ineradicable propensity to form (a posteriori) principles
based on self-love. The best one can hope for in this case is the subordination of
a posteriori principles to a priori ones. Morality thus requires constant vigilance,
a constant testing of one’s principles.
In the second part of the Religion book Kant turns to the way in which
this conflict between good and evil maxims has been played out in religion,
particularly Christianity. In this section he systematically takes up the Christian
theological doctrines of original sin and salvation and shows the moral core lying
underneath. “Its [the life and death of Jesus] meaning is that there is absolutely
no salvation for human beings except in the innermost adoption of genuine
moral principles in their disposition. . . .”34 Here, again, Kant does not differ
from other Enlightenment accounts of religion, which claim that any properly
rational account of religion will ultimately reveal morality. From Kant’s point
of view, however, religion in its historical form produces actions in accord with
duty but does not produce actions solely from duty. That is, religion produces
right action, but the motives behind these actions arise out of self-love.
In part three Kant sharpens the distinction between morality and religion and
at the same time recuperates religion as synonymous with morality. At this point,
Kant recasts the distinction between morality and religion as pure religion and
historical faith. Pure religion is what can be known universally through reason
a priori. Historical faith (also “ecclesiastical faith”) is what can only be known
a posteriori and is identical to the cultic practices of specific historical groups
(Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Lutherans, etc.). Kant’s contention is that the kingdom
of God can only be established on earth to the degree that pure religion replaces
faith. This is simply another way of making his previous point that morality,
or a kingdom of ends, is only possible to the degree that our maxims are in
conformity with reason.
Of course, our maxims are not always in conformity with reason. Because
of this lack of conformity a battle rages within us between good and evil
that gives rise to the question with which Kant begins the Religion book, are
we basically good or evil? Kant is astute enough to recognize, however, that
these conflicting principles have political consequences. Through the use
of ritual and the inculcation of habit it is possible to coerce people not by
encouraging the use of reason a priori but through the baser inclinations of
hope and fear. At this point Kant seems to be echoing the major themes of
Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, as he aims in part four at the abuses of
priestcraft and the anthropomorphization of God that supports it. Insofar as
priestcraft elicits service out of hope and fear, it produces counterfeit service.
True religious service can only come from universal moral principles that
spring solely from duty.
Orientation and hylozoism
As we have seen, the very task of reason and the very urgency of the critical project
is the proper setting and maintenance of boundaries. These boundaries and
the territories they organize are thought in legal and geographical terms. These
boundaries not only allow one to be oriented in thought but also oriented with
regard to any question one might care to pose. Questions concerning religion,
politics, morality, and even censorship all must be answered by first referring
to the boundaries in question. While it initially seems that Kant proliferates
boundaries of all kinds throughout his work, the fact is that there is only one
boundary in Kant, the boundary between the sensible and the intelligible. He
draws this boundary in his “Inaugural Address” and it forms the axis around
which the entire critical project revolves. In order to foreground this axis and
the centripetal force it exerts on the Kantian corpus, we will take up a concept
that calls the sensible/intelligible distinction into question, namely, hylozoism.
Hylozoism is the claim that matter is self-organizing and can generate its own
formal principle of organization. This is in opposition to hylomorphism, which
argues that the formal principle is separate in kind from the matter that it
enforms. What we will see is that Kant rejects hylozoism ultimately because
Kant denies the continuity of the sensible and intelligible, while hylozoism
affirms it.
The term “hylozoism” was coined by Ralph Cudworth in his The True
Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). As the name indicates (no doubt
modeled on “hylomorphism” as description of Aristotle’s philosophy) hylozoism
is the attribution of life to matter. In this book, Cudworth, one of the Cambridge
Platonists, was arguing against atheism and determinism. Atheism came in
several varieties for Cudworth, each one resulting from a misunderstanding
of the nature of matter itself. His primary focus was actually “hylopathism,”
which is materialism simpliciter. Although Cudworth always locates these
descriptions in an ancient analog his main target here is Hobbes. Much less
important for Cudworth at the time but still a logical possibility with an ancient
analog is hylozoism, which he identifies with Strato of Lampsacus (a later head
of Aristotle’s Lyceum). For Cudworth hylozoism is not inherently atheistic but
becomes so when combined with materialism (or “corporealism”).35
Cudworth’s System was published one year after Spinoza’s death and it
is reported that a colleague made Cudworth aware of Spinoza as a latter-day
hylozoist. Once Spinoza’s system became widespread, others also noted the
similarities between Spinoza and Strato. As Israel demonstrates in Radical
Enlightenment, while neo-Epicurean was the dominant epithet applied to
followers of Spinoza, many others used Stratonism as more apt, although both
terms were often used interchangeably in a string of pejoratives that usually
culminated in atheist.36
Given this constant equation of Spinoza, Epicurus, and Strato throughout
seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe it is curious that when Kant
first mentions the issue he does not refer to any of these names but simply
Cudworth’s original designation of hylozoism. In Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766)
Kant is grappling with the possibility of immaterial spirits communicating
with the material world. He is convinced that the principle of life resides in the
immaterial realm and that it is communicated to the material world in degrees.
The upper and lower limits of these degrees are hylozoism and materialism.
“Hylozoism imputes life to everything; materialism, carefully considered, kills
everything.”37 While Kant sees the scientific advantages of materialism, which
explains solely through matter and motion, he prefers an organic explanation,
which would allow the causal influence of the immaterial, even though the
influence itself could never be measured. What Kant does reject here, though, is
hylozoism. There is never a question that matter could organize itself or move
itself without the impetus of some immaterial principle. While one could argue
about the relation between the precritical and critical Kant, he never waivers in
his rejection of hylozoism.
As Zammito argues in The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Kant’s

engagement with eighteenth-century biology forms the background against
which he rejects hylozoism.38 In particular, Kant equates matter with inertia.
As Kant argues in Lectures on Metaphysics from the mid-1770s, the distinction
between animate and inanimate is simply the distinction between those things
that can move themselves and those that cannot. Those things that cannot
move themselves are inert and inanimate. Matter is thus essentially dead and by
definition cannot move itself.39 To suppose otherwise is to court the most obvious
contradiction of positing matter that is both dead and alive. That is, matter that
can and cannot move itself. As Kant argues in the Metaphyscial Foundations of
Natural Science (1786) this abrogation of the law of inertia would be the death
of natural science.
Before pursuing Kant’s fullest discussion of hylozoism in the third Critique,
we would like to place Kant’s critical work in the context of the breakthrough
he makes in his Inaugural Dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible
and the Intelligible World (1770). In this work that Kant himself considered the
beginning of his critical period, Kant seeks to return to the ancient distinction
between phenomena and noumena, which he finds best exemplified in Plato.
What is at stake in this distinction is the fundamental but easily confused
difference between that which is sensed and the form given to that which is
sensed. For Kant it is clear that the form of sensation cannot be abstracted from
the sensible and must thus be thought of as not merely different in degree but
different in kind. Arguing for the qualitative difference of the sensible and its
form ran counter to the dominant view, which held that the difference was
merely one of degree. Kant singles out Wolff and states flatly that the sensitive
is not simply confused cognition.40 We can also see, though, that empiricist
tradition holds the converse view whereby cognitions are less vivid sensations.
In the Inaugural Dissertation Kant thus rejects the continuity of the sensible
and intelligible held by both rationalists and empiricists (albeit with different
emphases) and replaces this continuity with the radical discontinuity of form
and content. Both are necessary but irreducible to one another.
In the closing sections of the Inaugural Dissertation Kant returns to the
issue of matter. After outlining three fallacies of subreption that conflate the
sensible and intelligible in some way, Kant posits three principles of harmony. In
these principles he seems to firmly move away from the position he toyed with
in Dreams of a Spirit-seer. The first principle of harmony states that everything
takes place in accordance with the order of nature. The implication of this
principle is that “miracles, such as the influence of spirits, are carefully excluded
from the explanation of phenomena.”41 In the third principle of harmony,

however, he returns to the question of matter. “Nothing material at all,” Kant
states, “comes into being or passes away, and all the changes which take place in
the world concern its form alone.”42 The implication of this principle reaffirms
Kant’s earliest objection to hylozoism. Matter cannot contain its own principle
of change “because, if you concede that matter itself is in flux and transitory,
there would be nothing left at all which was stable and enduring, which would
further advance the explanation of phenomena in accordance with universal
and constant laws, and which would, therefore, further the advance of the
understanding.”43
Thus, while Kant’s account of matter and his objection to hylozoism remain
largely unchanged from his precritical to his critical work, the role played by
this view still needed to be worked out in light of his proposed separation of the
sensible and the intelligible. Kant spent the next decade working through the
implications of his denial of the continuity thesis, the culmination of which
was the Critique of Pure Reason. As we have seen, its impact was profound
and wide-ranging and called for nothing less than a complete reconception
of human cognition. The primary outcome of this reconception was twofold.
On the one hand, it limited knowledge to objects of possible experience. That
is, one could not extend the use of the form beyond the content. To do so was
to invite insoluble problems on cognition. On the other hand, this limitation
of knowledge is precisely what makes human freedom possible.44 Thus, in
the critical project there is a clear connection between Kant’s denial of the
continuity thesis and human freedom. It is not until the Critique of Judgment,
however, that Kant returns to hylozoism and its connection with Kant’s other
concerns.
Kant’s argument against hylozoism is straightforward. The very concept
is self-contradictory. Hylozoism requires that “one must . . . endow matter
as mere matter with a property . . . that contradicts its essence.”45 Matter is
essentially dead, but hylozoism holds that the essentially dead is alive. Setting
aside for the moment the way in which Kant begs the question here, we will
pursue further the danger that Kant sees in hylozoism. We will argue that for
Kant the possibility of a living, self-organizing matter is a danger to freedom
itself. The danger to freedom becomes clear when we consider the distinction
between the phrases null und nichtig (null and void) and unter Null/unter
Nicht (less than zero/less than nothing). Null und nichtig is, of course, a
legal term that refers to the limits of a contract. Kant is quite explicit that
any contract by which one damages one’s freedom is immediately null and
void, has no ability to compel (Gewalt), is not binding. Such a contract cannot
exist. In contrast to Kant’s legal language, however, at any point where the
demands of life as such (i.e. without the guidance of reason) assert themselves
and demand their worth, Kant quite consistently states that the worth is
negative, less than zero. Kant writes, “It is easy to decide what sort of value
life has for us if it is assessed merely by what one enjoys (the natural end of the
sum of all inclinations, happiness). Less than zero (Er sinkt unter Null). . . .”46
A life organized solely by natural ends not only fails to compel a rational
creature as in a breach of contract, but somehow manages to possess negative
value. The threat to life organized by rational ends (i.e. freedom) must be
great indeed.
If we take up Zammito’s thesis from The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment
that one of the primary motivating factors driving the writing of the third
Critique was Kant’s increasingly strained relation with former mentor Hamann
and former student Herder, we can see that what is at stake is a debate about
continuity. These relations first became strained as Hamann’s influence over
Herder eclipsed Kant’s and found Herder as one of the founders along with
Goethe of the Sturm und Drang movement. Zammito characterizes Kant’s
objections to Herder in terms of a series of continuities that Herder affirms
but Kant finds untenable. The continuities that Zammtio focuses on are life/
matter and human/animal.47 We can also safely (and most importantly for our
purposes here) add the God/human or creator/created continuity. This final one
becomes particularly germane in the wake of the pantheism controversy that
had everyone scrambling to take sides on Spinoza. At bottom, though, the real
issue for Kant is the issue of discontinuity itself. Kant’s entire project follows
from a denial of the continuity thesis. He rightly sees that Hamann in affirming
these continuities is at odds with him on the lynchpin of his entire system, and
to make matters worse Hamann is taking Herder with him.
Kant’s denial of these new continuities comes to a head in the “Critique of
Teleological Judgment” where he pursues the relation between objective purpose
and the ground of matter. Kant notes that one may be either a realist or idealist
with regard to purposiveness and a physicalist or hyperphysicalist with regard to
matter’s ground. The combination of these claims creates four possible positions.
If one is an idealist about objective purpose the result is either the lifeless matter
of Epicurus or the lifeless God of Spinoza. While Kant finds both positions
untenable, he regards the Epicurean position as essentially self-refuting. With no
formal ground outside of matter, matter’s organization becomes inconceivable.
Spinoza’s position, Kant admits, is not so easily refuted. On Kant’s reading, since
the formal ground of matter lies outside of matter in substance, Spinoza in

principle seems to maintain an appropriate discontinuity between matter and its
principle of organization. A closer examination of Spinoza’s theory of substance,
however, shows that since the relation between substance and modes is not
causal but entailing, all matter is reduced to its formal principle. Thus, while
Epicurus maintains the continuity on the material side, Spinoza maintains it on
the formal side.
The other two possibilities stem from the realism of purposiveness.
The first of these, hylozoism, claims that matter acts in a way analogous
to intentional activity. That is, matter produces its own formal principle
internally. Now this seems to maintain a discontinuity on one level between
matter and its principle. In fact, Kant seems to admit as much in the
Metaphysics of Morals when he says, “Neither experience nor inferences of
reason give us adequate grounds for deciding whether the human being has
a soul . . . or whether life may not well be, instead, a property of matter.”48
In the third Critique, however, Kant is less sanguine, saying, “the possibility
of a living matter (the concept of which contains a contradiction, because
lifelessness, inertia, constitutes its essential characteristic), cannot even be
conceived.”49 The final possibility preserves the discontinuity between life
and matter and indeed between creator and created by positing a living God
as the formal ground of purposiveness in nature. Kant’s only objection to
this final position is to argue that we must replace the dogmatic knowledge
of God claimed by this position with nondogmatic knowledge that remains
adequate to reason’s purposes.
The first thing to note about Kant’s taxonomy, given the history of hylozoism,
is the fact that Kant separates Spinoza, Epicurus, and hylozoism, even though
all three had been closely identified for the past 100 years. Kant also claims that
Spinoza certainly has an ancient antecedent, but does not name the thinker he
has in mind.50 It cannot be Epicurus, since he is named as representing another
position. Strato seems the next most likely candidate, but he is more closely
associated with hylozoism. What does Kant hope to gain through this separation?
One possible answer is that it is precisely the pantheism controversy that forces
him to single out Spinoza for specific refutation. This possibility is supported
by the fact that, while hylozoism finds its way into Kant’s writing as early as
1766, there is no mention of Spinoza until 1785. After 1785, however, the entire
German intellectual community was consumed with Spinoza and the possibility
of saving philosophy from atheism. As we have seen, after Mendelssohn’s death
Kant is reluctantly dragged into the debate with the orientation essay, and it’s in
this context that he once again affirms the limits of reason and the necessity of
a “rational faith.” He closes the essay with a thinly veiled appeal to Jacobi and
other “enthusiasts” that they risk making the free commerce of ideas impossible.
At bottom, and despite Kant’s distinctions, what remains is the opposition
between the theistic position that posits a realism of objective purpose and a
hyperphysical ground of matter and the other positions that seek a continuity
between life and matter, human and animal, and creator and created. Kant
wants to deny this continuity but in the Critique of Judgment he cannot do so
as a matter of determining judgment but only reflective judgment. God thus
remains a necessary posit for reflective judgment that allows us to talk about
purposiveness in nature.
Now that we have seen the way in which hylozoism concerns Kant both
cognitively and with regard to reflective judgment, we turn to the danger
to human freedom posed by hylozoism. As we saw above, the critical project
takes its primary task to be the preservation of human freedom, but of course,
this can only be in the practical realm, not the theoretical realm. The practical
determination of human freedom is required for human action but is not
necessary for cognition. In fact, the requirements for action take us well beyond
the bounds of human cognition. Nevertheless, we must act as if we are free,
as if human freedom could interrupt the necessary causality of phenomenal
experience.
Kant pursues the importance of human freedom negatively in the Metaphysics
of Morals, and he does so through the recurring phrase “null and void” (null und
nichtig). This contractual language fits nicely within Kant’s discussion of rights
and human freedom. Thus, if one buys stolen property, such a transaction is
null and void and the true owner has a right to recover it, regardless of whether
the item in question was bought in good faith.51 More to the point, when Kant
is later speaking about the sovereignty of a commonwealth, he notes that the
one thing the ruling body of a commonwealth cannot do is cede their power to
another. Any such contract, Kant says, is null and void.52 The moral analog here
is, of course, the human being as both sovereign and subject to him or herself.
Any contract that one enters into that would sacrifice one’s autonomy would be
“null and void.”
We mention Kant’s use of the phrase “null and void,” because we want to
compare it with similar phrases that show the depths of Kant’s concern with
hylozoism. Those phrases are “less than zero” (unter Null) and “less than nothing”
(unter Nichts). The phrase occurs twice in the Groundwork and once in the third
Critique. We’d like to focus on the Critique of Judgment passage since Kant gives
an explanation of the phrase. Kant writes:
It is easy to decide what sort of value life has for us if it’s assessed merely by
what one enjoys (the natural end of the sum of all inclinations, happiness).
Less than zero: for who would start life anew under the same conditions, or
even according to a new and self-designed plan (but one still in accord with the
course of nature), which would, however, still be aimed merely at enjoyment?
It has been shown above what value life would have if conducted in accordance
with the end that nature has set for us, which it contains in itself, and which
consists in that which one does (and not merely what one enjoys), where we are,
however, always merely a means to an undetermined final end. Thus nothing is
left but the value that we ourselves give to our lives through that which we do not
merely do but also do so purposively and independently of nature that even the
existence of nature can be an end only under this condition.53
The contrast here between a life lived in pursuit of happiness (i.e. our natural
ends) and a life lived in pursuit of the value we give ourselves independently
of nature (i.e. in accord with freedom) is clear. This is the contrast between is
and ought that grounds the practical philosophy is ultimately traceable to Kant’s
denial of the continuity thesis in the Inaugural Dissertation. What is not clear
here, though, is why a life lived in pursuit of happiness would be worth less than
zero. Kant’s claim isn’t that such a life would be worthless or even null and void,
but that such a life would somehow possess negative value.
Kant’s likely answer here is that if happiness (i.e. pleasure) is the only criterion
of judgment, then any life that produced more pain than pleasure would have
negative value, in precisely the same way that pain has a negative value in relation
to pleasure. Kant is also assuming that most lives on balance produce more pain
than they do pleasure, so life in general judged from this perspective is worth
less than zero. Fortunately, from Kant’s perspective we have another way to judge
our lives, by the purpose we give ourselves without respect to happiness, that is,
from the perspective of freedom. Even if we cannot on balance be happy we can
be good, and this is sufficient to make life worthwhile.54
If we characterize Kant’s claim in terms of his denial of the continuity thesis
we could say it is only insofar as the purpose of life (i.e. its intelligible form)
and happiness (i.e. its sensible content) are distinct that a meaningful life is
possible. Hylozoism, in contrast, would affirm the continuity of life’s purpose
and happiness. It would further claim that the principle or form of life’s purpose
would be essential to happiness as such. Thus the moral analogue to the “living
matter” of hylozoism would be “purposeful happiness,” or perhaps even more
directly “meaningful life.” In contrast to this the moral analogue to the “living
God” of theism would be “purposeful goodness.”
In order to maintain the space created for human freedom by a qualitative
distinction between the intelligible and the sensible, Kant cannot abide any
threat to that distinction. Any attempt to reassert the continuity of the intelligible
and sensible is a threat not only to the other distinctions running through Kant,
but a threat to freedom itself. However, we would like to pursue Kant’s more
circumspect claim of the Metaphysics of Morals, that perhaps life is a property of
matter. We would like to replace hylomorphism with hylozoism. We would like to
replace discontinuity with continuity. We would like to replace not only objects
of experience but even the ideas of reason with assemblages. We think the result
will be a new way of thinking about the relation among religion, philosophy,
and theology. We will no longer have a mania for drawing boundaries. In fact,
the very notion of boundary must be reconceived, since our point of orientation
will no longer be a discontinuity that divides the world in two. We will pursue
this positive project of continuity in the third chapter. However, we must first
show the way in which this Kantian discontinuity gets taken up in contemporary
philosophy.
2
From Geography to Ontology: Heidegger

and Derrida
In this chapter we will pursue the breadth of Kant’s influence in philosophy. In

particular, we will argue that phenomenology, as the dominant movement in
twentieth-century Western thought, is profoundly Kantian in its orientation.
In order to do this we will return to the legal and geographical metaphors of
Kant’s work and show how these metaphors are both criticized at the same time
taken up as an ontological distinction that results in a model that is structurally
identical to Kant’s. The result of this model has two effects. First, it reproduces
the same division between philosophy and religion. This effect, on the one hand,
clears the way for the recent “theological turn” in French phenomenology. On the
other hand, the way this division between philosophy and religion is articulated
ensures that the only kind of theology that is possible is an apophatic or negative
theology. The second effect that this model has, insofar as it relies on a denial
of the continuity thesis, is that it necessarily excludes hylozoism as a means
for rethinking the relation between philosophy and religion. Both Heidegger
and Derrida in their reliance on Kant’s transcendental form of argumentation
reproduce Kant’s hylomorphism. The experiment, then, is to begin extricating
ourselves from the Kantian framework in order to rethink the relation between
philosophy and religion from a hylozoic perspective.
Heidegger and the limits of metaphysics
Before becoming fully engaged with Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger

oscillated between medieval scholasticism and late nineteenth-century
Lebensphilosophie, particularly the work of Dilthey. The commitment to
Lebensphilosophie, in particular, made Heidegger quite critical of Kant.1 In the
process of writing Being and Time, however, Heidegger becomes increasingly

dependent on Kantian formulations in order to articulate his project.2 As is well
known, Being and Time (1927) is an unfinished work, and Heidegger had planned
to pursue his analysis of Kant in a later portion that was never written. There is
thus no direct engagement with Kant until Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
in 1929.3 Despite this lack of direct engagement or any explicit borrowing of
terminology, Being and Time is structurally a Kantian document.
The most immediate way in which Being and Time is structurally Kantian
is the way in which it pursues the analytic of Dasein in Division One. After
introducing the larger concern of the meaning of being4 and the entity for whom
being is an issue (i.e. Dasein) Heidegger begins with a phenomenological analysis
of Dasein in its “average everydayness.” The analysis of Dasein in its average
everydayness, however, goes far beyond a mere thick description of experience.
It certainly begins here, but the concern of phenomenology also encompasses
answering the question, why does Dasein have the experience that it does? It
is at this point that Heidegger must move from experience to the conditions
for the possibility of experience. At precisely this point Heidegger introduces a
formal split that runs through the entirety of Being and Time between ground
and grounded, between form and content, between conditions and conditioned.
Thus at the outset Heidegger introduces discontinuity into his philosophy. In an
important difference from Kant, though, this introduction of discontinuity goes
unacknowledged as such.
In order to illustrate this, let’s take a well-known example from Being and
Time, the broken hammer. With this example Heidegger is explicating several
interrelated facets of Dasein’s experience, including equipment, world, and
understanding. For Heidegger, Dasein only understands a hammer when it is
hammering, using the hammer as a piece of equipment. Furthermore, Dasein
only hammers insofar as it is trying to complete some task. Tasks always
happen within a context within which such tasks are meaningful. This context
is Dasein’s world. To treat the hammer as a thing divorced from its use and its
context is to understand the hammer in a deficient way. This way of attempting
to understand the hammer treats it as a discrete object standing over and against
a discrete subject, and as a result completely obscures the role that world plays
in experience.
In order to demonstrate not only his positive claims, but also what he is arguing
against, Heidegger asks us to analyze the experience of a hammer breaking,
while Dasein is hammering with it. To begin with Dasein is hammering because
it is trying to accomplish some task. Let’s say Dasein is building a birdhouse. In
From Geography to Ontology 39
order to build the birdhouse, Dasein has gathered all of the materials that are
required to complete this task, including a hammer. Unfortunately, the hammer
is in poor repair, and as Dasein is about to complete its task, the hammer breaks.
What now? For Heidegger the broken hammer reveals the world. The world
is revealed, though, not as some mystical experience but in the very mundane
sense that while hammering Dasein was absorbed in its task, but when the
hammer breaks it can no longer complete its task and thus begins to look around
its environment for other ways to complete its task. As Dasein looks around
some objects will be foregrounded as suitable for completing the task, while
others will recede into the background as unsuitable for completing the task.
Thus, wrenches, rocks, and mallets “show themselves” while screwdrivers and
lawnmowers do not “show themselves.”
The image that Heidegger has in mind here is a clearing (Lichtung) in the
woods. If we imagine ourselves standing in a clearing in the woods, only those
things that step into the clearing can be seen, while everything that stays in
the woods remains obscure. For Heidegger Dasein is itself the clearing. Dasein
is that open space within which equipment can appear as useful for its tasks.
We’ll return to the geographical nature of this image below, but for right now
let’s follow Heidegger through the implications of the broken hammer. The
broken hammer reveals the world not as the set of facts that always stand
as already given (as in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus), but as that which could be
meaningful to Dasein given its tasks. World in Heidegger’s sense comes much
closer to the way we use the word in the phrase “the world of the philosophy
professor.” The world of the philosophy professor has a great deal to do with
books and classrooms and computers and very little to do with hammers.
When the philosophy professor is in need of information in order to write
an article, certain books on the bookshelf show themselves and others recede
into the background. What does not happen, however, is that everything in
the world “lights up” equally. If this were the case, Dasein would be unable
to complete any tasks. It would be continually overwhelmed and unable to
distinguish between what was useful and what was detrimental to its tasks.
As we saw in the first chapter, in the first Critique Kant begins with the fact
of cognition and asks if it can be accounted for solely on the basis of intuition
(i.e. empirical experience). His conclusion is that cognition cannot be accounted
for solely on the basis of intuition and of necessity requires a priori concepts,
which are of a fundamentally different order than intuitions. This denial of the
continuity between concepts and intuitions is the engine of the Kantian critical
project. There is a structurally analogous move on Heidegger’s part in Being and
Time. He begins with an attempt to account for Dasein’s experience and argues
that traditional attempts to explain experience founder on a rigid and abstract
distinction between subject and object. These traditional explanations actually
obscure the phenomenon under examination. Heidegger proposes (along with
Husserl) in good phenomenological fashion to return to the things themselves.
What Heidegger discovers is not a rigid, abstract dualism of subject and object
but an entity open to its world and for the most part absorbed in its tasks. In
fact, Dasein is so absorbed in its tasks that the very structure of its experience
goes largely unnoticed. Kant also had a similar difficulty in that the a priori
concepts of experience worked so seamlessly with intuition that it is only with
great difficulty that they could be teased apart. The solution for both Kant and
Heidegger was to suppose that the conditions for the possibility of experience
were in principle separable from experience itself. Thus, in order to dissolve the
dualism of subject and object Heidegger resorts to a transcendental dualism of
conditions and conditioned.
Heidegger articulates this dualism in Being and Time through a series of related
terms: ontological/ ontic, existentiale/existentiell, and authentic/inauthentic. While
the importance of these distinctions is recognized, all too often the terms are taken
up in a moral register rather than an ontological one, and thus Heidegger’s entire
project is misconstrued. The authentic/inauthentic distinction is most prone to this
kind of misconstrual, and as a result readers often take Heidegger to be arguing
that Dasein is much too inauthentic and ought to strive to be more authentic. In
fact, Heidegger is making no such argument. For Heidegger, Dasein is necessarily
and ineluctably inauthentic, but this inauthenticity is not a moral failing on
Dasein’s part. Inauthenticity follows from Dasein’s ontological nature as possibility
and the necessity that some of these possibilities will be actualized. In the same
way, the distinction between ontological and ontic and the distinction between
existentiale and existentiell in each case is an ontological distinction between the
conditions for the possibility of experience and experience itself. The entirety of
Division One of Being and Time begins with Dasein in its average everydayness,
that is Dasein as ontic and inauthentic. Heidegger then argues that the conditions
for the possibility of an entity with this kind of experience lie in its ontological
and authentic nature. Heidegger refers to these conditions for the possibility of
experience as the Dasein’s existential structures, which then become actualized in a
particular way. These are Dasein’s existentiell experiences. To claim that Heidegger
wants to eliminate the ontic, inauthentic, existentiell part of Dasein’s existence
would be parallel to claiming that Kant’s true goal in the first Critique is to eliminate
intuition and have cognition based solely on a priori concepts. For both Heidegger
and Kant the dualism is necessary to explain the complexity of experience, but the
relation between the two halves is not a moral hierarchy but a relation between
conditions and conditioned, or form and content, a hylomorphism.
The existential structures that make Dasein’s experience possible are
articulated throughout Division One of Being and Time and include structures
such as being-with, being-in, world, and ultimately care (Sorge). In the care
structure Heidegger uncovers the fundamental existential structure that gives
Dasein the kind of experience that defines it. His model for the care structure
is Aristotelian kinēsis, which is always in the process of oscillating between
being and non-being. For Heidegger, this means that Dasein is always ahead
of itself, stretched into its future possibilities. It is this distention of Dasein that
constitutes its world and all of the possibilities within that world. Dasein is what
it is because it is ahead of itself. This being ahead of itself creates the clearing
(Lichtung) in which entities can appear as such.
Heidegger’s existential structures are thus precisely analogous to Kant’s
transcendental categories. Both have the function of making experience possible.
There is yet another parallel that can be drawn with Kant at this point, and this will
allow us to proceed into Division Two of Being and Time. The spatial implications
of Heidegger’s clearing are unavoidable. The care structure makes Dasein’s
spatiality possible as world. This is not to say that world is solely spatial, but that
in his articulation of Dasein’s existential structure Heidegger must necessarily
account for the experience of the contiguity of Dasein’s equipment. In accounting
for this experience, of course, Heidegger cannot resort to things arrayed in an
abstract Cartesian space. As a result he is left with a continually expanding and
contracting spatiality that is not absolute but in some way dependent on the
nature of Dasein’s existence as care. Kant faced a similar problem with space in
the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of first Critique. His argument was that positing
the reality of space ultimately led to insuperable philosophical difficulties. His
solution was to propose space as the necessary form of our external intuitions.
What Kant did not propose, however, was a reason why our external intuitions
should take this form. Heidegger, however, does give a reason why Dasein should
have this particular kind of spatiality, namely, the care structure. The parallel
between Kant and Heidegger extends beyond a claim about the “ideality” of space
to a claim about the nature of time. We would go so far as to say that Being and
Time rewrites Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic and that Division One deals with
space, while Division Two deals with time.
The relation between Division One and Division Two of Being and Time
is often misconstrued as well. It is tempting to imagine that Division Two
is an even deeper existential analysis of Dasein. In the same way that the
fundamental existential structure of Dasein is revealed to be care in Division
One, one might think that the ground of care is discovered to be temporality in
Division Two. Heidegger is explicit, though, that temporality is not an additional
structure beyond care, but simply a reinterpretation of care. The three modes
of fundamental temporality that Heidegger describes in the second half of
Being and Time are nothing other than the tri-partite care structure articulated
temporally. The being ahead of itself of care becomes the futural nature of
Dasein’s temporality. Being already in a world becomes, not the past, but the
“always already” (immer schon) of essence, and being alongside is the factical
actualization of Dasein’s essence. “Temporality reveals itself as the meaning of
authentic care.”5 While we can certainly separate an object from its meaning
in principle, we do not thereby mean that the meaning exists as an additional
obscure object beyond the original. In the same way, temporality is not some
additional thing beyond the care structure; it is the care structure, but the care
structure interpreted as temporality.
This is how Heidegger completes his thesis on the ideality of space and
time, although, of course, he would quibble with the appellation of “ideality.”
Suffice it to say that time no less than space cannot be thought as an object that
stands over and against a knowing subject. Space and time thought as objects
of consciousness are abstractions that obscure fundamental spatiality and
fundamental temporality. Both of which arise from Dasein’s essence as possibility
or being ahead of itself. Crucially, this retrieval of Dasein’s primordial experience
of space and time is only revealed through a methodology that is fundamentally
Kantian. Heidegger essentially distinguishes between the conditions for the
possibility of experience and experience itself. Furthermore, he abduces these
existential, ontological structures by beginning with experience.
It is our contention that Heidegger never abandons this fundamental
Kantianism, even in his later work. What we would like to show is twofold.
First, we will argue that Heidegger’s methodological Kantianism requires him to
think about issues of territory and boundary in a particular way. Second, we will
show that his thinking about the relation between philosophy and religion also
bears the telltale signs of Kantianism, specifically with regard to the way that a
fundamental discontinuity organizes his thought.
In Heidegger’s 1951 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” he has left the
phenomenology of his early career far behind. He remains concerned, however,
about giving an account of human experience. He begins the essay with a
discussion of “domain” (Bereich). As we saw above a related term (Gebiet) had
crucial legal connotations for Kant. In Heidegger, though, these legal connotations
have dropped away. The task is no longer the proper setting of a boundary; it
is rather the way in which our very existence is already a dwelling. Or, more
precisely, existence is dwelling. As such, this dwelling carries with it a domain.
To be sure, domain here indicates a belonging, but it is not a belonging thought
in terms of property rights, as it is in Kant. Heidegger illustrates the sense of
belonging he has in mind with the phrase “at home.” A person could be more
“at home” at the office or on the road than at his or her place of residence. What
this entails for Heidegger is that human dwelling precedes any of the particular
buildings. “Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling.”6 Even
more forcefully, Heidegger writes, “We do not dwell because we have built, but
we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers.”7
Heidegger is explicit in the text that he is trying to think spatiality in terms of
dwelling. It is dwelling that creates space, and to abstract a concept of space as
“the measurable” is to misunderstand not only space but human existence as
dwelling.
In a brief discussion of boundaries in “Building Dwelling Thinking” Heidegger
says, “A boundary is not that at which something stops, but as the Greeks
recognized, that boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.”8
Despite Heidegger’s invocation of the Greeks, this is also a very Kantian
sentiment. For Kant thinking a boundary or limit necessarily entails thinking
what lies beyond that limit. This necessity is built in to the very structure of
reason, which always seeks the unconditioned. At the same time, however,
boundaries are conditions of possibility. If we return to the language of Being
and Time, the clearing is only a clearing insofar as it has a boundary, and the
boundary of the clearing is the precise point at which something appears, or
“begins its presencing.”
Heidegger deepens the analysis of the boundary in his discussion of
the threshold in “Language” from 1950. In “Language” Heidegger is struck
by a line in Georg Trakl’s poem, “A Winter’s Evening,” which reads “Pain
has turned the threshold to stone.”9 A threshold is of course a boundary, a
boundary between the outside and the inside. The threshold beckons the
outside in and the inside out. It is the middle between the two. The threshold
is the place where inner and outer meet, and yet the threshold is itself
neither inner nor outer, or it is both at the same time as the unity of the
inner and the outer. The threshold is “dif-ference” itself (Unter-schied), the
place where difference is unified and unity differs from itself. Furthermore,
and here Heidegger uses language similar to his discussion of boundary
above, “Being the middle, [dif-ference] first determine world and things in
their presence, i.e., in their being toward one another, whose unity it carries
out.”10 A boundary thus defines, divides, and unites two spaces. At the very
point where it allows these two spaces to appear to one another, the boundary
itself disappears. The conditions for the possibility of appearing of necessity
disappear in the appearing of what appears. Unquestionably, Heidegger is
thinking difference as fundamental. In this respect, Deleuze shares much with
the Heideggerian project. However, and for us this is decisive, Heidegger’s
conception of difference remains predicated on a more fundamental
discontinuity of conditions and conditioned, or form and content. In contrast
to this, Deleuze articulates his conception of difference on the basis of a
fundamental continuity, which is the univocity of being.
Despite profound differences in style and method these ideas echo very
clearly some of Heidegger’s concerns from Being and Time. In particular,
Heidegger maintains the distinction between a scientific space that is abstract
and measurable and the space within which humans live. Furthermore, this
space is created by the very nature of human existence. It is insofar as humans
dwell that they lay out a domain in which both building and thinking can occur.
In this light, we might think of “Building Dwelling Thinking” as a rewriting of
Division One of Being and Time, a rethinking of being-in-the-world.
“Building Dwelling Thinking” was published in a collection of essays in 1954
that also included “The Question Concerning Technology.” This essay offers
an analysis of technology, but not in any straightforward sense of the term.
Heidegger immediately bypasses the moral connotations of the term (i.e. is
technology good, bad, or neutral?) in order to pursue the essence of technology.
The essence of (modern) technology lies in what he calls the enframing (Gestell).
There are two important things to note here. First of all, enframing suggests the
setting of a boundary, an ontological boundary. For Heidegger, this boundary
concerns the precise way in which humans define what is real. Reality within
this frame is seen as energy to be exploited. A river is no longer a river, but a
potential hydro-electric plant. A forest is no longer a forest but so many board
feet of lumber. A mountain is no longer a mountain but a repository of coal or
other minerals to be extracted. This kind of thinking reaches its apogee in the
equation of matter and energy, E=mc2. The essence of technology is such that
the real is revealed as matter, and matter is understood as energy. For Heidegger
these are the boundaries of contemporary thought, the limits within which all
of our discourse is framed. Notice, though, that the boundary here is not a legal
boundary. It is not a boundary that requires enforcement. It is not a boundary

that is subject to a discourse about rights or property. It is not a boundary that
is under dispute in any way. For Heidegger, in fact, the boundary is for the most
part unnoticed and unnoticeable. The boundary of enframing is ontological for
Heidegger in precisely this way: the enframing makes possible a particular way
of revealing being. Being is revealed as exploitable energy within the enframing.
The claim is not legal but it is ontological and transcendental. Heidegger is still
working within the Kantian framework here. How is a world of atomic bombs
and human resources possible? The condition for the possibility of world such
as this is the enframing.11
The second important thing of note is that the Gestell has not always been
the boundary. Where Heidegger crucially diverges from Kant and Being and
Time in this essay is the suggestion that these ways of revealing have a historical
dimension, a suggestion that Heidegger writes about more extensively in the
earlier essay “The Age of the World Picture.”12 While Being and Time concerned
itself with uncovering the existential structures of human existence, the later
Heidegger is concerned with differences among ways of revealing. Thus in the
technology essay, Heidegger contrasts the way of revealing of modern technology
with the way of revealing of the Ancient Greeks. For the Greeks, the way of
revealing lay in poiēsis, a bringing forth that did not see reality as stockpiled
energy. Despite the recognition that ways of revealing arise historically, there
is another transcendental layer to Heidegger’s analysis that is not subject to
history and, in fact, makes the movement of history possible. This additional
transcendental layer Heidegger calls “being.” Early appropriations of Heidegger,
particularly religious ones took being in a mystical sense, claiming that Heidegger
was really talking about God. These religious interpretations were aided by the
translation of Sein with capital-B “Being.” Ostensibly, this capitalization was part
of an effort to distinguish Sein from Seiende (“beings”). The result, however, has
been the endowment of being with godlike powers of agency, and a much too
rigid distinction between the early and the late Heidegger. Our very deflationary
reading of Heidegger is that being is nothing other than a reflection of human
finitude. Because human existence is finite, being-towards-death in the language
of Being and Time, two things are possible for it. First, phenomena appear to it as
such. Second, and this is a continuing concern for Heidegger, every appearing is at
the same time a concealing. The clearing, dwelling, the threshold, the enframing
all reveal and conceal at the same time. This is the very structure of kinēsis, of
becoming, of finitude. This structure of concealing/revealing, presence/absence,
being/nothing, dif-ference is what Heidegger is trying to think in the term

“being.” There is no God here, but there is a transcendental ontological structure
that accounts for human experience.
The limits of ontotheology
Now that we have seen the extent to which Heidegger relies on a kind of
Kantianism to think human experience, we will turn to Heidegger’s discussion
of the relation between philosophy and religion, in order to see what effects
his Kantianism has here. In a lecture from 1927 entitled “Phenomenology and
Theology,” Heidegger takes up the very question that concerns this book, what
is the relation between philosophy and religion, between faith and reason.13 The
way Heidegger answers the question is not surprisingly very closely aligned
with Being and Time, which came out the same year. To begin with Heidegger
makes a distinction between philosophy and the sciences. The distinction is the
ontological distinction between being and beings. Science deals with beings,
while philosophy deals with being as such. Each science thus presupposes a
regional ontology that defines the particular kind of beings appropriate to that
science. As a result, the differences among sciences are relative. Every science as
science deals with beings. The only question is which particular set of beings is
under analysis. In contrast to this, philosophy does not deal with beings but being.
The difference between philosophy and the sciences is thus absolute. Perhaps the
most surprising thing about Heidegger’s argument is that he considers theology
a science. This is made less surprising by the fact that the German Wissenschaft
has much broader connotations than science in English.
For Heidegger theology is the science of faith, and he defines faith as “the
believing-understanding mode of existing in the history revealed, i.e., occurring,
with the Crucified.”14 Several important things are worth noting at the outset. First,
that religion is reduced to theology. Or, more charitably, that religion only attains
a scientific character in theology. Second, the only kind of religion or theology
that concerns Heidegger here is Christianity or Christian theology. Finally, even
Heidegger’s Christianity is reduced to a kind of Lutheranism. This is also not
surprising given Luther’s importance for German intellectual history, and also
Heidegger’s seminar on the Phenomenology of Religion (1920–1), which we’ll
turn to below. One could even argue that Heidegger’s decisive turn to Aristotle is
motivated by Luther’s unrelenting critique of Scholastic Aristotelianism.15
In tandem with his analytic of Dasein from Being and Time, and indeed
borrowing liberally from it, Heidegger treats faith as an existential structure that
is lived out within the particular destining of a people. Here Heidegger combines
the relation between Dasein’s existence and the temporal interpretation of its
existence in historical destining. Thus, while faith is experienced by an individual
Dasein, it does not take place outside of a community with a shared tradition.
The meaning of theology’s definition as the science of faith is, Heidegger writes,
fourfold:
1. Theology is the science of that which is disclosed in faith, of that which is

believed. That which is believed in this case is not some coherent order of
propositions about facts or occurrences which we simply agree to—which,
although theoretically not self-evident, can be appropriated because we
agree to them.
2. Theology is accordingly the science of the very comportment of believing,
of faithfulness—in each case a revealed faithfulness, which cannot possibly
be any other way. This means that faith, as the comportment of believing is
itself believed, itself belongs to that which is believed.
3. Theology, furthermore, is the science of faith, not only insofar as it makes
faith and that which is believed its object, but because it itself arises out of
faith. It is the science that faith of itself motivates and justifies.
4. Theology, finally, is the science of faith insofar as it not only makes faith
its object and is motivated by faith, but because this objectification of faith
itself, in accordance with what is objectified here, has no other purpose than
to help cultivate faithfulness itself for its part.16
Thus, theology for Heidegger arises in faith, is the science of faith, and has as its
task the cultivation of faith. Theology is a historical science insofar as it arises
out of the specific historical occurrence, namely the event of the crucifixion.
Furthermore, as systematic, theology seeks to give an account of the unique way
of being in the world of the faithful. Because theology is concerned with “living
faithfully” it is pulled in two directions. First, its object is limited to faith. It is
precisely this limitation that makes theology a science. However, as a science
theology both presupposes a regional ontology, that is the kind of being peculiar
to faith, and, second, at the same time depends on philosophy to clarify the nature
of being as such. This dependence on philosophy is ultimately how Heidegger
articulates the relation between philosophy (understood as phenomenology)
and religion (understood as Christian theology).
Heidegger articulates the relation between philosophy and religion with the
following claim: “Philosophy is the possible, formally indicative ontological corrective
of the ontic and, in particular, of the pre-Christian content of basic theological
concepts. But philosophy can be what it is without functioning factically as this
corrective.”17 Theology needs philosophy, but philosophy does not need theology.
Theology needs philosophy in order to clarify the “pre-Christian content”18
of its concepts. One might construe this relation as protecting theology from
the heterodox implications of the concepts that it borrows from non-Christian
sources, in particular Greek philosophy. However, Heidegger has something
different in mind, which he illustrates using the concept of guilt. If faith is
the fundamental phenomenon of Christian existence, then it also necessarily
entails its “counterphenomenon,” sin. Sin, however, cannot be thought without
guilt. The necessary interrelation of faith, sin, and guilt immediately shows the
limits of theology, because “guilt is an original ontological determination of the
existence of Dasein.”19 We won’t dwell on the way that Heidegger egregiously
begs the question here, in order to think through his claim. His claim is that
“all basic theological concepts . . . are ontologically determined by a content
that is pre-Christian and that can thus be grasped purely rationally.”20 Thus in
the case of guilt, even though it has been used in a theological context for two
millennia, the content of the concept is ontologically determined by Dasein’s
existential structures. In this case Heidegger is referring to his discussion of guilt
from §58 of Being and Time, where he argues that guilt is the ineluctable nullity
that constitutes Dasein’s very existence. Any ontic (in this case theological)
determination of guilt presupposes this more fundamental ontological structure
of guilt. Theology needs philosophy to clarify the ontological content of its ontic
concepts, but philosophy has no reciprocal need of theology. In this respect,
Heidegger is also claiming that philosophy precedes theology in an important
way. As we will see in Part 2, though, we diverge sharply from the inferences
that Heidegger draws from this claim. For us, philosophy is protological in
relation to theology, but only in the very limited sense that theology is a finite
and historically bounded assemblage.
As we saw in the first chapter, for Kant the relation between philosophy and
religion (also narrowed to mean Christian theology), was articulated in legal
and geographical terms. Religion’s proper boundary lies within reason and
properly exhausts itself in morality. In some respects, Heidegger is willing to
grant a great deal more to religion. Heidegger does not think that the proper
end of religion is morality, nor does he think that religion lies wholly within the
domain of philosophy. Religion (as the positive science of faith) is dependent
on philosophy (as phenomenological ontology) to correct its concepts, but

this correction is not articulated in legal terms. In practical terms, though,
Heidegger comes very close to Kant’s claims in The Conflict of the Faculties,
where Kant argued that the philosophy faculty should be free to examine the
concepts generated by the theological faculty. Whereas Kant was pleading for
the freedom of the philosophy faculty from state intervention, Heidegger is
claiming that the theology desperately needs the “correction” of philosophy. This
correction does not take the form of a “right” or “jurisdiction” but takes the form
of “co-directing.” Philosophy itself, though, can never establish the necessity of its
corrective function for theology. The necessity must come from theology itself,
and only insofar as it properly understands itself as a positive ontical science and
philosophy as ontology.
It is at this point that we see not only Heidegger’s greatest difference
from Kant, but also the point at which Heidegger’s Kantianism returns most
ferociously. Unlike Kant, Heidegger did not think that philosophy should be a
science like other sciences, so it was a mistake for Kant to pursue this as a goal.
For Heidegger philosophy is absolutely different from the other sciences, and it
is here that an absolute boundary is erected between philosophy and the other
sciences, including theology. Or, more precisely, it is not so much that a boundary
is erected but that it is rediscovered in the fundamental discontinuity between
being and beings. If for Kant the fundamental confusion of philosophy lies in the
continuity of concept and intuition, for Heidegger the fundamental confusion
is the continuity of being and beings. The solution to this confusion for both
is, of course, to deny the continuity by establishing a transcendental relation
between the sundered halves. Being and beings are not only different in kind
but being is related to beings as condition to conditioned. Even though Kant’s
legal and geographical language gets replaced (for the most part) by Heidegger’s
ontological language, the structure remains the same in both cases.
We now turn to Heidegger’s 1920–1 seminars on the phenomenology of religious
experience in order to see how this Kantianism is borne out in the discussion of
religious texts.21 In particular, we want to focus on Heidegger’s understanding
of Paul, since Paul has become such an important touchstone in contemporary
philosophy in the works of Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek. Heidegger does not
begin the seminar, however, by directly interrogating Paul’s texts. Rather, (and as is
typical for Heidegger) he begins with methodological considerations. Within these
methodological considerations, Heidegger focuses on “factical life experience” as
the “point of departure of the path to philosophy.”22 Here we can see Heidegger
moving toward the concern for “average everydayness” that dominates Being and
Time. Indeed, the movements are strictly parallel. One properly, philosophically
begins with life as it’s lived and then moves to give an account of it. In the case
of these lectures, the account is articulated in terms of the “how.” Factical life
experience experiences the “world.” World, here is not quite the fully fleshed out
concept that it will become in Being and Time or Basic Concepts of Metaphysics
(1929), but he does note that it is comprised of three concentric envelopments:
surrounding world, communal world, and self-world. Also, in keeping with his
later phenomenological work, world is never to be confused with object.
When Heidegger shifts from factical life experience to the “how” that
accounts for it, his Kantianism comes to the fore. Heidegger writes, “one can
only characterize the manner, the how, of the experiencing of those worlds. . . .
It is questionable whether the how—the relation—determines that which is
experienced—the content—and how the content is characterized.”23 The how
is the manner of experiencing the surrounding, communal, and self-worlds.
However, it does not determine the content of these worlds. The how is thus a
strictly formal concern. Content is factically given. It is one’s comportment to
facticity that is not given with the content. Rather, it is given by the very structure
of human existence. Thus, as we saw in our discussion of Being and Time, the
fact that hammers are made of a certain material and have a certain shape is
part of Dasein’s surrounding world. However, how Dasein takes up a hammer
and for what tasks, is part of Dasein’s existential constitution. Even if Dasein has
no comportment to hammers whatsoever, this is still encompassed in Dasein’s
how. And this precisely is where we see Heidegger’s Kantianism. The distinction
between form and content, between conditions and conditioned, in short a
hylomorphism, subtends these early lectures on Christianity.
When Heidegger turns in the second half of the course to Paul’s letters (first to
Galatians), he is determined to avoid any extraneous considerations that might
prevent him from penetrating to the heart of the matter. He writes, “one must take
as the only point of departure the Pauline situation and the How of the necessary
motivation of the communication in letters. The content proclaimed, and its
material and conceptual character, is then to be analyzed from out of the basic
phenomenon of proclamation.”24 Heidegger returns to “the how” as definitive for
his project and notes that the content of Paul’s message is to be understood in
terms of the basic phenomenon of proclamation. While Heidegger does not yet
have all the tools at his disposal that he does when he writes “Phenomenology
and Theology,” it is clear that both analyses are commensurate with each other.
“Proclamation” like “guilt” above is a basic existential concept that theology must
have clarified for it, if theology is to proceed as a positive science.
In his analysis of Thessalonians, Heidegger takes up the theme of temporality,

which, as we’ve seen, becomes central to Heidegger’s project. Also in keeping with
later discussions, the primordial experience of temporality in early Christianity was
occluded during the Middle Ages by the increasing dependence on Platonic and
Aristotelian modes of explanation. Contemporary theorizing about temporality
has only served to darken our understanding further. Thus in an effort to retrieve
the primordial temporality of early Christianity, Heidegger focuses on Paul’s use
of parousía. Here Heidegger finds “the center of Christianity: the eschatological
problem.”25 Paul’s suffering and the urgency of his message follow from temporality
entailed in his eschatology. We cannot understand the how until we understand
the “when.” “Here, how Paul answers the question of the ‘When’ of the parousía is
decisive; from this can one first judge what he said.”26
The how and the when of Paul’s proclamation allow Paul to experience factical
existence in a particular way. First, the how allows Paul to distinguish between the
surrounding world and the communal world. The surrounding world is the world
of the flesh (sarx), while the communal world is the world of the spirit (pneuma).
Second, the when not only repeats the distinction between the surrounding
world and the communal world, since those in the surrounding world literally
do not know what time (it) is and continue to be absorbed in the concerns of this
world that’s passing away, but the when also divides the communal world. There
are those in the communal world, who only focus on the when, become obsessed
with what time it is. They have a when but it is not guided by a how. As a result,
and the Kantian reference is unmistakable here, they fall into “enthusiasm.”27
From his early lectures to his later writings, and despite changes in
methodology, Heidegger remains consistently Kantian. His Kantianism lies
in the fundamental distinction between experience and the conditions for
the possibility of experience. This formal structure is continually repeated
throughout Heidegger’s work. As we’ve seen throughout our discussion of
Heidegger, whereas Kant consistently articulates this difference in legal and
geographical terms, Heidegger tends to think about spatiality as generated
by this difference, and thus thinks the difference in strictly ontological terms.
However, there are crucial points where Heidegger reimports unavoidably
spatial language such as the discussion of the threshold in “Language” and
enframing in “The Question Concerning Technology.” When Heidegger turns
to the relation between philosophy and religion his Kantianism remains in
full force. Philosophy (as phenomenology) is the science of being as such,
while religion (as Christian theology) is a positive science of beings, and thus
presupposes a regional ontology in need of clarification by philosophy. This
distinction between philosophy and religion is not the same as Kant’s, but it
does reproduce Kant’s formal, ontological schema.
Derrida, difference, and discontinuity
The work of Jacques Derrida is characterized by a scrupulous reading of texts, texts

in both literature and the history of philosophy. In this respect he shares a great
many similarities with Heidegger and fits within a broadly phenomenological
tradition. Although it must be said that his similarities with Hegel, Nietzsche,
and Freud problematize his relation to phenomenology in general a great deal.
Furthermore, the fact that Derrida is a French theorist coming of age in the
wake of World War II complicates his relation to Heidegger in particular. The
chief similarity between Derrida and Heidegger we will explore here is their
Kantianism. Derrida, too, is reliant on a kind of Kantianism as the fundamental
basis of his theorizing. As with Heidegger this is most evident in his earlier works,
however, it remains clear throughout his oeuvre. Once Derrida’s fundamental
Kantianism is established, we can see the degree to which this colors his
articulation of the relation between philosophy and religion. We will see that
despite Derrida’s considerable care and subtlety, he remains beholden to a kind
of transcendental theorizing that qualitatively differentiates form and content,
ground and grounded, conditions and conditioned. In the end, his philosophy
is predicated on precisely the same kind of discontinuity and hylomorphism as
Heidegger’s.
Derrida acknowledges his Heideggerian starting point in the name of his
philosophy, deconstruction, which is his translation of Heidegger’s Destruktion.
Heidegger most famously calls for the Destruktion of the history of ontology in
Being and Time §6. Derrida too is calling for the deconstruction of metaphysics
in his work. Crucially, in neither Heidegger nor Derrida does Destruktion/
deconstruction mean to annihilate or get rid of. Rather, both terms should
be thought in a Kantian sense. For Heidegger, Destruktion means uncovering
and accounting for the primordial experience that has been covered over by
millennia of ontological theorizing. For Derrida the task is very similar and here
he combines some of the themes from the early and the later Heidegger. The
task is to give an account of Western metaphysics, to answer the question, what
are the limits of our way of thinking. Taken in this way, Derrida’s project has
similar contours to Heidegger’s analysis in “The Age of the World Picture” and
“The Question Concerning Technology.” Derrida’s Kantianism is seen in the way
in which he seeks a ground for metaphysics that lies outside of metaphysics.

All of the terms generally associated with deconstruction such as différance,
supplement, pharmakon, etc., are in fact attempts to articulate such a ground.
The key difference between Derrida and Kant on this notion of ground is
that for Derrida the conditions for the possibility of metaphysics are also the
conditions for the impossibility of metaphysics. In order to clarify this seeming
contradiction, we will examine Derrida’s method more closely before turning to
a few key texts.
Deconstruction begins with the careful analysis of the text. In his analysis
Derrida is concerned not only with the philosophical content but the literary
form of the text. In terms of the philosophical content Derrida is primarily
focused on concept formation. Concepts are formed by the creation of
binary oppositions. Thus there can be no concept of good without necessarily
generating a corresponding concept of evil, no presence without absence,
no reason without madness, no man without woman, and perhaps most
importantly for Derrida’s early work, no speech without writing. Additionally,
the terms of these binary oppositions do not possess the same value. One
of the terms is always privileged over the other. Speech, for example, is not
simply distinguished from writing it is also seen as superior to writing. Plato is
explicit about this in the Phaedrus, as is Rousseau in his “Essay on the Origin
of Languages.” The first task of deconstruction, then, is to follow the thread of
concept formation through a particular text and show that the philosophical
content is organized around one or several hierarchical, binary oppositions.
The second task of deconstruction is to analyze the way in which the
author attempts to maintain these binary oppositions, which often requires an
examination of the literary aspects of the text. It is often the case (every text is
different) that the author uses a metaphor to hold the two terms of the oppositions
apart. For example, when Rousseau speaks about the relation between speech and
writing, he attempts to maintain the hierarchical privilege of speech by referring
to writing as a “supplement.” The problem with supplement is that it has two
diametrically opposed meanings. On the one hand, and this was surely Rousseau’s
intention, supplement means an addition to something that is already full. In this
case speech is sufficient unto itself and writing is an unnecessary addition. On
the other hand, supplement, also means to complete something that’s lacking.
This is the sense that the word is used in the case of vitamin supplements. One
may take vitamins because she is (or fears that she is) deficient in some essential
vitamins or minerals. Taken in this sense supplement is essential, necessary.
Thus, here at the conceptual boundary between speech and writing, we find that
the boundary is maintained by a term that means both essential and inessential,
necessary and unnecessary. The conditions for the possibility of maintaining
the distinction between speech and writing (supplement as inessential and
unnecessary) are also the conditions for the impossibility of maintaining the
distinction (supplement as essential and necessary).
The real concern at this point is what to do with this information. One could
make a claim about the nature of texts and complete this analysis on the literary
level. This is certainly how Derrida was taken up in the United States, following
the lead of the Yale deconstructionists. However, Derrida is explicit that the
results of this kind of analysis point to a philosophical conclusion, a conclusion
about the nature of Western metaphysics as such. On the one hand, Western
metaphysics must produce concepts through hierarchical, binary oppositions.
On the other hand, Western metaphysics always founders on its attempts
to maintain the very distinctions that ground it. For Derrida, this suggests
the limits of Western metaphysics. But, the limit is not one that surrounds
metaphysics like a fence, such that if we wished to stop doing metaphysics we
could simply leave the enclosed area. Rather, it is much more like Heidegger’s
“threshold” that we examined above, a limit that runs through all of metaphysics
and simultaneously uniting and dividing inside and outside, while at the same
time disappearing, leaving only a trace in words such as “supplement.”28
Much like in Heidegger there is a temptation to see a kind of mysticism lurking
here. Derrida himself admits that he uses the strategies of negative theology to
pursue his arguments.29 However, just as we saw in the discussion of “being” in
Heidegger, it is crucial that we do not read a covert theology into Derrida’s texts.
Différance is no more God than Heidegger’s threshold, but at the same time both
Derrida’s and Heidegger’s texts do authorize a particular view of the relation
between philosophy and religion. Furthermore, this relation is fundamentally
Kantian in its orientation. What we will see, as we saw in Heidegger, is that
Derrida also takes Kant’s legal and geographical distinction and reformulates it
as an ontological distinction.
In his 1968 essay “Différance” Derrida invents the neologism that makes him
famous and uses the same neologism to show the limits of Western metaphysics.
In taking up Western metaphysics as a whole Derrida follows Heidegger in
characterizing it as the metaphysics of presence. That is, Western thought has
been consistent in its claim that what is really real (being as such) is that which is
present. Of course, this doesn’t preclude a whole host of arguments about what
is really present or the most present. Is it the Platonic forms? Is it matter? Is it
sensation? On both Heidegger’s and Derrida’s readings, the history of philosophy
has been unanimous concerning the nature of being (presence), but disagreed
about the way in which presence presents itself. Derrida’s task in “Différance” is
to pursue both the conditions for the possibility of the metaphysics of presence
and the conditions for their impossibility, in short, to find the limits of the
metaphysics of presence.
Let’s start then, where Derrida does, with the letter “a.” It’s the letter “a” that
distinguishes “différance” from “différence.” While in English the difference
between the two words becomes clear in pronunciation, in French it does not. Both
would be pronounced in exactly the same way. No doubt this was maddening
for the audience that originally heard the paper, and no doubt that Derrida
intended this exact reaction. What this subtle difference in spelling (but not
speaking) allowed Derrida to do was to perform the very distinction between
speech and writing in such a way as to highlight the essential supplemental
relation of writing to speech. The goal here, though, is not simply overturning
the usual speech/writing hierarchy. This would be a simple romanticism
and only serve to reinscribe us within the same metaphysics of presence.
No, the goal is to show the way in which presence (in this case as speech)
is always already interrupted by absence (in this case writing). There is no
pure presence. Presence only exists as the result of a differential structure that
effaces presence at the same time that it makes it possible. Derrida borrows the
idea of a differential structure from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who
sees language as only a series of differences, a series without any positive terms.
Différance is the differential structure that makes the metaphysics of presence
both possible and impossible.
Much like supplement, différance is composed of two irreconcilable ideas,
differing and deferring. Differing has an unavoidably spatial connotation, while
deferring has an unavoidably temporal connotation. This complication brings
us back to the issue of spatiality that we explored earlier in this chapter and in
the chapter on Kant. Unlike either Kant or Heidegger, though, Derrida is not
looking to articulate a fundamental spatiality (either as the form of intuition
or the openness that arises out of being ahead of oneself), and it is here that
Derrida displays his preternatural self-consciousness with regard to language.
Derrida’s argument is that even our conceptions of space and time cannot be
models of pure presence. Space and time themselves are both made possible and
impossible by a spacing (differing) and temporizing (deferring). Derrida, unlike
the Heidegger of Being and Time, is not arguing that time is more foundational
than space.30 Rather, Derrida is arguing that space and time (as forms of presence)
already presuppose différance.
Messianism and the limit
Derrida’s early work is replete with this kind of careful analysis, all designed
to show that Western metaphysics is traversed by its limit. The goal of
his analyses is to make room for what is other than philosophy, what is
necessarily unthought because of the ways that concepts must be formed.
Derrida’s concern in an analysis of this type is profoundly ethical. Through
deconstruction he can lay low the pretensions of metaphysics to totality, a
totality that inherently excludes difference and alterity. Derrida’s inspiration
for generating an ethics through the critique of totality is Emmanuel Levinas,
another thinker in the phenomenological tradition, who also reproduces the
Kantian transcendental schema. Despite Derrida’s concern with ethics from
the very beginning of his career, his concern with politics comes rather late.
His explanation for this delay was that he needed to do the earlier ground
clearing work before pursuing topics like politics. One of his first major works
in politics is Specters of Marx (1993).31 In the text he first describes his notion
of the “messianic,” which is borrowed from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the
Philosophy of History” (1940). What is crucial about Derrida’s account of
the messianic, and as we’ll see his account of religion in general, is the purely
formal nature of it.
In Specters of Marx, Derrida takes up the notion of the spectral in Marx.
Of course the spectral, which refers to ghosts, spirits, and revenants of all
kinds, is a boundary concept that tries to hold two spheres together and
apart at the same time. The spectral is the boundary between the living and
the dead. Within this context Derrida proposes that Marxism carries within
it a “messianic eschatology.”32 As Derrida’s analysis proceeds it becomes clear
that he intends to think this messianic eschatology in purely formal terms,
without the content of either religion or Marxism. Such a bracketing (epochē)
of the content is “essential to the messianic in general, as thinking of the
other and of the event to come.”33 While there can be no doubt of the Kantian
impetus behind this distinction between form and content, what Derrida
gains from this move is a way to think openness beyond totality. However,
unlike his earlier writings this openness beyond totality has political force.
Derrida writes, “it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism,
a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an
idea of justice—which we distinguish from law or right and even from
human rights—and an idea of democracy—which we distinguish from its
determined predicates today.”34
We’ll return to those notions of justice and democracy in a moment, for right
now we’d like to focus on the phrase “messianic without messianism.” This phrase
is meant to reproduce the distinction between form and content that Derrida has
already instituted. Messianism is the specific religious and political content of
any “messianic eschatology.” It could be the promised messiah of Judaism or the
communist state of Marxism. For Derrida all the great monotheistic religions
(Judaism, Islam, Christianity) and also Marxism share both the messianic and
messianism. But, what would it mean to think the messianic as such without the
content? What’s left? For Derrida what is left is the structure of a promise, the
bare “to come” “of an alterity that cannot be anticipated.”35 The messianic is the
anticipation of and openness to the other who cannot be named, a “hospitality
without reserve.”36 Importantly for Derrida, the “to come” of the promise does
not indicate simply “the future.” He is much too Heideggerian for that. In the
same way that Heidegger returns to the roots of the German Zukunft in order to
extract a notion of the “to come,” which indicates Dasein’s being stretched ahead
of itself, here Derrida plays on the same ambiguity in the French avenir. The
“future” as commonly thought becomes merely another modality of the present,
but Derrida is trying to think the “to come” in such a way that it is no longer a
modality of the present and in fact makes the present possible (and impossible).
Furthermore, such a “to come” structures human experience as openness to the
other, as a hospitality without reserve. Derrida brings all of these ideas together,
including justice in a remarkable bracketed passage from Specters of Marx:
Awaiting without horizon of the wait . . . just opening which renounces any right
to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to
the event that cannot be awaited as such—and this is the very place of spectrality.
It would be easy, too easy, to show that such a hospitality without reserve, which
is nevertheless the condition of the event and thus of history . . . is the impossible
itself, and that this condition of possibility of the event is also its condition of
impossibility, like this strange concept of messianism without content, of the
messianic without messianism, that guides us here like the blind. But it would
be just as easy to show that without this experience of the impossible, one might
as well give up on both justice and the event.37
Here we see Derrida expanding on the implicit ethical concerns of his early
work to a full-blown account of justice. Surprisingly, this account of justice is
predicated on the messianic without messianism. As we have seen, though, this
is strictly a formal claim, a claim about the conditions under which something
like justice might be possible. For Derrida, justice is only possible on the basis
of the “to come,” which creates the empty place for the stranger and a hospitality
without reserve. At the same time, however, the conditions for the possibility of
justice are also the conditions for its impossibility. This is Derrida’s double-edged
Kantianism. Is Derrida saying that there’s no justice? No, he is saying that justice
as justice is always to come, and that without this aporetic structure justice will
always be subsumed by its content. Only insofar as there is a radical disjunction
between form and content, between conditions and conditioned, between the
messianic and messianism is justice possible. Thus, even at Derrida’s most
vigilant he repeats the Kantian denial of the continuity thesis and parallels Kant’s
formal reduction of religion to morality.
Just two years after Specters of Marx, Derrida continues his engagement with
religious topics in an essay entitled, “Faith and Reason: The Two Sources of
‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.”38 The full title of the essay is important
because it explicitly refers to three different works on the relation between
philosophy and religion. The first part “Faith and Reason” is clearly a reference
to Hegel’s Glauben und Wissen (1802). The “Two Sources” portion of the subtitle
refers to Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1935), and, of course,
the last part of the subtitle is a reference to Kant’s Religion book, which we
discussed in the first chapter. In this text, Derrida is trying to think the religious
as such, but he can only think it in relation to its history as intertwined with
Western thought. Immediately he is faced with the difficulty of asking if religion
itself is one. Can it be thought as such? From what we’ve already seen of Derrida
it should not be surprising that something like religion cannot be thought as a
simple unity. The etymology of the word indicates two opposed but intertwined
ideas. The first etymological source of “religion” refers to the holy or unscathed.
Its second etymological source refers to trust and has the economic overtones
of the fiduciary.
The difficulty of thinking these two “sources” together is again the issue of
alterity. The “holy” is something “wholly other,” unthinkable and unfathomable,
while trust entails a relation of exchange. But, how can any kind of exchange
exist with what lies beyond all exchange? Here, Derrida suggests the aporia of
the gift that he explored in works such as Given Time and The Gift of Death.
Religion evinces a similar structure in which we are caught up in an economy that
necessitates exchange, but the economy is only set in motion by what exceeds it.
The gift is impossible, but without its impossibility no exchange at all would be
possible. At this point, the parallels with the messianic should also be evident.
Despite these parallels with Derrida’s other work, Derrida does bring two
important issues to the fore in this essay. The first is the logic of auto-immunity,
which he uses to describe the relation between faith and reason. The second
and related issue is the nature of the religious as such. The term immunity has
a long history in both political and theological contexts. It refers to some sort
of protection or exemption. This use of the term is still seen today in a political
context in the phrase “diplomatic immunity,” in which a foreign diplomat is
exempted from the laws of the host country. This kind of immunity is the price
that countries pay in exchange for the possibility of continuing relations both
political and economic. For the most part, though, immunity is associated with
its biological use. In this case one is exempted from a particular disease either
through experience (having had the disease), genetic inheritance, or mechanically
through immunization. Auto-immunity, though, is when a biological system
attacks its own immunity. The most common example of this is an allergic
reaction, in which a body’s own immune system overacts to the presence of a
foreign body. In this case the immune system fails to distinguish between its own
body and the foreign body. Or, for Derrida’s purposes, we might even say that
the body treats itself as foreign. Derrida goes on to say that this “general logic of
auto-immunity” . . . “seems indispensable to us today for thinking the relations
between faith and knowledge, religion and science, as well as the duplicity of
sources in general.”39 Thus, not only is auto-immunity required to think the
relation between philosophy and religion, it is required to think religion itself.
The way that auto-immunity helps us to think about the relation between
philosophy and religion is the way in which philosophy continually indemnifies
itself against claims of faith, claiming to proceed by reason alone, while at the
same time reintroducing these faith claims surreptitiously through notions of
the public trust, the social bond, and private property. Although for Locke, there
is nothing surreptitious about it as he explicitly connects private property to a
theological ground in the Two Treatises of Government (1690). Philosophy must
both immunize itself against religion and then attack that same immunity in
an auto-immune reaction. The logic of auto-immunity also explains the way in
which globalized religion both uses modern technology to advance its ends and
at the same time decries the technology that makes this globalization possible.
Philosophy and religion are thus pictured as two foreign bodies that are both
immune to one another and at the same time destroy their own immunity. The
logic of auto-immunity thus works from both sides of the divide.
Religion as such is also characterized by this logic of auto-immunity, and for
Derrida this auto-immunity is ineluctable. The two sources of religion, as we
saw, are holiness and trust, and as such religion is continually separating itself,
immunizing itself and then reacting against that immunization by reaching
out in trust. This dual movement abstracted from all content Derrida calls a
“universal structure of religiosity.”40 What is at stake for him, and this brings
us full-circle back to Kant, is the possibility of radical evil. The structure of
auto-immunity, the structure of religion is the structure of risk, or, and for
Derrida this is the same thing, the structure of a promise. Both risk and promise
presuppose openness, which is the fiduciary source of religion. However,
openness entails risk, the possibility of betrayal. It is possible that in a hospitality
without reserve, the one we invite in might destroy us. This possibility is the
logic of auto-immunity. The very principles that constitute religion can also
destroy it. Derrida describes the risk of religion as “menace and chance,” and
that “it must take charge of—one could say: take in trust—the possibility of
that radical evil without which good would be for nothing.”41 As we saw above
in our discussion of Kant, radical evil is the possibility that one might take
self-love rather than reason as a principle of one’s action. Taken in its strictly
Kantian sense, Derrida repeats the conundrum of freedom that has plagued
theology since Augustine. If humans are truly free then choosing evil becomes
possible. However, it is only with the possibility of choosing evil that choosing
good becomes praiseworthy and worthwhile. Only if evil is a possibility are we
truly responsible for the good we choose.
Derrida wants to say more than this, however. The real risk to which we are
opened, it seems, is not radical evil but diabolical evil. For Kant diabolical evil
is choosing evil, not out of self-love, but for the sake of evil itself. Diabolical evil
is inconceivable, impossible for Kant, but is not the impossible precisely what
Derrida is arguing we are open to? The issue here is the “good conscience.” On
Kant’s model, not only can one do the good, but one can know with certainty that
he or she has done the right thing. This certainty is the entire point of determining
the will a priori. This certainty is also the source of a “good conscience.” Derrida,
in contrast, argues that “one must avoid good conscience at all costs.” The
problem with good conscience is that “good conscience as subjective certainty is
incompatible with the absolute risk that every promise, every engagement, and
every responsible decision—if there are such—must run.”42
Derrida’s model for ethical (and political and religious) engagement can be
found in Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, which he discusses in The Gift of Death
(1992). Derrida pictures Abraham as caught in a dilemma that he cannot resolve
with any kind of certainty or good conscience. Either he must betray his family
and community, or he must betray God. For Derrida this is the risk that makes
every ethical decision both possible and impossible. In doing good we also (and
at the same time) do evil. Crucially, the risk here is structural and not empirical.
The problem does not arise because of a lack of information or a failure to fully
think through the consequences of an action. Action itself constituted out of this
impossible, undecidable situation. Because Derrida thinks of action in this way,
we think that the better model for him is diabolical evil. Ethics for Derrida is not
the stark choice between reason and self-love, but the impossible risk of doing
both good and evil at the same time.
As we have seen not only is this undecidability at the heart of ethics, it lies at the
heart of Western thought as such. Through deconstruction Derrida discovers it in
the founding concepts of philosophy. Western metaphysics itself can be understood
as this unavoidable tension between a drive toward totality and the openness to
what lies beyond that totality. Furthermore, this différance, this spectrality, this
auto-immunity, also lies at the heart of both politics and religion. For Derrida the
structure of the promise, hope itself is built into the very nature of reality, but it
is always a hope deferred. The formal nature of Derrida’s analyses operates on a
hylomorphism, a strict separation between form and content. Derrida’s interest is
not in the content of the promise, but the structure of promising as such, because
as we saw in the case of ethics to give content to the promise is also to betray it.
However, even in the face of this betrayal the structure of the promise remains
necessary in order to think justice and democracy.
Of course, Derrida does not simply maintain a sharp distinction between
form and content, his further claim is that the relation between form and content
is one of conditions to conditioned. It is here that his fundamental Kantianism
lies. Derrida is an unusual Kantian in the sense that conditions for the possibility
are also always and at the same time conditions for the impossibility. This
complication in Derrida’s methodology makes him a much more subtle Kantian
than Kant (and even Heidegger), but it makes him a Kantian, nonetheless. The
consequences of Derrida’s Kantianism are seen throughout his work, but our
primary concern is the way in which this structure generates a boundary and
beyond that boundary that which is in principle unknowable. For Kant the
boundary was the boundary of the island of sensible experience. However, Kant
was able to recuperate what lay beyond that boundary not through knowledge
but through morality. For Derrida the results are more extreme in a number
of respects. First the boundary is not a geographical boundary that marks
a spatio-temporal limit. For Derrida the boundary is always internal. It runs
through every conceptual distinction. It is the difference (différance) between
every binary opposition that both maintains and contaminates the distinction.
This boundary is always generated in situ. It doesn’t preexist the conceptual
distinction, but arises in the very making of the distinction. As a result, Derrida
sometimes calls this boundary “quasi-transcendental,” a phrase that both brings

him close to Kant and holds Kant at arm’s length at the same time.
Derrida’s methodology requires him to characterize the relation between
philosophy and religion in a particular way. On the one hand, Derrida’s way
of taking up the issue has been profoundly influential in what has been called
“the theological turn” in recent Continental philosophy. In particular, the kind
of Kantianism endemic to phenomenology continually re-spawns the notion of
an alterity that is structurally necessary, but by definition cannot be given any
content. In addition to Derrida, thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc
Marion also work within this phenomenological tradition. What all of these
thinkers have in common is a commitment to that which is other than Western
metaphysics, but at the same time a recognition that which is other can only be
given negative contours. That is, one can say what it is not, but what cannot say
what it is. The reason, of course, is the very question, “What is it?” is the question
par excellence of Western metaphysics. To answer this question about the other
metaphysics would be simply to reappropriate it back into metaphysics. As a
result, and beginning with Heidegger, a phenomenology of this type resorted to
any number of circumlocutions, such as writing under erasure or neologisms
or square quotes, if not to avoid the problem than at least to highlight the fact
that there is a problem. Thus, Kantianism in all its myriad forms leads to the
positing of a boundary beyond which knowledge is impossible. The tendency in
post-Kantian thought has been to connect what lies beyond the boundary with
religion, but a religion that can only be determined negatively.
At the same time other thinkers outside of the phenomenological tradition
such as Lacan, Žižek, Badiou, and Agamben also reproduce this same division
between conditions and conditioned, albeit in very different ways. While
we will take up these thinkers below, the crucial question that arises at this
point is, is it possible to avoid the Kantian distinction between conditions
and conditioned? At the outset it is important to note that the qualification
of “Kantian” is essential. We are not proposing to eliminate the distinction
between conditions and conditioned, only its Kantian, transcendental variant.
This is what it would mean to once again affirm the continuity thesis. One
must distinguish between conditions and conditioned, but one need not
do it in the Kantian fashion. The reason for avoiding the Kantian version is
obvious. The Kantian version of the distinction, as we have seen, necessarily
entails an apophatic account of religion. Our wager is that if we can produce a
sufficiently robust account of the relation between conditions and conditioned
that is not beholden to a kind of Kantianism, then it will be possible to have
not only a kataphatic account of religion, but also an account of the relation
between philosophy and religion that does not depend on a legal, geographic,
or ontological account of a boundary.
Metaphysics without discontinuity
Ultimately, we will turn to Deleuze to help us think through this issue, but for
now, in order to explain what a non-Kantian relation between conditions and
conditioned might look like, we will turn to Spinoza, one of Deleuze’s most
important precursors. Because Spinoza’s metaphysics is precritical (Kant would
say dogmatic), he accepts the continuity thesis, the idea that concepts and
intuitions are not different in kind (as in Kant) but merely different in degree.
Already, this sets up a very different relation between concepts and intuitions,
as neither can be straightforwardly the condition for the possibility of the other.
Concepts are not the form that intuitions take in Spinoza. While a great deal
more could be said about this, for our purposes it is enough to note that Spinoza’s
acceptance of the continuity thesis allows him to make direct statements about
God. In fact, the entire first section of his major work, Ethics, is simply entitled
“God.”
Furthermore, the way that Spinoza thinks about boundaries is much more
fluid than in Kant or the post-Kantians. To begin with for Spinoza a boundary
doesn’t entail that something lies beyond it. Thus, in the case of his argument
for substance, if one’s concept of substance entails something beyond substance,
then for Spinoza one has misconstrued the nature of substance, which is “that
which can be conceived in itself. ” The result of this definition is a conception
of substance that entails all that there is. To conceive of anything lying beyond
this would limit substance and thus make it no longer substance. Substance is
Spinoza’s way of thinking “the whole.” Everything else that exists is a “part” of
that whole, and has no separate existence apart from the whole. On this model
the relation between whole and part in some way parallels the relation between
conditions and conditioned, but the distinction between the two cannot be
articulated in legal, geographical, or even ontological terms. On the one hand,
we can surely say that the whole is the condition for its parts. For Spinoza it is
an axiomatic truth that without the whole there can be no parts. On the other
hand, however, it would be strange to ask where the boundary between whole
and part lies, or to ask where the proper domain of the whole lies and where the
proper domain of the part lies. Furthermore, it is not even clear that there is an
ontological distinction at stake here for Spinoza. Are whole and part distinctly
different kinds of things? For Spinoza, the parts are just finite expressions of the
whole, while the whole is the sum of the parts. It seems more helpful to think
of the distinction between parts and whole as an epistemological distinction.
That is, we may think about the universe as a whole (natura naturans), and thus
think about the whole as the active source of movement in the universe. Here
Spinoza has in mind something like, “Gravity caused the rock to fall.” Here the
power of the universe is displayed through its eternal laws, in this case gravity.
We may also think about the universe from the perspective of the parts (natura
naturata). Using the same example, the concern would be in this case about the
rock as that part of the universe that was acted upon by the laws of the universe,
the universe as passive. Thus, we make look at the universe from the perspective
of its activity, the whole, or from the perspective of its passivity, the parts. At no
point in this distinction, however, do we suppose that the whole is ontologically
separate from its parts. The universe is both acting and acted upon at the same
time. Spinoza formalizes this distinction but the result is not a distinction of form
and content, nor does it result in a transcendental relation between conditions
and conditioned. In Spinoza we see the possibility, at least, of a non-Kantian
account of the relation between conditions and conditioned. The hope is that
armed with a resource of this type we might be able to propose a new relation
between philosophy and religion.
Kant is without question the watershed figure in modern Western
philosophy. It would be impossible to overestimate his importance for
nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophy. We have argued in this chapter
that Kant’s legacy often finds subterranean legitimation, even in philosophers
who are trying to distance themselves from Kant. So, while phenomenology
does not see itself as Kantian and in many respects positioned itself against the
contemporary Neo-Kantians, at the same time its methodology continually
repeats the fundamental gestures of Kantianism. In particular, the move
from experience to the conditions for the possibility of that experience
is continually repeated, not only in Husserl’s texts, but as we saw, in both
Heidegger’s early and later work. The result of this repetition of Kant in
Heidegger was the positing of both existential and ontological structures
that account for experience. Furthermore, in the case of religion Heidegger is
adamant that any religious expression is made possible by distinct and prior
ontological forms. By the same token, Derrida not only repeats the same
Kantian motifs in his work, but often does so in a vein similar to Heidegger.
Derrida is explicit that the difference between conditions and conditioned is
internal, which greatly complicates his account of what is other to Western

metaphysics, but at the same time he is reduced to a purely formal analysis of
ideas such as justice, democracy, and religion. The result of Kantianism in all
of its guises is a peculiar account of religion that can only be apophatic, and a
division between philosophy and religion that on some level repeats the rigid
separation of conditions and conditioned, which, as we have seen arises from
Kant’s denial of the continuity thesis.
Our next step is to begin rethinking the relations among philosophy, religion,
and theology by affirming the continuity thesis. This will require a rethinking of
whole series of notions. In particular we must reformulate the very concepts of
boundary and territory in a way that is not dependent on geography and politics.
We must also rethink the very notion of “thing” not as a discrete object but as an
assemblage or rhizome. In short we need a new cartography in order to map the
relations among these new assemblages that we’re constructing.
3
Hylozoism and Rhizomatics: Deleuzian

Cartography
Up to this point, the previous chapters have been concerned with uncovering the
degree to which both philosophy and Christian theology are beholden to a kind of
Kantianism. What is distinctive about the Kantianism we uncovered is its repetition
of Kant’s denial of the continuity thesis, which necessitates a transcendental style
of argumentation in which conditions and conditioned are different in kind. This
difference between conditions and conditioned orients not only Kant’s thinking but
those who follow in Kant’s wake. In the second chapter we suggested that Spinoza
provides an alternative model for thinking about the relation between conditions
and conditioned. In Chapter 5 we will take up the challenge of Spinoza from the
perspective of Christian theology and argue that Leibniz does not fully meet
Spinoza’s challenge philosophically precisely because he surreptitiously imports
Christian dogma into his argumentation. Thus Leibniz accepts the continuity
thesis (as does Spinoza) but he is unwilling to accept the full implications of the
continuity thesis. In particular, Leibniz maintains the transcendent distinction
between creator and creature that facilitates the doctrine of imago Dei. Ultimately,
what is at stake in this difference between Leibniz and Spinoza goes straight to the
heart of contemporary philosophy and also contemporary theology.
In order to proceed with this project we must understand what it would
mean philosophically to affirm (or reaffirm) the continuity thesis. Having spent
so much time showing in previous chapters the way in which Kant’s denial of the
continuity thesis resulted in a particular kind of transcendental theorizing, it is
now time to take up the continuity thesis anew. As has already been made obvious
in previous chapters, affirming the continuity thesis will suggest affinities with
pre-Kantian thinkers such as Spinoza and Leibniz. At the same time, however,
a simple nostalgic return to pre-Kantian philosophy will not be adequate. We
must affirm the continuity thesis in Kant’s wake. Our guide for taking up the
continuity thesis anew will be Gilles Deleuze, and in particular his work with
Felix Guattari.
Continuity, hylozoism, univocity
Affirming the continuity thesis entails two ontological correlates: hylozoism and
univocity. As we saw above, the point at which Kant denies the continuity thesis
concerns the relation between concepts and intuitions. For Kant concepts and
intuitions are different in kind. In Kant’s case the difference in kind results in a
hylomorphic distinction between form and content. Concepts and intuitions are
never convertible. One can never become the other. The additional layer that
Kant adds to this hylomorphism is the transcendental relation between form
and content. The form becomes the conditions for the possibility of the content’s
appearing. In contrast to Kant’s position, affirming the continuity thesis would
entail seeing concepts and intuitions as different in degree, not different in kind.
That is, concept and intuition are abstract poles of a single continuum. This
difference in degree has two principal implications. The first is hylozoism. The
second is univocity. As we saw in the first chapter, denying the continuity thesis
is precisely what allows Kant to dismiss hylozoism as a viable option. At the
same time, however, Kant begs the question here, because his assumption that
matter is dead and cannot form itself, presupposes the hylomorphic distinction
that Kant is arguing for. If, however, matter is not transcendentally governed by
form, then matter must be thought as self-forming. Kant himself in a moment of
circumspection admits that this might be possible in the Metaphysics of Morals.
As we proceed further into Deleuze’s ontology, we will see the way in which he
takes matter to be self-organizing. We have not yet discussed at any length the
ontological positions of univocity (that being speaks with one voice) in contrast to
equivocity (that being is said in many ways), or equivocity’s theological cognate,
analogy, but as we will see, univocity is the necessary ontological correlate to
hylozoism.
Critics of Deleuze, such as Alain Badiou, argue that this commitment to the
continuity thesis and its ontological correlates, hylozoism and univocity, results
in a subordination of difference to oneness. How, Badiou and other critics argue,
if there are only differences in degree, can there be any thing like real difference?
Isn’t everything swallowed in the same sea of indistinctness? This objection,
of course, parallels Hegel’s criticism of Spinoza. Hegel argues that without the
Hylozoism and Rhizomatics 69
power of the negative in Spinoza real difference is impossible. Saving difference

from overwhelming totality has taken on increasing importance in French
philosophy since World War II. It is thus no small thing that Badiou accuses
Deleuze of drowning difference in the same. He is essentially accusing Deleuze
of being a totalitarian. The fundamental philosophical issue for contemporary
French philosophy is the possibility of resistance. In the wake of Nazism, French
philosophy has been concerned to unmask what it considers totalitarian regimes
of thought and carve out a place for resistance to totalitarian regimes of thought.
Insofar as Badiou accuses Deleuze of being a totalitarian, he is accusing Deleuze
of failing at philosophy.
We will have an opportunity to return to Badiou later in this chapter and in
Part 2. For the moment let’s examine this basic criticism of the continuity thesis.
How is it that any philosopher who argues for continuity can avoid this charge
and save not only difference but resistance? The answer to this question takes us
back to the debate between Aquinas and Duns Scotus in the Middle Ages. The
fundamental question for both of these thinkers is, in precisely what sense is
God knowable? This is a difficult question for any Christian theologian because
it requires holding two propositions in tension. First, knowledge of anything,
let alone God, requires that the knower and the known have something in
common. Without this commonality, there is no way to bridge the gap between
knower and known. This commonality gets parsed in innumerable ways in
the history of philosophy, but it remains the starting point of all theories of
knowledge, even knowledge of God. The second proposition that must be held
in tension with the first is the infinite way in which God’s nature surpasses
human nature, or in John Calvin’s words, finitum non capax infiniti (the finite
cannot contain the infinite). The tension between these two propositions can be
neatly combined into the question, how can we know God if we have nothing
in common with God?
Aquinas answers this question through the analogia entis, the analogy of
being. Of the two propositions Aquinas chooses the second at the expense
of the first. That is, he chooses to maintain God’s separateness at the risk of
having any point of commonality that might make knowledge possible. The
way that Aquinas seeks to bridge the gap between humans and God is through
resemblance. The assumption is that there will always be a resemblance between
an artist and what the artist creates. Notice that even at this foundational point
we are already relying on an analogy between the artist and the work. Through
analogy, then, we can say some things about God through the parallels of
resemblance. Of course, the analogy is neither exact nor complete. Everything
we can affirm of God through analogy we must also deny, lest the resemblance
deceive us. To only affirm the analogy without the countervailing denial of
the analogy would obliterate the distinction between creator and created. The
ultimate result of Aquinas’ theory is an apophatic theology in which ultimately
nothing can be known of God, and only God’s mysteriousness can be affirmed.
In contrast to Aquinas, Scotus sees clearly that sacrificing all commonality in
relation to God will ultimately result in apophatic silence. Scotus’ solution is to
affirm that there is in fact something that God has in common with everything
else, and that therefore God is in principle knowable. The risk, though, that Scotus
takes is undermining God’s transcendence. What Scotus is willing to affirm of
all things, even God, is being. For Scotus, God exists in exactly the same way as
everything else exists. The verb “to be” does not mean something different when
it is predicated of different objects. When one says, “God is,” and “The lamp is.”
The “is” in both sentences is identical. They do not merely resemble one another.
We are not forced to both affirm and deny the meaning of “is” through analogy.
There is one meaning for both. This is the doctrine of the univocity of being.
Being is said in one way, or being speaks with a single voice.
We will pursue the theological implications of univocity in Part 2. At this
point, we should look at the philosophical implications. Deleuze, following
Scotus, takes univocity to be the only viable philosophical position. Paradoxically,
Deleuze takes up univocity, because pace Badiou, he thinks it’s the only way to
preserve difference and ultimately resistance. The reason that Deleuze thinks
that univocity preserves difference is because it is only under the conditions of
the univocity of being that one could know that a difference is real. In the case
of analogy, one can never know if a difference is real. One can only know that
an object resembles another in some respects but does not resemble it in other
respects. One would never get to the point of real difference. One could only get
as far as apparent difference. Even difference requires something common to
both relata in order to know if the comparison is apt.
Deleuze’s rejoinder to Badiou concerning the supposed monotonous sameness
of his philosophy is that univocity does not entail either oneness or sameness.
On the contrary, difference in itself is only thinkable on the condition that what
differs, differs in some comparable way. Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sense,
The univocity of Being does not mean that there is one and the same Being; on
the contrary, beings are multiple and different, they are always produced by a
disjunctive synthesis, and they themselves are disjoined and divergent, membra
disjuncta. The univocity of Being signifies that Being is Voice that it is said, and
that it is said in one and the same “sense” of everything about which it is said.
That of which it is said is not at all the same, but Being is the same for everything
about which it is said.1
What is ultimately at stake, though, in the difference between Deleuze and Badiou
is that Badiou falls on the Thomist side of the debate rather than the Scotist
side. Badiou argues for a strict separation of what he calls the event and the
situation. The event for Badiou is unaccountable and arises miraculously within
the given situation, an issue we will return to in Chapter 6. As we will see below,
Badiou’s argument for the discontinuity of event and situation forces Badiou into
precisely the kind of apophatic locutions that we saw in Aquinas. For example,
Badiou writes, “The event belongs to that-which-is-not-being-qua-being,”2
and “There is no acceptable ontological matrix of the event.”3 In attempting to
separate the event from ontology, Badiou is forced back on the logic of analogy
in order to be able to talk about the event at all. Even in the case of political
resistance, which is most surely his ultimate aim, he must resort to what he calls
a “metaphorical affinity” between mathematics and politics in order to articulate
the possibility of the political implications of an event.4
In denying the continuity thesis, Kant is also forced to take up analogy as a
way of mediating between the two sides of the fundamental division that runs
through Kant’s philosophy. Thus, while he argues that only objects of sensible
experience are theoretically knowable, at the same time he argues that God,
the soul, and the world, are theoretically unknowable but practically necessary.
These posits of practical reason are necessary, according to Kant, in order to
be able to act morally. Kant would even go so far as to say that they regulate
theoretical knowledge, but technically they are not knowledge. In order to think
about the practical postulates at all, though, it is necessary to think about them
analogously as knowledge. We can make claims about them, act on them “as if ”
they were knowledge, while at the same time denying their status as knowledge.
Even in the third Critique, beauty becomes an analogue of morality.
We have thus seen that the continuity thesis entails both hylozoism and
univocity, while denying the continuity thesis entails hylomorphism and analogy.
Deleuze argues that not only is philosophy properly pursued through univocity,
but that any thought that denies univocity will (consciously or unconsciously)
reproduce the theological tropes of transcendence and analogy. Deleuze writes,
“Philosophy merges with ontology, but ontology merges with the univocity of
Being (analogy has always been a theological vision, not a philosophical one,
adapted to the forms of God, the world, and the self).”5 There are numerous
motivations for taking up discontinuity, hylomorphism, or equivocity, and taking

up one entails taking up the other two, but the result is always the importation of
religion into philosophy. Aquinas takes up analogy in order to expand the realm
of theology. Kant takes up discontinuity in order to limit the pretensions of
theology, and at the same time save it from itself. Heidegger takes up equivocity
in order to uncover the meaning of being. Derrida uses discontinuity to pursue
a critical and ethical project, and Badiou uses the discontinuity of being and
the event to pursue revolutionary politics. Without fail all of these thinkers, in
spite of their protests the contrary, unavoidably fall into some form of religious
transcendence, which they can only explain by recourse to analogy.
The rhizome
The affirmation of the continuity thesis as well as its necessary correlates,

hylozoism and univocity requires first a rethinking of philosophy. This rethinking
of philosophy begins with the very nature of thought itself. Deleuze and Guattari
begin A Thousand Plateaus with this very task. Thought, they claim, is a rhizome.
Notice right away that we did not say that thought is like a rhizome. We do not
want to fall immediately back into resemblance and analogy. Part of the difficulty
in explaining Deleuze and Guattari will be to take literally many of the things we
would expect to take analogically. Thought is a rhizome, but what are rhizomes?
Rhizome is a botanical term used to describe an underground stem that sends
out both roots and shoots from nodes along its length. Ginger roots and lilies
are examples of rhizomes, as well as some colonies of Aspen trees in the Western
United States. A rhizome has no top or bottom, no beginning or end. It is always
in the middle. Any part of a rhizome can become a new rhizome, sending out
its roots and shoots. For Deleuze and Guattari, thought, too, is always in the
middle, sending its roots and shoots in every direction. There is no Ur-thought
from which all other thoughts must spring. Any thought can connect to any
other thought. Any thought can be the beginning of a new series of thoughts,
and thought in the new series can itself generate a new series.
In an effort to further clarify what a rhizome is, Deleuze and Guattari identify
six “approximate characteristics” of the rhizome. The first characteristic is the
principle of connection. A rhizome ceaselessly makes connections. However, and
this is the second characteristic, these connections are never homogeneous but
always heterogeneous. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate both of these principles
with language. Language is never a pure semiotic chain. It connects with and
incorporates a whole host of nonlinguistic connections. Language is a semiotic

chain, but it is political, geographical, economic, religious, historical. “Language
stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by
subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads
like a patch of oil.”6 Nothing is pure. Everything is a temporary connection of
heterogeneous elements that can combine with other heterogeneous elements.
The task of philosophy is to see things in their rhizomatic impurity.
The third principle of a rhizome is multiplicity. With this principle Deleuze
and Guattari are trying to extract themselves from the stultifying logic of the one
and the many. The one and the many is simply the repetition of the discontinuity
thesis, which as we have seen generates the entailment relations of equivocity and
analogy. In the Platonic version the many is subordinated to the transcendent
unity of the forms. In the Kantian version the sensible manifold is subordinated
to the transcendental unity of apperception. For Deleuze and Guattari there is
no transcendent or transcendental unity that governs. The one and the many are
simply the abstract poles of a continuum. What populates that continuum are
multiplicities, which is another name for the knots of heterogeneous connections
described in the first principle. Thus, language is a multiplicity.
The fourth principle concerns the peculiar way that rhizomes are organized.
The rhizome certainly organizes itself, some parts of the underground stem
become shoots and some become roots. Deleuze and Guattari have numerous
names for this process: segmentarity, stratification, and most importantly for our
purposes, territorialization. The remarkable thing about a rhizome is that if it is
broken at some point, shoot or root, then that segment itself can generate a new
rhizome. According to strict botanical classification a potato is not a rhizome,
but we can see this same principle at work. In our garden at home we often
get volunteer potatoes from composted slices of potato. A potato is removed
from the ground (deterritorialized) in Idaho, cut up for dinner in Virginia
(reterritorialized), and some of the scraps end up in the garden as compost.
These scraps grow new potatoes. A rhizome territorializes the garden. Deleuze
and Guattari call this characteristic of a rhizome the principle of asignifying
rupture, and it speaks directly to the continuity thesis. There are ruptures;
there are breaks. These breaks are the places where something new forms. The
ruptures, however, only produce a difference in degree, and never rise to the level
of difference in kind.
The last two principles concern the difference between mapping and tracing,
between cartography and decalcomania. Decalcomania is the process of
transferring ready-made pictures onto another surface, such as pottery or glass.
It is where we get the word “decal” from. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the
rhizome is cartographic not decalcomanic. The problem with tracing is that it
obscures the knotty complexity of the rhizome and recasts everything in terms
of ready-made pictures. For Deleuze and Guattari, psychoanalysis only makes
tracings. Freud was very close to acknowledging the rhizomatic nature of the
unconscious, but instead of mapping it out, he opts to paper it over by placing a
giant decal of Oedipus over every unconscious. There is no attempt to understand
the types of connections being made, only a concern to find which part of the
complex is mother and which is father. Once these points are established, the
dots are connected and the picture is Oedipus every time. A map, in contrast to
tracing,
is entirely oriented toward experimentation in contact with the real. The map does
not reproduce an unconscious closed in open itself; it constructs the unconscious.
It fosters connections between fields. . . . It is itself a part of the rhizome. The
map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible,
susceptible to constant modification. . . . A map has multiple entryways, as
opposed to the tracing, which always comes back “to the same.”7
Maps are always in the process of being drawn and redrawn. There are no
predestined endpoints. No one can predict where the rhizome will branch next,
no ready-made shapes that the rhizome must conform to. There are only constant,
heterogeneous connections being made and broken. Our task in this book is
a new cartography of philosophy, theology, and religion, but a cartography in
the strict sense outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. We want to avoid tracing
the relation between philosophy and religion. We will not be describing what
philosophy and religion must be according to predetermined representations.
Rather we will be trying to understand what kind of assemblage, rhizome, or
multiplicity each forms. Will be looking for points of connection and divergence,
not so that we can reterritorialize each of them with a new tracing, but so that we
may experiment, ask what is possible.
In order to draw a strong contrast with the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari
claim that for the most part philosophy has not thought that thought, or anything
else for that matter, is a rhizome. For the most part philosophy is much more
interested in trees. Trees have the great virtue of clarity. The roots are clearly
distinguished from the trunk, and the trunk is clearly distinguished from the
branches. Furthermore, the importance of any given part of the tree is clearly
marked by its size and position in the tree. Insignificant branches are small in
size and kept on the periphery. More important branches are larger, closer to the
center, and some connect directly with the trunk. Trees are so logical and orderly;
surely thought is a tree, too. Logic loves trees. Biology organizes all of life on a
tree. The history of thought has been (with rare exceptions) the history of making
us trees. We organize not only out thoughts but our societies arborescently. Trees
help us organize our lives clearly, hierarchically. The difficulty with hierarchies,
though, is that they reintroduce discontinuity, and along with it analogy and
hylomorphism. Discontinuity, analogy, and hylomorphism all belong to
arborescent thought. Trees are another version of tracing, of decalcomania. We
do not know what to do with ideas or things that do not fit onto an arborescent
hierarchy. We either force them into the mold or ignore them altogether as
nonsense.
The contrast between rhizome and tree, on the one hand, and map and
tracing, on the other hand, raises a difficult question for Deleuze and Guattari,
especially in relation to the continuity thesis. Do they affirm continuity, only to
devolve into discontinuity at these crucial points? What exactly is the relation
between tree and rhizome, tracing and map? Do trees actually exist, or are
they misconceived rhizomes? The same questions could be asked concerning
maps and tracings. Are tracings merely illusory? If tracings are real, should we
be trying to turn them into rhizomes? If trees and tracings are illusory, then it
appears that Deleuze and Guattari will have to account for their apparent reality.
However, if trees and tracings are real, then it appears that they are caught up in
precisely the kind of discontinuity that they’re trying to avoid.
The solution to this dilemma lies in the continuity thesis itself. Map and
tracing, rhizome and tree are endpoints on a continuum. Any given object will
display a tendency or direction toward one of these endpoints, but the object itself
will be a mixture. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is much more concerned
with these tendencies than the object produced by these tendencies. This is
the concern behind such terms as multiplicity, which we discussed above, and
assemblage, which we’ll discuss below. Any given object is a particular selection
of tendencies. Some of these tendencies are heading toward more discrete and
territorialized states (trees and tracings). Some of these tendencies are heading
toward less discrete and more deterritorialized states (rhizomes and maps).
There is no bright point that differentiates these tendencies into kinds. There is
only a difference in degree.
It is also important to note that while Deleuze and Guattari are certainly very
interested in explaining the rhizome in opposition to the tree, one must not
automatically assume that the rhizome possesses greater value in relation to the
tree. To privilege the rhizome would be simply to install a new hierarchy in place
of the old one, which would then create a new discontinuity, equivocity, and
hylomorphism. “[T]here is no dualism, no ontological dualism between here
and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad. . . . There are knots of
arborescence in rhizomes and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. . . . The important
point is that the . . . tree and the . . . rhizome are not two opposed models. . . . We
employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges
all models.”8 This caveat will apply to all of the dualism that Deleuze and Guattari
employ throughout their work, some of which we’ll examine as they become
relevant to our project here. They call dualisms “an entirely necessary enemy,” an
enemy they must confront in order to overcome but which keeps arising in ever
new forms, a Hydra. Dualisms are strategic, never ontological.
Plans and planes
Deleuze and Guattari never cease generating dualisms, not because they think
the world is fundamentally bifurcated, but as a strategy to get beyond dualisms.
We have argued that the way to think about these dualisms is as the abstract
poles of a single continuum. What lies between these poles, Deleuze and Guattari
call assemblages or multiplicities. These assemblages have tendencies toward one
pole or the other and in many cases toward both poles at the same time. In order
to further highlight what is at stake here let’s look at another crucial dualism
that orients Deleuze and Guattari’s thought: consistency and organization, or
immanence and transcendence. Understanding this distinction is made more
difficult by the fact that the word usually attached to the two terms (le plan) can be
translated as either “plan,” as in blueprint, or geometrically as “plane,” a surface or
two-dimensional object. In English translations the word is most often translated
as “plane,” which can obscure the cartographic dimensions of the word. In What
is Philosophy?, though, Deleuze and Guattari helpfully speak of the plane/plan as
a “survey of the entire field,”9 which helpfully captures both aspects of le plan. For
the most part we will stick with the conventional translation of “plane,” but both
meanings should always be borne in mind. Deleuze and Guattari, thus, introduce
us to the plane of organization and the plane of consistency, and tell us that these
are “two ways of conceptualizing the plane.”10
As abstract tendencies, it’s not surprising that the differences between the
planes of organization and consistency run parallel to the differences between
trees and rhizomes. The plane of organization is “a hidden principle, which makes
visible what is seen and audible what is heard, etc., which at every instant causes
the given to be given. . . . But the plane [of organization] itself is not given.”11 As
a tendency of thought, the plane of organization places everything in relation
to a “supplementary dimension.” Here we see very clearly that the plane of
organization depends of discontinuity as its very foundation. “This makes it a
teleological plan(e) . . ., a plan(e) of transcendence. It is a plan(e) of analogy. . . .
Even if it is said to be immanent, it is so only by absence, analogically. . . .”12
Aside from understanding this particular tendency of thought toward a plane
of organization, Deleuze and Guattari want to clarify the important implications
of this tendency, forms and subjects. A thought that surveys the entire field as
organized by a plan that lies beyond the field will tend to populate that field with
forms and subjects. The reason for this lies in the hylomorphism endemic to
discontinuity. Once a discontinuity is established the primary task of philosophy
is to account for how the two sides communicate with one another. This has
been traditionally accomplished with some version of hylomorphism in which
the transcendent or transcendental principle shapes the unruly content of the
other side into something intelligible. The result of this formation is the creation
of discrete objects that are knowable or discrete subjects that are both knowing
and knowable.
In contrast to the plane of organization, the plane of consistency is not a priori
to its field of survey. The plane of consistency is produced hylozoically by the
becomings of its field. The plane of consistency is not a supplementary dimension,
but immanent to the becomings of its field. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari
sometimes refer to the plane of consistency as the plane of immanence. The
plane of immanence is, of course, contrasted with the plane of transcendence,
which is another name for the plane of organization. Furthermore there are at
least a dozen other distinctions that map onto these coordinates. We will try to
keep the proliferation of distinctions to a minimum for the sake of clarity, but
the immanence/transcendence distinction will be essential for our discussion of
the relation between philosophy and religion below.
While the plane of organization is populated by forms and subjects, that is,
things that are organ-ized, the plane of consistency is populated by assemblages.
At this point we could produce another long list of equivalent expressions in
Deleuze and Guattari. We’ve already seen that rhizome and assemblage are
synonymous, and we could additionally add the term borrowed from Duns
Scotus haecceity. We will try to keep these to a minimum as well. We are at this
point, though, in a better position to understand what Deleuze and Guattari
mean by assemblage. On the plane of consistency, there “are only relations of
movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least
between elements that are relatively unformed. . . . There are only haecceities,
affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages.”13 In
order to explain what is at stake here, let’s take another brief detour through
Spinoza, the thinker of the plane of consistency, par excellence.
Bodies and assemblages
Deleuze and Guattari would take everything that Spinoza says about bodies and
apply it to assemblages. For Spinoza a body is an infinity of parts (or modes)
with a fixed relation of motion and rest among its various parts, and this
relation of motion and rest allows one body to be distinguished from another.
“Bodies are distinguished from one another in respect of motion and rest,
quickness and slowness, and not in respect of substance.”14 Thus, for Spinoza
(and mutatis mutandis for Deleuze and Guattari) identifying a body is not a
matter of identifying its substance and then asking what sort of attributes might
inhere in such a substance. This is the case for Spinoza because all bodies are
composed of modifications of an infinite substance. A body is identified by the
unique relation of its parts to one another. The identity of a body is the result of a
unique intersection of modes that relate to one another in a peculiar and limited
way. If this relation among the parts is changed, the specificity of the body is
lost. The most obvious example of this kind of change can be seen in the various
metamorphoses of the animal world: tadpole to frog or caterpillar to butterfly.
In these cases, the relation among parts is radically changed, so much so that
we identify each creature as a separate entity. This extensional relation of parts
Deleuze and Guattari call a body’s longitude. The affects that extensional relations
make possible are called a body’s latitude. A body’s individuality is determined
by its longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates. Thus, while we can clearly see that
tadpole and frog are the result of a continuous process, at different points in the
process the tadpole or frog will have radically differing coordinates.
On Spinoza’s account bodies may be combined with other bodies to form
even more complex bodies. As long as the natures of the bodies combined are
not in conflict with one another the affects of the complex body are increased.
Human bodies can be differentiated from other human bodies and other bodies
in general, but this does not lead Spinoza to posit that a human body represents
a different order of existence that is capable of operating according to its own
rules. Human bodies do not compose “a kingdom within a kingdom.” They are
only distinct with respect to their unique relations of motion and rest and not
according to any unique substance that they possess. Thus, for Spinoza one
understands a body in the same way regardless of whether it is the simple body
of a tick or the more complex human body. To understand a body is to know
what affects it is capable of. For a human body this understanding can only be
achieved through experimentation. This same way of understanding also applies
to politics and economics. One can always ask, what affects is this religious
organization of human bodies capable of? Does this economic arrangement
of human bodies increase power or decrease it? Does this political economy
increase the number of affects its members are capable of or decrease them?
These questions are not reducible to the substantial question of traditional
philosophy, “What is it?” Rather, they are all variations of the minor question,
“Which one?” by which Deleuze and Guattari seek to reorient philosophy. Our
task here is to ask these questions not only about philosophy but also about
religion and theology.
Neither for Spinoza nor for Deleuze and Guattari can bodies, whether human
or otherwise, be spoken of in the abstract. All bodies have limits. The limits of
any body are produced by that body. In other words, for a body to have particular
affects its parts must be assembled in a particular way. The affects that a tick
is capable of result from its parts being related to one another in a particular
ratio of motion and rest. This ratio produces a limit beyond which the tick is
not capable of affecting or being affected. Thus, given the tick’s ratio among its
parts it cannot, for example, fly, or spin a web, or inject venom into its host to
liquidate it. Any body or any assemblage will have two opposed tendencies. On
the one hand it will have a tendency toward deterritorialization (lines of flight)
that will seek new arrangements and new combinations. This tendency is the
plane of consistency or immanence. On the other hand, a body or assemblage
will have a tendency to territorialize (stratify) itself by cutting off lines of flight
and preventing new arrangements and new combinations. This tendency is the
plane organization or transcendence. Conceptualizing assemblages in terms of
the territorializing tendency, leads one to suppose that forms and subjects are
foundational. This in turn leads one to suppose that organization into forms and
subjects is governed by a transcendental plan, a plane of organization.
At this point it is very tempting to suppose that Deleuze and Guattari have
reverted to an axiological dualism in which the plane of consistency is to be
privileged over the plane of organization. There are no guarantees, though, that
a plane of consistency will produce beneficial results. “But once again, so much
caution is needed to prevent the plane of consistency from become a pure plane
of abolition or death,” and they continue by asking this very telling question, “Is it
not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, a

minimal subject from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages?”15 The
opposition set up here between organization and consistency, transcendence and
immanence, is the opposition between two poles of a continuum. Understanding
an assemblage means understanding these opposed tendencies, not eliminating
one of them.
The refrain
With some of the background information in place we can return to the issue
of the relations among religion, theology, and philosophy. To put the matter as
schematically as possible for the sake of clarity: both philosophy and religion are
assemblages, but with differing tendencies. Philosophy tends toward the plane
of consistency (or immanence) and thinks in terms of speeds and slownesses,
longitudes and latitudes, while religion tends toward the plane of organization
(or transcendence) and thinks in terms of forms and subjects. Both of these
assemblages are territorial, but not territorial in a legal or geographical sense.
Thus far our discussions of philosophy, religion, and theology under Kant’s
influence have always found themselves wrapped up in geographical and legal
metaphors or their formal, ontological equivalent, transcendental argumentation.
In essence Kant argues that both religion and philosophy occupy distinct
territories and that it is the task of philosophy to police these boundaries lest
philosophy fall into enthusiasm or religion escape the boundaries of reason.
Kant’s point of orientation for surveying these territories, though, is his denial of
the continuity thesis. Our hypothesis is that a new conception of territory and
territorial assemblages would make possible a new relation among philosophy,
theology, and religion. In order to articulate this new conception of territory
we will look at what Deleuze and Guattari call “the refrain” (la ritournelle) in
A Thousand Plateaus. From the refrain we can turn to an account of territory
as rhizomatic and hylozoic and the cartography of such a territory. Once this
conception of territory is in place we can turn to What is Philosophy? in order to
see how philosophy, theology, and religion are all territorial assemblages.
Deleuze and Guattari begin their discussion of the refrain with a suggestive
image, a child singing in the dark. They write,
A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his
breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself
with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming
and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child
skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip:
it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of
breaking apart at any moment.16
Again we return the question of orientation, but four points differentiate this
orientation from the kind of orientation that Kant proposes: (1) The orientation
is affective; (2) Affects combine to form territories; (3) Territories are distinguished
from chaos not other territories; (4) Boundaries between chaos and territory
differ from boundaries between territories. The first difference is that while Kant
proposes an orientation in thinking, the kind of orientation proposed here does
not fit neatly into a space of reasons. The process that leads a scared child to
sing in the dark seems more intuitive and bodily than it does reasonable. At
the same time, however, thought is not thereby excluded either. Perhaps we can
further draw on Spinoza here and suggest that the child is oriented as a whole
and that this orientation can be understood a series of affective interactions. On
this reading, the child is beset by forces set to overwhelm him through fear, and
he resists through song. The child doesn’t so much overcome the fear as keep it at
bay through his singing. Something similar is at work when a scared child pulls
the covers over her head. In each case there is an orientation going on here but it
is neither an orientation in thought nor by thought.
The second difference from Kant that we find here is the very notion of
territory. The territory that the child creates through his song is neither legal
nor geographical. It is affective. In order to make more sense of this notion of
an affective territory, let’s turn again to Spinoza. To begin with affectivity is a
larger category than the emotions. All emotions are affects, but not all affects
are emotions. For Spinoza the universe is constituted as an infinitely complex
series of interactions among the various parts of the universe. These parts
Spinoza labels modes, while the universe he calls substance, nature, or God. The
interactions among modes, the way they affect and are affected by one another,
are what Spinoza names “the affects.” Many of the interactions that involve the
interaction of humans with other parts of the world have taken on distinct
names, which we refer to as the emotions. Thus, when someone stubs his toe,
he describes that interaction as painful. When he lashes out at what he stubs
his toe on, he labels his reaction as anger. These interactions that are named
with emotions, though, are nothing other than some of the ways of affecting and
being affected by the world around me. No doubt, Spinoza’s primary concern
in the Ethics is this subset of affects that have emotional names. Indeed, part 3
is a taxonomy of these possibilities. However, Deleuze is concerned with two
novel extensions of this notion of affect. The first extension is to pursue at greater
length these nonhuman affects, the ones that don’t have a ready emotional
label. Deleuze is thus interested in the way that nonhuman things affect and
are affected by one another. Additionally, though, he recognizes that the kind
of analysis that Spinoza provides is scalable. One can pursue this on the micro-,
meso-, and macrolevels. One can speak about biochemical reactions at a cellular
level as affects. One could speak about the migration of caribou being driven by
black flies and mosquitos in terms of a complex set of affects. Finally, one can
analyze international politics in affective terms. We do not think this extension
of Spinoza is unwarranted, though. He authorizes it in the Preface to part 3,
where he argues that everything is to be understood according to the same set
of laws. There are no “kingdoms within kingdoms” in Spinoza’s universe. There
is only one universe with one set of laws. The task of understanding is the task
of teasing out the ways that these laws combine to create increasingly complex
affects on multiple levels.
Deleuze’s second extension of Spinoza is an account of the way in which affects
combine into more or less stable entities, that is, assemblages. The extension is
also warranted by this same commitment to a single universe with a single set
of laws. Here both Deleuze and Spinoza run up against a long-standing problem
in the history of philosophy, accounting for a universe that seems to have both
stable and mutable elements. While Spinoza’s solution to this problem is subject
to some dispute, on Deleuze’s reading and in Deleuze’s own thought, he argues
for a hylozoic solution to this problem, that is, that matter is self-organizing.
Deleuze’s hylozoism is correlated with his commitment to a single universe with
a single set of laws. With no extra-mundane or intelligible realm to guarantee
stability within the world, Deleuze must give an account of the way in which
stability is generated out of mutability. Hylozoism is opposed to hylomorphism
in all of its forms, whether they be Platonic, Aristotelian, or Kantian. What
Deleuze’s hylozoism allows him to do is think of stable objects as the result of
underlying processes. Stabilities are then temporary coagulations of ongoing
and intersecting processes. This is the case not only for geological and biological
processes, such as mountains or humans, but it is also the case for cultural
products, such as technology and political systems. In Deleuze’s work with
Guattari the process by which momentary stabilities arise is “territorialization.”
The result of territorialization is a territory. Territorialization recognizes that
affective interactions organize themselves. A flowing river does not distribute
sediment equally but in fact sorts it according to size. The result is striated
sedimentation that territorializes the material found in the river bed and in
suspension in the flowing water.
The child in the example above also creates a territory by singing. This
territory seems, of course, very different from the kind of territory created by
flowing water. One of the tasks of this chapter is to explore the precise nature
of this difference. Is this merely an analogy by which we group disparate things
together in a novel way? No, our claim is that, as in Spinoza, there is only a
single universe and single set of laws that combine to create infinite diversity.
Sandstone and a scared child’s song are both territories resulting from a process
of territorialization. Our task will be to think the relation between philosophy,
theology, and religion in terms of this new conception of territory.
The third difference that we see between Kant’s notion of orientation and the
one proposed by Deleuze is that while Kant is very keen to properly draw the
boundaries between territories, for Deleuze the boundary is between the territory
and chaos. As we saw in the first chapter Kant comes close to distinguishing
between territory and chaos when he speaks of the island of the sensible and the
stormy sea of the supersensible in the first Critique, but even here one can orient
oneself in the supersensible, just not by the categories of the understanding.
The question of orientation and proper boundaries is so important to Kant
precisely because a different territory requires a different kind of orientation. For
Deleuze the issue is quite different. “We require just a little order to protect us
from chaos.”17 Territories are forged out of chaos in an attempt to guard against
it. “The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible, and the interior
space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do.”18 The child
feels overwhelmed by the dark, beset by noises that become sinister because
their source cannot be identified, terrified by shapes the loom uncannily all
around. What can he do? What possible power does he have in response to the
chaos? He can sing, slowly, tremulously at first, but it is enough. The darkness
that threatened to engulf him and paralyze him with fear is now territorialized
through song. The song creates a territory, but a small territory, only the size of
the song. But, it is enough. Enough to keep the chaos at bay, so long as he sings.
He can no longer hear the strange noises. They are swallowed up in his song. The
uncanny shapes do not react to his song but remain motionless and mute. His
song goes wherever he goes, and his song, however, tenuously defines the space
between territory and chaos. It orients him.
The final difference between Kant’s notion of orientation and the one we’re
pursuing here is that boundary itself must be conceived of differently. For Kant
boundary is conceived in legal and geographic terms and for Heidegger and
Derrida in ontological terms. The result of this conception in Kant’s case is a rigid
division that may only be crossed at the risk of becoming dis-oriented. As we saw
the issue in Heidegger and Derrida is more complicated as each is trying to think
the boundary as in some sense prior to and productive of the difference between
territories. Furthermore, and this is most explicit in Derrida, the difference
between territories is both made possible and impossible by the boundary. For
Heidegger and Derrida, then, the boundary itself has a different ontological status
from what it differentiates. Or, more precisely, ontology as such is made possible
by this process of differing and deferring. Thus, on Heidegger and Derrida’s
view the boundary makes orientation both possible and impossible. One is both
oriented and dis-oriented by the boundary. Given these differences, what remains
constant in Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida is a transcendental methodology that
not only separates conditions and conditioned but argues for their discontinuity.
In contrast to this, Deleuze’s hylozoism suggests the continuity of conditions
and conditioned and as a result conceives of boundary differently. We get an
inkling of this difference when we return to the child’s song. Deleuze writes, “[the
song] jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger
of breaking apart at any moment.”19 Any territory is an ordering of chaos, but
the distinction between order and chaos is not a transcendental distinction. As
we saw above, territory is nothing but the temporary organization of affects that
for a time is able to resist the forces of chaos. This is not to say that the territory
is ontologically distinct from chaos. The difference is one of degree rather than
kind. Territory is formed out of chaos but remains in chaos. It is stable but only
temporarily so. The boundary between territory and chaos is both fragile and
continually evolving. There is nothing like the discontinuity thesis to guarantee
the boundary’s existence either legally or ontologically.
The child’s song continues as long as he needs it to. When he arrives at his
warm, well-lit home, when he crosses the threshold into another territory, he
no longer needs the song to keep the chaos at bay. His home is a much more
stable territory than his song; however, it would be a mistake to assume that this
stability arises solely from the fact wood and brick are more durable than sound.
A cave is more durable than a house, but we do not thereby assume that the cave
makes a better home. Home is where we take the “fragile center” created by the
song and attempt to reinforce it and organize a space around it. This process
involves selection and exclusion, an attempt to determine which affects will be
allowed to circulate and which must be kept outside. The circulation of affects
is facilitated by internal differentiation. There are rooms for eating and sleeping.
Televisions and radios allow sound to circulate, but they also prevent some
sounds from penetrating. With media of all types there is a further process of
selection. Some sounds will be allowed; others will be excluded. Caller ID filters
the types of phone conversations one will have. The entire array of selections
and exclusions serve to organize chaos by allowing some affects to circulate and
excluding others. Deleuze and Guattari also name this process by which the
fragile center is shored up “stratification.”
At the same time, of course, the boundary between territory and chaos is
not hermetically sealed. We do not come home in order to stay forever. We are
continually forming new territories in order to open them onto new vistas.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the process of forming a territory as drawing
a circle around and organizing a small piece of chaos. He also describes a
counter-process of opening the circle back up again:
Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls
someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens the circle not on
the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region,
one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended on its own to open
onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters . . . One launches
forth, hazards an improvisation . . . One ventures from home on the thread of a
tune.20
This entire process of territory formation and its concomitant assemblages,

forming a center, drawing a circle, and opening the circle, Deleuze and Guattari
call “the refrain” (la ritournelle).
Religion is a refrain. In order to make sense of this claim we need to look
at the four ways that Deleuze and Guattari classify refrains (1) Some refrains
establish territories, as we saw above in the example of the child’s song (2) Other
refrains work within a territory to further subdivide it. The example that Deleuze
and Guattari have in mind here is a busy market in which various merchants
hawk their wares. As the voices of the merchants rise above the din of the busy
street, their calls divide the market according to what each is selling (3) Still
other refrains work from within a territory, as above, but also create something
new. Let’s suppose that a composer walks through the market and hears the
various cries of the merchants and writes an opera that contains these cries.
On the one hand, the merchants’ “songs” are still recognizable, but they have
been taken out of their original context (deterritorialized) and placed in a new
context (reterritorialized) that has nothing to do with merchants selling products
(4) Finally, there are refrains that “collect or gather forces, either at the heart of the
territory, or in order to go outside it.”21 Religion falls into the fourth classification
for Deleuze and Guattari.
Why is religion a refrain at all? Even granting that it is a refrain, why is it the
fourth kind of refrain? It is in answering these questions that we begin to take
the full measure of the experiment proposed in this book. Religion is not a set
of doctrines or dogma, although these certainly make up part of its assemblage.
Religion is not a set of truth claims. Religion is a particular way of capturing
affects. Refrains are the process by which affects get captured and stabilized into
territories and assemblages. Religion captures affects such that they are directed
toward some “supplementary dimension,” which takes on a transcendent or
transcendental relation to what is stabilized. In short, religion is a refrain that
opens up its territory in the direction of the plane of organization. The single
survey that religion provides does not arise from the territory itself but from that
which conditions the territory. It is here that we see the origins of discontinuity,
analogy, and hylomorphism.
In contrast to this, philosophy is also the fourth kind of refrain, a refrain that
opens up, but a refrain that opens in the direction of the plane of consistency or
immanence. The great danger that continually haunts philosophy, though, is taking
the plane of immanence and making it immanent to something else, substance,
being, or God, for example. Making immanence immanent to something other
than itself transforms immanence into transcendence. At precisely this moment,
philosophy ceases to be philosophy and becomes religion. “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. . . .”22 The
primary exception here is Spinoza.
Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only
immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements
of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince of
philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised
with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere. . . . He discovered
that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy because he
satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition.23
Spinoza thus becomes the hero (and savior) in Deleuze’s history of philosophy,
the only one who understands the true nature of philosophy, which he pursues
relentlessly. If Deleuze’s account is accurate, though, it would seem that philosophy
has rarely been philosophy. The history of philosophy has rather been dominated
by the continual attempt to subdue immanence, make it immanent to something,
ensure that all assemblages tend toward the plane of organization. Within this
context Kant errs by capturing the tendency of his philosophy toward the plane
of consistency and subordinating it to the transcendental unity of apperception.
On Deleuze’s terms then, Kant does not successfully differentiate philosophy and
religion because despite all protestations to the contrary he provides a religious
account of the relation between philosophy and religion. Kant’s entire project
of orientation depends on privileging only the tendency toward the plane of
organization. This is the final outcome of his denial of the continuity thesis. By
the same token, insofar as they deny the continuity thesis, Derrida, Heidegger,
and even Badiou remain religious thinkers.
We also think theology is a refrain. Furthermore it is a refrain that is
distinguishable from both religion and philosophy. Theology is a paradoxical
refrain that opens toward both immanence and transcendence. It does not
try to conceal its tendency toward transcendence the way that contemporary
thinkers do. At the same time it freely admits that it can no longer maintain
the discontinuity between transcendence and immanence that has characterized
much of the history of theology. As we will see in Part 2, theology assembles
itself beginning with a concept of God that is hidden, incarnate, and revealed.
Concepts and figures
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari take up some of the themes from A
Thousand Plateaus in order to clearly define the nature of philosophy, explicitly
in relation to science and art, but also, of necessity, in relation to religion. The
necessity of distinguishing religion is obvious given the fact that religion is the
tendency of an assemblage toward transcendence, or the tendency of a territory
toward organization in terms of forms and subjects. Philosophy is distinguished
by the fact that it produces concepts on a plane of immanence. Art and science
each have different products and different planes. While Deleuze and Guattari
do not accord as much space to religion, they are explicit that religion produces
figures on a plane of transcendence. In order to further clarify, then, the difference
between philosophy and religion we will take up the difference between figures
and concepts and their related planes.
Not surprisingly, given what we have seen so far, Deleuze and Guattari say,
“The concept is not object but territory.”24 This claim allows them to avoid the
pernicious dichotomy by which a knowable objects stands over and against a
knowing subject, another version of discontinuity. No, the concept is a territory, a
rhizome, an assemblage that gathers together diverse and heterogeneous elements.

This understanding of the concept gives Deleuze and Guattari an interesting take
on the history of philosophy. A history of philosophy would be an account of
the new concepts that were produced. For example, Plato produces the concept of
the idea. Descartes produces the concept of cogito. Leibniz’s concept is the monad,
and Kant’s is the condition. In each case, the philosopher combines heterogeneous
elements that resonate with other concepts and are strictly correlated with but
separable from the plane of immanence or consistency. In Plato’s case, “the concept
of Idea has the following components: the quality possessed or to be possessed;
the Idea that possesses it first, as unparticipable; that which lays claim to the
quality and can only possess it second, third, fourth; and the Idea participated in,
which judges the claims.”25 As we saw above the problem that Plato is trying to
solve is the problem of stability. What is stable? Why are things both stable and
unstable? Plato’s solution to this problem (and concepts are solutions to problems,
while the plane of immanence is the set of problems presupposed by philosophy)
is the idea. The idea is that which is identical to itself. “Only Justice is just, only
Courage courageous.”26 Things differ from ideas in that they are not identical to
themselves. A thing may be both beautiful and not beautiful. A person may be
just at times and unjust at other times. Any stability, any goodness that a thing
possesses derives from its participation in the idea. Plato’s concept of the idea
holds together these various components in a “fragmentary whole.”27
Deleuze and Guattari outline four main characteristics of the concept,
which they then contrast with the figure. The concept is (1) syntagmatic,
(2) connective, (3) linking (vicinal) and (4) consistent.28 They take the term
“syntagmatic” from linguistics, which is used to specify the kind of order
produced by syntactical relations. These syntactical relations can be thought
of as functioning according to a series of statistical correlations. For example,
if we imagine the English language as completely crystallized and then
shatter the language into its component words, what we will discover is that
certain correlations occur with great frequency. That is, we will repeatedly
find words grouped together, such as, “tiger” and “fierce,” while we will rarely
find groupings such as “tiger” and “dancing.”29 In a similar vein, currently
the website “amazon.com” uses “statistically unlikely phrases” to help buyers
differentiate among books. The thinking behind this is that “statistically
unlikely phrases” in a book will be precisely the point at which the author is
trying to say something new or provocative. In the same way, the creation of
new concepts is the combination of statistically unlikely components, which
purport to be a solution to a problem or set of problems.
The concept is also characterized by its internal connections or “internal

neighborhood.” As we saw above in the example of Plato’s idea each of the
components fits with the others as a “fragmentary whole” such that “we can
no longer add or withdraw a component without changing the nature of the
concept.”30 Deleuze and Guattari illustrate this idea by comparing Descartes’
cogito with what becomes of it in Kant. For Descartes the “I think” is prior to any
determination, in itself undeterminable. This is precisely where, of course, that
Kant aims his criticism of Descartes. For Kant the “I” is rendered determinable
in time. Thus, the “I think” is apprehendable only according to the form of inner
intuition, time. When Kant introduces temporality into the Cartesian cogito, he
deforms it and reforms it at the same time. It becomes a new concept.
The translators of What is Philosophy? note that the French word “vicinal”
that they translate as “linking” is most often used to describe the side roads
that connect small villages to one another. This characteristic of the concept
describes the external connections among concepts. Creating a concept usually
requires the creation of additional concepts. Just as, solving one problem
usually reveals the existence of other problems to be solved. The solutions to
these problems are linked together in what Deleuze and Guattari call a concept’s
“external neighborhood.” The internal and external neighborhoods of a concept
answer the twin questions that philosophy must answer anytime it creates a
concept: What goes in a concept? and What goes with a concept? As we saw in
Kant, time must go in the cogito and a whole host of other concepts must go with
it: the condition, the sensible manifold, space, etc.
The internal connection of the components of a single concept and the
external linkages to other concepts together form what Deleuze and Guattari
call the consistency of the concept. The consistency of the concept can be
illustrated by compossibility in Leibniz (itself another concept). For Leibniz
when God is imagining all of the possible worlds that might be created, these
worlds will be distinguished from one another by the degree of goodness that
obtains in each one. Within each possible world every monad has its own internal
neighborhood, perception and appetition, and its own external neighborhood,
its perspectival reflection of all other monads. These two factors are necessarily
interrelated and Leibniz calls this interrelation “compossibility.” Compossibility
requires some connections and some linkings, while at the same time, it rules
out other connections and other linkings. For example, the world that obtains
is not compossible with human lungs that can extract oxygen from water. For
Deleuze and Guattari, concepts have a consistency among their components and
among their linkages that rule out other components and other linkages.
In contrast to concepts, figures are (1) paradigmatic, (2) projective, (3)

hierarchical, and (4) referential. It is important to note that for Deleuze and
Guattari figures are not unique to Christianity but religion in general. As
examples of figures they give “Chinese hexagrams, Hindu mandalas, Jewish
sephiroth, Islamic ‘imaginals,’ and Christian icons.”31 Our interest in this book,
of course, is the way in which figures get taken up in Christian theology. We
will take up this aspect in Part 2. For now, however, we will focus simply on the
relation between philosophy and religion in general. As we’ve seen the relation
between philosophy and religion is to be thought as the relation between two
tendencies on a continuum. The relation between figures and concepts is no
different. Figures and concepts are actualizations of these two tendencies,
toward immanence or transcendence. “Must we conclude from this that there
is a radical opposition between figures and concepts?” No, there are numerous
correspondences between figures and concepts. Both are multiplicities that
gather together heterogeneous elements. “But correspondences like these do not
rule out there being a boundary, however difficult it is to make out.”32 Of course,
“boundary” here must be thought in the precise sense outlined above.
In the first instance, while concepts are syntagmatic, figures are paradigmatic.
Again, Deleuze and Guattari are borrowing terms from linguistics in order to
make their point. While syntagmatic arrangements are statistical and serial in
nature, paradigmatic arrangements are formal models that are thought to create
the a priori conditions that make syntagmatic arrangements possible. The alphabet
is thus the paradigm that makes words possible. Grammar is the paradigm that
allows some syntactical connections and disallows others. In anthropology,
kinship is the paradigm that makes some syntagmatic (familial) relations possible
and others impossible. For Deleuze and Guattari, religion is dominated by its
tendency toward transcendence and as a result creates paradigmatic figures that
express the a priori, form-giving nature of the transcendent.
Whereas concepts are connective, figures are projective. For Deleuze and
Guattari, concepts are flat surfaces and possess only neighborhoods. The interior
connections of a concept are always lateral, never vertical. A figure always has a
vertical connection. It is a projection upward and onto a plane of transcendence.
In God without Being, Jean-Luc Marion argues that the distinction between idol
and icon is absolutely essential to giving an account of God that is not bound
up with traditional Greek metaphysics. Marion writes, “Whereas the idol results
from the gaze that aims at it, the icon summons sight in letting the visible . . . be
saturated little by little with the invisible.”33 For Marion, then, the idol forecloses
on transcendence while the icon saturates vision with what lies beyond it.
What lies beyond vision for Marion also radically supersedes it. In addition
to being projective, the figure, in this case the icon, is also hierarchical. Marion
continues, “the icon is defined by an origin without original: an origin in itself
infinite, which pours itself out or gives itself throughout the infinite depth of
the icon.”34 Whereas the concept was linked externally to other concepts on a
flat plane of immanence, the figure necessarily links to something inherently
superior. In Marion’s case the icon connects us to the infinite origin, that in the
face of which all of our concepts fail. “Contemplating the icon amounts to seeing
the visible in the very manner by which the invisible that imparts itself therein
envisages the visible.”35 The purpose of the icon is to shift our perspective from
the immanent to the transcendent.
The final characteristic of figures is that they are referential. The referential
nature of figures is opposed to the consistency of concepts. It is also the case that,
just as the consistency of concepts followed from their (internal) connectivity
and (external) linkages, the referential nature of figures follows from their
projective and hierarchical nature. The figure installs transcendence on the plane
of immanence by ensuring that every component on the plane of immanence
refers to transcendence either directly or indirectly. This is the point at which
analogy again enters the picture. From the perspective of analogy, the assumption
is always that the transcendent and immanent are incommensurable but at the
same time related. The nature of this relation is analogy, where everything is both
like and unlike the transcendent in some respect. We saw this in Kant’s account
of the relation between beauty and the moral law. It is even in Badiou’s account
of the event. Marion writes, “Concerning God, let us admit clearly that we can
think him only under the figure of the unthinkable, but of an unthinkable that
exceeds as much what we cannot think as what we can; for that which I may not
think is still the concern of my thought, and hence to me remains thinkable.”36
Here Marion takes up this referential relation in terms of the “unthinkable” that
at the same time remains thinkable as my unthinkable.
Because concepts and figures are not radically opposed but expressions of
tendencies toward immanence or transcendence, philosophy is not immune
from creating figures. By the same token, religion is not barred from creating
concepts. For Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy has created three figures by which
immanence was made immanent to something. “The three figures of philosophy
are objectality of contemplation, subject of reflection, and intersubjectivity of
communication.”37 These three figures not only correspond in broad strokes to
the history of philosophy, but they also indicate the points at which philosophy
has betrayed itself. The Greeks betray philosophy by setting up the Platonic idea,
which lies beyond experience but organizes it, and is the object of contemplation.
The moderns replace the Platonic idea with the Cartesian subject as the ground of
experience, which requires that philosophical method be one of reflection rather
than contemplation. Contemporary philosophy, beginning with phenomenology,
sees the ground as the ineluctable relation between subjects, which then requires
communication as its method. In each case, however, philosophy betrays its task
of creating concepts in order to ground these concepts in a figure that points
beyond immanence toward transcendence.
Religion can also create concepts, but just as philosophy only creates figures
by betraying itself, religion can only create concepts by betraying itself. Deleuze
and Guattari discuss both Pascal and Kierkegaard as religious thinkers who
nevertheless created concepts such as “belief, anguish, sin” and “freedom.”38 The
price of creating concepts, though, is transformation of belief into “belief in
this world.” Simply put, the creation of concepts requires the expression of the
tendency toward immanence rather than the tendency toward transcendence.
It is not possible to arrest the tendency toward immanence by making
immanence immanent to a transcendent figure. This is the threat of betrayal
that lurks within every philosophy. By the same token, pursuing the tendency of
immanence, even through religious figures, uncovers the atheism that lurks in
every religion. “Perhaps Christianity does not produce concepts except through
atheism, through the atheism that it, more than any other religion, secretes.”39
Both of these possibilities, religion producing concepts and philosophy
producing figures, are conceivable not because Deleuze and Guattari are caught
up in a dialectic where every position produces its opposite, but because any
assemblage, any body is always, already a selection of forces that contain these
opposing tendencies. Immanence and transcendence, philosophy and religion
are the two abstract poles of a continuum, not the discontinuous, analogical,
hylomorphic relation of form and content. Theology is the simultaneous
tendency toward both poles.
Chaos and umbrellas
In his “Introduction” to Harry Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun, D. H. Lawrence is

giving an account of the role of poetry in life. While plants and animals can bear
and even thrive in chaos, we cannot. In order to protect ourselves from chaos we
put up an umbrella:
But man cannot live in chaos. The animals can. To the animal, all is chaos, only
there are a few recurring motions and aspects within the surge. And the animal
is content. But man is not. Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of
apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting
up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting chaos. Then he paints the
underside of his umbrella like a firmament. Then he parades around, lives, and
dies under his umbrella. Bequeathed to his descendants, the umbrella becomes a
dome, a vault, and men at last begin to feel that something is wrong.40
As we saw above in our discussion of the refrain, it doesn’t take much to protect
us from chaos. Sometimes all it takes is a song. However, the song can become
a ritual, a talisman against the chaos. At this point the protection from chaos
becomes permanent, calcified, and we begin to paint the underside of the
umbrella, and that becomes our sky. For Deleuze and Guattari, what we paint
on the underside of the umbrella are figures. Not only does the umbrella protect
us from chaos, but we become fixated on the figures on our umbrella. Lawrence
continues,
Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the wild
chaos, and gradually goes bleached and stifled under his parasol. Then comes a
poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse
of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun. But after a while, getting used to the
vision, and not liking the genuine draught from chaos, commonplace man daubs
a simulacrum of the window that opens onto chaos, and patches the umbrella
with the painted patch of the simulacrum. That is, he has got used to the vision,
it is part of his house-decoration. So that the umbrella at last looks like a glowing
open firmament, of many aspects. But alas, it is all simulacrum, in innumerable
patches. Homer and Keats, annotated and with glossary.41
Deleuze and Guattari, following Lawrence, see the role of art as well as the role
of philosophy and science as cutting slits in the umbrella in order to let a little
chaos in. Importantly, it is not the case that philosophy, art, or science simply
removes the umbrella. We cannot exist in pure chaos. Rather, we make small
slits in our protective barrier in order to let a small bit of chaos in. In particular,
philosophy casts a plane of immanence or consistency over chaos.
Deleuze and Guattari’s use of “plane” here should not be surprising. This
is precisely what we should expect given our argument up to this point. Any
assemblage, any territory combines a tendency toward a plane of immanence
and a tendency toward a plane of transcendence. In this case, the discussion of
the plane of immanence remains the same, but the plane of transcendence gets
a new name “opinion.” Opinions claim to protect us from chaos. Opinions take
the form of settled knowledge guaranteed by some transcendent, organizing
principle. Here Deleuze and Guattari give the example of the artist. The artist
does not struggle against the white canvas or blank page, which must then be
filled. No, the problem for the artist is that the canvas is already covered, the page
already filled, covered and filled with clichés about what art is. “The painter does
not paint on an empty canvas, and neither does the writer write on a blank page;
but the page or canvas is already so covered with preexisting, preestablished
clichés that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as
to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision.”42 The canvas
appears black to the artist, so she begins by scraping it clean in order to let a little
chaos in.
Like art, philosophy finds itself suspended between two dangers, chaos on
the one hand and opinion on the other. Philosophy must select from chaos in
order to be able to create something new, but it must be a selection. Otherwise,
philosophy itself devolves into chaos. At the same time, philosophy must avoid
succumbing to the temptation of subordinating what it selects from the chaos
to opinion, or the three great figures of philosophy of objectality, the subject,
or intersubjectivity. To do so would be to make a tracing, not a map, and to
confuse philosophy with its history. No new concepts are created in a tracing.
Old ones are faithfully reproduced as the slits in the umbrella get patched over
with figures of the familiar.
Religion, in contrast to philosophy, takes up the need to be protected from
chaos and responds to it by creating something stable, something immune to
chaos. Without question, this response to chaos has been the dominant one in
human history. Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattari are not claiming that this is
a bad or inadequate response to chaos. There are no moral categories attached
to the two tendencies, transcendence and immanence. Deleuze and Guattari are
not arguing that immanence is good and transcendence is bad. Furthermore,
immanence and transcendence are not related to one another analogically or
hylomorphically. They are the two abstract poles of a univocal continuum.
This position has several implications for the relation between philosophy
and religion. First, they are distinguishable, but the distinction is one of
orientation, not of essence. Second, because the distinction is one of orientation
on a continuum, it is not possible to subordinate religion to philosophy as Kant
does, nor is it possible to relate them as form and content as Hegel does. In
fact, the entire edifice of post-Kantian thought falls with the re-positing of the
continuity thesis. This removes the reflexive dependence on transcendental
thinking that dominates post-Kantian thought. Third, the conflict between

philosophy and religion is real, but not in the traditional, geographical sense that
each is fighting over the same ground. Rather, the conflict is real because any
assemblage, any territory (in the strict sense outlined above) has two opposed
tendencies, immanence and transcendence. As we have seen, it is possible
for an assemblage to betray one of these tendencies and pursue one to the
exclusion of the other. The dominant tendency is, in fact, to betray immanence
for transcendence. Philosophy, too, has its figures. Fourth, even if the conflict
is real, it is not possible for one side to vanquish the other, any more than it is
possible for one directional tendency to eliminate another. If one vows to walk
east, she does not thereby make westward travel impossible. East and West are
two abstract poles of directionality.
Beyond the explicit account of the relation between philosophy and religion
that we find in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, our contention is that
theology is a distinct assemblage, an assemblage that seeks to hold the opposed
tendencies of immanence and transcendence in paradoxical tension. As we will
see in Part 2, this is not a Hegelian sublation of two contradictory standpoints.
Immanence and transcendence do not rise to the level of contradiction. Rather,
every assemblage must be thought of as a certain ratio of both immanent and
transcendent tendencies, tendencies that are multiple and diverse. Our contention
is that theology has a different ratio of these tendencies. Additionally, while both
philosophy and religion tend toward the elimination of either transcendence
or immanence, theology by its nature seeks to hold both together in creative
tension.
If Deleuze and Guattari seem to privilege one tendency over another, it is not
because of some latent romanticism by which they hope to invert traditional
hierarchies, but because for the most part the tendency toward immanence has
been little recognized and usually subordinated to some transcendence. It is only
in this sense that philosophy, theology, and religion are in conflict. Furthermore,
far from arguing that salvation lies in immanence, they continually caution that
immanence has its own dangers, too. Any escape from transcendence can easily
turn into death and dissolution. At the same time, the possibility of creating
something new lies in the direction of immanence. It is only by experimenting
with chaos that we can hope to create something new. There are no guarantees
that the new will be beneficial, and it is only by experimenting that we can
discover whether this is the case. This is the risk of philosophy, and it is a risk that
can only be ameliorated by betraying philosophy itself.
Interlude
How to Orient Oneself in Thinking . . .

To What Comes Next
We have seen in Part 1 of this book that when intuitions and concepts are
understood in continuity with one another, they form abstract poles on the
continuum of experience. Experience in turn is always an ordering of chaos,
where the distinctions between chaos and order, intuition and concept, manifold
and scheme are not transcendental, such that some a priori plan constituting
the subject of experience and the ordering of experience is foundational and
as such timelessly and universally applicable. As a result of this critique of
critique that comes through rethinking philosophy with Deleuze, the distinction
between subject and object is something more like one between a gardener
and the wilderness, that is, the object is the cultivated life of the garden that
emerges when the riot of life is territorialized in the interest of some human
well-being. Seen metaphysically, the subject with the garden it makes is but
a temporary organization alongside many other formations of the infinity of
natural interactions at any moment, fragile and constantly evolving. Without
active engagement in and as a gardener, the garden soon goes to weeds and the
boundary between it and the wilderness (or other gardens) disappears.
In the Deleuzian cartography, religion and philosophy appear as refrains
within this active human engagement of natural life, one to gather forces for
conservation of the existing order and the other to press beyond existing
boundaries and open up new experience hitherto overlooked or even suppressed
by the existing manners of cultivation. The tendency of religion is to capture
interactions and organize them into enduring stabilities by anchoring them in a
dimension transcendent to experience. To extend the image: one might imagine
the quilt-work sections of gardens laid out surrounding European cities, each
fenced and often graced with a shrine to the patron saint or the Virgin. Thus the
dualizing division of life into sacred and profane dimensions arises out of the
need to bless the garden as one’s own property and to protect its boundaries, both
ontological (against weeds) and legal (against the encroachment of neighbors).
But that is religion. Certainly, philosophy in its history succumbs again and
again to the religious tendency to fix immanence as immanent to something
transcendent, rather than to experiment in the free and joyful exploration of
immanence in its infinite play of forces. That is philosophy.
The Deleuzian argument of Part 1 of this book concludes on the ironic note,
accordingly, that most of what has been called philosophy has rarely been
philosophy. In Part 2 we will similarly argue that too much of what has passed as
Christian theology has been bad philosophy, not genuinely theological. Christian
theology in the tradition of Paul, Augustine and Luther is in any event sharply
critical of “religion” precisely as it is revealed in Deleuze’s account of experience
(even as it ought to welcome the force of his analysis).1 Correspondingly,
“theology,” that is, the creation of concepts (e.g. Kierkegaard’s “belief, anguish, sin”
or, as we shall study below, Paul the Apostle’s “justification, reconciliation, faith”)
by which to articulate and extend the message of Christ crucified in its conflict
with the powers, is subversive. It subverts, according to the terms of Deleuze’s
account, in that it articulates the imminent God of Trinitarian advent, giving no
quarter to self-transcending subjectivity, whether religious or political.
That is a chief reason why such Christian theology has always been unpopular
in the funeral societies we call “church.” To call our churches “funeral societies”
is not an insult. It describes the reality, lightly dressed in Christian cloaking, of
organizing bodies to cope with the traumas of natural existence, preoccupied as a
result with maintaining ontological (against death) and legal (against competing
funeral societies) boundaries. Yet beneath this cloak, hidden under it, may still
exist the Pauline “body” of Christ. Who knows unless we look and see and in
the process reassemble some items? And who knows what the body of Christ
could do, if raised again from its living death as the state’s chaplaincy, that is, our
mutually tolerant because equally inconsequential funeral societies?
The very juxtapositioning of a philosopher like Deleuze and Christian theology
is disorienting in the foregoing way—so we hope—on both sides of the aisle.
Of course, we intend any such disorientation for the sake of reorientation: new
thinking no longer along legal or ontological lines but rather along rhizomatic
ones, as Part 1 of our book has laid out. In what follows accordingly a theological
argument is made about the discipline of theology today operating in one and
the same world as does philosophy, that is, philosophy taken as contemporary
naturalistic metaphysics in the tradition of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze.
Several clarifications about this procedure are immediately in order.
Interlude 99
First, what follows descends from Jürgen Moltmann’s 1967 Theology of Hope,
with its seminal critiques of the twentieth century’s predominant theologies
of the transcendental subjectivity of God (Karl Barth) and the transcendental
subjectivity of man (Rudolf Bultmann).2 It takes up Moltmann’s rejection of the
modern choice between transcendence or immanence in articulating the key
Christian notion of “God.” Instead of arguing philosophically and foundationally
for either of these ways of locating the notion of God within the present epoch,
it argues theologically for the apocalyptic imminence of the God who comes,3
“at hand,” as Christopher Morse says, but never “in hand.”4 To be sure, such
theology appears philosophically as a strange assemblage that holds together
apparently contrary tendencies toward both philosophy and religion. Explaining
that oddity, so that it makes sense, rather than nonsense, is a major burden in
the chapters that follow in which we pass from the hidden God through the
incarnate God to the revealed God.
Hence, second, what follows is not an exercise in the “method of correlation”
(Tillich), in which philosophy frames the questions that theology then tries
to answer. What follows is not a “Deleuzian” or “Nietzschean” or “Spinozist”
theology, where religious representations figure as decorations on a cake baked
by philosophers. Any such approach depends on timeless constructions of the
essence of philosophy or the essence of theology, overlooking the conflicted
nature historically of either discipline and therefore missing the timeliness
of our proposal and its sharply critical edge. In theology the latter takes the
form of an urgent summons to dePlatonize and reMessianize (this latter not
in the apophatic sense of Derrida criticized previously in Chapter 2, but in the
kataphatic sense articulated in what follows).
Third, the historically particular judgment we are making is that Cartesian-Kantian
“humanism” is a conceit that is now taking its revenge and killing us. To put the
point provocatively: the naturalistic metaphysics presented in Part 1 dehumanizes.
To put exactly the same point in a more appealing way: it renaturalizes.5 It radically
deflates the pretensions of “modern man” to transcend and create and instead
teaches how to be at home on the earth where first and foremost each of us is being
created through the web of life in which we are immersed without remainder. This
state of natura naturata is what we shall mean by speaking of human patiency as
prior to, and formative of, whatsoever agency is achieved within immanence.
So, fourth, the question in what follows is how Christian theology arises at all
in the world that is metaphysically such and to which humans are no exception.
Since Christian theology has often received the book of nature, read according
to our best contemporary thinking, as general revelation, one might answer with
Spinoza or Leibniz that theology arises simply as the natural wisdom of true
beatitude; there is much, as we shall see, to commend such “ontotheology.” But we
do not live in a world which is at home with itself, but in one which is increasingly
alienated and dangerously so. Christian theology in its particularity comes into
its own in contestation with this alienation and especially the forms of political
sovereignty that it evokes. Theology arises, in other words, when the God who
comes actually does come—“paradoxically”—as word of the Crucified Messiah.
Theology is a discipline that arises on this contingency or it does not make an
appearance at all. Its presence is therefore disruptive of political sovereignty in
a sense carefully to be laid out in what follows—or it is not theology, but bad
philosophy or mere religion.
Fifth, nothing has intellectually burdened Christian theology more in the
scientific age than “creationism,” as is called the reading of the first chapters of
the Bible as if natural science were intended rather than theology and theological
interpretation of natural science. From this philosophically follow all the sterile
debates between abstract theism and abstract atheism that still dominate
discussions of the relation of theology and philosophy. Likewise what follows from
this theologically is a dreadful picture of nature as the fixed and well-designed
stage on which humans play out the drama of acquiring an otherworldly home.
Adopting hylozoism, we preclude both of these devolutions. It is not mind alone
that makes God God or soul soul or spirit spirit. It is not matter alone that makes
body body. If really we leave behind the Platonic dichotomy, we have to think
in new ways about these familiar categories. If bodies are better understood as
assemblages (what Leibniz termed “well-grounded phenomena”), as Part 2 will
argue in the train of Leibniz’s response to Spinoza, then God, soul, and spirit
are better understood as communions, holy, and otherwise. “God” is Trinity,
capable in the Incarnation of the Son of including in its own tri-personal society
the death of the creature in order joyfully to exchange life for death and justice
for injustice. Likewise, then, “creation” must be understood not only as origin,
not only as continuing, but indeed supremely as eschatological fulfillment—the
Pauline revelation of the glorious liberty of the children of God, the coming of
the Beloved Community (Josiah Royce). Creation is “Trinitarian advent.”6
Finally, Christian theology as an “in-house” discourse for the sake of the
community of faith has an apostolic mandate “to test the spirits, to see whether
they are of God” (1 Jn 4.1). Interestingly, this injunction arose to fend off
spiritualizing interpretations of Christ as an apparition rather than as a true
coming “in the flesh.”7 In the course of time such theological testing has acquired
a negative hue as if the point were to draw rigid legal boundaries by which to
Interlude 101
separate from others. This is a huge irony, since the coming of the Crucified
Messiah in the flesh—Deus incarnatus—is exactly how Christian theology
connects with one and all suffering and abused creatures for the sake, as just
mentioned, of a new and joyful exchange. Be that as it may, “testing” here has
another connotation: experimenting. What follows is an experiment to see what
the “body” of Christian theology can do under the set of circumstances laid
out in Part 1. As in science, one cannot know in advance. We have given some
orientation here. But one must look and see.
4
Deus Absconditus
Ambiguities of immanence
When a contemporary Christian theologian first encounters Deleuze’s notion of

“the plane of immanence” she or he is likely to think that “the” plane indicates
the continuum in the continuity thesis rather than what it actually is for Deleuze,
namely, “the” philosophical way of slicing the continuum. Thinking in this
erroneous way, the Christian theologian will ask questions like: Can we be at
home in such a world of pure immanence? Or is there not a “transcendence” in
our humanity which makes “the” plane of immanence less a home than a cage,1
even a “biopolitical” (Agamben) captivity? On the plane of immanence is God
possible? Is the human possible? Is morality possible? Can anything genuinely
new happen within immanence or is it all repetition of the same? If matter is
here not opposed to mind, but mind is matter in its self-organization, what then
is spirit? If mind does not (alone) make God God, or matter does not (alone)
make creature creature, what does? What is the spirituality of God, if God is not
only or merely mind? How could we ever know? On “the” plane of immanence
“God” appears to be deeply hidden,2 Deus abconditus!
All such questions reflect understandable perplexities in the encounter with
Deleuze and are important to theology; we will pursue them in this chapter
in order to develop a proposal about the place of theology when it locates
alongside philosophy on one and the same “plane of immanence.” Yet as
they stand, the questions above betray an insufficient grasp of what Deleuze
himself means by the “plane of immanence.” Following Spinoza and Nietzsche,
he means by this idea an exclusive domain of thought within the continuum,
wherein immanence is immanent only to itself, where conditions are never
unconditional but themselves conditioned ad infinitum.3 Thus protological
thought regresses infinitely (as Nietzsche’s “Vicious Circle”—circulus vitiotus

deus—indicates), never arriving at a perfect, unconditioned, necessary, first
being as the single and simple arche of the whole dynamic realm of becoming.
In Deleuze’s metaphysics, it is becoming which is eternal and being which is
temporary. This inversion of Parmenides by Heraclitus, moreover, provides
the metaphysical basis for genealogical critique and emancipatory stratagems.
Metaphysics in this vein shows us how nothing is necessary, how anything is
possible. Genealogy, on the other hand, exposes to critique how particular
historical arrangements may falsely and oppressively impose a sacral aura of
eternity on what is in fact a temporal and temporary arrangement. Generally,
such sacral “anchoring” and “fixing” of immanence is what Deleuze polemically
paints as religious “transcendence” and as such bans from philosophy—though
not, crucially, from occupying its own domain on the continuum, making
its own slice of reality. So the question before us is not whether religion can
locate alongside philosophy on the plane of immanence, but whether theology
can—and what such a distinction and relation entail. Or, to put it another way,
how does the problem of “God” appear here and thinking about this problem,
when immanence is immanent only to itself? How does theological subjectivity
arise when immanence is immanent only to itself?
Deleuze allows no orientation of thought by means of the conceptualization
of the infinite as such over against the finite, no notion of the transcendent God,
just as he and Guattari likewise have abandoned notions of the human mind
as subject of knowledge and agent of moral action. Here God as “the” Good is
philosophically impossible, inconceivable. Like Nietzsche, Deleuze accordingly
restricts religion to figures on the plane of immanence, like Dionysus or the
Crucified, who invoke an (illusory) transcendence. Kataphatic theology is the
only possible theology here, even if this restriction to immanent figuring reduces
religion to a polytheistic parade of clashing figures. Deleuze accomplishes
this reduction by making impossible trans-temporal and universal claims, as
traditionally inscribed in the concept of a transcendent God’s revelation or in
the transcendental subject of Kantianism. “When immanence is no longer
immanent to something other than itself it is possible to speak of a plane of
immanence . . . [which] presents only events, that is, possible worlds as concepts,
and other people as expressions of possible worlds or conceptual personae.”4
In that case, let us note that “God” may be able to appear on the plane of
immanence as a figure, incognito, but just the same as the event of a possible world,
to be thought out and understood as such in a kataphatic theology, provided we
are not smuggling in with the word, “God,” an a priori notion of timeless and
Deus Absconditus 107
universal validity, but rather learning what and who “God” is from the figure
itself. Then the figure itself may project a kind of universality, just as happens in
philosophical conceptualizations of experience that aspire to truth, beyond mere
opinion. This procedure would yield “transcendence within immanence.” On
Deleuze’s own terms, then, imminence, advent, the “drawing near of the reign of
God” (Mk 1.14) may indicate the mode of “God’s” being in the world, signaling
not another world above which would be the superior double of this one, its
allegedly true reality, but rather the newly anticipated universal of “the same
earth on which the cross of Christ once stood” (to cite Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
abortive Bethel Confession5), a future which remains immanent to immanence
in its advent, albeit it in, with and under a protracted contest of sovereignties.
Modern theology, for its part, remains divided between the camps of
immanence and transcendence, the great chasm still demarcated by the names
of Schleiermacher and Barth respectively. Here the immanence—transcendence
relation parses differently than in Deleuze. Two recent titles serve to reiterate
the stand-off and illustrate the difference in usage. John J. Thatamanil in The
Immanent Divine puts Paul Tillich into dialogue with the Hindu master Sankara
in order to squeeze out the last vestiges of the Creator-creature “dualism”6
from Tillich’s “self-transcending naturalism,”7 the better to establish the latter.
Thus theologies of immanence conceive of self-transcending creatures rather
than Spinoza’s natured (natura naturata) beings—the very thing that Deleuze
identifies and excludes from philosophy as religious transcendence. By contrast,
David H. Hopper in Divine Transcendence and the Culture of Change argues
acutely that God’s transcendence rightly understood issues in the critique of
“otherworldliness,”8 using Luther’s theology as an exemplary instance of this
tendency toward immanence. Here divine “transcendence” affirms immanence
as the good of God’s creation and the object of Messianic redemption and
fulfillment. Understanding “rightly,” however, is the trick in Hopper’s case, since
here transcendence must somehow work a rupture in the immanent analogy
of being, the great chain of ontological continuity stretching from the Beyond
of being all the way down to unformed, chaotic matter, forming a closed
cosmic totality. Here the biblical God’s transcendence vis-à-vis the foregoing
cosmic order contests idolatrous representations and practices by which the
divine is thought eminently to express the transcending of nature in human
consciousness, so that God is used practically for the symbolization of human
aspiration. Just this latter is regarded as idolatrous. According to Karl Barth,
the rupture in such symbolization comes by the event of the Word of God
that constitutes a new, theological subjectivity that “thinks after” the God who
comes.9 This Nachdenken arising from the advent/event of the Word of God is
what theology as a discipline is.
But the difficulty here is that Barth’s stance seems epistemologically
unfounded and hence fideistic. Barth’s appeal to the sheer miracle of the
Word of God seems to lead to the ghettoization of theology as a sectarian and
privatized discourse.10 Even when as post-Kantians we give up foundationalist
strategies and enter willingly into the postmodern multiverse, theology still
finds itself pleading a special exemption from ordinary structures of scientific
plausibility on ethical and aesthetic grounds.11 The light of an alternative way
of “transcendence within immanence” flickered briefly in subtle Christological
divergences that Dietrich Bonhoeffer registered, albeit in sympathy with
Barth’s new start,12 before the Nazi hangman ended his path. In what follows
we call this “transcendence within immanence,” meaning the Incarnation not
transcendental subjectivity, and its discipline, meaning “critical dogmatics”
(not Barth’s “church dogmatics”), and its method, “positive dialectics” (neither
analogy nor negative dialectics). This comports with Deleuze, who undercuts
any possibility of theology riding the horse of transcendental subjectivity,
whether human or divine; broadly speaking, his metaphysics signify the end
of “modern” theology. Granted, Deleuze would probably be little impressed,
since the constitution of the theological, indeed political subject which follows
hinges on a report and address that Deleuze himself would not even entertain.
Yet there is an historical reason for this blind spot, in that for him as for so many
others instructed by Nietzsche, Christian theology is of intellectual interest only
as “Platonism for the people.” A reMessianized Christian theology may arguably
gain traction here. In this chapter, the task is to reframe the inherited questions
about divine transcendence and/or immanence by apocalyptic imminence, that
is, the coming of God to the world by the Pauline metaphor, not simile, “Christ
crucified,” a metaphor that both expresses the hiddenness of God and exposes it
as a possible problem also for philosophers.
The cumulative import of the differentiations to be gained in this chapter
is that the impersonal God who works all in all under the mask of Dionysus
indicates the same experience that Christian theology has denominated
Deus absconditus, the hidden God exposed in Christ crucified, although the
evaluation of it differs. The change in designation means that philosophical
theology as such, particularly a “natural theology,” which would face, know,
and master this abyss is not possible. It is an unspeakable Chaos to us.
Nietzsche’s double-faced Shiva13 is the deep, not merely conceptual, ambiguity
of philosophy, what cannot be thought yet concerns us all intimately. The
ultimate goal, however, is to determine whether and how on Nietzsche’s

own rigorously immanentist grounds a recognizable Christian theological
discourse might be generated, which re-opens the alternative that Nietzsche
posited between Dionysus and the Crucified.
Deleuze’s Nietzsche
Early in his career, Deleuze published an influential study on Nietzsche that,

together with a significant study by Pierre Klossowski,14 wrested the chief
notions of the will to power and the eternal return from unsavory association
with fascism.15 In the middle of the study, Deleuze acknowledged: “We will have
to return to those famous passages where Nietzsche considers the Judaism of
the Jewish priest. They have often produced the most dubious interpretations.
We know that the Nazis had ambiguous relations with Nietzsche’s work:
ambiguous because they like to appeal to it but could not do so without
mutilating quotations, falsifying editions and banning important texts. On
the other hand, Nietzsche himself did not have ambiguous relations with the
Bismarckian regime, still less with Pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism. He
despised and hated them . . .”16 In Chapter 6, we will return to the problem
flagged here, Nietzsche’s religious anti-Judaism (in distinction from racial
anti-Semitism), since on it turns a Messianic, as opposed to Platonic,
reading of Paul the Apostle. For the present, Deleuze’s claim for Nietzsche’s
philosophical significance depends on two moves. First, the will to power
as a creative and affirmative act is and can be distinguished from a will to
dominate as something weak, resentful, and reactionary. Second, the eternal
return is and can be taken as an efficacious parable rather than a traditional
metaphysical thesis about the prima causa.17 Both of these moves become
central features of Deleuze’s mature thought, as may be limned already from
this statement in the 1962 study: “We misinterpret the expression ‘eternal
return’ if we understand it as ‘return of the same.’ It is not being that returns
but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed
of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns
but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or
multiplicity.”18 Precisely as a parable of infinite diversity and change, eternal
return selects only the strong, that is, only those who actively undertake
the burden of creating the meaning of their existence as entirely their own
task: “The eternal return would become contradictory if it were the return
of reactive forces. The eternal return teaches us that becoming-reactive has

no being.”19
Needless to say, Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche is contestable. The interests
of the philosopher who wishes to appropriate insights and of the historian
who wants empirically to ascertain ideas and their influence may diverge. It is
noteworthy how historians or historically oriented philosophers (e.g. Safranski,20
Aschheim,21 Gillespie,22 Wolin23) see rather more continuity between the
ontological inscription of violence at the heart of Nazism and the metaphysical
reading of Nietzsche’s will to power as causa prima, positively articulated as a
cosmological doctrine of the eternal return of the same arrangements of finite
matter through infinite time. Even Arthur Danto can concede historically that
Nietzsche “was not immune to the moralization of natural selection that almost
defines nineteenth century thought . . .”24 Derrida’s cautionary comment here
is perhaps the wisest: “I do not believe that we as yet know how to think what
Nazism is[;]”25 in other words, the enigma is less Nietzsche than Nazism. With
Nietzsche one is dealing in any case with “notorious problems of interpretation”
(Solomon).26 Acknowledging then the variety of “Nietzscheanisms,”27 for
the sake of the argument we proceed with Deleuze’s Nietzsche. The salient
observation in this light is that a thinker with Marxian sympathies like Deleuze
turned to Nietzsche not after Hitler, but after Stalin. This turn to Nietzsche by the
post-structuralist generation worked to deprive Marxian theory of its confident
teleology. It could no longer regard itself (by virtue of bad Hegelianism) as
the self-conscious “key to the riddle of history,” where History is scientifically
predetermined to pass through class conflict to the workers’ paradise (no matter
at what ethical price). Such notions of “scientific” Marxism, and their sources in
bad faith, wooden philosophizing and all-too-human malice were exposed by
Nietzsche’s critique of socialism. With his help, Deleuze made sense out of the
catastrophic irony that Marx’s Marxism had somehow borne fruit in Stalinism.
Deleuze’s Nietzsche, then, is surely one worth heeding.
Platonism for the people
At the beginning of his late work, Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche summarily
tried and executed Christianity as “Platonism for the people.”28 His philosophical
wrath was directed against the founder, Plato, who stood truth on its head,
Nietzsche charged, by denying natural “perspective.”29 But equally it was
directed against Plato’s latter-day apostle, Kant, who claimed to discover but
in fact invented a “faculty for the supersensible.” This moral and practical
faculty could, Kant held, override bodily desire with its sensible inclinations in
a morally meritorious act of free will in obedience to Reason’s own practical
law to act in a universalizable way. Stood upright, Nietzsche argued, the truth
is that a capacity for such moral “judgments must be believed to be true for the
sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves”30—at least such creatures
as we have become under particular historical circumstances that genealogical
method unveils. “We,” who today hold to the free will of the rational human
soul, hold it als ob—“as if ” we knew this to be true (when in fact all our scientific
knowledge says otherwise). Yet holding this “as if ” is supposedly our rational act
of faith, faith within the boundaries of reason alone, faith then in the rational
self ’s self-transcendence and its capacity actually to do what the moral law of
universalizability commands.
We want to take Nietzsche at his word here and also at this most acute point
of his attack: he claims to be the first to reject the Christian Platonist ethic itself
with its precious faith in the human subject, precisely in its attenuated Kantian
form, not merely the dogma about God that backs it up. Hence he excoriates the
intellectual dishonesty of moderns (both philosophers and theologians) who,
following Kant, would hold onto an altruistic ethic apart from the dogma of faith
in God and therewith also in humans as imago Dei that grounds it. Kantians
consequently fail critically to evaluate the ethic of altruism for what, unmasked, it
is: the nihilistic Christian Platonic devaluation of bodily life as it naturally exists
in the innocence of the will to power. To the Kantian, who actually has ceased
to believe dogmatically but wants to live als ob there is a true Christian Platonic
God who created rational human agents, Nietzsche elaborates: “Christianity is a
system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out
of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing
to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands. Christianity
presupposes that man does not know, cannot know what is good for him and
what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows. Christian morality is a command:
its origin is transcendental; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticize; it
possesses truth only if God is truth—it stands and falls with the belief in God.”31
Nietzsche’s claim here is strongly “conceptual, that the full meaning of any of
these [moral] terms . . . cannot be captured or restated if one separates them off
the belief in God. Strictly speaking they are part of a theological language which
cannot be secularized” (Bergmann).32
If we no longer believe the Christian God, or, what is the same for Nietzsche, if
we no longer see the wisdom of philosophy as preparation for death, we must own
up to our bodies with their natural perspective on life. In that freshly recovered
perspective, we invent new gods—or rediscover the old one long ago suppressed
by the Crucified, whom Nietzsche names Dionysus. Against Platonism’s covert
act of faith in moral law and free will over-ruling natural, bodily inclination,
Nietzsche wanted to affirm the newly recovered truth of hylozoism: matter is
self-organizing across the full spectrum of existence, from the inorganic to the
organic. Self-organization manifests any natural individual’s will to power, which
is an organization of the forces of Nature into an internal structure of command
and obedience, action and passion, for the sake of preserving and enhancing its
own existential unity. The dawning consciousness, thanks to science, of such
material self-organization in internal structures of command and obedience, for
Nietzsche, launches and progressively requires Euro-American humanity’s own
“self-overcoming” of its deeply internalized legacy of Christian Platonism. This
new metaphysics thinks out consequently what was timidly begun in Kant, who
only dethroned God as the official founder of morality. Nietzsche thus continues
with the dethroning of God’s Kantian surrogate, the noumenal realm of moral
freedom. The human individual, as a temporary configuration of natural forces,
is neither the Christian-Platonic soul trapped in a sinful body nor the Kantian
moral agent introducing spontaneous moral acts into the causal nexus; it is
nothing but the will to power. It is nothing but natural self-organization to
affirm, preserve, and enhance its own existential unity, even if not especially in
full knowledge of its eventual disintegration and return to the eternal chaos of
natural forces.
Nietzsche’s motive in this is existential and aesthetic, even “spiritual.” On
the basis of hylozoism, the human spirit at the heights of its aspiration will
not execute a negation but rather an affirmation of life—in its terror as well as
wonder. In this way life justifies life, which it thus expresses. This affirmation
constitutes the “anthropodicy,” the vindication of its natural life in full face of
the ineradicable cruelty involved in inherently predatory acts of appropriation.
(As an aside, we may note here that for Deleuze Nietzsche’s affirmation of life
in “anthropodicy” is fundamentally set against Hegel’s dialectic of negation,
which he regards as the continuation of Christianity33—with its theodicy.34)
Anthropodicy thus supplants Euro-America’s failed Christian theodicy. “Why
atheism today?—‘The father’ in God has been thoroughly refuted . . . the
religious instinct is indeed in the process of growing powerfully—but the theistic
satisfaction it refuses with deep suspicion.”35 “Dionysus” (circulus vitiosus deus36)
will be the religious name Nietzsche gives to this newly owned instinct for an
existential and aesthetic anthropodicy, the justification of humanity in and by
its affirmative act of creative valuation. In its repudiation of the moralistic past,
anthropodicy consists in self-overcoming. In its affirmation, it consists in new
(self-) creations of tragic beauty.
The alternative would be to continue in the cultural trajectory of nihilism
toward decadence, that is, the explanation, but even worse, the practice of
self-organization, as instituted in the Phaedo and popularized in the gospels, of
killing the body for the sake of the soul. Nietzsche calls this trajectory of the
false, that is moralistic “self-overcoming” in Christian-Platonic nihilism. He
battles to overcome this nihilism. Moralism wants to believe in Something,
indeed Anything, even if it is really only Nothing; at all costs it holds on to
objective Meaning, absolute Value als ob it were really so. The teleology of the
“soul” desires The Universal Good, even if at the cost of its own body. How
precious that Good must be! Thus Plato’s Good came to be figured, precisely,
as the Crucified—Socrates drinking the hemlock transposed to “God on the
cross”—the revaluation of all hitherto prevailing values of life-affirmation,
Platonism popularized. As the whole Christian-Platonist house of cards comes
falling down today it is attended by a delicious irony that Nietzsche incarnates:
morality succumbs to itself, to moral criticism. “Finally—what remained to be
sacrificed? At long last, did one not have to sacrifice whatever is comforting, holy,
healing; all hope, faith in hidden harmony, in future blisses and justices? Didn’t
one have to sacrifice God himself and, from cruelty against oneself, worship
the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing?”37 This last bitter observation in
the form of a rhetorical question refers to the quotidian post-Christian atheism
that Nietzsche detects all around him, which punishes itself for giving up God
with all the more strident moralism and in just this way continues in the same
old nihilistic self-sacrifice. Nietzsche himself has passed through this crucible
and beyond it. That “beyond” within immanence is, so to speak, an achieved
transcendence given in his figure of the Űbermensch.
The life-denying cruelty of moral self-organization that takes perverse pleasure
in self-sacrifice lies at the root and explains the continuity—otherwise baffling
to these partisans—that Nietzsche discerns between Platonism, Christianity,
democracy, socialism, feminism but also the routine atheism. Truly to break
free, one has to overcome merely truthful, still moralistic “atheism.” One has
to satisfy the religious instinct by the creation of new gods. Armed with this
analysis, in his final books, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche
returned explicit attention to Christianity, opposing his new evangel of natural
apotheosis by self-overcoming to Christianity in the polemical juxtaposition of
Dionysus and the Crucified.
Any Christian theological alternative to this critique will not be one that
merely contradicts Nietzsche and refuses his insights but rather one which
recognizes his truths in such a way as to advance the argument about a new
relation of theology and philosophy. That will entail an alternative reading of the
Crucified, not the figure of “Platonism for the people” that Nietzsche saw. It will
also entail an alternative reading of Dionysus, not the recovered “innocence of
becoming” that Nietzsche intended. To facilitate that advance, we will next add
into the mix another figure, homo sacer, who reveals the ominous symbiosis
between modernity’s “sovereign self ” and what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare
life.” The following discussion anticipates Chapter 6, where the fuller argument
will be made that the Messianic alternative to Platonism will be to regard
bare life as the life reclaimed by the Crucified Messiah in His contest with the
regnant powers of this evil epoch. In the interim, we will try in the remainder
of this chapter to appreciate Christian Platonism on its own terms but then
move forward with the argument toward a new relation of dePlatonized and
reMessianized theology and post-Nietzschean philosophy. We shall see that the
mere appeal to transcendence on ethical or aesthetic grounds does not help,
even on the leveled playing field of postmodernism. We shall see that such
special pleading only begs the question of sovereignty. But sovereignty involves
the same question with which we began, whether we can be at home on the
earth. Sovereignty—whose earth is it after all?
Biopolitical captivity
In Deleuze we find a profound systematization and articulation of the anti-Kantian

program initiated by Nietzsche, a return of naturalistic metaphysics which is no
longer just another “footnote to Plato,” as Whitehead (whom Deleuze admired)
famously claimed about all of Western thought. Rather for Deleuze (just as with
Nietzsche himself 38) “Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers . . . [who] thought
the ‘best’ plane of immanence—that is, the purest, the one that does not hand
itself over to the transcendent or restore any transcendent, the one that inspires
the fewest illusions, bad feelings and erroneous perceptions.”39 Unlike Whitehead,
whose dipolar God retrieved and modernized the Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus,
Deleuze rigorously restricts metaphysics to the invention of concepts on the “plane
of immanence.” He has no need here of Whitehead’s theological hypothesis.
The genuine concern that arises otherwise in theologically reckoning
with Deleuze is not that the plane of immanence bids farewell to forms of
transcendence which falsify our experience of becoming as becoming, nor the

rigorous insistence then that our knowledge is a product of affect in the world
instead of the effects of a sovereign producer from a stance taken above the
body and its corporal extension. Rather, the concern with Deleuze’s program
from the side of Christian theology (as presently conceived and argued) is
that in its own way this “plane of immanence” generates or at least expresses
(and to that extent ideologically fixes) a new captivity. How in such a world
in which immanence is always immanent to itself, and the condition is itself
conditioned, are we to discriminate between action and reaction—so vitally
important for Deleuze’s Nietzsche? The worry is that with strict, non-dialectical
immanence we descend into Hegel’s “night in which all cows are black,” a
night that effectively puts to sleep the protesting conscience formed by the
tradition of the Hebrew prophets with the corresponding hope of Jewish
apocalyptic for the coming of the Beloved Community, where “God” figures
as the eminently creative actor acting to redeem and fulfill the oppressed
creation. Lost then, it is feared, is any capacity within immanence to resist
the captivation of desire by Juvenal’s imperium of “bread and circuses,” more
profoundly by its thrall at Leviathan’s sacred sovereignty, Hobbes’ “god on the
earth,” who rules by self-exception from the very moral demands it institutes
and safeguards.
This complex of ideas has been introduced into the contemporary discussion
by Giorgio Agamben,40 and has led him to a profound new reading of the
Apostle Paul (to be considered in Chapter 6). In his celebrated genealogical
study, Homo Sacer, Agamben traced the epoch of political sovereignty back to
the ancient practice of the ban as the constituting power by which a polity is
formed through mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The “exception” that
institutes polity is the originating act of sovereignty. It is not called exceptional
just because it is the power to decide who is excluded from membership by
being placed beyond the ontological and legal boundaries of the state. It is
called the state of exception because precisely in making this determination,
constituting sovereignty itself also and continually steps outside the rule
of law by which the boundaries of constituted power are policed. A double
exclusion occurs in the ban, which renders the law inoperative on either
side. The sovereign is above the law in determining to whom the law applies;
the banned are placed outside the law by the sovereign’s determination of
boundaries. The banned are in this way stripped of all vestiges of social
relations that make for more than bare life, like the man on the road left to
die by the bandits in Jesus’ parable (Lk. 10.29–37). They are made bereft of
neighbors. They cease to be comrade, friend, sister, brother, boss, colleague,

barbarian, or Greek and are reduced to biological existence as such, Dasein
ohne Leben, Lebens unwertes Lebens. Such slogans from the Nazi eugenics
regime are the sense of Agamben’s odd term, “bare life,” blosses Lebens, taken
over from Walter Benjamin. It is a concept by which one determines who
does not count as the neighbor to whom love is due, the mere body that can
rather be commodified and so disposed.
“This is the structure of the ban that we shall try to understand here, so that
we can eventually call it into question.”41 We need not detain ourselves with
Agamben’s erudite genealogical investigations into the ancient figure of the
being abandoned to the gods of the underworld as the primordial bare life,
which can be “killed but not sacrificed.” The point is properly philosophical: to
demythologize the “Hobbesian mythologeme of the state of nature,” not as a “real
epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the City but a principle internal
to the City . . .”42 The State, in other words, is always also this “state of exception.”
If that is so, Hobbes’ “state of nature” is not so much a literal bellum omnes contra
omnem from which the social contract and the election of a sovereign rescue.
Rather, the state of nature is “a condition in which everyone is bare life and
a homo sacer for everyone else.” Consequently the constituting of sovereignty
does not come about by “the subjects’ free renunciation of their natural right
but in the sovereign’s preservation of his natural right to do anything to anyone
. . .”43 That is to say, the exceptional suspension of rights in a state of emergency
is always latent in the City as the very presupposition of the order of rights
instituted by the drawing of legal and ontological jurisdictions—which must be
defended, precisely, in the ever threatening circumstances of an emergency. The
sovereign retains his own exceptional right to do anything to others as needed
to perpetuate the instituted order. Thus “sovereign violence is in truth founded
not on a pact but on the exclusive inclusion of bare life in the state,”44 since in an
emergency one and all can be returned to the condition of being bare life and
become homo sacer for everyone else. Thus the “first foundation of political life
is a life that may be killed, which is politicized through its very capacity to be
killed.”45 The power of the State is the sword and its jurisdiction is the body.
The principle of the rule of law, “which today seems inseparable from our
conception of democracy and the legal State, does not at all eliminate the paradox
of sovereignty.”46 Any state, qua constituted order, is always also this monopoly
on the means of coercion that enables the self-exception of sovereignty to
constituted law and rights (as in Bush-Cheney renditions and water-boarding or
Obama kill-lists and drone warfare47). What is deeply troubling about Agamben’s
analysis, of course, is that it opens up an ontological zone of indiscernability

between modern democracy and equally modern fascism, notwithstanding the
important ontic differences between them. Habeas corpus—you have a right
to your bare life, your mere body. This legal rule of modern democracy is “its
strength and, at the same time, its inner contradiction . . .” since “[c]orpus
is a two-faced being, the bearer both of subjection to sovereign power and of
individual liberties.”48 It is as conceptually reduced to mere physical existence
that persons are equalized and thus entitled to the same rights. At the same
time this democratization to the bare equality of bare life in turn compels “law
to assume the care of this body” as a matter of right, so that basic life within the
constituted order is enabled and safeguarded. Consequently, in “biopolitical”
modern democracy, “the physician and the sovereign seem to exchange roles.”49
But that will mean that just as politicians can now appear as healers so also
physicians can now occupy the sovereign place of exception in determining
who belongs and who will be the banned, the Lebens unwertes Lebens. Nor can
this medicalizing of politics under modern democracy call any halt. It rather
relentlessly expands with the creeping emergency created by the ecologically
unsustainable project of transcendence. “The life that, with the declarations of
rights, became the ground of sovereignty now becomes the subject-object of
state politics (which therefore appears more and more in the form of ‘police’)
. . . its own principle vocation as the formation and care of the ‘body of the
people.’”50 This is the contradiction: the mere body that is presupposed as
the bearer of rights cannot in fact care for itself without the protection of the
sovereign to which it must then submit. Modern democracies thus enter into
“a lasting crisis, and the State decides to assume directly the care of the nation’s
biological life as one of its proper tasks.”
Thus the presupposition of Nazi racial politics in modern biopolitics is shared
by the democracies. “In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the
value or the nonvalue of life as such. . . . The Führer represents precisely life itself
insofar as it is he who decides on life’s very biopolitical consistency.”51 In terms
of this shared modernity, Agamben writes provocatively that there “is no reason
to doubt that the ‘humanitarian’ considerations that led Hitler and Himmler to
elaborate a euthanasia program immediately after their rise to power were in
good faith . . .”52 Indeed, the Nazi “laws concerning the Jews can only be fully
understood if they are brought back to the general context of National Socialism’
legislation and biopolitical praxis.”53 Mutatis mutandis, in “the fight against the
external and internal enemies of the State, and . . . the care and growth of the
citizen’s life, National Socialist biopolitics—and along with it, a good part of
modern politics outside of the Third Reich—cannot be grasped” apart from the
fusion of policy and policing required by the sovereign state of exception and
its democratic sublimations.54 If the democracies differentiate from fascism,
it is only because and to the extent that they still ask and permit answering
the question, “Who is my neighbor?” differently. Or perhaps better, fascism
answered this question with greater clarity, resolve, and ruthlessness, given the
progressive displacement by biopolitics of the competing notions of sovereignty
and membership in the Western tradition descended from Paul the Apostle
and the prophetic biblical tradition that he recapitulated. Here one asks with
Augustine, What is the state apart from justice but organized crime? Hobbes,
however, renders this question unthinkable. Not least of Hobbes’ contributions
to the constitution of modern political sovereignty by fusing religion to the
throne was the banning of such Pauline competition.55
From the perspective of Christian theology, John Milbank has posed the
right question here: “But is there,” he asks, “a secular, immanentist way out
of the biopolitical?”56 Milbank answers “No,” and thus summons philosophy
to convert to (his “radically orthodox” Christian) theology. In the face of the
crisis of the unsustainable and increasingly despotic biopolitical organization
of modernity, he advocates a retrieval of medieval theopolitical Thomism,
resourced with a fresh appropriation of the Apostle Paul’s resurrection faith.
Milbank thus proposes that we today adopt an alternative worldview beyond
“bare life” that funds utopian-socialist generosity that refuses the politics
of scarcity behind the biopolitical myth of the Hobbesian state of nature.
He thus argues largely, if not entirely for an ethical reason—the very one
of “all hope, faith in hidden harmony, in future blisses and justices” that
Nietzsche saw his newly atheistic contemporaries sacrificing to the will to
truth. Does the will to believe reappear here, trumping the will to truth?
From Nietzsche’s perspective, Milbank suggests that one could thus willfully
change worldviews—but this begs the question of “free will.”57 “No,” Nietzsche
would reply to Milbank, “and neither could there or should there be such a
way out of immanence.”
No matter how hopeless our worldview might be, no matter how attractive
Milbank’s alternative may appear, Nietzsche’s strong claim is to have uncovered
the truth about our actual views of the world at this historical juncture and to
have brought it to articulate consciousness in such a way that immanence must
truthfully be embraced as our destiny. Nietzsche would thus find Milbank’s
refusal of pure immanence on allegedly ethical grounds pointless nostalgia
and bad faith: as the Marxist dialectically presupposes the capitalist epoch’s
financing of technology to create the economic preconditions of communism,

Nietzsche also acknowledges the taming of the beast wrought by medieval
discipline as the cultural precondition of his own aspiration to artistry with
the human form. But that was then. Fatefully today we Euro-Americans are
the biopolitical, whose rapacious accumulation (just as Milbank in socialist
mode so acutely diagnoses) is a massive and literally desperate denial of death.
It is not sustainable. Camps will be—already are—necessary. Yet there is no
exit from this destiny. As Deleuze puts it: slave-morality’s “reversal of values
has to go so far—making us think that immanence is a prison (solipsism)
from which the Transcendent will save us.”58 Thus the mere assertion of
transcendence expresses this sense of alienation and captivity but does not
help remedy it. It only perpetuates what contemporaries have to regard as
“the long history of an illusion.” “Nihilism”—Deus absconditus—is precisely
what we must face and perchance overcome from within, on the plane of
immanence, or not at all.
Hence, if the experiment of this book to map theology and philosophy on
the same plane of immanence is to be conducted, we have to answer Milbank’s
important question in a different way. If there is to be any actual alternative to
Nietzsche’s tragic vision, it must take wing from within the biopolitical, earning
a new way forward, so to speak, by beating the dialectic of sin and law at its
own deathly game. To that extent (and only to that extent!) we will side in the
latter part of this chapter with Žižek’s Hegelian reading of the Apostle Paul in
order to regain focus on the Crucified Messiah, “who for our sakes, though He
knew no sin, was made to be sin, so that in Him we might become the justice
of God” (2 Cor. 5.21). That focuses us not only on the Pauline skandalon but
also on the Pauline oikonomia tou theou, the “economy” of a “joyful” (Luther)
and redemptive exchange by which freedom is won on the plane of immanence
(not announced as an obiter dicta, as it were, as the fiat of transcendental charity
authorizing a worldview in competition with philosophy). This focus gives what
we will call in Chapter 6 a “positive dialectic” that comports with a reading in
which “resurrection faith” is not the mere disclosure event of a timeless truth
(Milbank’s revelation of a transcendental “coincidence of opposites”) otherwise
obscured by finite perspective. Rather, resurrection faith here reflects the
apocalyptic invasion of our captivity by means of the Pauline metaphor, not
simile, “Christ crucified.” In distinction from Milbank’s “analogy” (but also from
Žižek’s “negative dialectics”), we will show in Chapter 4 that this root Pauline
formulation does not work disclosively, whether to bathe the finite in the light
of the infinite (Milbank) or to unconceal the hidden motor of the immanent
machine in negative dialectics (Žižek). Rather this language in its performance

subverts the double grip of sin and law from within, such that it only reveals
as it actually eventuates the new subjectivity in time and space by means of a
positive dialectic of the “law battling the law in order to make liberty” for us all
(Luther).59 Such an alternative approach has the virtue of meeting the challenge
of Nietzsche on immanent ground and in the very terms he proposed: Dionysus
versus the Crucified.
Is God possible?
If we decline Milbank’s solution to our problem, his acute question about

theological exodus from biopolitical captivity remains. The question then
becomes whether and how Christian theology can dePlatonize, or, what is the
same, reMessianize. But Platonic transcendence had made God seem possible.
Is God possible without it? What and who is “God” who comes to bring the
reign of life, righteousness, and peace? To begin to answer this question, we
first inquire more precisely how atheism became possible vis-à-vis the God of
Christian Platonism; how moderns, according to Nietzsche, ultimately had to
sacrifice “God” to the will-to-truth that, ironically, Christianity-cum-Platonism
had inculcated in them in previous centuries. Most contemporary atheism is
not a general denial of religious transcendence in Deleuze’s sense; in Deleuze’s
sense, atheism can just as much anchor immanence in transcendence by a
fetishized figure (think of the Marxist “key to the riddle of history” or the Nazi
Blut und Boden or the capitalist “hidden hand”) as can God. But by “atheism”
here we refer to the historically specific event of the rejection of the God of
Christian tradition in Euro-American modernity. The problem was that this
God’s existence became inconceivable. At issue is not whether one can imagine
an idea of God, but whether the very idea of God imagined in Christian
Platonism can be conceived as actually existing. One cannot meaningfully
engage God in His self-communicating claim as Maker and Redeemer, after all,
if one cannot say what in the world one is talking about. Yet that is precisely the
problem. The Christian-Platonic God is not something in the world. A supreme
or perfect or most real Being is an inevitable idea of Reason, which imagines
speculatively the cause of all causes, the reality of all that is real, the necessary
being undergirding all contingent beings, what Tillich called das Unbedingt or
“Being Itself.” In classic Christian Platonism this was thought as the perfect
actuality of the self-causing necessary being, the One who exists eminently, as
“ontotheology” imagines, a Supreme Being alongside many lesser beings. Yet

precisely the existence of such perfect being cannot be conceived, let alone
deduced—so Kant first argued against Anselm—on the ground that existence
predicates relationships within the causal nexus in space and time. Existence
“beyond” that nexus is thus literally inconceivable. Hence Tillich, to save das
Unbedingt, concluded apophatically from the line of thought begun in Kant with
the (at the time shocking) pronouncement, “God does not exist.”60 For Tillich,
“God” thus becomes purely the symbol/idea of the Beyond of Being, not even
any longer “Being Itself ” (as he corrected his own earlier semantics). For him,
moreover, this apparently atheistic result is to be welcomed, since it delivers
theology from the traditional, but self-contradictory idea of God as a being,
albeit superior, alongside other beings. That ontotheological God of Christian
Platonism would in any case be bounded by the existence of other beings on the
same plane, which contradicts what is essential: God’s unboundedness, which is
to say, God’s Beyondness. Thus “God” self-destructs. “God” does not exist.
If one could conceive such a way of perfect being on the plane of immanence,
on the other hand, the ontological proof would be valid and God’s existence as
Creator could be inferred from His relation to the world of His creatures. Here
God would indeed be “ontotheologically” related to the world in a kataphatic
theology as that than which nothing greater can be thought by His creatures, their
eminently real One and cause of all other beings in the covenant of creation.
The existence of creatures as a compound of being and non-being makes them
ontologically less real, with the result that loss of God is loss of the creature’s
very grip on reality and its descent to nothingness. Evil here is privation of the
eminently real, which is God. Note that the concept of existence here is being
used univocally to denote that which persists in space through time. As we have
just seen, Kant objected to the ontological argument’s univocal extension of
“existence” to the Beyond of time and space. That violation of the transcendental
boundary is why we cannot treat “existence” as a substantive predicate, as Anselm
did, further qualified by adjectives of eminence like real, true, actual, necessary,
etc. And if existence is not a substantive predicate denoting persistence in space
through time, we cannot think that this perfect existence in its actuality is
contained analytically in the concept of the greatest being, as Anselm’s notion of
the one true God uniquely proposes.61
But surely this is to argue in a circle: God cannot be conceived to exist
because God cannot exist in time and space. Says who? The usual critique
had been to compare Anselm’s idea of God to an imaginary island, which
although perfectly an island in thought, no more exists in reality than
perfectly imagined unicorns or perfectly imagined leprechauns. But this

critique never dug deeply enough. It easily denies probative value to Anselm’s
demonstration of God’s existence, but misses the singularity of the idea of
the most real being, which Anselm captured under the relative tag, “that than
which nothing greater can be thought.” A relation is thus posited, namely,
divinity’s perfection as persistent in being in relation to all becoming, its
necessity in relation to all contingency, finally then simple actuality in
relation to all, even its own possibilities, in the unique act of its being, God as
the wholly simple actus purus. Yet all of these divine perfections are relative,
constructions of God from within the covenant of creation by those who know
themselves as creatures; moreover, they innocently or naively or unwittingly
involve God in time precisely as the One eminently persistent in being. It is
just when we grasp this singularity of Anselm’s original “ontotheological” idea
of God, however, that the very notion today seems to crumble in our hands. It
is not only that we today cannot conceive of existing supremely or perfectly
or most really on the plane of immanence, as Anselm could. It is not only
“beyond” us cognitively, as per Kant. For us, as Nietzsche would finally point
out, existence, in designating a relation, can only refer to what instantiates the
perpetual becoming of Nature on the plane of immanence. For us, becoming
yields beings for their brief flicker and then reclaims them into the vortex.
Metaphysically speaking, then, only such individuals would actually exist in
relation to us human knowers that emerge randomly out of the Chaos for a
fleeting finite duration, itself a series of infinitesimal transformations; then
disintegration of this series follows and its components resolve back into the
Flux. God’s very existence under these metaphysical conditions accordingly is
more than inconceivable. It has become impossible. Perfect being disappears
into the unfathomable Chaos. The unfathomable Chaos becomes its specter,
our operative eternity, our Deus absconditus. That should direct us, however,
to examine who “we” are, in whom this event of the “death of God” has
transpired.
For Kant, in contrast, the ontological argument had as yet merely failed as a
proof of God’s existence. It retained, however, a definite, indeed critical function.
Kant thus first coined the term, “ontotheology,” for his new, transcendental
interpretation of the ontological argument and as such it retained great value for
him. It is, to be sure, “of no great utility from a practical standpoint.” It does not
ground morality any longer in the theoretical knowledge of the perfect being
(it is practical reason that now postulates the existence of God as its deus ex
machina). But, Kant adds, ontotheology “still has the advantage of purifying our
concepts and cleansing them of everything which we as human beings belonging

to the world of sense might ascribe to the abstract concept of God. It is the
ground of every possible theology.”62 In Kant’s hands, ontotheology becomes a
new iteration of the via negativa, a critique of the via eminentia and kataphatic
“enthusiasm,” as Kant tagged it. There is a considerable irony at work here. Kant
takes up Luther’s critique of Schwärmerei (“enthusiasm”), though no longer in
service to Luther’s or Paul’s Verbum externum that tells of Christ crucified. As
Kant puts it in the Orientation essay: “Thus if it is disputed that reason deserves
the right to speak first in matters concerning supersensible objects such as
the existence of God and the future world, then a wide gate is opened to all
enthusiasm, superstition and even atheism.”63 Indeed, the irony is that the epithet,
Schwärmerei, denoting “self-delusion, a mistaken conviction that one had become
a receptacle of a divine possession” and connoting “contagion and mass-frenzy”
like “bees swarming around a hive” had been popularized, if not invented by
Luther to stigmatize his spiritualizing opponents, “the mobs that followed
self-appointed field preachers or rampaged through churches, smashing the
statues . . .”64 In the end, however, the concept was appropriated by the Tribunal
of Reason to rule Luther’s own kataphatic theology of the self-communicating
God out of bounds.65
To make this irony of Kantian ontotheology clearer, we may recall here
Kant’s Ding-an-sich. It has been said to represent the incalculable Multiple,
the Chaos of unimaginable and infinite possibles, the manifold of sensible
experience, the sheer maelstrom of events from which individuals emerge
and to which they return. Such constructions represent the various attempts
of German Idealism to know the Ding-an-sich, culminating in Nietzsche’s
will to power, if we interpret Nietzsche’s meaning metaphysically. If we stay
with Kant, however, we can say nothing more about the posited Ding-an-sich
than that it is the necessary condition, transcendentally deduced, for the
object of our cognition. As such it functions as a limit-concept: it is not there
for us to puzzle out what the Ding-an-sich is in-und-für-sich, but rather works
to refer us back to the continued cognitive synthesis of sense experience in
space and time, where knowledge alone has its limited validity. In this more
strictly Kantian objection to the new metaphysical turn of idealism, we could
regard ontotheology as it developed through idealism’s new but illicit attempt
to grasp the Ding-an-sich as a manifestation of the pure will to power that
grasps and masters all that remains other for human purposes. Ultimately,
that is the new reading of “ontotheology” by Heidegger. “Will to power is the
ultimate factum to which we come.”66 Here Nietzsche’s will to power represents
the titanic culmination of Western metaphysics, the supreme ontotheological

idol, the apotheosis of human will as domination over Being, sovereignty as
its own justification and goal grounded in the being of becoming itself and
figured as the many-faced, Shiva-like Dionysus. Ontotheology in this new
sense of Heidegger exposes the human, all-too-human self-seeking at work
in all acts of valuing, eminently in the ontotheological case of the summum
bonum.
Thus Heidegger’s Nietzsche is less an atheist than a theologian of new divinity,
a creator of better and more powerful gods, unleashing a veritable pantheon of
existential possibilities. The one, supremely real being that actually exists as per
Christian Platonism would seem then to be not only an impossible contradiction
in terms, as per the historical Kant, not only a nihilistic illusion suffocating the
diverse and multiple evaluations of life in the name of Supreme Being and
Highest Good as per the historical Nietzsche, but now the very emblem of the
metaphysical will to power which forgets Being in order to dominate beings.
In this line of thought, traditional kataphatic theology is rendered doubly
impossible. “God,” that is, “the” Good is impossible at best, toxic at worst.
We have traveled some distance through the modern collapse of Christian
Platonic faith in God. To appreciate the aporia to which the various iterations
of the critical notion here of ontotheology come, a final retrospect is necessary.
Anselm was not thinking simply of a supreme, or perfect, or most real Being in
the Platonic way of Kant, who, as mentioned, sought a purified idea by the way of
negation in order to suppress kataphatic theology as “enthusiasm” that impurely
mixed the sensible and the supersensible. Anselm’s Proslogion is preceded by the
Monologion and flows out of it.67 The Monologion is concerned with specifying and
critically evaluating the possibilities of God’s existence. It asks, Is God possible?
As mentioned, a relation is thus projected. The question is really, Is God possible
for us? What existence is divine, that is, worthy of all of the rational creature’s
love, laud, honor, service, and obedience? And what rational creatures are just
those who so ask about God? They are those who ask for the true recipient of true
worship—to whom does the earth belong? It is a double question: who or what
is worthy of worship? What is worthy worship of the One so worthy? Just this
question, however, on apostolic authority (Rom. 1.18), is not universally posed;
rather, it is universally suppressed by multiform religious endeavors to use God
for human purposes, offering not worship but bribes, seizing the sovereignty from
God. Hence, where and when on the earth this precise question of the love of God
for God’s sake, not the creature’s, is taken up, as in Anselm’s thought-experiment,
we have an instance of prophetic theology, of the contingent event of fides quarens
intellectum (as Karl Barth righty pointed out), where faith designates the new
subjectivity worked by the self-communication of God’s claim and promise.68
Because this loving relation of creature to Creator in gratitude and praise is here
expressed in the faith which seeks, as love seeks, to know what and whom it believes,
Anselm can answer the question of how God is possible for us with Christianity’s
homoousios: “The expression of the Supreme Being is the Supreme Being” (“Quod
haec summae essentiae locutio sit summa essentia,” Monologion, chapter 12, emphasis
added). God’s existence is in this way thinkable: the possibility of God’s existence for
us becomes clear to human understanding, when and where the world is received
as God’s giving, as the self-expression of divine fecundity, by God’s own act of
self-communication, in the event of God’s coming near in the self-communication
that God is, supremely, then, in the assumptio carnis of the Incarnation, where
this expression of God in time and space is homoousios with God. Because God
expresses Himself as God in the act of creation, which is gift, the rational creature
can by the further gift of faith in this self-communication know that just this giving
God “exists” as that “than which nothing greater can be thought.” God “exists” within
the covenant of creation, as Giver to the gifted, in the fullness of time at home in the
body, on the earth, not in any kenosis of divinity but rather in its ownmost actuality
as self-expression. With that realization, Anselm exults with joy that he now knows
the reality of the One in whom he has believed. Anselm’s hermeneutical circle is
certainly then no “proof of God’s existence” before the Tribunal of Reason. Rather
it is a theological demonstration of the sense of faith: “no one who understands
that which God is can think that God does not exist” (Proslogion, chapter 4), that
is, no one can think of the God who exists in and as His self-expression as merely
an idea, in need then of purification from all that is sensible and thus rendered
into an abstraction. On the contrary, the one who thinks God’s existence rightly
as the Giver of the gifted doxologizes: “O mercy, from what rich sweetness and
sweet richness You flow forth unto us! O immensity of divine goodness, with what
affection sinners ought to love You! For You save those-who-are-just, since justice
accompanies them; but You free those-who-are-evil, even though justice condemns
them” (Proslogion, chapter 9).
The foregoing retrospect on Anselm gives greater accent to his Christian,
as opposed to Platonic, legacy at the precise point where classically the two
traditions diverged: the homoousios.69 This makes evident how by the time
that Anselm’s theological demonstration of God’s existence reached Kant to
be transformed at his hands into transcendentalism’s “ontotheology,” it had
been decoupled from the Christian’s prayer to understand the One in whom
he believes. Against authoritarianism in theology, Anselm had in his own time
demanded this theological understanding in faith as proper to faith’s love of

God as the One who initiates love in actions of gift. His great achievement
was the theater he staged, asking “by reason alone” about the truth of inherited
theological verities. Theology, which is not fideism but this rational procedure
of faith seeking understanding, is forever in his debt for this, even if we are not
particularly helped today by Anselm’s program. Anselm could take for granted
things to which theologians today on the plane of immanence are not entitled.
He could universalize the Christian experience of grace and think to discover
its possibility “by reason alone” just because he presupposed the universal
applicability of the notion of the rational soul made in the image and likeness of
God. That is indeed a theological dogma, though it is not philosophy today on
the plane of immanence.
Spirit, matter, and mind
The theological situation today, indeed, is almost precisely the opposite of

Anselm’s, corresponding to the end of Christendom in Euro-America. We ask
how faith can be generated on the plane of immanence, how the world and the
self can be received as gift within an immanence captivated by “biopolitics.”
For us the question of how God is possible reverts to what Anselm could and
did take for granted in the deposit of faith: precisely the Christian homoousios,
telling how God truly if not comprehensively express Himself to us as God
such that we receive ourselves and our world as His gift—this would give the
truly human possibility, the fulfillment of the lost imago Dei, the “political
subject” for which contemporary thought gropes. How is this event possible
for us today? To understand this “us,” who “we” are today, whom God must
now reach, we cannot willfully reassert the Christian dogma of creation or
even of the homoousios that presupposes this event of God’s reality in God’s
self-communication and use these ideas like axioms with which to philosophize
better than the philosophers, as if “we” already understood ourselves as gifted,
as creatures, to whom God exists in His Word and for whom God exists in the
Word incarnate. Such Spiritless resort (“as if ”) to Christian dogma at this precise
juncture is culturally question-begging, even though the theologian worth her
salt enters the contemporary exchange with philosophy in this perspective of
knowing faith (or else she is not a theologian, but something else, say, a Religious
Studies scholar or a Philosopher of Religion or a Kantian). Thus the change in
our situation into post-Christendom requires of theology a reorientation in
its relation to philosophy. Naturalism, which had to emerge from Christian

Platonism’s “great chain of being” at the cost of a wrenching cultural battle,70
is disrespected or disregarded to the peril of Christian theology itself, even if
in traditional Christian perspective it is the new naturalism that imperils the
human just as it has banished God as inconceivable.
Deleuze’s strict “plane of immanence” excludes the “humanism” of Platonic
transcendence, that is, the notion that the human mind stands out of the
plane of immanence and participates in the divine ideas so that by this inner
light it can recognize and hence realize (with the aid of grace in Christian
Platonism) its true self as conformation to the divine order. Deleuze strikes
at the heart of the Christian-Platonist anthropology. “The copy is an image
endowed with resemblance, the simulacrum is an image without resemblance.
The catechism, so much inspired by Platonism, has familiarized us with this
notion. God made man in his image and resemblance. Through sin, however,
man has lost the resemblance while maintaining the image. We have become
simulacra. We have forsaken moral existence to enter into aesthetic existence.
This remark about the catechism has the advantage of emphasizing the demonic
character of the simulacrum . . . built . . . upon a disparity or upon a difference.
It internalizes a dissimilarity.”71 The Nietzschean revaluation of values is once
again executed here: what Christian Platonism has moralistically called sin
is merely difference. In fact, difference is the riotous production of Nature’s
fecundity. The immanent self expresses Nature’s fecundity in overcoming
inertia, in overthrowing otiose ideals, in valuing itself by affirming its own
difference—the very deviance regarded as sinfulness by Christian Platonism.
The challenge of this new metaphysics is thus quite profound to venerable
traditions of Christian theology. Nor is it limited to victims of the Catholic
catechism. Protestant theologies, which take their stand not on any uncorrupted
light of reason but on the plain-sense meaning of the Bible to correct the sinful
soul’s misreading of its own predicament, have also presupposed Platonism’s
innate or natural light for deciphering the supposed plain-sense of the Bible:
“everywhere,” Luther writes, “we should stick to the just the simple, natural
meaning of the words, as yielded by the rules of grammar and habits of speech
that God has created among men.”72 But even this minimally Platonist assumption
about the divinely authorized lawfulness and hence meaningfulness of language
is called in question by the new metaphysics, which, following Nietzsche, will no
longer be bewitched by grammar. “Shouldn’t philosophers be permitted to rise
above faith in grammar?”73 Indeed, “formerly, one believed in ‘the soul’ as one
believed in grammar and the grammatical subject.”74 But now we understand
that the psychological self of consciousness, encoded in grammar and reinforced

by linguistic habit, is in fact the product of forces contending for mastery of a
body. Likewise, then, rather than expect the Bible to critique and correct nature,
now Nature as appropriated in the new metaphysics must critique and explain
the Bible (as Spinoza had first demanded).75
How then can we even ask whether God is possible, according to the traditional
imago Dei doctrine, when we no longer believe that we are ontologically special
creatures or that the “soul,” that is, the personal identity and agency of the
persisting human self exists as mirror of God?76 The depth of the challenge of
the new metaphysics is not merely that it has made God inconceivable but that it
undermines the very notion of humanity in relation to God on which Christian
Platonism built in the imago Dei doctrine.77 A new conception of the relation of
spirit and matter in terms of the continuity thesis, not founded on the Platonic
dualism of mind and matter, is thus required. This suggests in turn the new
mapping of theology’s relation to philosophy in temporal rather than spatial
terms, as eschatology to protology, as we have proposed by the organization
of our book into two parts. This aspect of the new mapping, however, is not a
simplistic rejection of Christian Platonism, but rather the resolution of a tension
within it that aims to complete its own inner tendency toward immanence as first
enunciated by the homoousios.78
So we turn now to Anselm’s great source. Augustine, it may be recalled,
extracted himself from the extreme dualism of the Manichees with the
help of (Neo-)Platonism just as, in his world, Platonism, with its Great
Chain of Being, was regarded as an optimistic, ennobling, world-affirming
philosophy79—in the end, too optimistic for Augustine.80 Augustine found
in Platonism’s doctrine of desire a unitary conception of the human81 as
seeker for the good which she—qua individual—does not already enjoy, but
must ever appropriate and in turn produce with and for others in a Beloved
Community.82 Coupled with the affirmation of the body carried over into
Christianity from Jewish eschatology,83 Augustine’s cor inquietem thus found
its living and life-enhancing rest in the God who had to be conceived in a
veritable metaphysical revolution84 as the Trinitarian life in which difference
and procession—space-like and time-like—constitute its own eternity (not,
then, eternity as an a priori concept of abstract timelessness gained by the
negation of motion). As Trinity, moreover, God is the primordial Multiple,
taking place as internally differentiating and differentiated, rendering a fit
Creator of the becoming which is the creation. This is the God, then, who is
and can be coming to the earth, the imminent God, the Trinitarian advent, the
eschatological event. “Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the
sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it. Then shall
all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord; for he is coming, for he
is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness and
the people with his truth” (Ps. 96.11–13).
Here too Platonism was of aid. “God” according to the Christian message
(especially of Paul the Apostle, as Augustine tells us), cannot be known
and loved and enjoyed unless God gives Himself to be known as love which
rejoices in what is other, even in what is ruined and unworthy. “God” just so
effectuates His judgment (His “revaluation” of the predominant values under
political sovereignty) of grace on the earth paradoxically as a justification of
the ungodly. But how could “God” be engaged in such temporal and indeed
material acts as reported by the Christian gospel and remain God, that is, the
object of supreme desire which is supreme precisely by virtue of ontological
transcendence of the vicissitudes of temporal-spatial existence? If, on the one
hand, the Christian message with its affirmation of God coming in the flesh is
the permanent crisis of ontotheology’s supreme, perfect and timelessly eternal
Being, just here Platonism (in spite of itself) provided to Augustine (as it had
earlier to Origin) with a needed qualifier by which to preserve the divine
initiative, hence grace as grace, in this relation of imminence to immanence
and Giver to gift. God’s Trinitarian self-relations, Augustine held, are “simple,”
that is to say, eternal, immense, immaterial, “spiritual.”85 God is spirit not
matter. God as spirit is “simple” and not compounded, thus not vulnerable to
disintegration like all material combinations, capable then of persistence. Thus
the complex divine life of the three is “immutable” in being. We cannot conceive
this unique simplicity, only describe it. But the description of God’s Trinitarian
existence as simple qualifies God’s internal relations or self-organization,
expressed in the giving of the Son and the sending of the Spirit, as ineffable and
incomprehensible to all that is not God, which by contrast is material, hence
temporal, located, embodied. This divine simplicity guarantees that from the
origin things could have been otherwise, that the necessities of our world exist
within a divine contingency which exceeds the visible totality. The gifts of the
world, its redemption and fulfillment, are not necessary but exist by the costly
grace of divine self-determination. Thus grace is ontologically secured in the
Christian’s God existence as an eternally self-organized becoming, the Father
begetting the Son and breathing the Spirit who eternally return to the Father in
love and joy, bringing with them the renewed creation now included by virtue of
their historical missions in them.
Mystery or muddle? Is this the affirmation of something which we can know?

Or rather the negation of what we know? Is it the description of a “fact,” which
serves then as a rule for reverent speech about the divine complexity which is the
Trinity? Or is it the importation of an alien metaphysical insight that ultimately
subverts that divine complexity of the God of the gospel, even as ironically it
proves to be the Nothing uncovered by genealogy? Herein lies the ambiguity
which has troubled Christian-Platonic theology in the West ever since Augustine.
With this Platonically inspired proviso of simplicity have we a rule of reverent
speech about the encompassing mystery in its imminence to our immanence?
Or have we that reification of a Nothing against which Nietzsche railed, that is,
the empty cipher of the Christian who would rather have nothing for a meaning
than no meaning at all?
We can only make progress in better answering this question if we overcome
the Platonic construction of the relation of matter and spirit as a relation of
matter to mind. If matter is self-organizing, as per the continuity thesis, it is no
longer thought as it used to be: dead, inert, irreducibly hard atoms randomly
interacting in the void, as in Epicurean materialism (or, equivalently, the dreadful
unbounded, the disorganized Chaos of all possibles, as in Platonism). Rather
self-organizing matter is itself capable of spirit, of conceptualization in a possible
world, that is of a “full and complete concept” (Leibniz) precisely in and as the
individual idiosyncrasy that it is in its own full sequence by virtue of its internal
relations to the cosmos (for Leibniz’s “windowless” monad, by virtue of its internal
relation to God who relates each to all). If that is so, then the correlate notion, spirit,
tells about how individuals connect with the forces at work in the world to form
monadologies, that is, communities. Hence, spirit accordingly is also not being
thought as it used to be: as mind imposing order on chaotic possibilities, forcing
them within the boundaries of intelligible form, as in Plato (or, equivalently, as
the unmotivated “swerve” in Epicureanism, personified as an arbitrary act of will,
the blind though productive desire of the deus exlex whimsically playing out all
possibilities in infinite time, the circulus vitiotus deus).
If matter is itself self-organizing, the contrast between matter and spirit is no
longer a contrast between the blind, chaotic infinity of possibilities and mind
which selects from these for actuality by materializing them as instruments
of a goal extrinsic to their own idiosyncrasy. The human mind certainly does
impose order on the chaos in its own interest. But this intelligent action is not
spirit, which is rather alignment of forces to form living wholes, community not
mere order, sharing not mere economy. Mind is matter’s self-organization and
organization is just how material minds function, while both mind and matter
are functions of primordial desire, the erotic hunger of life for life, Nietzsche’s
will to power, which Deleuze, with Spinoza’s help, socializes as the combination
of forces. Inorganic matter’s tendency toward organization has its rarest and
most precious manifestation in organic life, supremely (so far as we know) in
the human brain. But even this mentality—our human consciousness—remains
flesh, something material. Spirit, according to an important (though not fully
integrated) line of thought in Augustine, is what binds individuals together into
communities, beginning with the Holy Spirit, who eternally binds together in
love the Father and the Son, and Who, correspondingly, temporally unites the
breath of life with clay to make living beings, who brings the Crucified Son back
to the Father’s living embrace, and in the new creation unites believers with the
Son to suffer and to enjoy the eternal dance (perichoreisis) of the Father with
the Son and the Son with the Father.86 Spirit in every case is what binds together
that which is naturally individualized or unnaturally estranged, as blessed eros
in creation, as holy agape in the new creation. Accordingly there can be natural
spirits and unnatural ones, human spirits and demonic spirits, Holy Spirit and an
unholy spirit, since combinations can be life-enhancing unions or life-destroying
aggregations, active or reactive, trivial or significant, going with the grain or against
it, holy communions or collective egoisms. Love, or desire, is what for good or ill
unites individuals into spiritual wholes that become to these individuals “second
nature,” acquired nature, internal to the selves which may logically or factually
have existed before the coming of community and their incorporation into it,
constituting an achieved transcendence within immanence.
If spirit with matter belongs on the plane of immanence in the way that
community belongs together with individuality, and if both aspects of
immanence express the self-organizing insignia of life, then the respective
domains of philosophy and theology may be mapped along new lines,
not ontological and legal, but of spirit and life. While matter tends toward
organization, community (not aggregates, or associations, but the sharing
which becomes internal to the individuals who enter into communion)
comes upon matter in events that cannot be deduced from the status quo
ante, taken as eternal repetition of the same. “The Spirit blows where He
will” (Jn 3.8). Philosophy as the quest for original principles looks back,
however, seeking cause(s) of all that necessarily follows, whether primordial
or more immediate, whether single or multiple, whether in repetition of
the same or in repetition of difference. It is therefore necessarily reductive
in its method and suspicious of spirit. But theology strains forward in
wonder about what is new, which comes, as it were, from the future into the
present, from all-possibility to new actuality. It is accordingly imaginative in

its method, even recklessly so, “enthusiasm” according priority to unrealized
possibilities vis-à-vis actuality. Philosophy gives a metaphysical account of
the present in terms of origins to which it traces phenomena back. Theology
is an eschatological account of the present in terms of possible futures, for
which the oppressed creation groans. Philosophy is a protology, theology an
eschatology. This construction, to be sure, involves a judgment: “[L]earn from
the apostle to consider the whole creature as it waits, groans, and travails
in pain, i.e., as it turns in disgust from what now is and yearns for what is
to come. Then the science of the essences of things and of their accidental
qualities and differences will soon become worthless.”87 Luther, a “modern”
Augustinian,88 judges against the dualism of the metaphysical tradition on
behalf of the whole creature. With the apostle, Luther judges for the coming
liberation of the suffering body and anguished soul. Or, what is the same,
Luther judges that philosophically God is hidden in the sense that God the
Giver’s presence and gift is not discernable in the darkness of philosophical
light, that worse, the metaphysical construction of God as the perfection of
this anguished being of the world makes God into a devil, Deus absconditus.
An eschatology thus always presupposes or constructs a protology as its own
“old,” as the actual that is now being relativized by new possibilities that have
come on the scene, which coming is the mode of God’s being on the plane of
immanence. But protology does not necessarily presuppose eschatology, since
it may as readily think in terms of eternal return of the same in a spirituality
of heroic naturalism, or, if Deleuze is right, eternal becoming in a spirit of
experimental naturalism. Both theology and philosophy share a common world;
they are present to one another. Both occupy a place on the plane of immanence,
side by side in one world running by the same rules. But philosophy need not
think of itself as an “old” in relation to another “new.” It only does so, when and if
theology has disrupted its domain and upset its equilibrium by introducing the
equivocation encoded in the evangelical paradox of the apostle’s proclamation of
“Christ crucified.” But this proclamation comes, as it seems, as a pure contingency
and thus falls on the wrong side of Lessing’s ugly ditch. Theology, as a result, must
think of itself as a “new” in relation to a philosophical “old,” since otherwise it
appears on the plane of immanence as nothing but a fortuity, without a claim to
truth that surpasses what philosophy can know of God, the Deus absconditus. By
the same token, however, theology ever needs philosophy in order to determine
its own place in our world, “whose form is passing away.”89
A contemporary alternative: Žižek—Milbank
Thus we have arrived through the course of this chapter to a proposal about
the place of theology on the plane of immanence shared with contemporary
metaphysics. The alternative to this view of theology is the analogy of being. In
this theological mode, finite things can by means of similitude be made to point
to an encompassing transcendent reality and be seen in turn as sacramental
participants in that divine reality. In the case of philosophy, the alternative
would be negative dialectics. Negative dialectics finds the motive of movement
on the plane of immanence, not in plentitude (as in Deleuze90) but in lack. An
alternative to our construction of the theology—philosophy relation could thus
be formulated, in Žižek’s words, as between “a Christianity which fully asserts the
paradox of the coincidentia oppositorum in the transcendent God in whom all
creatures analogically participate versus the atheist-Hegelian Christianity which
treats paradox ‘as a merely logical moment to be surpassed’. . .”91 This alternative
gives a competitive, if not confrontational model of the theology-philosophy
relation as found in the Milbank–Žižek exchange, The Monstrosity of Christ.
Here transcendental Thomism and Hegelian negative dialectics confront one
another, demanding of us a choice in a contest of mutually exclusive claims that
ostensively replay the Protestant-Catholic divergence,92 but in reality (as we shall
show) succeeds only in repeating (in loud register) the Kantian themes that we
are attempting to surpass.
Creston Davis, who has edited this exchange, rightly warns at the conclusion
of his Introduction that the Enlightenment’s ideal of “ahistorical reason” is
not capable of arbitrating between Milbank and Žižek. The cultural truce of
Kantianism has broken down, even if its themes still predominate—a very
unpleasant situation. Without a Tribunal of Reason to keep theology and
philosophy peacefully cordoned off in each one’s own domains, “[o]urs is an
age of uncompromising winner-takes-all. The encounter between Milbank and
Žižek is the intellectual equivalent of Ultimate Fighting . . .”93 Žižek at times
describes and as such defends his “dialogue” with Milbank as “an interaction of
two monologues” on the grounds that “a pure confrontation of positions is never
possible: no formulation of differences is neutral, every attempt to delineate
the confronted positions already formulates them from the standpoint of one
position.”94 Probably Milbank would agree.
It is a confrontation. Milbank for his part calls upon Žižek to act upon
his own best insights into the Christ-event and its significance for resistance
to imperium. Thus he should “further accept the full skandalon of the New
Testament: namely, that this necessity [of the idea of the Incarnation for
the possibility of truth and justice], in its actuality, really is conjoined to the
infinite in its own actuality.”95 Žižek’s atheistic interpretation of Christianity
resolves itself, he charges, into incoherent kenoticism (“God” actually died on
Golgotha, the “Spirit” of Jesus lives on in the militant community). But this
atheism removes the ground from beneath Žižek’s own commitments to truth
and justice. So the philosopher should repent and believe in their grounding
in the transcendental God of Thomism, “the infinite in its own actuality.” Žižek
for his part commences the final part of Monstrosity with a counter-attack,
rejecting Milbank’s appeal for his conversion. Not willing to settle for a polite,
postmodern agreement to disagree, but continuing in his “truly Hegelian
approach,” Žižek reproaches Milbank: “You say this is your position, but it is
not true—you do not have a position at all!” It is the theologian then who should
repent and believe, namely, that his resort to analogy masks in bad faith the truth
of Golgotha: “there is no transcendent God-Father who discloses himself to us,
humans, only in a limited way . . . God is hidden not to hide some transcendent
Truth, but to hide the fact that there is nothing to hide.” Pressing the atheistic
point to underscore how “Milbank misreads him,” Žižek registers afresh the
Nietzschean reversal of values: “Evil is not finite as opposed to the infinite, so
that it can be redeemed when it is disclosed that it is ‘somehow infinite;’ Evil
is, on the contrary, the Infinite itself so far as it entertains a negative attitude
toward the finite, negating or excluding the wealth of the finite content. Or, as
Schelling put it, Evil is much more spiritual than Good; Evil is not the body
rebelling against the spirit, but a bleak infertile spirit which hates bodily reality
. . .”96 The antagonists lower themselves to name-calling. Žižek calls Milbank’s
professed politics as a “Red Tory” a form of “soft fascism.”97 Milbank accuses
Žižek of nostalgia for the East European Communist ghetto (an insult that
Žižek unnervingly owns up to).
A zero-sum confrontation like the foregoing leaves spectators entertained,
sometimes dazzled, but as often perplexed and demoralized by the suspicion
that a false dilemma is being imposed upon them by the antagonists. Tertium
non datur? Yes, indeed as per the present proposal. From that perspective,
the hope is that we can discover a better alternative to reciprocal demands for
unconditional capitulation. The hope here is that we can use their confrontation
to move the argument ahead by moving it back, as it were, to the pre-Kantian
“ontotheological” alternatives articulated by Spinoza and Leibniz, as we shall see
in Chapter 5.98
Milbank invokes “paradox” and Kierkegaard, but he means “analogy,” and

specifically the “analogy of being,” that is the equivocation (with respect to
the univocity requisite to meaningful speech on the plane of immanence)
entailed when finite terms are made to refer by similitude to the transcendental
infinite, not properly but by analogy, a procedure that in turn bathes the
finite in a “metaxological” (i.e. “participatory”—William Desmond) aura of
infinitude. He explicitly etymologizes the Greek para-doxa in this way: the
interplay of background and foreground, of hiddenness and revealedness in
any landscape (=worldview) implies “not an impossible contradiction that
must be overcome (dialectics) but rather an outright impossible coincidence
of opposites that can (somehow, we know not how) be persisted with. This is
the Catholic logic of paradox—of an ‘overwhelming glory’ (para-doxa) which
nonetheless saturates our everyday life.”99 In this notion of paradox, we do not
have the surprising event of the vindication of the crucified Jesus at work in
the gospel proclamation subverting the dominant mindset, the speech-act of
Paul’s proclaiming of “Christ crucified.” In the latter case, as we shall explore
in greater detail in Chapter 5, paradox is not simile, but metaphor, that is,
not a comparison between known things which illumines the less known by
the better, but a collision of literally incompatible terms which yields a new,
hitherto unknown reference in the world.
Converting Pauline metaphor to simile, there is a very specific soteriology at
work here, turning the passion of Christ into pure action. Following Eckhart,
Milbank sees “not just the action [passion?] on the Cross, but the Incarnation
itself as resolving the aporia of sin”—namely, the aporia that the finite has
culpably denied and rejected its “ontologically constitutive relationship to the
infinite.” The Incarnation reverses sin’s action by a sheer, non-dialectical counter-
assertion, namely, of Christ’s action of living the ontologically constitutive
relationship to the infinite, refusing the perplexing refusal of infinitude in sin:
“the Cross is but one aspect of an entire action whereby the finite is restored to
full existence in time through its paradoxical conjunction with the infinite.”100
The New Testament’s Jesus, who innocently bears the sin of the world, and so
cries out His Godforsakenness, is thus eclipsed by Milbank’s idealized depiction
of “perfect action in time and through suffering perfectly . . .”101 Here, the
Infinite God in the dress of finitude strides like a Greek hero to the cross, or like
Socrates to the hemlock: not really a passion as it appears but rather an action.
This depiction supposedly shows us—“somehow, we know not how”—that
dereliction becomes beatitude when we reconnect it with transcendence, as
Christ himself supposedly did originally. As a similitude, Christ’s action gives
us a model to imitate; salvation comes by the imitatio Christi. Žižek will be

right, however, when he argues against Milbank’s analogical imagination that
this highly optimistic soteriology falsifies experience; it wears rose-colored
glasses in the name of faith, it looks at the world “as if ” it were bathed in infinite
glory, it looks at passion “as if ” it were action. The historical Christian paradox,
however, narrates a real contradiction on the cross, a confrontation between
the hallowed Father and the sin-laden Son, which must be overcome in the new
action of the Spirit if it is to be overcome at all—all this moreover here, on the
plane of immanence, or not at all.
Milbank thus remains captivated by Kantianism’s als ob. His program of
“radical orthodoxy” is misunderstood when it is dismissed as nothing but a
repristination of medieval Catholicism, when in fact it is a highly acute and
critical stance within modernity. His is a transcendental Thomism. Milbank
traces deviations from Thomist equivocity that began in Duns Scotus, continued
in Ockam, took on popular form in Calvinism and culminated in the monstrous
God of Cartesian voluntarism, the deus exlex.102 In the full flower of Cartesian
theology we come to the Hegelian story of the “contingent dawning of the
realization that there ‘is’ only the contingent . . .” This path has actually been
taken. We today are at its end. Milbank, who narrates this tale, knows this and
knowingly participates in this state of affairs. He does not, after all, precritically
renew Thomistic proofs for God’s existence to ground theology, but takes his place
on the leveled field of postmodernism. He quietly concedes to Žižek the latter’s
point that there is no “going back” on this realization in Scotus of contingency
“save at the price of bad faith.” That is in fact an enormous concession. In that
case, a “universal structure of essential and teleological significance,” such as
medieval Catholicism represents with its doctrine of the analogy of being,
could at best be held today as a matter of “faith”103 (even as Žižek vigorously
disallows also this postmodern act of “faith” as “bad faith”). Milbank’s program
then is indeed for a “radicalized orthodoxy”104 that no longer pretends to impose
faith by the force of rationally compelling foundational arguments on the field
of philosophy. Rather it offers its vision of a re-enchanted universe in the
defenseless posture of the leap of faith (to this extent, Kierkegaard indeed!). The
argument for this vision comes down to the pragmatic advantages of its ethical
and aesthetics implications. Rhetorically Milbank forcefully sets his vision of
ultimate medieval-Catholic harmony over against the bleak disillusionment
represented by Protestant modernity, in this instance, by Žižek’s consequent
metaphysical nihilism of negative dialectics. Precisely then what is “radical” in
“radical orthodoxy” is its location within Kantianism.
The Hegelian break with Kantianism’s “as if ” is for Žižek Christianity’s “bad
news,” which undermines the als ob of rational faith in transcendent ideas of God,
freedom, and immortality by the philosophical comprehension of its religious
representation or symbol, Christ crucified. Thus Žižek cheerfully concedes to
Milbank this accusation of disillusionment, that “the good news is the bad news,
just viewed from a different perspective.”105 What is at stake in Žižek’s insistence
on the “bad news” is the “monstrosity” of Christ:106 the cry of dereliction indicates
“separation of God not only from the world, but from himself also—in short, the
explosion of an unbearable antagonism, of Evil, in the very heart of God himself
. . .” How are we to combine the full assertion of this tension that tears apart
God with Milbank’s claim that, for the Catholic’s “paradoxical, nondialectical
logic, there is never any contradiction, conflict or tension[?]”107 On the other
hand, the Hegelian mischief Žižek goes on to make of this confrontation of
the Father and Son with the claim rationally to comprehend it, however, is quite
another matter: “. . . as Hegel pointed out, what dies on the Cross is not only the
earthly-finite representative of God, but God himself, the very transcendent God
of beyond. Both terms of the opposition, Father and Son, the substantial God
as the Absolute In-Itself and the God-for-us, revealed to us, die, are sublated in
the Holy Spirit.”108 Milbank is quite in order to call this Hegelian reading of the
Trinity simply “heresy” vis-à-vis the doctrine’s classical form,109 as we saw above
in Augustine’s qualification of Trinitarian complexity with divine simplicity
(a point that Žižek dialectically concedes, arguing that the orthodox form of the
doctrine is already the cover up of the trauma of the death of God).
In ironic parallel, then, to Milbank’s sleight of hand with “paradox” (when
he means the analogy of being, not the metaphor of “Christ crucified”), Žižek’s
“dialectic” fails to follow Paul the Apostle’s sourcing of the dialectic of wrath and
mercy in the Father’s self-surpassing love for the hostile world and its victorious
outcome in the Spirit’s return to the Father of the Crucified Son in the company
of the ungodly with whom and for whom He perished. This “victory” of God for
us is the sense of Paul’s “resurrection faith” as reconciliation of the holy God and
the sinful creature and just so the creature’s liberation from demonic subjugation.
This Pauline “positive dialectics,” as we shall examine with the help of Agamben
in Chapter 6, is motivated by love that must surpass its own opposition to
what really is against love, that is, to the sinful, in order to surpass guilt and
condemnation. In place of this, Žižek substitutes Hegel’s negative dialectics,
which is primordially motivated by lack, by negativity, by nothingness, which is
a modern Gnosticism.110 Milbank gets this precisely right: “The process of real
becoming (which is all that there is for Hegel) is the outworking of the initial
contradiction according to which abstract original being (because univocal) is

identical with its opposite, which is nothing . . . contradiction is the motive force
of real becoming.”111 Here God is not the Beloved Community, but an infinite
and strangely impersonal narcissist-seeking self in all things.
As mentioned, Žižek launched this exchange with a polemical broadside,
“The Trouble with Christ in Orthodoxy . . .” in which he erases the “crucial”
ecumenical doctrine of the Trinitarian “distinction between essence and its
hypostases”112 since this very distinction of simplicity in nature and complexity
in tri-personal existence in the divine life, as Žižek realizes, is what establishes
the Christian Trinity as “the original unfathomable mystery, in clear contrast
to the God of the Philosophers, who see in him the primordial simplicity of
the Cause.” Yet just this theological move is disallowed by Žižek, who imposes
upon the orthodox essence-hypostasis distinction the Hegelian (metaphysical)
“opposition” (n.b., not epistemic “distinction”) between “In-Itself and For-us.” He
does so in order “deeply” to problematize the orthodox distinction: “from the
strict Hegelian standpoint . . . is not the very essence of the Son to enable God to
manifest himself and intervene in human history?”113 The orthodox answer to
this question would be, “Precisely not; the essence of the Son is the same as that
of the Father, since God is God’s self-expression, even though in living this divine
Life it is the Father personally who speaks and the Son personally who is spoken.”
Imposing negative dialectics here obviates the gospel narrative from which the
doctrine of the Trinity derives, which tells that only the Son became incarnate;
that therefore in the drama of His incarnate life there can be and must be read as
a real confrontation at Golgotha between the sending Father who now abandons
and the Son who is abandoned on account of the Son’s inclusion into the very
life of God of what opposes God. This is not a Hegelian pseudo-confrontation,
a dialectic of empty signs. It is a positive dialectic of the thing signified, which
issues in a real conciliation in the Spirit, not metamorphosis into another
genus. If such considerations still do not sufficiently indicate for Žižek God’s
“full engagement” in human history (namely, to the point of the Son’s earthly
dereliction as an event within the divine Life), if instead they rather indicate that
human history has here acquired an eschatological destiny in God’s own eternal
life by the promised and now justified coming of the Beloved Community—such
precisely would be the orthodox point.
While Žižek boldly owns his Hegelianism, it is in fact (as Hegel is in fact) a
renegade form of Kantianism desperately seeking to secure political subjectivity
in a godless world so that the dehumanizing implications of our godlessness
may be resisted. Milbank sees this heroic motive in Žižek with great clarity.
“Since, Žižek argues, in materialist fashion, ‘all there is’ is materially determined
processes, such that the human being ‘is’ only body and brain, the human
subjective sense of a free exception to this state of affairs is an invocation of
the ‘non-All,’ which signifies the contingency of the material totality itself—an
excess over its determinate logic . . .”114 Žižek’s “non-All” secures the otherwise
highly counterintuitive claim to a noumenal space of freedom within the
material realm, from which new causal series may be freely introduced. Žižek
deploys the “non-All” as a negative theology, to escape ontotheological totality.115
In Žižek’s own words (paraphrasing Badiou): “How can a human animal forsake
its animality and put its life at the service of a Transcendent Truth? How can the
‘transubstantiation’ from the pleasure-oriented life of an individual to the life of
a subject dedicated to a Cause occur? In other words, how is a free act possible?
How can one break (out of) the network of the causal connections of positive
reality and conceive an act that begins by and in itself?”116 Žižek’s double-sided
doctrine of “ontological incompleteness”—that “there is nothing which is not
matter” and that “the non-All is matter” thus serves as a Kantian limit-concept
to open up a non-reductionist “space for the explanation of immaterial
phenomena” in a relentlessly material world. Its symbol is the cry of dereliction,
philosophically comprehended as the death of the abstract otherworldly God
and the birth in its place of the militant community of the oppressed struggling
in the Spirit for freedom.
The dilemma of the post-Stalinist Marxist (Žižek is discussing Lenin’s
treatise, Materialism and Empiriocriticism) is acutely felt in this connection:
“There are two options here: either subjectivity is an illusion, or reality is in
itself (not only epistemologically) non-All.” Žižek’s Marxian motive here is
to avoid Stalinism: there is no “big Other” (in this case, the Class Struggle) of
which we are the innocent instruments; we take the risk and responsibility of
political subjectivity in Class Struggle upon ourselves.117 This reckoning with,
and existential alternative to, the crushing burden of Stalinism is surely to be
appreciated. Yet Milbank is just as surely right to ask in the end whether “one
is not left with something relatively banal? Namely, that the immanent ‘is only’
the economic Trinity, and so God ‘is only’ the creation itself, or ‘is only’ a map.
Behind the inflated rhetoric of such statements lies mere atheism, for which
there is no creation but only nature (or worse) and no man as the creature in
the image of God, but only a rather weird, crippled, but dangerously complex
animal . . .”118 Banality notwithstanding, the appeal of post-Stalinist thinkers
like Žižek and Badiou to Pauline paradox is understandable in our present
situation. If we deny totality to comprehending theory, “contingent” events
become possible again as indeed a contingent event is needed to evoke the

political subject who breaks free from the otherwise total grip of the causal
nexus and gives herself to a cause transcending animal self-interest. Moreover,
Žižek on this basis is entitled to draw a bold and interesting conclusion: “only
atheists can truly believe; the only true belief is belief without any support in
the authority of some presupposed figure of the ‘big Other’ [Lacan] . . . the pure
form of belief deprived of its substantialization.”119 That is a motif reminiscent
of Rudolf Bultmann’s theology (and Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology, which
doubles as the “mythology” from which Bultmann wanted to rescue faith). To
that extent the “death of God” is recognizably Christian: “God” does not work
in Christian theology as the Big Other of bad faith, just as Christ’s prayer in
Gethsemane for deliverance from passion goes unanswered. Atheism vis-à-vis
such transcendence is a valid conclusion120 because Milbank has (howsoever
quietly) conceded to Žižek that we cannot go back on Hegel’s contingent
realization that contingency is all there is.
A Trinitarian theology could in principle exploit this realization, as Leibniz
tried in his confrontation with Spinoza, as we shall see in Chapter 5. A Christian
theology of nature would locate the necessities of becoming within the larger
contingency of the divine decree, which would mean that from all eternity
the cross of the Incarnate Son is known and willed as the cost to God of this
creation. But just here, Milbank’s orthodoxy, howsoever “radical,” seems more
Neo-Platonic than Pauline: “Milbank’s vision remains that of a substantial
immediate harmony of Being; there is no place in it for the outburst of radical
negativity, for the full import of the shattering news that ‘God is dead.’ ”121 Žižek
judgment is thus harsh, but acute: “my claim is that it is Milbank who is in effect
guilty of heterodoxy; ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism I am
more Christian than Milbank.”122
Thus we have reached another impasse in the now prolonged history of
Kantian impasses: when we begin with the antinomy of freedom and necessity,
we can never not continue to repeat it in endlessly new ways. Similarly, when we
begin with the sensible-supersensible distinction, we can never not continue
to repeat it in endlessly new ways. At times, both thinkers are aware of this.
Milbank, for instance, argues that the freedom-necessity antinomy is based
on the false equation of freedom or subjective agency with the voluntaristic
vision of the deus exlex, as if any otherwise malicious or stupid act could
be called “free” simply because it was arbitrarily willed.123 Žižek in parallel
fashion veritably roasts the Derrida wanna-be, John Caputo, for apophatically
castrating the word, “God,” to name “radical openness, for the hope of change,
for the always-to-come Otherness . . .” “as spectral life that ‘stirs within the
name of God,’ but is already betrayed by each positive determination.”124 All
such apophatisms, whether Kant’s, or Heidegger’s, or Derrida’s, not only remain
within the sacrificial structure of Christian Platonism identified by Nietzsche,
but also in just this way avoid “the properly apocalyptic shattering power” of
the death of God expressed and preserved in externalization, in “organized
religion,” in dogma, in the monstrosity of Christ represented as the crucified.
All such bourgeois theology of accommodation, despite armchair radicalism,
fails utterly to read the sign of these postmodern times: “Today, apocalypse
is near at many levels . . .”125 Liberal theology continues on with “business as
usual” in the Kantian impasses of modernity, even though the Milbank-Žižek
exchange demonstrates how desperate this culture has become for genuine
alternatives.
Apocalyptic times
Theology, for its part, might well take up this hint from Žižek about apocalyptic
to think about its relation to philosophy today, in Euro-America, on the plane
of immanence. That would involve a language of God that is neither univocal
nor analogical, but, as we find in the New Testament, a language expressing the
imminent God in subversive parable, paradox, and enigma. This constitutes the
topic of Chapter 5 of this book. Yet we can indicate here by way of conclusion
how this apocalyptic language also modifies Žižek’s all too convenient Hegelian
philosophical colonization and rational sanitizing of early Christianity’s
apocalypse of the death on the imperial stake of the Son of the Father in heaven
and His vindication as Messiah by the Spirit in the resurrection of the dead
(Rom. 1.2–3). Frank Kermode grasped this irreducible quality of the apocalyptic
parable in his study of the Gospel of Mark a generation ago. Mark’s “parables
are about everybody’s incapacity to penetrate their sense” (see Mk 4.10–13).126
Accordingly theology may give another name to the opaque force of life which
Nietzsche wanted to make luminous in naming it Dionysus—Deus absconditus,
which, like the apocalyptic parable, may only be decoded by its own retelling,
Deus revelatus by the mediation of the Deus incarnatus (see Mk 4.14–20). Yet
the parable, when retold, is still heard in such a way that it never ceases to a
verbum externum, with the discomfiting result that “being an insider is only
a more elaborate way of being kept outside”127 or conversely, that being kept
out is an equally elaborate way of being gathered in (see the Pauline paradox
in Rom. 11.32). If God is thus to be understood apocalyptically as the One

who comes like a thief in the night, who plunders the strong man’s goods by
first binding him up (Mk 3. 27), as imminent to our immanence in this way
of contesting sovereignty, then this positive dialectic of Word and Spirit of the
parable which is the Crucified Jesus and the retelling of Him by the Spirit on
Easter morn, must be rigorously observed. Likewise, in that case, the light of
grace does not supersede the light of nature, but actually depends upon its
continued shining for its own further illumination. Whether the light of nature
desires or seeks or needs the light of grace, on the other hand, is not in the
power of either philosophy or theology to determine or to bestow, though in
either case divine reality corresponds to the perspective from which it is seen.
Rigorous philosophy sees an enigma, Deus absconditus.
5
Deus Incarnatus
Recalling the critique of Heidegger and Derrida in Chapter 2, we turn in

this chapter to epistemic issues facing theology, if it would or could arise as a
discipline on a plane alongside philosophy in which immanence is immanent
only to immanence, that is, how theological subjectivity could arise under these
conditions. We will inquire how the thick theological notions of Trinity and
Incarnation may came about and hold ground, that is, how they map in the
one world shared with contemporary metaphysics. An epistemic account is not
an epistemology, that is, an attempt to found knowledge as such by acquiring
a timeless and universal knowledge of knowledge through which one would
be able to define and assign one and all the various domains of inquiry. An
epistemic account by contrast arises “after the fact,” or better, after “the event”
that invokes a particular line of inquiry by the narrative it constructs and the
project it mandates. An account of epistemic access thus serves to clarify and
relate a particular line of inquiry to others. It clarifies to the inquirers themselves
what it is they seek to know and how they achieve that knowledge. It relates its
particular inquiry and discipline to others in the world (e.g. in the asymmetrical
way worked out in this book, that theology must engage with philosophy, while
philosophy may engage with theology, but does not have to in order to pursue
its own vocation). The question of epistemic access scrutinizes the subjectivity of
a line of inquiry, but not in any transcendental sense. The exploration involved
here is akin to Nietzsche’s “genealogy” in that it clarifies the narrative of the
event that elicits and sustains the theological subject, holding up to the light
long forgotten metaphors that have since turned into clichés: in the present
case, the Pauline “Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1.23).1 The claim of this chapter is
that what theology seeks to know by the “word of the cross” (1 Cor. 1.18) is the
Deus incarnatus. What is at stake in this knowledge is the justification of the
ungodly by the theological subjectivity that knows the hidden God now as Deus
incarnatus. The Deus incarnatus is found at the juncture with philosophy in the
Cry of Dereliction, where abandonment is met and vanquished and the Deus
absconditus is overcome in the flesh.
Disentangling Paul and Plato
When asked in a seminar on Paul years ago why theological students study
academic theology and even philosophy’s notorious “wisdom of the world,”
J. Louis Martyn observed in rabbinic fashion, “If God condemns the wisdom
of this world, how much more does He condemn its folly.” Paul’s conflict is not
Plato’s conflict of the soul’s higher powers against the body’s worldly needs,
desires, and distractions. But for him the wisdom of God manifest in the crucified
Messiah conflicts with the wisdom of the world at its highest and best, as, for
fitting example, in Plato’s ethical idealism. Martyn pointed us to the apocalyptic
antinomy of the ages that arose in second Temple Judaism as the “mother of
Christian theology” (Käsemann), according to which God’s good creation lies
prostrate and imprisoned, its dominion usurped, groaning for liberation in a new
creation, as the theodicy of faith in the eighth chapter of Romans so poignantly
depicts. To stay with this picture and follow out this line of thought is at once to
dePlatonize and reMessianize Christian theology. To understand it and leave it
behind (or, more recently, to find it again), on the other hand, is the subterranean
theological tale of twentieth-century philosophy.
The story of Paul the Apostle and philosophy in the last century goes back to the
early work of Martin Heidegger,2 whose initial line of interpretation was carried
on influentially in the theological school of his Marburg colleague, Rudolf
Bultmann.3 The “basic insight” here “was that the apostle’s anthropological
termini do not, as in the Greek world, characterize the component parts of the
human organism; they apply to existence as a whole . . .”4 In the crosshairs is
Plato’s tri-partite division of the soul and the hierarchical organization of it he
recommended in the Republic, Book VII, the original and quintessential portrait
of Western philosophy’s rationalism and ethical humanism. Bultmann’s rebellious
pupil, Ernst Käsemann, in turn appropriated Paul’s holistic anthropology and
apocalyptic theology to contend in his own day against the “last custodians of
the ethical idealism of a liberal world,” who even after Hitler “content themselves
with a Christian humanism in which Christology possesses at most an awakening
and controlling function” and Paul’s “Kyrios is turned into an example and
Deus Incarnatus 145
model.” Against this, he claimed, the fire of Jewish apocalyptic illuminates “the
nightmares of contemporary man” and makes Paul’s theology vivid and alive
by posing the “disquieting question . . . who owns the earth?”5 This legal and
geographical question of apocalyptic, as we shall see, is Christologically modified
by Paul in paradoxically ascribing sovereignty to the Crucified Messiah. It is not
just a reversal in which sovereignty remains legal and geographical while being
assigned to a new, hitherto excluded or oppressed subject. But in giving the
inheritance of the earth to the excluded and the oppressed by way of the cross,
sovereignty itself is transformed and in this a genuine novelty appears.
Historically, Plato and Paul are woven together in a complex knot of Western
tradition that this chapter attempts patiently to untie by a study of theological
language. The claim is that Paul’s language about God constitutes an historical
world, organizing experience to transform suffering into redemptive and
liberative action and in this way to contest the political sovereignty of this age.
In this connection, one of two crucial differentiations that Käsemann offered
was his repudiation of existentialist individualism as valid interpretation of Paul:
“The terms used in Pauline anthropology all undoubtedly refer to the whole
man in the varying bearings and capacities of his existence; but they do not
apply to what we call the individual at all. Here existence is always fundamentally
conceived from the angle of the world to which one belongs.”6 The other
clarification was to dispute his teacher’s reliance on Heidegger’s existential
analytic of Dasein as the source at once of great insight, but also of a great blind
spot. Käsemann isolated the categorical principle of Bultmann’s Heideggerian
interpretation of Paul: “Every assertion about God is simultaneously an assertion
about man and vice versa. For this reason and in this sense Paul’s theology is, at
the same time, anthropology.”7 Why, under this principle, one should persist as
theology in speaking of God at all, let alone in such a way as to issue a normative
anthropology, is a problem that Heidegger early on understood and acted upon.
Bultmann, evidently, never did. Grasping why, according to Paul, one must speak
of God as that which exceeds existentialist anthropology was Käsemann’s great
aim and contribution. Deus incarnatus does not mean and cannot be understood
as the metamorphosis of God into another genus, the human.
The “world” in Paul denotes “epoch,” the social organization of experience
that prevails in a given time. As Martyn later stated the matter in his
commentary on Galatians, “Paul’s distinction between the present evil age and
the new creation is not at all a distinction between the profane and the
sacred. It is in fact the end of that latter distinction”8—since it envisions the
redemption of the good creation by a deed of atonement that brings about its
new creation. That is not the victory of the sacred over the profane (or vice
versa) within this present evil age. Martyn’s achievement in this commentary
was to tease out this difference between the characteristic dualisms within
immanence (Greek and Jew, slave and free, married and single, as in Gal.
3.27–8) and what he calls the apocalyptic antimonies (e.g. flesh and Spirit,
Adam and Christ, God and devil).9 Apocalyptic theology likewise clarifies the
peculiar equivocation of New Testament language in reference to the sphere of
overlap between theological and (classic) philosophical (or legal) discourses:
the sarx (the flesh), the kosmos (the world). For theology in the tradition of
Paul, Augustine, and Luther, “flesh” can be the spiritual power of creaturely
hubris, boastful self-reliance over and against the Creator which despoils and
ruins the web of created life, and yet human “flesh” or the “body” can also be
the chosen dwelling place of the Creator, who makes it His very own forever
in the person of the Incarnate Son, whose body is a new temple of the Spirit
prepared for a new humanity. “World” can be both “the Apostasy” (as Irenaeus
later called it) but also the oppressed creation destined for final liberation.
“Behold, the tabernacle of God is with the people, and he will tabernacle with
them, and the people will be His people, and God Himself will be with them.
And He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, neither
mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the first things have passed away”
(Rev. 21.3–4).
Equivocation is then unavoidable when theology redeploys the language
of the present epoch to evoke its new “transcendence within immanence.”
This procedure has significant implications for the new relation of theology
and philosophy we are envisioning in this book. Just what “world” is it with its
wisdom that is theologically overturned by God’s remaking its instrument of
humiliation, torture and extermination the vehicle of a message about the right
and power of the coming messianic order of universal grace accomplished at the
Messiah’s death? As radical as is Paul’s opposition between this world and the
coming one, his word from God has incarnational bite on the wisdom of that
world and gains traction from within to make it foolish. It bites only because
of semantic, if not also ontological univocity. Univocity requires that the Deus
incarnatus be understood such that The Word, remaining divine, became flesh,
and His flesh, remaining flesh, becomes divine. Thus His cross does not represent
something else nor does it tell us what anything else is like. It is the imperial
state’s stake on which those who dissent and resist are hoisted in the flesh to
exhibit their folly before one and all and thus to close the case on them. The
cross is banning, abandonment in the name of God, for the sake of law and order,
Deus Incarnatus 147
for the preservation of civilization and in defense of political life. And only as
such does the cross of the Messiah become God’s word of grace, according to
Paul, banning the ban, effecting the death of this death, working this present
hell’s destruction. By the same token, then, God’s grace is not the transcendent
indifference of apatheia, however universal, however benign, but the zeal of the
Lord of hosts which comes with disruptive force. How can this be?
The disruption of grace
Historically, it had been the word of the cross that brought about the specifically
Christian-theological construction of deity expressed by the doctrine of the
Trinity, since the cross implicated the Creator not only in the creation’s space
and time, but also in its sin and death, that is, not only in what is not God but
also in what is opposed to God.10 This daunting ontological implication of the
Deus incarnatus explains the otherwise surprising contemporary fascination
with Paul the Apostle among a number of significant post-structuralists thinkers
(as we shall see, not all yet clearly or fully thinking after transcendentalism, on
a Deleuzian plane of immanence). We will engage these thinkers in some detail
in Chapter 6. But in this chapter the question remains: What is that word—the
word of the cross? And what is the epistemic access or theological subjectivity
that it creates? How is that possible on the plane of immanence? How do we
come to the Deus incarnatus?
There is no immediate answer. Traditional theories of religious language
contend over the Pauline “Christ crucified,” as if to capture it and put it to
work for causes other than its own. What theory would let the word of the
cross speak for itself and just so speak to us—not merely to provide answers
to our questions but to reframe our questions and thus give its own answer
also to us? Is that even possible? If so, that disruption would be theology, Paul’s
kind of theology after he was overtaken by the event reported and, as it were,
reenacted in him in hearing the word of the cross. Theology as a discipline
stands and falls with this Pauline “disruptive grace,”11 as George Hunsinger
deftly captured Barth’s theology of the permanent revolution. Here “God”
names the condition for the possibility of disruptive grace and “faith” for
this becoming, this acquisition of the new theological subjectivity. But the
disruptive reality of grace on this earth, we argue here in some distinction
from Barth, is God actually surpassing God12 in temporal events of the Word
incarnate and of the freely moving Spirit to justify the ungodly, as the Apostle
has it; this is the justice of God that puts at naught the things that are and
call into being those that do not yet exist. Not “God” then in the sense of
a regulative idea of human self-transcendence, but “God” is here meant in
the sense of the supreme instantiation of the freedom of self-overcoming Life:
Űber-Gott, if I might outbid Nietzsche, in reference to the Pauline “event” that
transpires within immanence when and where an uncanny surplus emerges
from its tomb, having beaten the prevailing rule at its own game, the original
Aufhebung, an achieved “transcendence within immanence.”
A critical clarification is immediately in order. Happily, eros may be disruptive,
but it is not the grace of agape under discussion here. Neither in principle is eros
agape’s foe. Eros finds value and enjoys it in another, as befits any creature that
does not have life per se but only per aliud, as the Scholastics a little too glibly (for
a robust Trinitarianism), and as Spinoza a little too rigidly (also for Trinitarian
theology), glossed the ontological difference between God and nature, action and
reaction. The point of the distinction, at least in the tradition of Paul, Augustine,
and Luther is that divine agape radiates from the One who exists per se and
not only per aliud, as obtains in creaturely existence. Neither needy nor greedy,
divine agape can thus be wholly and freely pro alium in a way that creaturely
eros, rightly in need of reciprocal exchange and mutual recognition if it is to be
just, cannot be. Agape is freedom for the other without obligating exchange and
reciprocating recognition; it is creatio ex nihilo, the insignia of true deity, esse
Deum dare. It is thus grounded in the antecedent life of the Three, according to
ecumenical Christian tradition, and being so grounded it also truly gives the same
when it enters into relationships with creatures. God is the Beloved Community
and as such can truthfully be so for others who are not God. With apologies
to Kant, I will refer to this divine ontology of agape at the end of Chapter 6 as
theology’s “immanental induction,” the “after the event” reflection on God’s one,
immanent life as inferred from the dramatic action of the three in the gospel
narrative. Theology thus hypothesizes God’s one, immanent life of agape as the
immanent condition for the possibility of God’s opening His life to the creature
through the missions of the Son and the Spirit. The hypothesis is that God exists
per se as per alium, as one through others, in that God’s own eternal existence is
the existence of the Father and the Son in the Spirit. While creaturely knowledge
of God’s unbounded ousia or essence can never be comprehensive, the essence
of God can accordingly be known truly as agape, as creative love, and as spirit,
as holy communion. Agape is the One Who is the Three, the love effective and
revealed in the economy of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but just so
also presupposed thereby as God’s very and eternal being. Note well: to affirm
Deus Incarnatus 149
in this way that God is spirit and God is love is to make a kataphatic affirmation,
also in regard to God’s essence, howsoever qualified by apophatic reserve that
comprehension of such divine life exceeds us.
Retrieving this theological tradition into an apocalyptic episode of modernity,
Bonhoeffer devised a new Christological formula when he famously called
Christ the “man for others.” He was drawing on the early Luther’s rediscovery of
Pauline agape, who distinguished agape from eros, that is to say, Creator from
creature, in that agape does not find value to enjoy but rather creates value in
unloved and even otherwise unlovable creatures. This universal of agape (“while
we were still weak,” Rom. 5.6, “while we were still enemies,” Rom. 5.10) occurred
once and for all in the human life of that one of the Three who suffered.13 It is this
event of Deus incarnatus that Paul first expressed by his proclaimed paradox,
Christ crucified, on the word of which the community of the renewed humanity
is therefore founded and is to persevere (1 Cor. 3.11). So also Nietzsche, though
not with approval: “God on a cross—the transvaluation of all hitherto existing
values!” Nietzsche perceived with amazement (though he did not rightly
understand) what the dull Christians of his time no longer sensed. Why?
Sensitivity to the Christological peculiarity of the New Testament’s language
has been muffled by generalizing theories of similitude, as if the point of New
Testament language were to generate mere reference to transcendence (any
transcendence, as in, “Is anyone out there?”) resulting in the Christological
banality that Jesus somehow shows us what God is like, a stance that then
necessarily oscillates uncontrollably between fundamentalist exclusivism (only
Jesus tells what God is like) and liberal relativism (Jesus tells me what God is
like). So long as this quest of natural theology for the Beyond is not disrupted by
the grace for those weak and at enmity, it makes no difference which stratagem
is employed: whether the kataphatic by the way of eminence, or the apophatic
by the way of negation, or in famous and subtle combination of these two by
way of Saint Thomas’ extension of the simile, the analogy of being. But all this
procedure begs the questions, Which transcendence? And how do we on the
plane of immanence come to access it epistemically, that is, without departing
from immanence?
As mentioned, the confrontation between biblical and philosophical
monotheism that took Christian form in Paul’s theology of the Messiah’s
cross was first and formatively parsed by the development of the doctrine of
the Trinity;14 we took special note of how it plays in Anselm’s teaching that
God is God’s self-communication in the previous chapter. This confrontation
has ebbed and flowed through the centuries. With the passing of modern
transcendentalism, it resumes today in full force. Robert Jenson, for example,

has confronted this situation by the drastic device of writing a system of
theology that so radically eschews any philosophical foundation in natural
theology that it declines to present the traditional topic of the metaphysical
and moral attributes of God. Rather he derives such divine attributes as are
required to parse the “dramatic coherence” given and revealed in the life of
the Three through the gospel narrative. In his account, “natural theology”
in Thomas and others in classical Christian dogmatics “was thought to be a
body of knowledge about God and his intentions not intrinsically dependent
on historically particular divine dispositions, and therefore properly the
common property of humanity. In fact, however, this body of knowledge was
as historically particular as any other . . .” It was, namely, the precipitate of
ancient Greek philosophical theology stemming from Parmenides’ revelation
and Plato’s demythologizing of Homer. The conceit of “such knowledge as
that appropriate to humanity’s ‘nature’ can become a covert recommendation
of this knowledge, and precisely in its distinction from that given by the
gospel.”15
Intriguingly—such is also the present contention—the disentanglement
of Paul and Plato for the sake of the former’s disruptive grace is aided and
abetted in this long-running dispute by the death-sentence pronounced on
philosophical monotheism today in the line of thought that begins in Scotus
and runs through Spinoza and Nietzsche to Deleuze. This judgment, which
encompasses classical and modern transcendentalism, therewith disables the
traditional theories of religious language and their corresponding ontologies.
It makes resorts to equivocation in reference to a Beyond by the devise of
similitude suspect of nonsense. It makes negation of all that actually is to
find the one true Being into the reification of a No-Thing. On the plane of
immanence, it renders the kataphatic figures of religion into a Mount Olympus
of contending polytheistic powers. It does all this by demanding semantic if not
also ontological univocity, which, according to the contention of this chapter,
is the inalienable presupposition of the Pauline metaphor, not simile, “Christ
crucified.” Therein lies its advantage, no doubt unintended, for theology in the
tradition of Paul, Augustine, and Luther. This collapse of natural theology, also
of its continuation by dishonest means in transcendental subjectivity, now
makes God responsible not only for speaking God but also for our hearing
God spoken—a contingency not in the control of theology or philosophy but
occurring ubi et quando Deo visum est. Only as such is the theological subject
constituted properly as a Novum in the world. But as a result of forgetfulness
Deus Incarnatus 151
(or evasion) of the founding answer and question of theology as a discipline

in Paul’s word of the cross, theology turned into philosophy—bad philosophy,
which snuck in by the back door a latterly developed Christian dogma about
the qualitative distinction in being between Creator and creature, deployed it
as a supposedly universal axiom by downplaying its Trinitarian articulation,16
and then surveyed the field looking for kindred spirits as if it were a queen.17
The Tribunal of Reason has been philosophy’s modern revenge on this
theological imperialism. It is time, however, for both inquiries to reorient and
move on.
By the same token, renewal of Paul’s gospel theology today cannot easily
be dismissed as “fundamentalism,” that is, as a foundationalism appealing
to privileged intuition (as in, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it”). The
particularity of Paul’s event of elective grace and its communication in continuing
narration in constituting the theological subject is misunderstood when taken
as the self-privileging of a pseudo-philosophical epistemological claim. God’s
self-revelation does not establish itself like an observable fact that a neutral
subject could ascertain and thus master. It is world-constituting. It comes as the
covenantal event founding a society of freedom for all and eliciting persevering
loyalty to its struggle on the earth and through time. Thus no one “has” this
grace as a private possession or personal privilege—especially not by the trick of
epistemology; rather one “has” it only in the personal risk of faith by which grace
disrupts and lays claim, in Paul’s “as having, yet not having.” This risk is real and
makes vulnerable. Recall, for classical example, the earliest Christian theology
of the martyrs who were tried for “atheism”—for disbelieving Caesar’s claim
of divine Sonship and believing instead in the divine Sonship of the Crucified
One. They became martyrs just because they saw no possibility for equivocation
at this juncture of krisis, where a judicious ambiguity (as championed by the
Gnostic alternative of a docetic Christology) would have served them well. But
they could not say Yes both to the divine Sonship of Caesar on the imperial
throne and to Christ who reigns from His cross (Lk. 23.39–43; Jn 19.28–30). The
theological subject is in this way conformed to Christ, not speculatively in gazing
theoria, but existentially in trusting patiency and true vulnerability in this sick
and dying imperium.
This classical confrontation and the conformation of the theological
subject to the cross of her Lord, moreover, turns conceptually on the
univocity of the notion of “sonship” as denoting the rightful claim of the
heir. Certainly a notion like “sonship” would be inadequate or imperfect if
ascribed generically to “God” in a general religious semantics of ascent to
the divine Other. But “sonship” in that case is being taken as a similitude,
which admittedly equivocates by improperly attributing a finite (and thus
inevitably exclusionary) term to an infinite (thus, supposedly, universally
accessible) nature. Uncomprehending apologists will then defend “sonship”
as an equivocation, not to be taken literally, which merely tells us what God
is like, namely, like Jesus His lovely “son.” Apologists make this defense,
ultimately, on basis of mere authority, on the arbitrary fact of the given
language of the New Testament as tout court divinely authorized revelation.
For those unwilling to submit in this way, however, “sonship” may connote
masculine gender or imply the need of the “Father” for a female consort to
begat offspring, just as feminists and Muslims, respectively, have in fact found.
Hence this language offends, particularly when the exclusive claim to tell us
what God is like is sanctioned by a self-validating appeal to authority that
cannot hear such concerns, let alone entertain such objections. Yet for Paul
and his martyr followers in the early church this refusal by some feminists
and Muslims would be as uncomprehending as are the defenses made by
mere apologists. All such dispute would be quite beside the point in that these
disputants do not share the martyriological context18 generated by the New
Testament language in its address of disruptive grace.
Here the notion of “sonship” must be understood to refer to Jesus’ divinity
in a way that is ontologically continuous with ordinary earthly usage in the
context of the gospel’s contestation with political sovereignty. The “son” is the
rightful heir to the “father’s” estate and throne. Just so, the contestation of
political sovereignty by messianic sovereignty could not transpire, and Caesar
and Christ would be victims of an unfortunate mutual misunderstanding
instead of Crucifier and Crucified, if both did not so understand the sense of
“sonship” in exactly the same way. In just this univocal fashion, however, the
notion of “sonship” worked the metaphysical (and political19) revolution of
the doctrine of the Trinity: divine being, as disclosed in the word of the cross,
immeasurably or ineffably (the apophatic adverb) organizes itself (a life, a verb
not a noun, as the eminent ens, the ens per se) in relations of self-donation and
reciprocal recognition (per alium, the kataphatic content of the Three disclosed
in the gospel narrative), as Beloved Community (the consequent dogma of the
Trinity), one of whom suffered, Deus incarnatus. God’s eternal being lives in
becoming,20 as befits the One who becomes the Creator,21 who in the fullness of
time assumes human flesh, who in the fulfillment of time makes His own eternal
life the temple of redeemed humanity. Such is the disruptive claim of the God of
grace embodied as the Deus incarnatus.
Deus Incarnatus 153
How both rightfully and powerfully to effect the apparent equivocation (as
recognized precisely by univocity) at work in the founding metaphor, “Christ
crucified” (or, as in the example just parsed, “Crucified Jesus is the Son of God”)
to give us the Deus incarnatus is the art of theology as the new language of the
Spirit and, at the same time, its possibility for a fruitful collaboration with a new
metaphysics that also loves this world (though not its corruption).
Liberating the metaphor, “Christ crucified”
The early Heidegger noted that the comment of Rom. 1.19–20 on the visibility
of the invisible God through His created works seemed to confirm the Platonic
“ascent from the sensible world to the supersensible”—as if this procedure were
“taken from Paul” himself (perhaps Heidegger was thinking of the literary persona
of the fifth-century writer who posed as Dionysius,22 companion of the historical
Paul). The reference here is to the way of eminence, which traverses upwards the
great chain of being from imperfection to perfect being. Finding support for an
attack on this pseuo-Paulinism in the early Luther’s 1518 Heidelberg Disputation,
Heidegger continued, ascent “is a misunderstanding of the passage . . . Only
Luther really understood this passage for the first time” when he contrasted
the theologian of glory, “who aesthetically takes delight in the wonders of the
world, [who] names what is sensible in God,” with “the theologian of the cross
[who] says how things are.”23 God’s utter invisibility is how things really are,
according to Heidegger. The constituting discourse of Christian theology is
not the philosophical way of eminence from created works to Creator, but the
Pauline “word of the cross” by which “God” is said to have made “foolish” the
“wisdom of this world,” that is, its would-be ascent to God (1 Cor. 1.18) that did
not succeed in finding God. Thus in Heidegger’s reading of Luther’s reading of
Paul, the word of the cross indicates a certain disjunctive relation of theology to
classical philosophy, namely, to the ontotheological way of eminence. It does this
for the sake of a purified apophatism. The cross represents pure negation.
Pursuing this disjunction led Heidegger to what he took to be a Luther-like
program of Destruktion in philosophy.24 As briefly discussed in Chapter 4,
Destruktion at length ripened to his influential critique of “ontotheology,” that
is, of the universal theory of value articulated by the notion of God as summum
bonum and of the human as constituted by desire for this one, true good. To
assess higher and lower goods in this way of eminence, of course, depends on
the univocity of the concept of good, just as it posits continuity in being between
what is higher and lower on the great chain. Heidegger consequently rejected
this entire “Platonizing” complex of Patristic theology as finally immanentist,
that is, God or the Infinite (the apeiron, the Chaos) yoked and made subservient
to beings (hence “ontotheology”) as the construction of the valuing human being.
Ontotheology by the way of eminence thus renders the kataphatic representation
of God as a being (albeit the highest being) alongside other beings, an apophatic
judgment for which Heidegger co-opts the biblical critique of idolatry. The
early Heidegger through his brief fling with Luther thus initiated his own exit
out of Christianity to a new conception of philosophy, no longer dogmatic
Platonism with its ascent by way of eminence through the great chain of being
to the theistic idol, but philosophy conceived now as “radical questioning” with a
corresponding radically apophatic theology that reverences the unspeakable in
knowing nothing of God. And Heidegger makes this move as if it were derived
from a correct understanding of Paul via Luther.
Ironically, this melodrama merely moves Heidegger from dogmatic to
skeptical Platonism. For Platonic skepticism, with its via negativa, is just what
in all its permutations modern transcendentalism is or continues, theologically
speaking. As influential as his philosophical journey has been for contemporary
thought, we can see in this light how Heidegger’s claim about Luther, and also
about Paul, misunderstands. Neither Paul nor Luther question ontotheology as
such, but rather the confident use of it by apologists of “this present evil age”
to excuse rather than to indict (so “they are without excuse”—Rom. 1.21).
Their theological programs therefore consist in disrupting self-congratulating
ontotheological immanence (Paul’s “boasting,” Luther’s securitas, the
“presumption of righteousness”) by news of the cross of the Messiah, which
effects in the theological subject a practical and existentially concrete, not a
speculative and metaphysically abstract, knowledge of the power, wisdom and
love of God.25 Yet immanence in the sense of the cosmic system is presupposed
as that which is to be disrupted. Univocity is the very means of this disruption.
But Heidegger wants to be done with all this theologically, to radically question
and destroy thinking in terms of worldviews as forgetfulness of Being, which in
this post-theistic way he wants to indicate as unspeakable transcendence.
Yet the Pauline word of the cross only gains its disruptive traction by breaking
into the system, owning up to its immanent law and therewith generating internal
contradictions and forcing their resolution. Eberhard Jüngel captures this: The
“story of salvation is gathered in kerygmatic and homological metaphors (as
clusters of time and eternity) whose root metaphor is the identification of the
risen one with the crucified man Jesus.”26 The Pauline metaphor, “Christ crucified,”
Deus Incarnatus 155
depends on the univocal est that makes this paradoxical identification. It cannot
be converted into an analogous signficat without turning Paul’s meaning upside
down. The word of the cross is metaphor, not simile; paradox, not analogy.
Paradox, of course, is not the nonsense of a literal contradiction, but the trope
derives from the Greek, para, against, doxia, opinion, that is, against common
understanding. Paul is not saying, Credo quia absurdam est in the manner of a
later Tertullian or a modern Pascal. He employs a trope, specifically the trope of
metaphor that rhetorically predicates a contradiction, as may be recognized by
the univocity of the terms. The metaphor does this in order to generate a new,
otherwise unknown meaning in the world, which for Paul is the reconciliation of
God and world. The simile, by contrast, already knows what things mean when it
introduces its comparison (not the collision of metaphor) between more and less
familiar things. Thus simile expands on existing meaning by means of evoking
illuminating or illustrative relations between terms.
That is why Janet Soskice can maintain that a “good metaphor may not
simply be an oblique reference to a predetermined subject but a new vision,
the birth of a new understanding, a new referential access. A strong metaphor
compels new possibilities of vision.”27 Unlike simile, a metaphor can create
new words (catachresis), fill in gaps in the existing vocabulary to name hitherto
unknown things or articulate new experience; entering into language this
way, metaphor comes to frame the linguistic structures in which we work,
forming “not only what sort of answers we get, but what kinds of questions
we ask.”28 A simile, on the other hand, does no less useful but far more routine
work. Simile illustrates the less familiar with the more familiar by introducing
a comparison (usually in English by the comparatives, “like” or “as”) between
items that are already known. Comparison expands existing knowledge.
Analogy is extended simile or elaborated comparison, which “stretches”
familiar language by applying it in new ways illustrative of an existing and
familiar relation. Analogy is neither a univocal proposition of simple fact, nor
the innovative equivocation that appears in metaphor to indicate something
new, but linguistically the construction of a relation which uncovers and
illuminates the reality already obtaining between the more or less familiar
terms compared.
Neither of these tropes is without literal reference, which is its sense. There
is no such thing as a figurative or metaphorical or parabolic truth, as sloppy
theologians often assert.29 “We may warn someone: ‘Watch out! That’s a live
wire,’ but even if we think wires are not literally ‘live,’ we do not add ‘but of
course that is only metaphorically true.’ It is true and it is expressed with the
use of a metaphor.”30 Thus we can see how the metaphor, “Christ crucified” and
the simile, “Christ is like one crucified,” have differing referents: the first gives
us a new Messianic presence in the Lord who serves in self-giving to justify
the ungodly; but the second likens the familiar sense of victorious Messiahship
in some respect to the victims of Roman imperial execution. This yields as
reference in the world either a perverse glorying in pain and victimhood, if taken
seriously (as Nietzsche did who in this way misunderstood “the Crucified”) or a
quasi-docetic Christology which makes the cross an accidental feature of Christ’s
substantial identity as God.
As metaphor, “Christ crucified” does not mean that someone who was Christ
happened to be crucified. It does not mean that the crucified of the world are
secretly somehow Christ. It means, as Mk 10.45 delivers the sense, that “Son of
Man came not to be served but to serve and lay down His life a ransom for many”
or in Paul’s paraphrase, that “He who was rich for your sakes became poor,” (2
Cor. 8.9) or again, that “for our sakes He who knew no sin was made to be sin
that in Him you might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5.21).” Paul’s
metaphor refers to a story, an event, a Novum. This metaphor’s reference renders
such new meaning in the world as is produced by the story. In the metaphor one
is thus confronted with news, which one must either refuse for the sake and in
the name of the familiar or be changed by its reported novelty. This change in
the existing self is the constitution of the theological subject. In response to a
simile, on the other hand, one may dispute reasonably about the aptness of the
comparison on the basis of what one already knows.
In sum, then, the “strong” metaphor innovates in this way because the
copula in a metaphorical utterance predicates in a paradoxical way, that is, in a
rhetorical performance that contravenes expectations encoded and reinforced
in dominant discourse. Metaphors can only do this so far as the collision of
univocal terms forces into sight the novelty of the actual referent in the world.
Metaphors then are not place-holders that substitute in language for the absent
things to which they point as in signs, simple propositions or statements of
fact, nor are they similes which illuminate relations which already obtain. But
metaphors are paradoxical predications by which some novelty becoming
present in the world becomes known. Of course, even strong metaphors can
suffer forgetfulness of the innovation they bear and become routinized clichés.
But you cannot replace the metaphor’s est with a significat without missing the
metaphor’s reference to the event that makes new. Substitution of significat for
est neutralizes the paradox and absorbs the intended novelty into the old frame
of reference.
Deus Incarnatus 157
The question of epistemic access for us today is to this extent clarified:

epistemic access in theology is constituted by liberating the Pauline metaphor,
“Christ crucified” from captivity in simile where it is made to do service in the
cause of transcendentalism—(think for representative modern example of Kant’s
Christ31 and ask how different Kant’s ideal Prototype actually is from modern
Christologies). But the reference of “Christ crucified” is to the new thing in the
world, the Lord who is present to serve the creature, as in the Eucharist, where
the gospel narrative about Christ is repeated as Christ’s own paradoxical address:
“This loaf of bread is My Body, given for you.” Theologically decoded, that gives
us, here and now, the Deus incarnatus, where the sense of incarnation is not the
instantiation of an idea in a Prototype, but the penetration and subversion of
the epoch in which we live under political sovereignty, the redemption of the
enslaved body by incorporation into Christ’s Body, and just so the inauguration
of the liberating reign of God. Note again, however, that the power to disrupt in
this way entails what Duns Scotus called univocity,32 if this biblical language of
grace is not to be neutralized in advance of any penetrating understanding on
its own terms. The reason is a semantically simple: one cannot recognize the
paradox of genuine metaphor—the disruptive equivocation—apart from the
base-line of univocal usage in one and the same world. In this way Paul’s word
of the cross also disrupts the usual theories of theological language, namely,
negation, eminence, and analogy. Just because of the stubborn univocity on
which the metaphor of “Christ crucified” turns for its force, it tells categorically
of the God who comes, Deus incarnatus, and not of human self-transcendence.
Having done now with Heidegger with whom we began in this section: in
truth he offers little more than return to an exclusive via negativa. According
to contemporary accounts dependent on Heidegger ranging from Marion to
Derrida, we are accordingly offered essentially apophatic proposals of “God
without being” or “being without God.” Or, in dispute with Heidegger, as in the
astute Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, we are given in antithesis new
iterations of the analogia entis33 that make everything on earth into analogues of
a God who infinitely transcends—and thus we would end up with a re-enchanted
universe but the same old apophatism.
The analogia entis tells us that God exists in a way like we exist, that God
perfectly is. But it cannot ever tell us what this God is, God’s essence. Of course,
on these conditions, one is wise to be reserved. If not reserved—and this was
Karl Barth’s central objection—then anything (including Adolph Hitler) can
become the analogue of God according to the felt needs of the present hour. But
more radically, contemporary metaphysics not only undermines essentialism
in the sense of fixed and eternal ideas to which individuals should conform,
suppressing difference, as we saw in Deleuze’s criticism of the Catholic catechism.
More radically, it questions that we exist as individuals in the sense of a subject/
substance possessing attributes and ipso facto capable of agency. God’s existence
is being imagined in just this way according to the analogia entis, the Agent whose
essential act is the performance of His own existence. God is thus the Subject
who perfectly enacts His own substantive being. But if, metaphysically, there is
no act of being by which agency the subject exists, if instead it is becoming that
gives a fleeting moment of being before taking it back again, then the analogy of
being that points to God so existing in an eminent but unspeakable way becomes
moot. One illusion cannot do other than indicate another illusion.
Thus we have to conclude that all such thinking is still caught up in the
classical or medieval project of natural theology that at a minimum fails, not in
what it sees (so far as it sees) but in how it systematically misuses what it sees
in the sense that it apologizes rather than indicts, that is, enables rather than
disables the epoch of political sovereignty into which we have fallen. At best, it
can offer an earnest but all the same utopian reformism. At worst, it occludes the
disruption intended and effected by the word of the cross and mutes it by turning
the metaphor of Christ’s cross into a simile of the transcendental coincidence of
opposites, pointing to an otherworldly harmony to which we ought to aspire by
imitation. As a result, under the conditions of modernity the Pauline metaphor,
“Christ crucified,” is systematically misconstrued as in Pascal, as otherworldliness,
as giving (at the woeful cost of ascetic self-immolation) “man’s road to God” in
a (not very impressive historically) praxis of imitation. It thus fails to hear of
God who comes (with the attendant Pauline demand for, but also gift of, the
freedom of self-giving) in the patiency of conformation to Christ crucified as the
constitution of the theological, indeed, the new and true political subject.
As just noted, and it bears repeating for emphasis (in view of my sympathy
otherwise on display for Leibniz in the next section), the present proposal
for epistemic access in the constitution of the new theological subject shares
with neither Scotus nor Thomas the medieval conceit that theology can do the
metaphysics of nature better than philosophers, though certainly theologians
will want to “baptize” metaphysics (not only with water but with Spirit and
fire) to produce their own theologies of nature (not “natural theology”) or
philosophically engaged theologies. But theology needs univocity to require that
it is not inventing another world but instead talking about one and the same
world as is thought in philosophy. Theologically, we must know what on earth
we are talking about, however reverently qualified, to be in any position to be
Deus Incarnatus 159
disrupted by grace and consequently to come to any judgment about its event
at all (also, then, a judgment of disbelief). Otherwise the claim of the gospel
becomes so ineffable that no one is able to affirm or to deny it. But causing just
this division—the Johannine krisis of the world—is the (at least, penultimate)
point of disruptive grace spoken in the word, Christ crucified, and understood
theologically as Deus incarnatus.
Leibniz, as is well known, represents the very epitome of Heidegger’s
“ontotheology,” that is to say, of “natural theology” of the Platonic ascent
supposedly indicated in Rom. 1.19–20, which, as we have already seen, is
predicated on the univocity of language if not also of being. He is rivaled in
this dubious honor only by Spinoza. In the next section, we ask what their
ontotheology allows them to see. The intimidating bogey of Heidegger’s
invention, to be sure, obscures what Spinoza and Leibniz had in common in
attacking the pretensions of transcendental subjectivity, classical and modern,
insofar as each anticipates the postmodern decentering of the self (though, as
we shall see, in significantly different ways). Even more intriguing, Heidegger’s
ontotheology obscures how Leibniz just so tried (though he failed) to save
Christian humanism for Europe by developing a natural theology in alternative
to Spinoza’s. His alternative Scotian “possible worlds” account of the free act of
creation, in contrast to the Thomist act of being account, argued that if God
is free, then we creatures can be freed. Leibniz’s “general pneumatology” thus
tried philosophically to immanentize theologically grounded freedom; the
entire program of Leibniz was secretly predicated on the dogma of the imago
Dei derived from Gen. 1. 26–8; this theological anthropology stands behind his
monadological (i.e. updated hylomorphic) alternative to Spinoza’s modalism.
The genuine lesson to be learned from Leibniz’s failure is therefore equally lost
on us by Heidegger’s blunt indictment of “ontotheology.” But let us look and see.
Precursors: Leibniz’s encounter with Spinoza
The early modern engagement of Spinoza by Leibniz gives a precursor to our

question in this chapter about epistemic access by the Pauline word of the cross.
But this retrospect is also necessary because, as Josiah Royce pointed out in his
pioneering, if nearly forgotten late-modern philosophical engagement with Paul
the Apostle, no pure return to Paul is possible (anymore than a pure return to
Jesus is possible, as Paul himself first taught us).34 According to the historical
Paul the world should have ended and we should not be here to think about
how we might retrieve the sense of his gospel for ourselves, that is, apart from
the historical Paul’s own near expectation of the Parousia. If Paul’s gospel can
be appropriated anew today theologically apart from the historical Apostle’s
expectation of the crucified and risen Lord’s imminent return in glory, it will
be by the tortured mediation of the tradition of the encounter of Athens and
Jerusalem of which Paul, of course, is an originative part. The result will be that
Paul’s own imminence is de-literalized, but not thereby abandoned. Indeed,
when we bear in mind the Pauline alternative to theological mediation—namely,
our nonexistence—that prospect seems less gloomy. Theology as a discipline in
any event would not be apart from both these facts: that Paul’s proclamation
of Christ crucified continues and yet that Paul was mistaken about Christ’s
imminent return in glory. Theology then arises both from Paul’s gospel in so
far as it is and shows itself a present discourse power and from its tradition in
continuing history that is the hermeneutical possibility of our understanding
appropriation of it. Epistemic access in the Pauline way comes to us only through
its own history in the world. Thus, we turn now to a paradigmatic episode of that
history.
Bertrand Russell, and his contemporary popularizer, Matthew Stewart, are
correct in asserting that Leibniz’s encounter with Spinoza was intellectually
decisive for him.35 But Stewart’s popularized Russellian reading retrojects the
historically later36 culture-warfare between science and religion onto this
encounter. In doing so, it simplistically impugns the Christian theological motive
in Leibniz37 with the gross smear, “theocracy,”38 and in psychological reduction
as shameless as it is embarrassing39 interprets a “coreless”40 Leibniz as Russell’s
dishonest crypto-Spinozist. This polemical construct has several philosophical
demerits, not least in minimizing the intended difference from Spinoza, so
important to Leibniz, in the latter’s signature monadology. Monadology is a
reformulation of Thomistic hylomorphism. It grounds a limited but real human
agency. In Leibniz’s own words: “. . . Spinozism [is] an exaggerated Cartesianism.
That which does not act does not merit the name of substance . . . [W]hy shall
we not say, with Spinoza, that God is the only substance, and that creatures are
only accidents or modifications?”41 Leibniz intends this rhetorical question
seriously. It indicates how his own innovative thought, seen as a development
of the compatibilism of divine sovereignty and human freedom in classical
Augustinianism, derives from his encounter with the radical42 challenge of
Spinoza. How, then, did Leibniz experience that challenge?
In the Appendix to Part I of The Ethics, Spinoza took well-deserved aim
at the deeply rooted superstition enacted in sacrificial religious rites by
Deus Incarnatus 161
which people have imagined they could leverage preferential divine love for
themselves and thus “direct the whole of Nature so as to serve [their own]
blind cupidity and insatiable greed.”43 In contesting this rapacious love for God
(amor concupiscentiae—Luther44) at the heart of sacrificial rites, Spinoza sagely
exposed a scholastic aporia in the received doctrine of God, by which, according
to Spinoza, sacrificial religion casts God in its own image in order to use God
for its own avaricious purposes. Anthropomorphic images allow attribution to
the perfect being of personal attributes of intelligence and will, as if God could
be cajoled into doing favors as humans do among themselves. Such attribution
of intelligence and will to the perfect being can be shown to reduce to a
contradiction. “For prior to creation they are not able to point to anything but
God as a purpose for God’s actions. Thus they have to admit that God lacked
and desired those things for the procurement of which he willed to create the
means—as is self-evident.” Lack and desire are implications of individuated
human existence, especially of what is called “will.” This anthropomorphic
construction of deity accordingly reduces to the absurdity of infinitizing human
lack, thus violating divine simplicity and substantiality. On Spinoza’s analysis,
attribution of will and intelligence “negates God’s perfection; for if God acts
with an end in view, he must necessarily be seeking something he lacks,”45
which contradicts God’s simplicity as the one true substance and perfection
of being. To resolve this aporia of attributing to God an intelligent and willed
act of creation, as if the Deity had lacked something, the anthropomorphic
attribution of intelligence and will to God, hence of purposive behavior, must
be given up. Metaphysics is to save God’s timeless immutability as the one true
substance that exists per se and not per aliud. The now purified conception of
the perfection of divine being as ens per se, reached on the basis of the univocity
of being by the way of eminence, is in turn purely metaphysical: “The perfection
of things [as follows ‘from the necessity of God’s most perfect nature’] should be
measured solely from their own nature and power; nor are things more or less
perfect to the extent that they please or offend human senses, serve or oppose
human interests.”46 The re-naturalization and de-humanization of metaphysics
and theology is thorough-going.
These incisive and highly influential concluding remarks to part I
harken back to the Scholium on Proposition 17; here Spinoza attacked late
Scholasticism’s desperate resort to voluntarism, that is, to an “absolute will”
of libertarian indifference or sheer good pleasure, by which the attempt was
made to resolve the aporia created by attributing to perfect being a contingent
act of will in the supposedly free decision to create. It did so by making
arbitrary acts of will the hyper-insignia, so to say, of free and omnipotent

deity. According to Spinoza, however, this hyper-voluntarism of the notion of
God as potentia absoluta only led to a further aporia with the corresponding
notion of a self-limiting potentia ordinata in the act of creation. One now had
to view the act of creation as a divine kenosis. “Thus, to affirm God as perfect
they are reduced to having to affirm at the same time that he cannot bring about
everything that is within the bounds of his power. I cannot imagine anything
more absurd . . .” Spinoza’s elegant but drastic resolution to the absurdity
lies in his metaphysical claim anticipating Nietzsche’s circulus vitiosus deus,
“that from God’s supreme power or infinite nature an infinity of things in
infinite ways—that is, everything—have necessarily flowed . . . Therefore
God’s omnipotence has from eternity been actual and will remain for eternity
in the same actuality.”47 There is then no “act” of creation as depicted in
anthropomorphizing religious imagination that is not, conceptually reduced,
the eternal act eo ipso of God’s own eternal being, active to passive, natura
naturans to natura naturata. Creator and creation constitute the eternal
system of the one world—a “steady state” theory of universal becoming before
its time.
Consequent naturalism in metaphysics has this virtue of true religion: it
humbles the arrogant anthropocentrism which makes all of reality revolve
around the Subject, our Narcissus, modernity’s “sovereign self ” as configured
by Descartes. But Leibniz frequently assimilated Spinoza to Descartes along
the lines of Descartes’ theological voluntarism. That is, he read Spinoza as a
consistent Cartesian, as in this early letter to Molanus dated ca. 1679, where
he alleges that Descartes thinks of perfect being as “not a God like the one we
imagine or hope for, that is, a God just and wise, doing everything possible
for the good of creatures. . . .,” as Leibniz alludes to the moderate, Calixtian
Lutheranism in which he had been raised. Rather Descartes has a “God who
created everything that can be made, and passes successively through all
possible combinations, following a necessary and fated order . . .” It is not
very clear in this critique, however, just how Leibniz’s Lutheran-Christian
traditionalism differs from Descartes’ turn to the subject: for Leibniz too, as is
visible in the citation above, God seems to be measured by human imagination
with its self-interested hope. A deeper reason Leibniz provides for his criticism
is that Descartes’ God “does not have the good as object of the will, nor the
true as object of understanding,”48 that is, does not have will or understanding
in a teleological sense at all but rather impersonally or mechanically processes
all possibilities through infinite time “following a necessary and fated order”
Deus Incarnatus 163
like an algorithm. What the young Leibniz gropes to say kataphatically is

that God has both will and understanding as distinct faculties or operations
(alike to our own minds which are imago Dei), yet God has these distinct
operations as One God who does not and cannot use one faculty without the
other, as per the apophatic doctrine of divine simplicity. This perichoreisis of
the faculties to work in mutual harmony is the unfathomable perfection of
Leibniz’s preferred God, the Christian Trinity. Affirming it is important for
him, because however muted and psychologized, Trinitarianism is what in
principle excludes the absolutization of the faculty of will as in theological
voluntarism.
In some distinction from this earlier line of thought, by the time of his late
(1707?) Comments on Spinoza’s Philosophy, Leibniz was fairer in acknowledging
that Spinoza “correctly denies that God is indifferent and that he decides
anything by an absolute [exercise of the] will . . .”49 The later Leibniz aligns
with Spinoza in this respect against Descartes to oppose the other chief enemy,
theological voluntarism, which he too takes as the idolatrous projection of
arrogant anthropocentrism onto the screen of transcendence, remaking God
in its own insatiable image. In this later text, then, Leibniz joins the issue in
concurrence with Spinoza’s prophetic attack on “blind cupidity and insatiable
greed” under the mask of religion, represented in idolatrous images of God as
arbitrary will. In his essay, On the Common Concept of Justice (ca. 1702–3), for
example, Leibniz had posed the rhetorical question whether the absolutizing of
power in radically negative theology (as in, “The infinite God can be whatever
God wills, who cannot be captured in our concepts by means of univocity”)
means that might makes right, making God the exception that proves the rule.
But all of history condemns “a happy tyrant.” By what right do we make this
moral judgment? Leibniz asks accordingly for the “formal reason” of justice, the
“why of this attribute,” and avers that “this formal reason must be common to
God and to man; otherwise one would be wrong in wanting to attribute, without
equivocation, the same attribute to both.” And to this specification of epistemic
access in theology, Leibniz the logician adds: “[T]hese are fundamental rules of
reasoning and of discourse.” The ontological distinction and relation between
Creator and creature under the univocity of language tends to the univocity
of being, rendering a “difference only [of] degree.” The creation, if good, is
continuous in its being good with its Creator—not numerically the same being,
but one perfect and many imperfect beings existing and being attributed in
the same way. Decisively, in that case discontinuity serves to identify injustice
and sin. “For God is perfectly and entirely just, and the justice of men is mixed
with injustice, with faults and with sins, because of the imperfection of human
nature.”50
An interlude: it is theological voluntarism that makes the univocity of being
appear “neutral or indifferent,” as Deleuze puts it. Under voluntarism (let us
think here of Occam, Hobbes, and Descartes, but also of Pascal), the world “as
it is,” after all, is cast out of nothing as a sheer given by an inscrutable Actor,
appearing as pure arbitrary positivity. Being is without grounds of its own, a
capricious potentia ordinata that may, metaphysically speaking, be revoked
today and recalled tomorrow as inscrutably as it now appears. This artificial
insecurity could perhaps be affirmed as the Unknown God’s production,
but not as a known God’s good creation, that is the creation which fittingly
expresses divine goodness together with power and wisdom. This explains in
part why Deleuze can make the striking claim that “the struggle undertaken
against Descartes by Spinoza is not unrelated to that which Duns Scotus
led against Saint Thomas.” And, we can observe, that while Leibniz borrows
from Thomas’ substantial forms to think his monads, his greater affinity
lies with Scotus, from whom he derives not only the way of eminence and
the univocity of language, if not being in natural theology, but above all the
inchoate idea of the temporality of God in the act of creation. A free divine
action as the resolve for this one, rather than any another possible sequence or
“world,” involves God in motion, and hence in time. In any event, for Deleuze
Scotus’ univocity emerges from under the shadow of that last and desperate
resort to transcendence, theological voluntarism, to become in Spinoza
“a truly expressive and affirmative proposition.”51 The world is, “as it is,” no
longer “neutral or indifferent” as immanence thought in relation to arbitrary
transcendent voluntarism, but rather as its own positive fecundity ever bursting
forth in a plentitude of rich and enriching difference. The revolution begun in
Scotus and carried forward by Spinoza will be, according to Deleuze, taken
yet another step in Nietzsche’s “categorical reversal according to which being
is said of becoming, identity of that which is different, the one of the multiple,
etc.”52 Eternal return, not the return of the identical (in that case “becoming
would be said of being”), but the repetition of becoming, is the metaphysical
outcome, the world “as it is” and affirmed as such in its eternal return—not
then as the brute positivity, here today and gone tomorrow, of a supreme and
inscrutable Will.
To return to Leibniz: it is just here, and taking this line of thought at its best,
that Leibniz’s hesitancy announces itself. Does not this outcome make any
conception of resistance impossible since resistance is subsistence through time
Deus Incarnatus 165
to a cause in loyalty to a Novum, an originative event? Must not such subsistence

in time in the form of a biographical personal identity dissolve like a mirage
in the all-devouring maw of the repetition of becoming? Does it not likewise
make the moral discernment of corruption itself (in distinction from change,
since corruption may often appear as fixation, as resistance to becoming)
suspect of world-slandering malice, since any moral critique assumes not only
the critic’s subsistence in unlikely resistance to the currents and vortices of
becoming but also the actual capacity to identify powers that be as evil-doers?
Have we here entered a world, in other words, in which God can no longer
discriminate between Pharaoh the slave-master and his Hebrew victims?
“Therefore,” Leibniz wrote to Molanus about this vertiginous outcome of what
appears to him from his traditional Christian perspective as voluntarism-on-
the-way-to-Eternal-Return-of-the-Same, “it is impossible to believe that this
God cares for intelligent creatures any more than he does for the others; each
creature will be happy or unhappy depending upon how it finds itself engulfed
in these currents or vortices.”53
For Leibniz to imagine God as arbitrary Will is not only misleading
anthropomorphism born of ignorance, as in Spinoza; it is a brutal
anthropomorphism which culpably idolizes tyranny and ends in despair,
abandoning justice on earth for a nihilistic metaphysic of morals beyond good
and evil. How can Leibniz thus extend (or co-opt) Spinoza’s critique, so far as
he concurs with it, and move philosophy toward a different outcome? Or, is
there no metaphysical alternative to what appears here from the perspective
of Christian tradition as nihilism? Leibniz failed, but it is an instructive failure
worth the effort now to retrace. Interestingly, we can pursue this question by
systematically dismantling the representation of Leibniz in the development
of the seventeenth-century idea of God by the theological philosopher,
Jean-Luc Marion.
Marion’s misreading of Leibniz’s ontotheology
In his survey of the seventeenth century’s “significant moment in thought

concerning the definition of God,”54 Marion claims that Leibniz embraced a
certain, irreducible duality in doctrine of the preestablished harmony according
to which God is both Architect of the cosmic machine and Monarch of the
community of rational beings. God constitutes the two orders of nature and grace,
governed respectively by efficient and final causality. God is the perfect being
and supreme object of desire in relation to spirits and the ultima ratio in relation
to the machine. These distinct but coordinate affirmations, according to Marion,
derive from the philosopher’s frequently mentioned “two great principles:”
noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The principle of noncontradiction
pertains to God’s mind, which is an understanding of all that is possible, that is,
of all noncontradictory notions or essences. This understanding then belongs
to God’s perfection of omniscience. It is the ontological ground for all that can
exist, thus also of rational beings in so far as they conform in their existence
with their essential determination as God has willed it in His full and complete
conception of all compossible individuals in the act of creation. Nonconformity
to this essential determination of all that exists is the privation of being, moral
evil that becomes its own punishment by the relapse of creaturely being back
into the nothingness from which it emerged. But in obedient conformation to
final purpose, rational beings attain their own individual perfection in harmony
with others. Science, on the other hand, requires without exception the principle
of the efficient causal relation in understanding the machine of the world.
This, Marion says, is grounded in the second notion of God in Leibniz, as the
necessary being who is as such the ultima ratio as per the principle of sufficient
reason. By the protological act of creation God is the ultimate causa sive ratio
of the machine, the cause of all causes and their ordering principle. Marion
regards this duality between the perfect God and the necessary God, which he
claims that Leibniz took over from Malebranche rather than developed from his
encounter with Spinoza, derives from “the irreducible duality of the principles
of metaphysics.” And he judges the ontotheologian accordingly: “neither the
exclusively metaphysical status of the divine names nor their submission to
metaphysics ever appeared so clearly.”55
This reading is flawed. Marion Kantianizes Leibniz.56 He does not notice in
his claim about Leibniz’s “duality” that the kingdom of spirits, which unfolds in
tandem with the world machine according to final rather than efficient causality,
in its own way—that is, by moral law rather than physical law—also conforms
to the principle of sufficient reason. God is the reason there is something rather
than nothing in both of the orders, nature and grace. Marion’s judgment upon
Leibniz’s “metaphysics” is fatal, then, only if theology submits to another kind of
philosophical captivity which privileges apophatism, whether that be of Plotinus
or Dionysius or Kant or Heidegger. Apophatism is Marion’s own position (at
least in this early study). His essay begins with an exaggerated account of
“Thomas’ radical agnosticism” and concludes with Pascal’s “entirely different
transcendence from that which metaphysics (above all Cartesian metaphysics)
Deus Incarnatus 167
can envisage,” namely, “not to know God, but to love Him.” The commitments
signified by these bookends produce a portrait of Leibniz as a strangely
inconsequent ontotheologian with two ultimate principles, a polytheist really.
However inadequate to the infinite reality of God Thomas at last found his best
analogical accounts, he knew this inadequacy on account of his knowledge in faith
of God the Creator’s transcendent causality, cause of all causes, which he held to
be analogous to our intramundane knowledge of a cause through its effect. To
separate, on the other hand, rather than to distinguish God from metaphysical
investigation of causality, as in Pascal, cuts the Gordian knot and makes faith
in “God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth” an empty relic, which
is the real effect of the Heideggerian critique of ontotheology. To love God as
unknown, moreover, is to love anything on the earth—a possibility for mystics,
or fanatics, but not for Pharaoh’s slaves. Pauline love “is sincere, hating what is
evil and holding fast to what is good” (Rom. 12.9). Leibniz’s justice is “the charity
of the wise,” that is, it is a discerning love which knows how to be against what
is against love. Leibniz, in any case, is hardly to be understood in Marion’s way
as the paradigmatic ontotheological outcome of Cartesian metaphysics. As we
have already seen, Leibniz sharply attacks Descartes’ theological voluntarism as
his ownmost foe.
Hidden access: Leibniz’s natural theology
Let us then take a fresh look at the issues Marion raises. According to Leibniz,
it is voluntarism in theology that violates the principle of sufficient reason
and thus licenses the superstitious leveraging of religious sacrifice, at the same
time subverting the trustworthiness of God in continuing creation (creatio
continua)—a vicious circle in which tyranny and resignation endlessly recycle.
How does the principle of sufficient reason break this cycle? Leibniz continues
on from the concurrence expressed with Spinoza in his late Comments to
differentiate himself from Spinoza as follows: God “decides through will based
on reasons.”57 The question is how Leibniz differentiates himself from Spinoza
with this statement.
On another occasion Leibniz explained to Queen Sophie that the statement,
“God decides through will based on reasons,” is for him virtually an analytical
truth. “One of the great principles I use is that which entails that nothing exists
without a reason, or rather that there is always a reason why. And just about
the first question that can be asked is: why is there something, and there would
indeed be no reason at all for the existence of things if there were not an ultimate
reason for them, which has no need for one itself, and which consequently
must have the reason for its existence in itself; otherwise the same question or
difficulty would always exist. So the ultimate reason of things is nothing other
than the absolutely necessary substance, and as such it is not subject to change.”58
The world exists: it is something rather than nothing. For this something rather
than nothing there must be found an ultimate reason, which Leibniz discovers
in the metaphysical notion of maximum compossibility as the fit, though not
strictly speaking necessary, expression of the plentitude of perfect being. Thus
far, Leibniz’s thinking of the principle of sufficient reason as virtually God is
fully compatible with Spinoza. Yet, Leibniz continues, the creation of which we
are a part is this something rather than another, for which there must also be
ultimate cause or divine reason. This Leibniz finds in the moral notion of God
willing the best of all possible worlds according to the benevolence of divine will
and the wisdom of divine intelligence that surveys all possible worlds to select
for existence the one which is best. In both aspects—that God creates at all and
that God determines this particular world as best—God “decides through will
based on reasons.”
It is in the second aspect, then, that Leibniz diverges from Spinoza, again in
words written for Sophie, to rescue theism from the latter’s pantheism (though
we note that Leibniz’s deviation here seems to violate of the continuity thesis):
“It must be acknowledged that there is some substance separate from matter
too, and to see this we need only consider that there is an infinity of possible
modes that all matter could have received instead of this sequence of variations
which it has actually received . . . Therefore it must be the case that the reason,
or universal determining cause, that things are and have been thus rather than
otherwise, is outside matter because the very existence of matter [in its actual
sequence] depends on it, and because we do not find in the notion of matter that
it carries its existence with it . . . and because of the connection between all parts
of nature, this ultimate reason of things will be common to all and universal,
and it is what we call God.”59 If we can symbolize Spinoza’s metaphysics as a
“steady state” theory of the universe before its time, we can likewise symbolize
Leibniz’s as a “big bang” theory ahead of its times in that matter and its rules
of formation are themselves evoked in the initial moments of creation. The
ensuing unity (=monad) of things as discrete individuals cannot be found in
aggregates of matter, phenomenal bodies, or ratios of forces, or assemblages.
Yet if particularity as this something rather than that is to be recognized and
affirmed, a connection, a unifier from beyond matter must be posited, and that is
Deus Incarnatus 169
God the creator and the unity God lends to matter by the monadology. Leibniz’s
apparent hylomorphism here certainly does revert to Aristotle and Thomas, and
to that extent seems to violate the continuity thesis of hylozoism.
Yet appearances may be deceiving. Being “outside” or “separate” from matter
does not entail a transcendence beyond the immanent “connection between
all parts of nature.” God and His monads “transcend” matter as not as mind
to matter but as spirit to individuals, as the universal but immanent connector,
the “universal determining cause” for emergent communities. Novelty consists
in new connections, new unions, new communions. For Leibniz, then, God
both creates matter ex nihilo and unifies it by the monadology in the course of
history (natural history as well). As the divine mind that holds all possible forms
together with the divine will that chooses to actualize the best according to its
own desire for the good, God selects that sequence of compossible individuals
that actually unfolds on the way to the civitas Dei. As in Thomistic theism,
Leibniz insists against Spinoza that his own conception of God yields an
intelligentia extra mundam. But unlike Thomas, God’s transcendence here is not
merely intellectual, it is more precisely spiritual, even more precisely the living
harmony of power, wisdom, and love in the Trinitarian sense of eschatological
creation worked out above in Chapter 2. As Deleuze exposits Leibniz: “For with
Leibniz the question surges forth in philosophy . . . not how to attain eternity, but
in what conditions does the objective world allow for a subjective production of
novelty, that is, of creation? The best of all worlds had no other meaning: it was
neither the least abominable nor the least ugly, but the one whose All granted a
production of novelty . . . The best of all worlds is not the one that reproduces the
eternal, but the one in which new creations are produced, the one endowed with
capacity for innovation or creativity: a teleological conversion of philosophy.”60
God is not here the passive object of human gazing in otherworldly desire (as
in Aristotle’s theoria or Thomas’ contemplation) but inexorable Ground and
restless Giver of novelty in a world taken radically as creation, just as here the
human, “endowed with capacity for innovation or creativity,” is the image on
earth of this Creator.
Leibniz states the issue here with Spinoza categorically at the outset of the
Comments: “It is true that one shouldn’t say anything about created things
except that they are permitted by God’s nature. But I don’t think Spinoza fully
understood this, in my view. Essences can, in some sense, be conceived without
God, but existences involve God.” Mind is not what makes God God, nor as such
is mind excluded from what makes creature creature. According to Leibniz, the
two ontotheologians diverge because Spinoza fails to grasp how the human mind
can imagine essences without acknowledging God as Creator of actual existence

in its historical specificity. For him, human freedom consists ontologically in
godlike imagination that is not purely ungrounded fantasy but is the rational
soul’s epistemic access to the region of eternal truths. These are infinite. Relative
to actual existence, human imagination can access this realm really to think
of new, that is, hitherto unactualized possibilities of being. They can likewise
even decide to act on them, so far as these rational objects of imagination
somehow come to whet the soul’s appetite for the good. The finite creature’s
mind transcends the historically actual and the naturally given, though not the
world or God, by its participation in the region where all logically possible, that
is non-self-contradictory essences reside as possibilities of being and candidates
for existence. One can know such essences “without God,” in the sense that one
knows God truly as the decided God, the Creator of this world that actually
exists in the destiny God intends for it, not in wandering around in any of the
possible worlds in God’s mind, worlds that God has in fact rejected in deciding
for this actual world and its destiny. “The essences of things are coeternal
with God, and the very essence of God comprehends all other essences, to the
extent that God cannot perfectly be conceived without them. But existence is
inconceivable without God, who is the ultimate reason for things.”61 The free act
of creation gives existence, the actual, and leads it to its appointed destiny. The
free act of imagination concurs or demurs because human minds share common
concepts with God, whether they acknowledge the determined God or not. As
monads, they have this quasi-divine power to conceive non-actual essences, to
desire them, to seek to actualize them. In this way, human minds can be gods
“without God,” though they will succeed only with divine concurrence, which is
the ultima ratio of this really existing world. For His part, God “decides through
will based on reasons” of compossibility in nature and justice in society in giving
existence to selected essences in purposive sequence. Concurrence consists in
establishing and purifying the righteous but in frustrating and turning back to
nothing the wicked in the working out of divine providence in history.
Is Leibniz fair to Spinoza’s intention in his criticism? In one sense, Leibniz
has merely restated the axial difference between a metaphysics for which there
is but one substance in infinite modes and another for which there are infinitely
many substances (actualized or materialized essences) but one Creator, who
gives actuality to essences by election into a definite sequence of existence with
a definite purpose. But we can dig deeper. Spinoza, we may recall, thinks that
imagination, that is, thinking in terms of contingent images, is the categorical
mistake in metaphysics, which properly thinks mathematically and geometrically
Deus Incarnatus 171
about forces and shapes in time and space without wishful pining that things
might be otherwise. The “image” in question is for Spinoza the physical
representation of the thing of immediate sense experience as grasped in naïve
egocentricity as opposed to intellectual understanding of its idea comporting
with the plentitude of diverse forms. The cross-over from Spinozist image,
that is the uncomprehended visual representation, to Leibnizian essence, the
conceptual imagination of internally consistent, noncontradictory possibilities
of being, is thus not exact. To be exact, Leibniz would have had to show that
ironically enough Spinoza’s strong distinction between ideas and images does
not stand up to hylozoic scrutiny, as in fact Leibniz does think that images
are primitive conceptions and conceptions are enriched perceptions, as per
the continuity thesis. “I explain insensible things by analogy with the sensible,
observing only the difference from great to small, from the more to the less
perfect.”62 For, according to Leibniz’s hypothesis of free creation, images however
primitive exist in predetermined harmony with essences. Thus images may be
“confused” and “inadequate” but they cannot be utterly misleading as Spinoza’s
polemic causes him to portray (especially in theology). Idolatry, one might say,
does not consist so much in the mere fact of representation as in the use to which
representations are put, whether compossibly with God the Spirit’s destination
of things to Beloved Community or not.
By the same token, however, Leibniz does not think that human imagination,
which can know essences “without God,” is absolutely free with a voluntaristic
freedom of indifference. Human willfulness, with all accompanying superstition
and fantasy, has its limits in God’s institution of this world, not another. This is
the reality check. I can imagine flying like a bird, but when I leap from the tower
where my office is located the law of gravity speedily disillusions me. Knowing this,
however, if I nevertheless will to fly as a bird—in fatal contradiction to what I am
as a heavy-bodied, wingless primate, I “sin,” that is, I will what God has not willed
in the act of creation, with God concurring in my sinful flight’s meet punishment,
as I fall to the earth physically crushed and morally chastened. By the same
token, however, human imagination may also enable one freely to assume and
knowingly to collaborate with God’s eminently free decision in the act of creation,
who has decided for this sequence of existence in which I find myself on its way
to the best of all possible worlds. True human freedom for Leibniz thus causally
depends (so it cannot be absolute or voluntaristic freedom) on the knowledge of
God’s free decision to create, redeem and fulfill the world, which reason ought to
realize and to which revelation attests. Reason ought to realize this because it has
epistemic access by virtue of the soul’s resemblance to its Creator as imago Dei.
Learning this is the key to human liberation. Awakening to God’s free choice in
creation for this existing creation causes the human mind to arise on a forward
path, no longer only as an automaton of nature qua body but also now as a moral
citizen cooperating in the reign of God as an embodied rational soul. This true
human freedom to cooperate with God gives Leibniz his own amor fati, a “happy
necessity” which he contrasts unfavorably with Spinoza’s “fatal necessity” of Stoic
tranquillity and resignation to the aimless course of events.
Of course, the differentiation Leibniz claims here is not so obvious to his
readers. His is a baffling, hidden access. A choice between sad and happy fatalism
seems purely psychological. Strictly speaking, the weighty differentiation from
Spinoza is not as clear as Leibniz imagined. At the conclusion of the Theodicy, he
wrote against the notion that “primitive Nature, which produces all, acts without
choice and without knowledge.” This, he deemed, is “Spinozistic and dangerous.”
But, he continues, if the meaning were that “the divine nature is determined
toward that which it produces, by its choice and through motive of the best, there
[is] no need . . . to grieve about this so-called immutable, inevitable, irrevocable
necessity. It is only moral, it is a happy necessity; and instead of destroying
religion it shows divine perfection to its best advantage.”63 Forgive the parody
of Heidegger, but what goes “unthought” in Leibniz’s reassurance here is that
divine nature is said to be determined by personal choice just as this choice is
then said to be actualized in what it produces. Leibniz’s theologically reassuring
alternative to Spinoza of a “personal” God utilizing faculties of intelligence and
will inescapably implies the temporality of the immutable God, just as Spinoza
had taunted when he first set at odds the moral and metaphysical attributes of
God. The apparent contradiction involved goes unacknowledged in Leibniz. It
is an aporia that Augustine had engaged in the final books of The Confessions,
the bafflement at the first words of the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the
heavens and the earth.” It is not merely the difficult thought of a beginning of
time, but of the temporal transition of the eternal that a beginning in God of a
free act of creation entails. The paradox here either reduces, as Spinoza thinks,
to a self-canceling absurdity, or, as we shall see when we turn in Chapter 6 to the
debate about Paul the Apostle in contemporary philosophy, it indicates the event
of God surpassing God in the Deus incarnatus (not, as Leibniz thought, the soul’s
reflective assent to the divine ground that by nature it imitates as its vestige).
What is clear to Leibniz is Leibniz’s own intention: he wished to coordinate
Spinoza’s order of nature with a complimentary moral order by arguing for
the infinity of monads in place of Spinoza’s modes as the “infinity of things in
infinite ways . . .” Moral order supervenes and integrates physical necessity in
Deus Incarnatus 173
the monad. Leibniz proposes therefore to qualify Spinoza’s seemingly simple

identity between natura naturans and natura naturata, without making the
transcendental move of negative theology to conceive of God as das Unbedingt.
He is trying to stay on the earth and play on the same field under the rules of the
univocity of being. He does so in two ways, the first of which goes unmentioned
in Marion’s account, namely, the monadology, which articulates how “the effects
of God subsist, not to mention that even the modifications and effects of
created beings are enduring in some way, and that their impressions merely join
together without destroying each other.”64 The monad is capable of time and in
it acquires, in the case of the rational soul-cum-body, an historical biography,
a personal identity anchored metaphysically in God’s full and complete
conception of it. The monad unifies experience, connects the dots of time into
a more or less coherent story. It is by means of the monadology, second, that
we are to interpret Leibniz’s corresponding idea of the preestablished harmony
between the mechanical and moral orders. These are not an unintegrated
duality, as Marion’s Malebrachean account suggests, for that would imply
occasionalism, which Leibniz explicitly and frequently rejects. Rather, Leibniz
is thinking perspectivally of two ways of looking upon one and the same world:
“just as motion leads matter from shape to shape, the appetite leads the soul
from image to image”65 of the desired good. This double perspective on the
same world is possible because of God’s predetermining selection of just this
coordinated sequence of the two orders. It is, moreover, precisely the monad
that can, imperfectly but really, see itself as both substance and body, as both
person and thing, as both agent and effect, because that is what the monad is, the
metaphysically irreducible unification of reality, the conatus, the entelechy, the
substantial form of a thing extended in space, that is, a body. Monadology gives
the metaphysical interpretation of the phenomenal world science discovers. By
the same token, as interpretation, the monad plays no direct role in scientific
inquiry.
Yet, when the dust settles, Leibniz’s reconciliation of freedom and necessity by
monadology in the preestablished harmony sounds like it turns on a distinction
without a difference. On some readings, the argument can be made that even
God is determined by the divine mind, that is by rationality as if an autonomous
power to which also God is subject and must render account. The principle of
sufficient reason would thus rule over God as well, rather than God as Trinity
being the principle of sufficient reason in relation to what is not God. In that
case, Leibniz’s attempted differentiation from Spinoza fails, and his muted,
psychologizing Trinitarianism collapses back in the Unitarianism of the one true
Substance in its many modes from which he had sought to differentiate himself.
So this is the crux intellectum.
The failure of theodicy
A corresponding aporia arises with Leibniz’s theodicy. Radicalizing the principle

of sufficient reason ontotheologically to account for God as the free creator of
this actual world is the equivalent of the theological proposition that “there
is no true enunciation whose reason could not be seen by one possessing all
the knowledge necessary for its complete understanding.”66 The truth of every
proposition is contained in the predicate, which is God’s full and complete
conception. To God all true propositions are analytical. To God the miracles of
biblical history are natural. Thus the comprehensive principle of sufficient reason
is Leibniz’s theology of God as the creator of all that is not God—also then the
tsunami and the SS medical scientist running experiments at Auschwitz. The
principle of sufficient reason does not metaphysically reduce the order of grace
to that of nature, as Marion fears. But that is because it rather applies equally to
both orders, though to each in its own way. Physical and moral events, which
really are and must appear contingent to the finite minds of creatures, are not
so to God their Creator, this ontological distinction and relation between Creator
and creature being the very point, Leibniz’s theological point. To object to this,
he thinks, is to object to God as creator of all—without exception—that is not
God, even of creatures whose moral choices may contravene His own. In this
supposition, Leibniz, like Augustine before him, may well be right.
What are we to make then of the appearance of actual evil in the world God
has wisely and benevolently decided upon—that which contradicts the decided
will of God for the good? Does not the existence of this surd unravel the entire
edifice? Privative evil and its just and natural recompense in the punishment of
eternal death do not suffice to harmonize the contradiction here. The difficulty
is that Leibniz’s God, precisely the principle of sufficient reason in relation to
all that is not God, wisely choosing the best in determining upon this world—
of the Trail of Tears, the African Slave Trade, the Gulag, and Treblinka—now
necessarily becomes the author of actual evil. The only recourse Leibniz has here
is the argument for the greater good in the sequence of the whole. Once more, in
a muted way Leibniz draws on Augustine to think this most grievous difficulty
of actual evil in the good world created by God. So Paul the Apostle appears
on the scene as if to rescue Leibniz’s appropriation of Rom. 1.19–20. From the
Deus Incarnatus 175
perspective of “Christ crucified,” Paul had spoken to console the persecuted

believers, implicated in the sufferings of the Messiah, that “all things work for
good to them that love God, who are called according to His purpose” (Rom.
8. 28). Confusing Paul’s epistemic access by the word of the cross with his own
Platonic ascent, Leibniz seized hold. Felix culpa! Happy fault, Leibniz acclaimed,
by which we have come to enjoy so great a redemption! But this gives a comic
Deus ex machina, not the costly Deus incarnatus.
Needless to say, Leibniz is in very real danger of losing his audience at
this point. Many find “theodicy” uninteresting, since it presumes to ponder
imponderables. In the spirit of Spinoza, Bertrand Russell is alleged to have said
in reply to Leibniz’s thinking: “The world just is. We begin with that.” Others,
notably Voltaire, have found theodicy offensive, since it seems better at justifying
(indeed, sanctifying) evils as part of God’s plan than justifying God by indictment
of these contradictions of His good will. But this attempt at theodicy, as we have
just seen, arises from the comprehensive principle of sufficient reason, which
interestingly serves to put a painful spotlight on the existence of actual evil and
calls attention to it as the surd that ought not to be. This rational absurdity of actual
evil does not lead the rationalistic Leibniz to leave behind the mask of natural
theology, however, and instead to embrace the revealed theology he inherits
from Luther, Augustine, and Paul (where even a boldly speculative notion like
felix culpa might make some sense). Rather it causes him to deny that in divine
perspective the evil is actually evil, since it ultimately serves a greater good in the
whole sequence. God permits actual evil in order to achieve a surplus of good
otherwise unattainable. So Leibniz becomes an apologist in his philosophical
theodicy rather than a prophet,67 like Paul, whose theodicy of faith in Romans 8
is an indictment of this present evil age based on the conviction “that nothing
in all creation can separate from the love of Christ”—Deus incarnatus under the
present form of the persecuted.
Thus the peculiar failure of Leibniz’s project in natural theology becomes
visible: borrowing without warrant a dogma of revealed theology (the strong
Creator-creature distinction), treating it as a philosophical axiom (God
selecting from possible worlds as the ultima ratio of metaphysics), and on
this basis speculating as if to secure the moral rationality of this creation (the
Theodicy) against objections based on the mere appearance of evil that in reality
is actual and a devastating surd. Leibniz’s natural theology thus proves to be a
sophisticated dogmatism, which turns theology into (bad) philosophy, not the
critical dogmatics of disruptive grace, which is faith seeking understanding of
the Pauline paradox, Christ crucified, for the sake of resistance in the trial of
history. So we have come, we submit, to a far more incisive judgment on Leibniz’s

failure than Marion’s historically dubious assimilation of Leibniz to Descartes
via Malebranche that elides Leibniz’s encounter with Spinoza.
But if we take Leibniz’s encounter with Spinoza as decisive for his thought, our
analysis has also uncovered the obscured biblical theology of divine temporality
in the background that makes the underlying issue between Spinoza and Leibniz
precise, just as it accounts better for Leibniz’s failure: whether the self-existent
(for Spinoza, recall, only God is properly substance) God is self-determinate
(eminently hylozoic, we might say, self-organizing life per se as per alium),
conceivable then in the Trinitarian way as the free Giver and Redeemer and Fulfiller
of gifts of relative temporal subsistence as to genuine though ontologically lesser
others. Those gifted are those whose self-organization is always per aliud; yet
as so gifted, they are genuine, subsisting, existing selves with personal identity,
narratable (however fragmentary, confused, contested) biographies and not only
passing modifications of the divine Substance. If we take God and the human
self in this way, however, we have clearly left the grounds of classical philosophy
with its protological bias and quest for agency to take up a theological position,
where human patiency constitutes the theological subject with its epistemic
access to the new world God inaugurates by the word of the cross. In fact, all the
intriguing moves in Leibniz depend on surreptitious borrowings from revealed
theology, especially the strong Creator-creature distinction.
Going forward, we can take our Deleuze straight up, or at least more straightly
than Leibniz took his Spinoza. Theology cannot any longer cook the metaphysical
books to suit itself and should never have done so. The truth is quite the contrary.
The metaphysics of any age are its epoch in being. One can no more protest that
than willfully fly away to another world. But the right and the power of revealed
theology in any epoch of being turns on the God who actually comes by His
Word and Spirit to a lost and oppressed people, out of compassion to redeem,
displaying by sovereign election of what is weak, poor, and dishonored on this
good earth whose truly is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. This coming
is and gives the epistemic access. It summons theology into existence. It creates
theological subjectivity. The question now becomes how such a Word of God
concerning the cross can actually enter into Egypt and set us free, how Deus
incarnatus becomes by a positive dialectic Deus revelatus.
6
Deus Revelatus
What does the gospel mean by “God”?
Christian theology’s genuine tendency toward immanence in the name of the

imminent God is a kind of “atheism” in respect to the gods of religion, the
figures of transcendence, the idols and demons that captivate desire and fix it in
a polytheistic territorializing of life on behalf of the various funeral societies. As
dogmatics, theology deals by conceptual analysis with beliefs generated by the
gospel of the Crucified Messiah. We have seen instances of this in the previous
chapters. In Chapter 4 there was a questioning of the very notion of “God,” in order
conceptually to articulate “God” as imminent to immanence in Trinitarian advent
by the work of eschatological creation. As critical but not foundationalist, we saw
in Chapter 5’s account of epistemic access in the constitution of the theological
subject how dogmatics tests beliefs by conceptual analysis for fidelity to the event
of the gospel by the norms of the gospel’s own novelty and externality, the verbum
externum. As such theology is preserved both from mere opinion and, worse,
mere opinion posing as Truth, liberalism, and fundamentalism respectively. As a
discipline it is entitled to claim the name “critical” and a corresponding claim to
truth, as Alain Badiou’s analysis of Paul’s “universalism” to this extent correctly
suggests,1 by virtue of its intelligent and articulate fidelity to the event named
and extended in the gospel. Like philosophy, as we witnessed at the conclusion
of Part 1, critical dogmatics too can appreciate the social conservativism of the
“umbrella”—what sociologist Peter Berger once described as the “sacred canopy”
of the world religions. “Since we cannot exist in pure chaos,” religion as such is
not going to be vanquished even by our proposed revisions of philosophy or
theology—any more than the state will wither away, though the right kind of
critique may re-naturalize, detoxify, and render these institutions more humane
on the way to the Beloved Community of God. Short of the ultimate coming of
the Messiah in glory, the Crucified Messiah’s paradoxical presence in and by the
Eucharistic community that forms His body in the world can and does render
such penultimate reorderings of the orders.2
This reordering may come about by a critical restoration of a provisional
and nonhierarchical distinction between the sacred and the profane in this
present economic culture of unchecked capitalism where nothing is sacred
and everything is for sale. The commodification of the human body by the
processes that Giorgio Agamben has identified as the biopolitical reduction
of the human to bare life complicates any merely polemical tendency to
ascribe repression chiefly to religion, when more precisely it is religion in its
symbiosis with political sovereignty and capitalist exchange that effects not
merely repression but its dialectical pair, the commodification of the body (as
we shall argue below). Here the gospel and its theology help by fracturing the
alliance of throne and altar in the Hobbsean Leviathan. And they fracture this
alliance by actualizing an alternative economy of joyful exchange. In just this
way, theology achieves a better distinction between the sacred and the profane
by rendering both provisional and assigning to each distinctive work (we will,
till kingdom comes, need both courts of law, markets, and funeral societies).
The key word here is “provisional” or “temporary.” Religion, even if it is not
itself the gospel, has a critical albeit provisional role to play in a world in which
experimentation is not yet free but rather funded by monied interests and
sanctioned by the state’s (even the “democratic” state’s) monopoly on the means
of coercion. But what renders religion, its figures and opinions, provisional and
genuinely conservative of monetarily incalculable natural and human value
and so capable of resisting rather than abetting the state’s creeping claim to
ultimacy is the messianic presence, God revealed, which in the Pauline case
comes as word of the Crucified Messiah. In the same way, the de-divinized
state may check untrammeled capitalism rather than serve as guardian of its
infinite appetite. This fracturing and reordering becomes thinkable when the
purpose of God for Beloved Community, hidden from the ages but now made
known in Christ (Eph. 1), is understood theologically. Indeed, this coming of
the Beloved Community is what the gospel means by “God.”
Deus revelatus—the coming of the Beloved Community in order to redeem the
oppressed creation—is the topic discussed in this chapter. The thesis is that the
revelation of God in the word of the cross as parsed by Paul’s positive dialectics
requires and generates its own discipleship and discipline of understanding in
the world, theology as critical dogmatics, in distinction from the immanent
Deus Revelatus 179
metaphysics of contemporary philosophy but operating on the same plane. To

articulate the self-giving and hence self-revealing God, that is, to do theology in
this way, we will sketch out the notion of “positive dialectics” to distinguish the
theological Paul not only from the modern Gnosticism of Hegel but also the
more modest als ob philosophy of the Kantians. Positive dialectics explicates
the metaphor, not simile “Christ crucified” as God who purely gives, provided
only that recipients are “grieved over the ruin of Joseph” (Amos 6.6—an obscure
allusion, to be sure, meant to provoke the reader to look it up and ponder). We
will accomplish this explication by tracing the argument about the judgment
expressed in the Pauline word of the cross with its Messianic claim to sovereignty
in the highly charged recent rediscovery of Paul the Apostle among post-Marxist
thinkers.
Positive dialectics
In the thick of the terrible woes of the last century, Max Horkheimer observed
that “the concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was
kept alive that there are norms beside those to which nature and society give
expression in their operation.”3 This is, prima facie, an apt characterization of
the biblical tradition that has at its heart news of the exodus of Hebrew slaves
from the land of bondage as also news of the resurrection of the Crucified One.
We may justly map these events that figure the imminent God and His reign
on our proposed cartography as a peculiar “transcendence within immanence”
because the terms of transcendence are inextricably if metaphorically tied to
immanent events and thus give reference to something in the one world. The
only legitimate controversy about this latter claim to truth in a rhizomatic
cartography is whether it is novel in the qualitative sense claimed, that is, the
novelty of God surpassing God.
Deleuze and Guattari in fact allow that at least “illusory” reintroductions of
transcendence are unavoidable. “Thought cannot stop itself from interpreting
immanence as immanent to something, the Great Object of Contemplation, the
Subject of Reflection, or the Other subject of communication. . . . And if this
cannot be avoided it is because it seems that each plane of immanence can only
claim to be unique, to be the plane by reconstituting the chaos it had to ward off:
the choice is between transcendence and chaos.”4 One might accordingly give
up the claim to truth that one’s philosophically constituted plane of immanence
is “unique, the plane.” But that seems to reduce philosophy to mere opinion and
vulgar relativism. So one must claim for the screening of the chaos, the plane a
philosopher slices through it, that it expresses the true relation to reality, even
though this is illusory: “Chaos does not exist; it is an abstraction because it is
inseparable from a screen that makes something—rather than nothing—emerge
from it.”5 The allusion to Leibniz’s famous question here is revealing. What
Deleuze seeks to avoid is Leibniz’s mind of God, the region of the eternal verities,
the omniscient knowledge of all possibles as transcendent to, hence anchoring
of, the particular world that in fact exists by virtue of God’s free election of it
from infinite possibilities. Instead, he here regards the chaos as an abstraction.
This abstraction replaces the realm of possibilities in God’s mind. Is this of all
things a Kantian move? The text above, cited from What is Philosophy?, is using
“illusion” in the Kantian sense that understanding necessarily applies its concepts
to the noumenal field of which, however, it can have no possible intuition. If so,
this concession to inevitable illusions of transcendence would represent an odd
residue of Kantianism, in that here the very notion of a plane of immanence
is constituted by refusing noumenal knowledge to finite minds. That becomes
vulnerable to the Hegelian objection that to know that immanence is not
transcendence is to know something indeed about transcendence. And so the
dialectic of negativity would gain here its foothold—a very unhappy dilemma
for Deleuze!
Somewhat more positively, however, Deleuze and Guattari write a little later,
“Even illusions of transcendence are useful to us and provide vital anecdotes—for
when we take pride in encountering the transcendent within immanence, all we
do is recharge the plane of immanence with immanence itself. . . .”6 The examples
they give here are Kierkegaard and Pascal, whose belief in God, they say, is not
probed or tested by “transcendent values” but only by “immanent criteria. A
possibility of life is evaluated through itself in the movements it lays out and the
intensities it creates on a plane of immanence . . . [They] are concerned no longer
with the transcendent existence of God but only with the infinite immanent
possibilities brought about by the one who believes that God exists.”7 Granted.
But what is the need, rigorously conceived, to identify the biblical God with a
world other than the one we experience here and now, other than a long-standing
bad habit? Indeed, transcendentalizing God apophatically distances the biblical
God and neutralizes the claim of disruptive grace, present subversively in the
word concerning the Crucified Messiah, His imminent presence as the Deus
incarnatus, revealing God’s purpose, Deus revelatus.
Employing the Kantian idiom of the ideal and real, Horkheimer for his part
pointed to that long-standing bad habit in the form of a certain domestication of
Deus Revelatus 181
the gospel that occurred as European Christianity “lost its function of expressing
the ideal, to the extent that it became the bedfellow of the state.” As a result, the
“productive kind of criticism” of the “struggle for a more rational form of social
life” migrated from accommodated Christianity; it has now “thrown off its
religious garb” for good. Yet this “loss leaves its mark behind.” Even “after Kant”
this immanent struggle, “even though it knows better, cannot avoid falling into
shattered but nonetheless recurring illusions . . . ,” specifically, “the image of perfect
justice.” Thus, as above with Deleuze and Guattari, the infinite disillusionment
represented by the Kantian view of judgment als ob recurs. For “it is impossible
that such justice should ever become a reality within history.” Justice is a dream,
an ideal, a utopia, to use again the turn of phrase from Josiah Royce, of “beloved
community,” or from Luther, of “joyful exchange.”8 Here, says Horkheimer, “each
one must have his share” and “the same basic right to happiness.” But now, after
Hitler (and Stalin, and Hiroshima), this nourishing fantasy of the immanent
struggle for justice may only be embraced in tragic awareness of its infinite
elusiveness, only als ob it could be true or become true.
Horkheimer’s disillusionment is not only an apt reflection of the European
catastrophes of the twentieth century. It has two bases in the mature apprehension
of reality. The first is what Royce called the “hell of the irrevocable,”9 that is, that,
as Horkheimer wrote, “there will be no compensation for the wretchedness of
past ages.” The second is the chaos that mocks the puny human “struggle to
impose a more rational form of social life,” for “there is no end to the distress
in nature.” Horkheimer’s mature vision thus expresses the Kantian doctrine of
judgment after its processing by the Hegelian-Marxian dialectic of negativity:
lack, the prospect of an ever desired but fatally foredoomed conquest of nature,
including human nature, by humanity, itself driven by a dream of justice and
happiness that can only be embraced “as if ” it were true. The Frankfurt School’s
chastened Hegelianism of so-called negative dialectics (Adorno) is a view akin
to that of Žižek, as we recall from Chapter 4. From the Christian theological
perspective, however, the theological promise of Beloved Community and
joyful exchange is insufficiently distinguished here from Cartesian sovereignty
and post-Kantian idealism, which have captivated Christian religion in modern
Europe just as thoroughly as sovereign power ever did. Indeed, the former
captivity continues the latter.10
To accomplish a deeper disentanglement, not merely with religion but with
political sovereignty itself, Christian theology needs to reclaim the positive
dialectics of Paul. Any theology that does not flatly identify God and nature (and/
or history) but rather aspires to receive and pass on the “concept of God” from
biblical tradition as the critical “record of the wishes, desires, and accusations of
countless generations” for the coming of the Beloved Community, as Horkheimer
put it, must engage the concept of God with some kind of dialectic of God as
norm. For “norm” is not the unequivocal concept that Deleuze assumes, at least in
that “concept of God” rigorously derived from the gospel. Here “norm” indicates,
in a mutual tension, God both as the critical demand for justice and God as
the merciful promise of justice, both a judgment and a justification. Rightly
distinguishing and relating these two is a dialectical art. The point of this art is to
offer an alternative to tragedy that is equally “dialectical” (sic et non) in the sense
that it attends to the apparent contradiction evoked in the metaphor, Christ
crucified, though not in senses either of the Frankfurt School’s interminable
“negative dialectics” or Hegel’s own modern-Gnostic “dialectic of negativity.”11
But the apparent form of the theological alternative is offensive and an abiding
stumbling block. It is the figure of the Crucified, not Dionysus. According to the
Christian message the true restoration of the “innocence of becoming” comes
paradoxically, sub contrario, because it comes under the conditions of an epoch
willfully alienated from its own true creation and consequent creativity. The
restoration of the “innocence of becoming”—the Pauline “redemption of our
bodies” (Rom. 8. 23)—is given with the resurrection of the Crucified. This event
is the Word of God incarnate, expressing a divine judgment and justification:
“For our sake He made Him who knew no sin to be sin so that in Him we might
become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5.21). The concluding clause reveals
God, Deus revelatus, but not apart from reconciling the apparent contradiction in
the event of the sinless sin-bearer. This offensively articulate statement mandates
the “positive dialectic” of the “Law battling the Law in order to become liberty
for us all” (Luther12), of God surpassing God who had “consigned all to sin in
order that He might have mercy on all” (Rom. 11.32). With this affirmation of a
positive dialectic as the cunning of love in its zeal, its wrath but supremely and
properly in its divine compassion comes also a theological rejection. Rejected
is any dialectic of negativity, that is to say, of the power of the negative in the
motive of lack, of desire taken as erotic lack in greed or envy seeking its own in
all things and through all others. This rejection is as old and classical as the early
Catholic rejection of Gnosticism (historically, the first step on the trajectory to
the doctrine of God as Beloved Community, that is the holy Trinity).
In the same reflection Horkheimer went on to say that even under Fascist
persecution the churches would not “regain once again the vital reality” that once
was theirs. The reason he gave for this prescient judgment is that the churches
simply cannot any longer give up their parasitical relationship to the state, even
Deus Revelatus 183
at the humiliating cost of theological bankruptcy manifest when the bureaucracy

of the “authoritarian state” takes over and “reorganizes the old ideological
apparatus in which the church had its share.” Referring to the Nazi policy of
Gleichschaltung (the “coordination” of institutions with the Nazi worldview),
Horkeimer aptly observed that even though this traitorous accommodation of
the community of the gospel to the Nazi state “involves hardship[,] the church
must eventually see that its own social position depends on the continued
existence of the basic traits of the present system.” If that system were to change,
“the church would lose all and gain nothing.” For the church’s position entirely
had depended on “the belief that absolute justice is not simply a projection of
men’s minds but a real eternal power.” Yet no one any longer holds that belief as
true, even if not especially in the funeral societies. If it were held as true in the
churches, dependence on the state would be expendable if in fact the relationship
to the state entailed betrayal of the belief in “a real eternal power.” But the church
today only pretends to hold such a belief, that is to say, holds it “as if ” it were true,
ideologically then, for the purpose of securing and influencing the real political
power of the sovereign state. By exchanging its former belief in God’s coming
reign for transcendent and intangible “values,” the church “survives” in its new
role as an obedient chaplaincy of the sovereign state. Under postwar liberalism,
has anything fundamentally changed? Why should this analysis be any less
applicable in Euro-America today?
For Horkheimer, what really survives in this debased existence is neither
the church nor its outmoded belief but “the drives and desires” for greater
justice that the “concept of God” once expressed. What remains of “God” is the
apophatic reserve of the post-theistic “concept of infinity [that] is preserved in an
awareness of the finality of human life and of the unalterable aloneness of men.”
This ghostly remnant of God, Horkheimer concludes, works as safeguard against
“thoughtless optimism.” But for such consolation of conscience one hardly needs
the modern church which rather does obeisance to sovereignty, as if this were
Christianity. Like Boethius of old, philosophy becomes the only consolation.
Positive dialectics in this light offers a post-Christendom retrieval of that old
belief in “absolute justice” as “a real eternal power,” yet not as the Platonic posit of
another and higher world, but rather as the “achieved transcendence” (Jenson13)
of the coming reign of God on “the very earth on which stood the cross of Jesus,”
as Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s anti-Nazi Bethel Confession14 put it during the very time
Horkheimer composed this reflection on religion. Bonhoeffer is the model of
this theology, as Horkheimer clearly saw: “A purely spiritual resistance becomes
just a wheel in the machine of the totalitarian state. True discipleship, to which
many Christians may once again be called, does not lead men back to religion.”15
The abandonment of transcendentalism for positive dialectics should not be
a problem for theology that intends the intensification of immanence as the
way of life that is discipleship.16 Nor should it be a problem for a theology that
presupposes and remains close to the Hebrew Scriptures, which for their part
cannot conceive of God apart from the kataphatic figure of the redeemer of
matter, the God who comes. “Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery
of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their
taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them . . .’”
(Exod. 3. 7–8). At length in Israel’s tradition of belief, this way of understanding
God ripened to the hope of the resurrection, that is to say, of the redemption
of the body as the coming of God. From his Nazi prison cell where he strove
to reread the New Testament in continuity with Hebrew Scriptures, Bonhoeffer
put his finger on the differentiation advocated through these pages. “Belief in
the resurrection is not the ‘solution’ of the problem of death. God’s ‘beyond’ is
not the beyond of our cognitive faculties. The transcendence of epistemological
theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is the beyond
in the midst of our life.”17 Positive dialectics gives such “transcendence within
immanence” as the meaning of the word, “God,” the Deus revelatus.
Admittedly, this is hard to swallow for us in the knowledge class, who write
and read books like this and are holding on for dear life to our own rapidly
eroding symbiosis with sovereignty. Transcendentalism, we object, has had an
honorable history. It was a, perhaps the leading force moving (other-than-Marxist)
progressive politics, especially in nineteenth-century Germany and America.18
That is why its rejection (think of Nietzsche on socialism or democracy) can
seem “reactionary” and indeed on certain readings can fund reaction. Yet
transcendentalism comes at a great cost, as we increasingly see, a socially
unsustainable and personally unbearable cost: it is always predicated upon
(and hence inevitably perpetuates, as we saw at the conclusion of Chapter 2)
an anthropological dualism ever more subtle and vicious. The corresponding
instrumentalization of the body at the beck of putatively sovereign minds19 is
spiraling today out of control, where illusions of sovereignty mask the will to
dominate and its cost to the web of life.20
As Oswald Bayer puts it: “In its problematical ambivalence the Western
history of monarchical reason [read: The Tribunal of Reason] and its violence
are clear to everyone, at least since the ecological crisis . . . [Following
Hamann, this means that] I recognize that in my life and thought I cannot
proceed from a universal openness in which universal incurvation, that is, sin
Deus Revelatus 185
(cf. Rom. 11:32; Gal. 3:22), is always overcome. Precisely this is the departure
for every transcendental-philosophical and transcendental-theological thought,
in Kant and subsequently, for example, in Schleiermacher, Tillich, Pannenberg,
or Rahner . . . [P]resuppos[ing] humanity’s openness and receptivity, proves to
be harmless, or put more pointedly, illusionary.”21 According to Bayer’s critique
of critique in the name of Kant’s contemporary, Hamann, the modern dualism
between thinking being and material being attempts (unsuccessfully) to retain
(a semblance of) Christian ethics without Christian dogma, that is, without
naming and knowing the God of the gospel identified in Christian doctrine—as
if the heavy lifting of creating, redeeming, and fulfilling something as troubled as
this craven being who we are could be assumed by “modern man” who is rather
the living quintessence of the sovereign will to dominate. But transcendentalism
elevates the supposedly universal human ego above nature in place of God
rather than finding it in humble solidarity with nature in anticipation of the
God who comes. It does so by naturalizing grace or immanentizing the imago
Dei or generalizing pneumatology, when any or all of these Christian dogmatic
concepts are illicitly smuggled into what presents itself as “natural theology,” as
we saw in the case of Leibniz in Chapter 5.22 It disingenuously avers in this to
have “destroyed knowledge to make room for faith,” where “faith” has become
a cipher for the aspirational self of ethical idealism rather than the somatic
life risked on the unlikely Pauline promise of the “redemption of our bodies.”
Transcendentalism thus became a powerful but false solution to the very real
problem of human unhappiness with the human condition, as experienced in
modernity. The philosophical as well as theological alternative is rigorously to
embrace life “as it is.” And that latter is the significance of Deleuze for Christian
theology.
Deleuze abandons any contrastive identity for matter over against ideas or
for immanence over against transcendence, just as he disowns metaphysically
the notion of a single arche in favor of an unbounded Multiple where difference
is not the repetition of the same but the same that is ever repeated. The
Nietzschean motive here is to affirm the world “as it is” and this “as it is” is
something to be painstakingly uncovered, not assumed or taken for granted,
since our inherited language has been shaped by numerous, even prevalent
metaphors of life-denying alienation. The new metaphysics thus employs a
genealogical method, suspicious of the myriad subtle ways by which religious
or philosophical transcendence, expressive of human discontent at life “as it
is,” inferiorizes nature by making of humanity something more than it is. One
pursues metaphysics in this new key in order to discriminate between the world
“as it is” from the world as it is made to appear in discourses of greed, envy, and
resentment.
To that extent, Christian theology can make common cause. In an exact
parallel, Bonhoeffer meditated upon the “real” world as the sinful one nevertheless
loved by God in Christ23 in distinction from “religious” constructions of it (i.e.
“inwardness and self-transcendence”) which perpetuate weakness, sickness, and
sadness to cultivate a need for the succor of “religion.” The theological reality
of the world “as it is” is the world loved by God. This world redeemed by love
and on the way to the Beloved Community is the referent of the paradox,
“Christ crucified”—decoded socially (rather than only individually, as in the
forgiveness of sins) by the art of positive dialectics. The one term, the Christ,
expresses God happy and at home on the earth, as articulated in the dogma of
the Incarnation, which affirms the promise of creation and creativity. The other
term, the Crucified, expresses God’s wrath and rejection of the world that is not
at home with itself as God’s beloved creature, as articulated in the dogma of
atonement or reconciliation as the fulfillment of the demand of God on behalf
of the helplessly enslaved.24 In what follows we critically purge both of these
terms from accumulated associations that hinder understanding in order to
relate them properly and positively in the Pauline dialectic that reveals God.
But this involves another kind of differentiation from Deleuze, since the world
“as it is” is something highly contestable. Consequently, affirmation of the world
is also and inevitably a judgment, indeed a polemical judgment. The same plane
of immanence maps differently from the perspective of Pauline theology, as we
shall now see by tracing a fascinating contemporary dispute about this.
Deleuze judges judgment
“Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence. For the latter
creates itself through its own forces, that is, through forces it is able to harness, and
is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings the new combination into existence.
Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge.”25To create
and not to negate—this statement concludes Deleuze’s succinct and passionate
reprise of arguments worked out earlier in his celebrated Nietzsche study
from 1962, as discussed in Chapter 4. The cited statement forms a fascinating
counter-point to the concluding judgment expressed in Paul the Apostle’s epistle
on Christian liberty, “For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything;
but a new creation is everything! As for those who follow this rule—peace be
Deus Revelatus 187
upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God” (Gal. 6.15–16). The Greek
word kanon here articulates Paul’s criterion, his “rule” of gospel faith and hence
standard of judgment for the authenticity of Christian communal existence.26
It cuts across the binaries of contrastive identity that otherwise prevail in this
epoch by setting in force the new creation of God (Gal. 3.26–8).27 Paul thereby
renders inoperative at least a certain kind of judgment precisely in order to
assert “a new mode of existence.” Paul knows and rejects as now outmoded this
kind of judgment spoken in the name of God which stultifies and suppresses
new life. He had accordingly written just a few paragraphs earlier, “For freedom
Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of
slavery” (Gal. 5.1). Thus, by the same rule, it is not just any novelty that is justified
in this way. Not all change is for the good; some change is relapse from freedom
into bondage. One must, just as a kanon indicates and enables, discriminate, that
is to say, judge. The novelty that Paul wants to assert and protect is not valid
as the individual’s spontaneous self-creation. Recognition of its source in the
God who comes must be carefully sustained in order to keep and enjoy it, by
the criterion marking the event of God’s self-giving and hence self-revelation to
which Paul himself also submits (Gal. 1. 6–9). The theological subject comes as
gift, hence as a Novum and can only be kept as this Novum.
So how may we parse this perplexing set of convergences and divergences
between Deleuze and Paul? Doing so provides a baseline for the discussion to
follow of the discoveries of Paul in Badiou and Agamben.
In this essay Deleuze in fact made an oblique reference to Paul. The context is
“combat.” The “system of cruelty” (Nietzsche’s “master morality” that has since
been supplanted by the “system of judgment,” i.e. “slave morality”) goes back
philosophically to Heraclitus, who has “combat, combat everywhere; it is combat
that replaces judgment.”28 Here “things come and become in the course of the
combat that composes their forces.” For Deleuze, as for Nietzsche, it is ambiguous
to what extent this prior system of cruelty is natural life, which is to be accepted
“as it is,” or is a particular historical form of primitive social organization that
may be left behind. In any case, Deleuze’s central point is that its replacement
by the system of judgment continues the cruelty in disguised ways. So it comes
about that Paul gets mentioned in a oblique way: “Whenever someone wants
to make us renounce combat, what he is offering us is a ‘nothingness of the
will,’ a deification of the dream, a cult of death, even in its mildest form—that
of the Buddha or Christ as a person (independently of what Saint Paul makes
of him).”29 The sense seems to be that Christ as a real historical person is like
the Buddha, that is, a pacifist recommending an unnatural sanctity, a nihilistic
annihilation of biological life “red in tooth and claw,” a renunciation of the will
to power and “combat.” Paul seems here, however, to be set against this image of
the historical Christ as brother in spirit to the Buddha. That would correspond
to Nietzsche’s portrait of the historical Jesus in The Antichrist. The hint is that
Paul has made something other, something militant, out of Christ, the crucified
and risen One.
A short detour is in order here. One topic in which Nietzsche showed
himself a true child of the nineteenth century was in the portrait of Jesus in The
Antichrist that Nietzsche drew to save him from Paul.30 In this he joined the
many contemporaneous “quests for the historical Jesus” that within a few short
years Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer would expose as fantasies of the
liberal Protestant soul.31 Weiss painfully demonstrated (to himself, son-in-law
of Albrecht Ritschl, as well as) to his generation that the first-century Jew Jesus
thought of the key notion in his proclamation and mission of the basileia tou
theou not “thetically,” but “antithetically.”32 That is to say, it does not indicate the
unfolding of the ideal in progressive historical advances, a “history of salvation”
proceeding to the universal, as Kantian theology had thought. Rather, Jesus
thought apocalyptically of the reign of God in combat with this epoch, under the
thrall of Satan, “antithetically,” then, as a collision. He now personified and that
would culminate in the coming in power and great glory of the heavenly Father’s
Reign by the miracle of the resurrection of the dead. Thus Jesus’ ethic is an
“interim” ethic; it is a “faith” ethic that ventures all. “But when you give a banquet,
invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed,
because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the
righteous” (Lk. 14.13–14). What positively connects Jesus and Paul historically is
such apocalyptic Messianism,33 which does not indicate any kind of Platonizing
ontological dualism between body and mind or real and ideal, but rather expresses
an ethical and historical combat between times, epochs, ages. What separates
Jesus and Paul historically is that Jesus anticipates the Reign’s arrival but Paul also
looks back at its breakthrough in the event of the resurrection of the crucified
Jesus, which in turn is the source of Paul’s word of the Crucified Messiah. A
further short note on this is in order. The Wirkungsgeschichte of the “Paul against
Jesus” conceit of liberal Protestantism is by no means reassuring. It makes its way
all the way to Hitler’s table, where with some justice it exploits Nietzsche’s trope
of Judaism as slave-morality, momentarily overcome by a free-spirited Jesus, only
to be reinstituted by Paul.34 Contemporary scholarship has exposed the depth of
the appropriation of Nietzsche’s liberal, all-too-liberal reading of the Jesus-Paul
relation in Nazified biblical scholarship35 and theology.36
Deus Revelatus 189
It will in any case be right, as we shall examine in the next section on Badiou,
to see militancy in Paul. The “combat” of the Spirit and the flesh stands at the
center of the apostle’s teaching on Christian life, as Badiou will rightly stress.37
Moreover, on close examination Pauline “combat” is comparable, if not identical
to the Deleuzian analysis in this essay: “more profoundly, it is the combatant
himself who is the combat: the combat is between his own parts, between the
forces that either subjugate or are subjugated, and between the powers that
express these relations of force.” While an external “combat-against” may be in
order to fend off encroaching forces of subjugation, such snarling and flashing
of teeth “find their justification in the combat-between . . . [that] tries to take
hold of a force to make it one’s own . . . [and so] enriches itself by seizing hold of
other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble: a becoming.”38 Paul too
snarls at interlopers in Galatia who would subjugate Gentile believers there again
to the contrastive identity marker of circumcision. Paul too flashes his teeth in
order to preserve for them the true freedom given with the combat of the Spirit
against the flesh. It would seem then that the difference between Deleuze and
Paul cannot be parsed in terms of what Nietzsche called “self-overcoming,” the
freedom to change, the freedom to become, since Pauline faith too comes and
hence exists in an ongoing “combat,” a “conversion,” a “becoming.”
“Combat is not war,” Deleuze now adds. War is merely a will to dominate
externally, not yet the interior combat of self-overcoming; war can even be a
destructive substitute for the latter creativity. “War is only combat-against, a will
to destruction, a judgment of God that turns destruction into something ‘just.’
The judgment of God is on the side of war, and not combat.”39 This aside marks
quite a gratuitous turn in the analysis, a passing indictment of God justifying a
renunciation of God as the supreme emblem of judgmental toxicity. But since
“God” is not anything real on the plane of immanence, Deleuze’s aside will rather
mean a sweeping indictment and renunciation of those who judge in the name
of God, presumably if not preeminently, Paul the Apostle, who sees in Christ the
judgment of judgment and hence the justification of the ungodly—this being his
very kanon of new creation. More assumed than explicitly argued in this essay, it
is just this human invocation of God on the plane of immanence that comprises
the “system of judgment” that Deleuze would “have done with.” So does this
invocation of God get to the bottom of the divergence between him and Paul?
Unfortunately, the answer must be yes and no, since what Deleuze means by
“God” and what Paul means by “God” are by no means commensurate.
For Paul the signature of God is creativity, “who gives life to the dead
and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4.17), as already
seen by Paul in the paradigmatic faith of Abraham. But for Deleuze God is a
feudal landlord, writ large. Deleuze’s anti-theology, following Nietzsche, runs
as follows. In the beginning of judgment was the quid pro quo economy of
exchange. “Existing beings confront each other, and obtain redress by means
of finite relations that merely constitute the course of time.” This economic
confrontation is the primordial instance of the external “combat-against” on
the plane of immanence, as introduced above. Nietzsche showed us, Deleuze
continues, that the “creditor-debtor relation was primary in relation to all
exchange.” Promises, debts, circumstances all enter into play, interactions
creating new affects among the competitive parties. The primitive system of
cruelty does not yet sublimate with monetary exchange; it “inscribes” debt
“directly on the body,” that is, making slaves of debtors. This gives a “justice
that is opposed to all judgment . . .” by the “terrible signs that lacerate bodies
and stain them, the incisions and pigments that reveal in the flesh of each
person what they owe and are owned.” Seeing this, one can also see that how the
“system of judgment” that supplanted this “system of cruelty” by sublimation
is “moderate only in appearance, because it in fact condemns us to an endless
servitude and annuls any liberatory process.”40 It replaces a manifestly cruel
reality “with a false judgment leading to delirium and madness.” It made this
maddening move by abstracting from the reality of natural life to which the
system of cruelty at least had the merit of attending truthfully. It accomplished
this abstraction by infinitizing life and thus also infinitizing debt: “the infinity
of the debt and the immortality of existence each depend on the other, and
together constitute the ‘doctrine of judgment.’”41 Hence we get God as eternal
Feudal Landlord and the immortal soul as infinite debtor.
The falsity of the feudal system of judgment is twofold. First, this system judges
falsely in assigning teleologically particular forms for particular ends from which
persons, as finite, will inevitably fall short, fall into sin, fall into a debt that is
simultaneously infinitized. Second, it judges falsely by alienating attention from
the actual interactions that affect them in the immanent nature of things and by
directing them instead to the fantastic worry over the eternal fate of their souls.
Christianity, Deleuze notes, brings both of these false judgments to a pinnacle
when we “become in our entire being the infinite debtors of a single God.”42
Two further deleterious consequences ensue from this infinite indebtedness to
the one God. First, the debtor lives in a dream world where the test of reality by
actual experience is suppressed: “The dream erects walls, it feeds on death and
creates shadows, shadows of all things and of the world, shadows of ourselves.”
Liberation comes from the “turn away from judgment to justice,” a new kind of
Deus Revelatus 191
“insomniac dream” or “Dionysian intoxication” in “drinks, drugs, ecstasies,” all

ways of “escaping judgment” by the justice of affirming life as it is. Second, the
debtor of the “theological doctrine of judgment” is implicated in a “veritable
organization of the bodies through which it acts . . . the judgment of God is
nothing other than the power to organize to infinity.” This power to organize
infinitely alludes to one of the most obscure ideas in Deleuzian metaphysics, the
“the body without organs.”
Bodies with organs would be assemblages organized, in the present case, by
the “infinite” system of judgment through which God asserts sovereignty over
them. But bodies without organs are these same assemblages, not as individuals
infinitely organized by transcendent judgment, but as “an affective, intensive,
anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients. . . .
Traversed by powerful, nonorganic vitality . . . [an] intense vitality that defies
organs and undoes their organization.” This rhizomatic anarchy of natural
life is what “God has stolen from us” in the name of organizing us. Hence the
way to justice, as anthropodicy, as the justification of life as it is, comes by
undoing God’s theft of anarchic vitality. The way to escape judgment “is to
make yourself body without organs, to find your body without organs.”43 To
be sure, these latter imperatives become aporetic upon reflection—to whom
are they addressed, if not to an individual self with agency? And how is she
to escape the system of judgment, when it comprehends and organizes all,
as “God” here so denominates? Can one escape the latter illusion with the
former one?
Attack on the Feudal Landlord notwithstanding, Deleuze’s affirmative
intention admits of certain structural parallels to Paul’s embattled “Israel of
God,” Royce’s “beloved community” in this epoch in which it is betrayed and
where atonement thus becomes the creative task of the messianic reconciliation
of the moral traitor who is therewith banished by the hell of the irrevocable. For
Deleuze summons us to a justice surpassing judgment that consists in connecting
again with creation and creativity. He acknowledges moreover that the disturbing
aspect in “renouncing judgment” had always seemed to be the surrender of
any means by which “to distinguish between existing beings, between modes
of existence, as if everything were now of equal value.”44 But according to the
analysis, anything that has “value can be made or distinguished only by defying
judgment,” that is by facing up to the reality of the system of cruelty in order to
return to the finite tasks of exchange and self-overcoming given with love of life
and hate of what diminishes life.45 Thus, “it is not a question of judging other
existing beings, but of sensing whether they agree or disagree with us, that is,
whether they bring forces to us, or whether they return us to the miseries of
war, to the poverty of the dream, to the rigors of organization.” Locating the
question of justice and its criteria this way on the level of immanent forces at
play is precisely not “subjectivism,” since re-locating the self with its love and
hates in the interaction of natural affects “already surpasses all subjectivism”46
or perhaps, better, subverts the sublimation expressed in the Cartesian Ego and
the Transcendental Subject, the modern philosophical forms of the system of
judgment.
Upon reflection, then, one has to be astonished at the blind spot. Deleuze
opens the essay by singling out the figures of Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka,
and Artaud as exemplary victims of the injustice of judgment—“they had
personally, singularly suffered from judgment. They experienced that infinite
point at which accusation, deliberation, and verdict converge.”47 But surely
Socrates and Jesus, with all the Hebrew prophets, are the foundational icons of
the Western tradition in this respect, free of resentment moreover in that each
affirms with a self-overcoming amor fati that it is better to suffer injustice
than to commit injustice. But this “better” is for them the norm encoded in
the “concept of God” beyond those regimes of vindictiveness operative in
nature and society. In this light one cannot knowingly pursue an anti-theology
in such vague and sweeping terms as is here assumed, as if Anselm’s early
medieval theological similitude of moral guilt as economic debt could stand as
part for the whole of Christian theology on sin and grace. Anselm is not in this
respect Paul (or Luther48). Badiou, who makes no secret of his own atheism
and ultimately anti-theological purpose, provides the telling criticism of
Nietzsche-cum-Deleuze in this regard. “If Nietzsche is so violent towards Paul,
it is because he is his rival far more than his opponent . . . To say that Paul shifted
‘the center of gravity of life out of life into the “Beyond”—into “Nothingness,”
and that in so doing he “deprived life as such of its centre of gravity”’ (The
Anti-Christ, # 43), is to maintain the very opposite of the apostle’s teaching, for
whom it is here and now that life takes revenges on death, here and now that we
can live affirmatively according to the spirit, rather than negatively, according
to the flesh, which is the thought of death.”49 Or again, commenting on The
Anti-Christ, # 58, Badiou writes: “Nothing in this text fits . . . the ‘world’ that
Paul declares has been crucified with Jesus is the Greek cosmos, the reassuring
totality that allots places and orders thoughts to consent to those places. . . . ,”50
in other words, to the very “rigors of organization” against which Deleuze,
following Nietzsche, had inveighed. “Nietzsche is Paul’s rival far more than
his opponent. Both share the same desire to initiate a new epoch in human
Deus Revelatus 193
history, the same conviction that man can and must be overcome, the same
certainty that we must have done with guilt and law.”51
Badiou’s fabulous event
Badiou reminds the reader at the outset of his Paul book that his project is “to
refound a theory of the Subject” as subject to the “event” without dialectically
negating the realities of the multiple, contingency and freedom.52 Badiou,
chastened “Maoist” exponent of “cultural revolution,”53 claims to have rediscovered
the paradigm of revolutionary political subjectivity in Paul the Apostle, who,
he says, “provoked—entirely alone—a cultural revolution upon which we still
depend.”54
Badiou is on solid ground here. The word of the cross is an event of reporting. It
is news of something whereby the new thing reported repeats itself in addressing
new people. This double-event conferred on Saul of Tarsus his new, theological
subjectivity, as Rudolf Bultmann rightly explained: “The question thrust upon
him by this kerygma was whether he was willing to regard the crucified Jesus
of Nazareth, whom the kerygma asserted to have risen from the dead, as the
expected Messiah . . . that meant whether he was willing to acknowledge in the
cross of Christ God’s judgment upon his self-understanding up to that time . . .”55
Paul’s acceptance of this judgment, Bultmann further observed, was “not the
result of an inner moral collapse” but rather the consequence of an external word
that came to him as news. But how can and did the repetition of the event of the
cross of Christ, the “kerygma,” reach Paul with right and power to convince him
as the judgment of God?
Bultmann does not reflect directly on this question, which would have led
him away from existential-anthropological interpretation to theology, that is, to
discourse about what is meant by the word, “God.” The kerygma is for him a brute
fact that appears in the world. It is the sheer assertion of a word from “God,” as
from the Beyond, of which no account may be given, for giving reasons would
jeopardize the authenticity of the decision of faith—the real topic of interest here.
Form criticism of the resurrection narratives in the gospels had suggested that in
the chaotic discovery of the missing body of crucified Jesus someone announced:
“He is not here.” And inferred: “He is risen.” Thus “faith” arose to overcome
disillusionment. Occasioned by the discovery of the missing body, faith expresses
by the myth of resurrection a human decision for re-enchantment. Henceforth
the repeated “word” of resurrection occasions psychologically the “event” of
such “authentic” decisions. Such decision formally submits to the divine krisis
(judgment) of the world, in that the cipher, “God,” stands for that which cannot
be spoken of nor thought, the non-world. “God” as Not-world designates only
the irruption of an incalculable and the divine word but a categorical negation
of what is. Repeated in the kerygma, this “judgment” of God summons auditors
to the same existential decision of faith to abandon worldly security and trust in
the unknown and unknowable future: deliteralized existential “eschatology,” as
Bultmann insisted, not crude apocalyptic theology. Bultmann thought that with
this account he could save the news (the kerygmatic event) without having to
affirm the new (the resurrection of the body of Jesus by God as an external event
in, if not of, history) or give an account of “God” as cause of this newness. Thus it
is not surprising, as we shall see, if philosophers like Badiou and even Agamben
reproduce this “existential-anthropological” position, reliant as they are on the
influential Bultmann school, and via Bultmann, on Heidegger.
Paul, so understood, becomes a cultural artifact that serves the philosopher
as a resource for the aforementioned project of theorizing the revolutionary
political subject. Paul gets this recognition, even admiration from Badiou. As
for the filmmaker Passolini, so for Badiou: Paul is “our contemporary” who “in
revolutionary fashion, wanted to destroy a model of society based on social
inequality, imperialism, and slavery.”56 But chiefly Badiou intends to decipher
and deploy the “underlying conceptual organization,” even while quite expressly
“setting aside the content of [Paul’s] event”57—the “fable” of the resurrection: “it
is rigorously impossible to believe in the resurrection of the crucified.”58 Since,
for Paul, faith in the resurrection is what it means to believe in “God,” as the
apostle teaches in Romans 4 on the faith of Abraham, Badiou’s appropriation and
abstraction of the formal logic of the “event” from Paul for service in Badiou’s
own project is necessarily “atheistic.”59 Or is it?
The philosopher seeks to “extract a formal, wholly secularized conception
of grace from the mythological core. Everything hinges on knowing whether
an ordinary existence, breaking with time’s cruel routine, encounters the
material chance of serving a truth, thereby becoming, through subjective
division and beyond the human’s animal’s survival imperatives, an immortal.”60
Methodologically, then, Badiou’s Paul study would be yet another example
(as just indicated, in the train of Kant and Heidegger and Bultmann) of the
subordination of theology to philosophy that our proposal of a new cartography
of the relations of philosophy, religion and politics, and theology rejects.
Nonetheless, what is of interest is an aspect of Badiou’s interpretation of Paul
that does correspond to our commitment to work rigorously on the plane of
Deus Revelatus 195
immanence. It may be teased out of his “attempt to restore the universal to

its pure secularity.”61 This “restoration” may in fact correspond to the apostle’s
own theological intention, that is to say, it may clarify more precisely just what
Paul means by “God” as the God who comes to raise the dead and inaugurate
a new world. His fundamental significations of the “universal”—justification
of the ungodly, resurrection of the dead, coming of the reign of God—for their
part already all seem to have reference to just such transcendence within
immanence.
What is puzzling about Badiou’s proposed philosophical subordination of
theology, however, is how what can be discounted as a theological fable (the
resurrection of the crucified) becomes any less fabulous in being transposed
to philosophical idiom under the denomination, “the event.” This latter is a
technical term, which means for Badiou a singularity that is universalizable,
a particular that envisions the whole and institutes a new subjectivity by this
new vision of the whole. Equally puzzling is how a metaphysics that accords
continuing primacy to possibility over necessity at every moment of ordinary
existence is not, finally, a specifically biblical theology (as in, “with God all things
are possible,” Mk 10:27, 14:16 or Paul’s faith of Abraham in Romans 4). Indeed,
Badiou’s own account of Paul acutely lays out the parallelism between Rabbinic
law and Greek wisdom as the twin forms of the closed cosmic order against which
Paul’s disruptive theology of grace by resurrection of the Crucified constitutes
an “anti-philosophy.” This characterization of Paul as the Anti-philosopher
(a parody of Nietzsche’s self-parody as “the Antichrist”) does major work for
Badiou: “Paul is not a philosopher precisely because he assigns his thought to
a singular event, rather than a set of conceptual generalities. For Paul, the truth
event repudiates philosophical Truth, while for us the fictitious dimension of
this event repudiates its pretension to real truth.”62 Just this latter is hard to
follow, however. Does Badiou mean that “we,” that is, we philosophers can have
miracles of our own in the “event,” provided only that we do not hold onto the
theologically fabulous content of Paul’s event, the resurrection?
It would seem so. In a meditation on Pascal, Badiou had written, “. . . the
miracle . . . is the emblem of the pure event as resource to truth. Its function—to
be in excess of proof—pinpoints and factualizes the ground from which there
originates both the possibility of believing in truth and God not being reducible
to this pure object of knowledge with which the deist satisfies himself. The miracle
is the symbol of an interruption of the law in which the interventional capacity is
announced.”63 Badiou thinks in this way to extract the philosophical kernel from
the mythological-theological husk. But how does what is substantively disruptive
of cosmic order and anti-philosophy become philosophy without thereby being

defanged and thus ceasing to disrupt? How can possibility precede and exceed
and follow actuality—except as the God who gives life to the dead and calls into
existence things that do not exist?
Perplexity about secular miracles diminishes to a degree as we grasp Badiou’s
rigorous equation of truth and universality. For Badiou “truth” simply is what is
universalizable, what always and everywhere is and therefore must also be the
case. Badiou’s “ought” derives analytically from the truly apprehended “is.” This
axiom of truth as the event of awakening to what is and ought to be universally
valid radically exposes the untruth of any and all prevailing particularisms
falsely posing as universals. In Paul’s day that was the pax Romana and in our
day it is liberalism-cum-capitalism, which in the name of the (false) universal of
monetary exchange institutes imperial regimes of Euro-American privilege and
corresponding exploitation of the global masses abroad and their refugees at
home. Such pseudo-universals or conventional “truths” block “the subjectivation
of grace’s universal address as pure conviction or faith,”64 evoking a true world of
human equality where one and all are treated the same. With this philosophical
insight into the contradictions of prevailing culture, the “event” of universalizable
truth coming into consciousness is disclosive, not causal. That is to say, the
philosopher’s “event” is not like the theological fable of the resurrection that is
fabulously thought in theology to be causal in nature, to alter reality, making
one who had truly died to live anew. Rather, the “event” is the unveiling of the
immanent contradictions that ought not to be and hence the constituting of truth
as the new subjectivity that intends universal consistency, as in the early Marx’s
categorical imperative to abolish all conditions that hinder man from being the
highest being for man. Thus, as Badiou summarizes, the Pauline subject is (1)
constituted by the event, (2) whose truth is entirely subjective in the sense of
being a testimony of conviction arising from the event, (3) and who perseveres
in a process of fidelity, (4) indifferent to popular opinion. Each of these features
of Paulinism, Badiou concludes, can be “appropriated for our situation and our
philosophical tasks.”65
Yet perplexity persists. Badiou’s disclosure event surely seems to work in
causal fashion after the Pauline model. Badiou is emphatic in speaking of the
“founding event,” Paul’s Damascus Road encounter as repetition of the Easter
event, as “totally incalculable;”66 as “the sudden eruption of chance, the event,
the pure encounter;”67 as “pure event, opening of an epoch, transformation of
the relations between the possible and the impossible;”68 as “the advent of a
subject,”69 namely Christ, not as a mediator within the closed cosmic system
Deus Revelatus 197
but as its alternative confronting the subjectivities of falsehood. Affirming this

confrontational nature of the Christ-event for Paul, Badiou’s argument now
takes a necessary but peculiar twist. He categorically denies any “mediation”
or “dialectic” in Paul, since that would entangle the new subjectivity with
the preexisting cosmic order and undermine the “ontological subversion”
worked by Paul’s anti-philosophy. So on the one hand we have what appears
to be a miraculous causal event in the incalculable coming of a militant new
subjectivity and on the other hand a resolute denial of any relation of this new
causal power to prevailing or preexisting powers. Badiou nuances the evident
tension here this way: “‘Grace’ means that thought cannot wholly account for
the brutal starting over on the path of life in the subject, which is to say, for the
rediscovered conjunction between thinking and doing. Thought can be raised
up from its powerlessness only through something that exceeds the order of
thought.”70 The emphasis on the word, “wholly,” is Badiou’s. But in that case the
event is not merely disclosive. Likewise, it must also be at least partially related
to the alienation of thought and doing which preexists in the prevailing false
consciousness. Consequently Badiou’s event not only remains (at least partially)
mysterious in its originative power, that is to say, miraculous, but the event is also
dialectically related to its own antecedents.
Yet Badiou gives a whole chapter under the title, “The Antidialectic of Death
and Resurrection,” in which he argues that resurrection “is neither a sublation, nor
an overcoming of death. They are two distinct functions . . .” in the sense that death
is wholly natural and immanent and resurrection to life is wholly grace. These two
confront each other as exclusive alternatives. Indeed, “[u]timately for Paul, the
Christ-event is nothing but resurrection. It eradicates negativity . . .”71 “Paul, we
have insisted, is not a dialectician.”72 The shadow of Hegel’s dialectic of negativity
falls heavily here, because Badiou rightly wants to see how in Paul “affirmation
triumphs over negation” and correspondingly to insist that universality transverses
rather than abrogates particularity. The cultural particularisms of Greek and Jew,
married and single, slave and free are not abolished but relativized and re-ordered
by the advent of the truth-event. Lacking, however, understanding of Paul’s positive
dialectic of the Law (as both promise and demand for justice), Badiou’s polemic
against dialectic as such gives rise to a series of massive interpretative blunders.
It is, he avers, Paul’s “Judaizing” opponents whose conception of the
subject is dialectical in that the novelty of the Christ-event for them
“conserves and sublates the traditional site of faith, that it incorporates it by
exceeding it. The Christ-event accomplishes the Law; it does not terminate
it.”73 Thus Badiou’s Paul becomes Marcion. Consequently the Jew Jesus
becomes expendable. “[W]e need retain of Christ only what ordained this
destiny [of ‘new creation’], which is indifferent to the particularities of the
living person: Jesus is resurrected; nothing else matters, so that Jesus becomes
like an anonymous variable, a ‘someone’ devoid of predicative traits, entirely
absorbed by his resurrection.”74 Thus Badiou’s Paul becomes a docetist. “Paul’s
project is to show that a universal logic of salvation cannot be reconciled
with any law, be it one that ties thought to the cosmos, or one that fixes the
effects of an exceptional election . . . One must proceed from the event as
such, which is a-cosmic and illegal, refusing integration into any totality and
signaling nothing.”75 So Badiou’s Paul becomes an obscurantist, a fideist, a
fundamentalist. Only in the little chapter on “Love as Universal Power”
does Badiou approach something like the positive dialectic of Paul’s actual
theology when he writes that Paul “rediscovers the living unity of thinking
and doing. This recovery turns life itself into a universal law. Law returns
as life’s articulation for everyone, path of faith, law beyond law. This is what
Paul calls love.”76 One could equally call it the “redemption of our bodies,”
the liberation of the frustrated and groaning creation for new creativity, the
reconciliation of the estranged, Paul’s transcendence within immanence—in
short, what Paul fabulously means by “God,” Deus revelatus.
Unsurprisingly, as we suggested above, there is a source in the scholarship
for these paralogisms besetting Badiou’s Paul interpretation. It can be traced
from his over-reliance on Günther Bornkamm, a significant representative of
the Bultmann school.77All of the distinctive polemical constructions of this
school are repeated in Badiou: Paul is opposed to the narrative attempt of the
gospels to give content and significance to the name of the Jew Jesus;78 thus
all that matters about Jesus is das Dass of His coming;79 the iconic Luther is
invoked as authorizing this reduction;80 Paul’s very place in the canonical New
Testament thus becomes an enigma.81 Most significant theologically speaking
is Badiou’s emphatic anti-Trinitarianism, which is expressly articulated in
the foregoing terms of anti-dialectic: “Later, theology will indulge in all sorts
of contortions in order to establish the substantial identity of Father and Son.
Paul has no interest at all in such Trinitarian questions. The antiphilosophical
metaphor of the ‘sending of the son’ is enough for him, for he requires only
the event and refuses all philosophical reinscription of this pure occurrence by
means of the philosophical vocabulary of substance and identity.”82 Behind this
judgment (which must make a Pauline text like Philippians 2 into a forgery)
stands Heidegger’s sweeping claims against “ontotheology,”83 which is to say,
against God immanent to the creation as Creator of all that is not God out of the
Deus Revelatus 199
positivity of Trinitarian surplus in the cunning of love that comes to dwell deep
in the flesh, anticipating the Beloved Community.
Milbank and Žižek have each made probing critiques of Badiou. Žižek
takes note of the “openly anti-Hegelian . . . interpretation of Christianity that
radically dissociates death and resurrection; they are not the same; they are
not even dialectically interconnected in the sense of gaining access to eternal
life by paying the price of suffering that redeems from our sins.” Anselm’s
misleading metaphor notwithstanding, this disassociation cannot easily pass for
interpretation of Paul, who sees the justice of the justification of the ungodly
grounded by the death of Christ in solidarity with them, the righteous for
the unrighteous. Žižek rightly sees that Badiou’s overriding concern in such a
forced reading of Paul is to “avoid the pitfalls of morbid masochistic morality
that perceives suffering as inherently redeeming,”84 an intention that is surely
to be affirmed and connected with Badiou’s discovery of Paul’s unexpected
closeness “to his great detractor, Nietzsche.”85 Notwithstanding his own atheistic
dismantling of Paul, Žižek’s negative dialectics by contrast have the virtue of
pointing to the death of the Son of God as a central element of the metaphor,
Christ crucified, since pace Badiou, “Jesus Christ is not thought of in the same
way as messiahs in other religions. Christ is not a representative of God; he is
God. This means that God is radically split . . . God abandoned by God.”86 From
this vantage point as regards the interpretation of Paul, Žižek can rightly criticize
Badiou’s eschewing of dialectic for missing the “magic,” that is, what Paul means
by “God:” “for St. Paul, precisely since there is the God of love, everything is
permitted to the Christian believer . . . the positive, affirmative attitude of love.”87
This “magic” grounds a different kind of dialectic than what Badiou rejects, one
that can connect Jesus who was crucified positively to the Christ-event and new
creation so that His suffering and death have indeed saving and new-creative
significance. Just such “magic” is what makes dialectic positive, not negative,
yielding the Deus revelatus.
Milbank on the other hand points to the fabulous, “magical” element that
survives in Badiou’s attempted philosophy of immanence: “Once he has declared
that the Event and the truth-process arrive in their actuality as a ‘gift,’ then it
scarcely matters that he does not affirm their arrival from an elsewhere . . . To speak
of grace without God can only mean to speak apophatically of God—unless the
Event is entirely hollowed out by the Void or is simply a human projection.”88 Both
Milbank and Žižek raise significant objections in this later connection, whether
Badiou’s stance reduces to pure decisionism. Milbank astutely connects Badiou’s
anti-Trinitarianism with his Cartestian voluntarism and subjectivism: “Badiou can
say that human beings ‘create the truth’ in exactly the same way as Descartes’ God.”
He asks, however, how this voluntarism can be “consistent with Badiou’s view that
subjects can only be subjectivized within in the truth-process.”89 Again, tracing
Badiou’s lineage to Heidegger, Žižek asks “what if what Badiou calls the truth-Event
is, at its most radical, a purely formal act of decision, not only not based on actual
truth but ultimately indifferent to the precise status (actual or fictitious) of the
truth-Event it refers to . . . ? What if the true fidelity to the Event is ‘dogmatic’ in the
precise sense of unconditional faith, of an attitude that does not ask for good reasons
and that, for that very reason, cannot be refuted by any ‘argumentation?’”90
It is difficult to see that Badiou has good answers to these objections or indeed
that he can even feel the force of them, since the axiomatic principle of truth as
universalizability is at work here as an Archimedean point. It is in this vein,
on the closing pages of the Paul book, that Badiou takes a swipe at Agamben’s
counterargument in Homo Sacer that universalism, in Badiou’s words, “found its
emblem, if not its culmination, in the death camps, where everyone, having been
reduced to a body on the verge of death, was absolutely equal to everyone else.”
Badiou protests that the universal law to love one’s neighbor as oneself “was what
the Nazis wanted to abolish.”91 For a putative follower of Paul this argument is
inexcusably superficial. It begs the question. It merely re-states the problem of the
law, even if not especially as universal love. “Who is my neighbor?” (Lk 10.29). In
Paul, as in Christian theology more broadly, the Neighbor, the near One, the One
who comes to aid is the imminent God who comes to befriend every wounded
one left dying on the roadside in the particular event of the death on the cross
of the Incarnate Son, with this event’s repetition by the Holy Spirit in the Word
and sacraments of the gospel to constitute the new, theological subjectivity that
knows God henceforth as revealed, as spirit, and as love. Agamben sees just this
with superior insight. For Agamben develops a notion of the Messianic present
that can give a genuine conceptual alternative (that is to say, theology) to the
philosophical subordination of Paul’s positive dialectic to the logic of the whole
and the part or the universal and the particular on which Badiou axiomatically
depends, no matter whether that philosophical logic is parsed disjunctively or
dialectically.
Agamben’s Pauline Aufhebung
In his interpretation of Paul, Badiou also showed himself to be indebted to

a certain schematization of nineteenth-century liberal Protestant theology
Deus Revelatus 201
known as “salvation-history,” which reappears today under the vague title of the
“New Perspective on Paul.”92 This scheme pits supposedly inclusive Christian
“universalism” against supposedly exclusive Jewish “particularism.” The great
superiority of Agamben’s reading of the Apostle, however, consists in a dramatic
break with this liberal interpretive tradition. Against a progressive unfolding of
history as the working out of a universal idea/ideal, Agamben recognizes instead
the fraught notion of Messianic time, the paradoxical presence of the subversive
Messiah. Without doubt, this latter view of time derives at least in part from
Agamben’s life-long fascination with Walter Benjamin.93 The latter’s fragmentary,
elliptical “Theses on the Philosophy of History” attacks the concept of empty,
linear time as the working presupposition of a philosophy of boundless and
irresistible perfectability.94 Neither the sighing of the oppressed nor the creeping
catastrophe of contradictory and unsustainable modernity in the name of
Progress, our Leviathan, can even be recognized on the basis of this metaphysics
of progressive time. Such recognition comes only with the Messianic presence,
the “now time” that exposes the hidden operations of political sovereignty in
the very act of constituting the new subjectivity of a “remnant” people. In the
case of Paul, Messianic “presence” indicates the sense of the resurrection of the
Crucified—not exaltation to a Platonic heaven but to the majesty of the imminent
God, the “right hand of God,” who thus “reigns until He subdues all enemies
under His feet” (1 Cor. 15. 25). Agamben via Walter Benjamin comes to his Paul
interpretation with this theory of Messianic presence and so locates Paul within
Jewish “particularism:” “The possibility of understanding the Pauline message
coincides fully with the experience of such a time; without this, it runs the risk of
remaining a dead letter. The restoration of Paul to his messianic context therefore
suggests, above all, that we attempt to understand the meaning and internal form
of the time he defines as ho nyn kairos, the ‘time of the now.’ Only after this can
we raise the question of how something like a messianic community is in fact
possible.”95 The latter is a cryptically stated formulation of the question of “God,”
since Paul’s God is the “possibility” of the coming of the Beloved Community.
Messianic presence is not the Kantian als ob, “as if.” The “as if ” is the
attempt of progressivism to hold on to the Christian ethic of the coming
Beloved Community of God, even though one now despairs that it will actually
arrive. The “as if ” comes after the belief in the Beloved Community, and its
dogma, the Trinity, have been jettisoned. It is in fact then a counsel of despair,
optimistically grounded on empty, linear time which in fact goes nowhere.96
What the Messianic presence constitutes, when it gives rise to faith, is not “as
if,” but the Pauline “having as not having,” a free and post-possessive use of
all good things in their very worldliness. Commenting on negative dialectics

in this regard, Agamben writes that “Adorno could never even conceive of
restoring possibility to the fallen, unlike Paul, for whom ‘power [potenza] is
actualized in weakness’ (2 Cor. 12:9). Despite appearances, negative dialectics
is an absolutely non-messianic form of thought . . . ”97 Messianic presence gives
back the possibility lost in Adam by virtue of the presence of the New Adam,
such that what has been done is now being redone, albeit paradoxically. This “as
not” accordingly works a division of the existing divisions, that is, of the typical
binaries of immanence. Agamben avers that Paul takes up the “question of the
universal and particular in a completely new way, not only in logic, but also in
ontology and politics.”98 Too easy a characterization of Paul as the apostle of
universalism misses this newness caused by the division of the divisions that
attends Messianic presence and rather tends to reinscribe Paul into the very
dualisms he seeks to overcome. But “for Paul, it is not a matter of ‘tolerating’ or
getting past differences in order to pinpoint a sameness or a universal lurking
beyond. The universal is not a transcendent principle through which differences
may be perceived. Such a perspective of transcendence is not available to Paul.
Rather, this ‘transcendental’ involves an operation that divides the divisions of
the law themselves and renders them inoperative . . .”99 Badiou’s undialectical
opposition of universal to particular or of whole to part, by contrast, yields little
more from Paul than the useful banalities of modern religious toleration and a
new iteration of the als ob of Kantianism. Agamben’s “division of the division,”
by contrast, in one way affirms the Jewish law and in another way cancels it; thus
Agamben uncovers Paul’s (in our terminology) positive dialectics. Terminology
aside, this is, as we shall presently see, the Leitmotif in his reading of Paul.
Critics, especially those embracing Kantian-trancendental doctrines of
judgment express no little astonishment: “Why Paul?”100 That “fundamentalist[!]”101
Historically, of course, Paul is involved in an intra-Jewish dispute about the
time of the now, whether it is a time of infinite deferral and apophatic theology,
for example, Derrida’s “Messianism without a Messiah” that was criticized
above in Chapter 2, or a paradoxical time of Messianic presence and hence
of kataphatic theology as may be found in Paul’s message of the Crucified
Messiah. What both of these have as a common inheritance from the Hebrew
Scriptures, however, is the prophetic indictment of this epoch as one in which
a state of exception has become the norm;102 it is precisely in this sense that
for Paul sinfulness has become second nature and sovereign order a becoming
posing as being. We live in an epoch arising from a suppressed and forgotten
origin that continues with abiding force as if it were simply real, when in fact
Deus Revelatus 203
this original sin continues as a dynamic imperative that is leading inexorably

and with increasing velocity to earthly cataclysm. Agamben’s reading of Paul is
motivated by a sense of urgency arising from these convictions.
As we recall from the discussion above in Chapter 4, Agamben excavated
the antique notion of the homo sacer, not at all in the contemporary sense of
the humanistic “sanctity of human life,” but virtually its opposite: the primitive
“sacred man” is the one whose murder does not count legally as a homicide,
since he has been banished to the gods (of the underworld), hence abandoned
by the political community that rules over him by excepting itself from the
exclusion that it imposes on the homo sacer. At the same time, this “sacred
man” may not be “sacrificed,” that is, in the antique sense, redeemed from
abandonment (whether by its own sacrificial death or a substitute’s). No act
of self-giving or of redemption revokes the abandonment, no sacrifice avails
to atone and restore the abandoned to the community. All the homo sacer has
then is “bare life,” life (bios) entirely excised from its familial, cultural, social,
religious, and political contexts (zoe). Homo sacer thus lives as a zombie in
a realm of “indistinction,” where he is included as excluded, counts only as
one abandoned, figures as one who vanishes from view. This reduction to
“bare life,” according to Agamben, indicates the original establishment of
political sovereignty; indeed it is sovereignty in the originating act of this
epoch, a principle with continuing force. Sovereignty on the earth appears as
the power to reduce human life to bare life, life that cannot be redeemed, life
that is utterly banished in and by sovereignty’s very assertion of dominion in
the name of Providence, of law and order. Following Foucault, “biopolitical”
is the name Agamben gave to this regime, which has its essence revealed in
the extremities of the concentration camps of the Nazis or the Gulag of the
Soviets—but no less in the refugees of today who are turned away, since they
are merely “human,” just “bare” life, not citizens of our city under contract
with political sovereignty. Such calculation, as Agamben shows, regarding
Lebens unwertes Lebens was at the biopolitical root of Nazism, whose
genocidal treatment of Jews and others was not at all for them a redemptive
sacrifice, but a perfectly (albeit shockingly) legal and economically calculated
disposal of an excessive number of hungry mouths in the Nazis’ eugenic war
for Lebensraum.103
The urgency in this situation of decaying modernity brings us back to
Agamben’s Paul and his attempt to restore the Letter to the Romans “to the
status of the fundamental messianic text for Western tradition.”104 As an aid
to understanding this claim, we may introduce here a dictum of Luther’s that
makes explicit the differentiation between discourses on the same plane: “in
philosophy the sign indicates the absence of the thing; in theology, however,
the sign indicates the thing’s presence.”105 Agamben articulates the same
view: “language produces the sensible expressed in it as past and at the same
time defers this sensible to the future,” and thus the linguistic sign is “always
already caught up in a history and time.” Hegel’s Aufhebung tries to capture this
presence of the thing as absence via the sign in that “what has been lifted is not
completely eliminated, but rather persists somehow and thus can be preserved.”
Hegel, whose thought expresses modernity’s “tightly knit hermeneutical
struggle with the messianic,” in this way demonstrates “both the connection
and the difference between the problem of the Aufhebung and that of messianic
time.”106 For the time of the now is each moment’s presence to the Messiah,
who comes and fills it with the God to whom all things are possible, even in
human weakness. This presence—presumably by means of its repetition in
the proclamation of Paul’s gospel—makes history cease as the law of empty
and linear succession with its infinite displacement and deferral in language,
not to mention the sinister optimism of liberal progressivism.107 It does this,
not by invoking and substituting an eternal for it, or by regarding aimless
procession “as if ” it were aiming at a goal. But empty time is made to cease
by “fulfilling” it incarnationally, albeit paradoxically. At the same time, empty
time is redeemed “by retrieving and revoking foundation, by coming to terms
with it”108 in the cross and resurrection of the Incarnate Son. The Messiah’s
coming, in other words, and filling of time (Incarnation) dialectically works an
exception to the state of exception (Atonement) and thus brings about a new
sovereignty-cum-subjectivity (Deus revelatus).
Thus we come to Agamben’s chief discovery of a positive dialectic in Paul.
“Paul is able to set the nomos pisteos, the law of faith, against the nomos ton
ergon, the law of works. Rather than being an antimony that involves two
unrelated and completely heterogeneous principles, here the opposition lies
within the nomos itself, between its normative and promissive elements. There
is something in the law that constitutively exceeds the norm and is irreducible
to it, and it is this excess and inner dialectic that Paul refers to by means of
the binomial epaggelia / nomos [promise/law] . . .”109 When we recall that the
Decalogue of Moses is founded on the event and promise of the liberating
God’s faithfulness, its claims and prohibitions are therewith relativized and
ordered to the sustenance of the community of liberated Israel. When the
commandments become universalized (say, as “natural law” or “categorical
imperative”) and in this way deprived of their covenantal context in the
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unilateral and unconditional divine promise, “I am the LORD your God, who
brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” however,
they become tyrants that only accuse, only revealing the incapacity of wayward
Israel to live and work as free people.
It is this latter law of works that accomplishes no good work, since it makes
separated and sovereign man into the agent (sicut deus eritis!), a detheologized
homo faber, Prometheus unchained. Since this project contradicts immanence,
somatic existence and solidarity, it in fact works only indictment, conviction,
and sentence of death—even upon those who earnestly work. If this juggernaut
is to be halted, the law of works must be rendered inoperative. The symbiosis
of sin and law leads to the death that must be now put to death. The Pauline
verb, katargeo, is a word virtually created by Paul, as Agamben discovers, and it
yields “substance for reflection . . . particularly surprising for a philosopher.”110
The surprise is this: Luther translated this verb meaning to deactivate, as in
Rom. 3.31, into German with the word, “Aufheben—the very word that harbors
the double meaning of abolishing and conserving used by Hegel as a foundation
for his dialectic!” So a “genuinely messianic term expressing the transformation
of law impacted by faith and announcement” was “secularized” into a “key term
for the dialectic” of negativity and thus for anti-messianic purposes: “Hegel used
a weapon against theology furnished by theology itself ” albeit ironically, since
“this weapon is genuinely messianic.” The implication, needless to say, is that
theology can fight back by reclaiming Paul’s positive dialectic of the Law battling
the Law in order to be liberty for all. This is theology, which tells of “God” as God
surpassing God in Christ crucified, constructing from our ruin as self-made
man by self-chosen works the new sovereignty and subjectivity of the Beloved
Community, Deus revelatus.
It is not germane here to explicate in detail the interesting ways in which the
positive dialectic in Agamben’s hands outfoxes self-excepting political sovereignty
and renders it inoperative. In brief, the spell cast by political sovereignty is its
Leviathan-like sanctity as the mortal god, that is to say, the state’s real appeal
to and claim to embody on the earth the moral law of the Creator (even as it
systematically betrays this law by self-exemption). Exceptional sovereignty
today increasingly blurs to the vanishing point the ordinary legal distinctions
between citizen and alien and obedience and transgression and thus making
law itself incapable of formulation. As per the Führerprinzip, the law becomes
whatever the sovereign wills. In this apocalyptic situation of the increasingly
manifest state of exception, Agamben finds Pauline theology “rendering the law
inoperative while carrying it to its fulfillment.” On the one hand, Paul radicalizes
the law until it becomes “entirely unobservable, and, as such, only functions as a
universal principle of imputation.”111 Lex semper accusat. But he does so in order
to “fulfill and recapitulate the law in the figure of love. The messianic pleroma of
the law is an Aufhebung of the state of exception, an absolutizing of katargesis.”112
Consequently, the new testament is not in the first place the text named after it,
“but the very life of the messianic community, not a writing, but a form of life . . .”113
Paul’s Israel of God, the Beloved Community comes on the earth as a profane
reality bringing the free use of all good things in joyful exchange. Its operative
presence in the world in just this way detoxifies and humanizes not merely
religion but above all the state. May it join hands in this with philosophy?
Theology alongside religion, politics, and philosophy
“In our tradition, a metaphysical concept, which takes as its prime focus a
moment of foundation and origin, coexists with a messianic concept, which
focuses on a moment of fulfillment.”114 Philosophy, at least classically, is protology
just as Pauline theology is eschatology. That is what historically we are seeing
with greater and greater clarity today. But to effect just this differentiation and
relation of discourses in their cohabition on the same plane of immanence is
a tall order. The argument of this chapter has been that it becomes possible
to the extent that theology effectively retrieves Pauline dialectics to yield a
revealed God. The reason why is that Paul’s messianism is quite literally crossed,
and because it is crossed, it cannot be captured by philosophical projects for
foundations, origins, universals, and/or transcendentals, as happens in the
history of Christian theologies of glory. Indeed it is repugnant to such projects, a
skandalon, a stumbling block as in the metaphor, not simile, Christ crossed. What
this metaphor instead requires and generates is its own discipleship of the mind
and discipline of inquiry alongside others.
Agamben’s discussion of this issue of the nature and possibility of theology as
a discipline is typically insightful, yet flawed by the trace of Heidegger’s notion of
ontotheology that inhibits full clarity on the decisive point. Agamben observes
that Paul does not typically use the copula as in, “Jesus is the Messiah,” as if the
two terms could each be known independently and then known together in a
predicative synthesis. “Paul’s faith starts with the resurrection, and he does not
know Jesus in the flesh, only Jesus Messiah.”115 Agamben’s observation here
could be understood to echo the previous discussion of the Pauline “crucified
Christ” as metaphor, not simile. But Agamben unfortunately follows the
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Bultmannian interpretation of 2 Cor. 5.16, with the docetist Christology to

which via Bornkamm also Badiou succumbed, as we saw above. The event,
“God raised crucified Jesus from death,” expresses the divine judgment, “It was
the Christ, the Son of God, who was thus crucified.” The Pauline word of the
cross continues to express this judgment of God in proclaiming the justification
of the ungodly, who in Christ become the justice of God in the world. The
statement asserts in this way the new political sovereignty of the Lord who is
servant, conferring the new theological subjectivity of faith operative in love,
which is indeed as Agamben sees, an ecstasy of love, a union with the beloved.
What traditional theology called the “personal union” in Christology does not
tack on various predicates of divine glory to an autonomous subject, Jesus, but
sees in the one person, Jesus Christ, the full exchange and communication of
divine and human attributes in the one person’s saving mission and personal
operations in history. It is this one person, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Deus
incarnatus, not divine and/or human attributes or a divine or human subject,
who is Jesus Christ and only so the revelation of God. Thus Agamben is
certainly right to insist that “[l]ove does not allow for copulative predication”
in the sense that love “never has a quality or an essence as its object.”116 Pauline
faith is just such an ecstasy of love that transports the believer, not into “a world
of substance and qualities” but “only into Jesus Messiah; I am carried away and
enraptured in him, in such a way that ‘I do not live, but the Messiah lives in
me’ (Gal. 2:20).” Thus “to believe in Jesus Messiah does not mean believing
something about him . . .”117
Yet lovers do tell one another what they love about each other, not as essences
and qualities, but as history, as narrative of what a person is and has done for
another, as promissory narrative of what they can and will do for each other.
Something is oddly missing in Agamben’s one-sided account. What is missing
is that stone of stumbling, the story of the way to the cross, that historically
denominates the name Jesus and hinders His exploitation, even if not especially
by those who are infatuated with Him, who in their infatuation overlook
significant things “about” Him. Agamben betrays here reliance on the familiar
strain of twentieth-century Protestant-existentialist Paul scholarship, when he
takes Paul’s statement that he no longer knows Christ “according to the flesh”
to refer to Jesus born of the unwed Jewish mother Mary and crucified as a
messianic pretender under Pontius Pilate. But in fact what Paul excludes in
2 Cor. 5.16 is knowing Jesus any longer in his own “natural” power, by his own
reason, philosophically and thus carnally, as he once did when he persecuted
Jesus in His believers for violating the law’s demand for the holy to separate
from sinful others. That carnal way of merely religious thinking is what “flesh”
means in Paul. But spiritual thinking knows Jesus, the Son who has come “in the
likeness of sinful flesh.”
The offense taken at the Bible’s kataphatic language about God who comes
in the flesh—and the apophatic resort to the varying interpretive stratagems of
simile, analogy, and demythologization to overcome the offense—is as old as the
encounter of Jerusalem with Athens: Philo and Origen, Ambrose and Augustine,
Denys and Saint Thomas, Kant and Schleiermacher, Bultmann and Tillich.
All of these weighty figures in the history of theology represent and reflect a
subordination, howsoever subtle, at the decisive point of theology to philosophy.
Yet the “problem” of the Bible’s kataphatic language is created by its dissonance
with the classic metaphysical quest of transcendence, theoria, the intellectual
contemplation of a transcendent Object modeled for antiquity in Aristotle’s deity,
“thought thinking itself.”118 This quest is at cross-purposes with Paul, whose God
seeks and finds the lost creature when the creature lost in bread and circuses
does not even grasp its own alienation. Accordingly for Paul, the predicative
copula indeed tells us something about Jesus as the Crucified Messiah; it serves
to identify Him in the world as that innocent friend of the excluded who died
in solidarity with them, while they were still weak and enemies. In this way it
distinguishes Him from imposters and frauds who claim to speak in His name,
providing in just this way much needed clarity on the ever elusive nature of
Christian freedom as the freedom to be neighbor to the repugnant, even to the
sinner. Agamben thus succumbs here to the same subtle error that Milbank and
Žižek found in Badiou’s reading of Paul, ironically enough, a kind of uncritical
dogmatism in which love for Jesus covers a multitude of lazy thinking, that is,
the pious flight from theology as critical dogmatics. But the ecstatic Galatians
text which Agamben cites, “I do not live but Christ lives in me,” continues quite
deliberately with the paraphrase, “And the life I now live in the flesh I live by
the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” This
refers essentially to the obedience of the man Jesus on the way to the cross. Thus
the stumbling block of the cross is reiterated, as it must be, if Jesus Messiah is
not to be devoured by the religious needs of devotees, digested as it were and
turned into energy for their own projects. Eucharistic feeding by faith on Jesus,
according to Paul, proclaims His death until He comes again and in this interim
instead works to transform believers into His body. That assemblage is His earthly
body, and its thinking here is the revealed theology of critical dogmatics.
Pauline Christology, however lacking in the narrative extension and detail
that the Evangelist we name Mark pioneered, depends essentially on the narrative
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later articulated in the gospels of the sending of the Son and His faithful way to
Golgotha. Agamben says here, “Love has no reason.” But Paul gives the reason
for his faith and love in telling of Jesus’ faithfulness to him and to all at the
cross and Paul critically discriminates on this basis what comports and what
does not comport with new creation and Christian freedom. If Agamben does
not quite see his way to this, he may be forgiven, relying as he does, like Badiou,
on cognitively empty, purely performative accounts of the apophatic theology
prevalent in Kantian culture.119 But, as we have just seen, the narrative germ
of what later emerges full-grown in the canonical gospels is essential to the
good functioning of the metaphor, Christ crucified, to preclude docetism and
render reference in the world to the messianic community (as Agamben himself
correctly sees), gathered to feed on the body of Jesus, harbinger of the Beloved
Community of God, Deus revelatus.
(With apologies to Kant:) On theology’s immanental induction
Deus revelatus. The self-giving, self-revealing coming of God in and by the

word, “Christ crucified,” is thus far theologically explicated. What has been
often parsed ontologically as a difference in kind between Creator and creature
turns out to be the difference of that self-overcoming that does not arise out
of a lack or deficiency that must be overcome for God to acquire Himself, but
rather out of the God who is always, already the fully giving self-relation that
is the Trinity. Esse Deum dare—to be God is to give. That is to say that God
is uniquely the One who is per se as per alium and thus can be pro alium.
This giving pro alium is not a physical motion as such (though it is always
also a physical motion) but a turning of God here and now, on the plane of
immanence, from wrath to favor by the just resolution of conflict, resulting
in the restoration even of the traitor, provided only that she is “grieved over
the ruin of Joseph” (Amos 6:6). This dialectical way of speaking of “God”
establishes the holy law’s ethical purpose by performing the Christ-event,
which at the same time disestablishes its juridical condemnation and thus
subverts the claim to totality by political sovereignty. It ascribes this Aufhebung
to the life-deed of Jesus Christ given universally in His messianic presence by
the word of the cross. Here Jesus Christ appears as the new Adam, the new
political subject in His Body, the totus Christus. It is the task of theology in
Paul’s train critically to see to the giving of this gift as the revealing of God by
the making of that ascription.
This ascription of the difference that God is and God makes is not a
transcendental deduction of the implied subject of knowledge. It is an induction
from knowledge of the event of gospel narrative. An induction arises as a working
hypothesis, not a corollary analytic to what is already known, hence not a topic
for further speculation, but rather a hypothesis that works better to account
for Christian experience. The church father, Irenaeus, was the first to make
this induction in his battles against the Gnostics (thus also against the modern
Protestant Gnostics,120 Hegel and Žižek, who want to deduce God’s mortality
from the incarnate Son’s death on the cross): “The Word and the Wisdom, the
Son and the Spirit are always present with [God the Creator]. By them and in
them, he freely and independently made all things” (Against Heresies IV, 20, 1).
This induction holds that it is as the immanent and antecedent Trinity that God
comes to us as the Beloved Community, Deus revelatus. As such it also points to
justice and happiness as most real possibilities for us, revealed and actual already
to faith although yet to triumph in power and great glory.
Mystery or muddle? The immanent and eternal Trinity is and remains
an induction, to which faith comes and there remains in tense anticipation of
the coming of the Beloved Community. As the Catholic theologian, Ralph Del
Colle, has written: “[T]he trinitarian naming of God points to the Christian
understanding that the event of Jesus Christ and the sending of the Spirit reveal
the loving mystery of the saving God whose transcendence in the mystery is
the basis for its communication and invitation to the creature.”121 This gives
“transcendence within immanence.” But if the immanent Trinity ceases logically
to perform as this induction of faith, that is, as the explication of the implied
belief that the revealed Trinity is antecedently capable, competent and willing
to keep the commitments made in Christ by the Spirit; and if, instead, the
immanent Trinity becomes a revealed dogma taken on mere authority more
and more detached from its soteriological basis and existential function; then
the notion of an immanent Trinity invites speculation about the conditions of
transcendence as such that must apply. The ironic result, however, is that such
detached speculation about conditions of transcendence ends in a self-defeating
apophaticism, that is, in the “conundrum” that, as Del Colle puts it, “the
redeemed human creature does not actually know or participate in the actual
being of God.”122
But the revealed God is spirit and is love, and if theology cannot say this
directly of God, it would do better to close down shop. Del Colle’s analysis brings
us to the impasse of contemporary theology that we hope in the preceding
pages to have challenged: “Either the Christian knowledge of God identifies the
Deus Revelatus 211
very being of God in the revelation of the divine persons and in this manner
preserves the transcendence of God, or trinitarian language amounts to a triadic
representation of God in history according to the receptive capacity of the human
subject and nothing more. In ultimate terms this latter position eventually yields
to apophatic agnosticism concerning the being of God.”123 That latter is an
expression of the dualism that violates the continuity thesis. But if we accept the
continuity thesis, the genuine transcendence of the Triune God is to be found and
preserved in, and not in spite of or beyond, the revelation of the divine persons,
one of whom suffered, in order that the Beloved Community may come even to
us who flee. This coming, now by the Word to form the Eucharistic community,
eternally by its victory in the redemption of our bodies, gives us God revealed.
Theology knows no other god and knowing this God on the earth and in history
is its own cognitive task in the one and same world known by philosophy.
Conclusion
What These Bodies Can Do
Given the argument we have made in this book, it would be a savage revenge if
some critic could accuse us of having made the book of Deleuze and Guattari,
What is Philosophy?, into a new and improved iteration of the Tribunal of
Reason, assigning to each one its place in an eternal and universally applicable
taxonomy of the fixed and unchanging body of knowledge. On the contrary,
we take the rhizomatic cartography worked out on these pages as yielding
an historically specific proposal dreamed up and worked out because the
predominant models of each of our disciplines had brought us to the boredom
of dead-ends repeating themselves in ever-new abstractions. The relation of
theology and philosophy is not in any case an eternally fixed one, since both
disciplines are historically characterized by unsettling disputes about their
vocations in the world. Thus our book has simply tried to pose these vocational
questions together in a mutually enlightening way that neither subordinates
theology to philosophy nor requires that philosophy do work that concerns
Christian theology. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari ask: “Is
it not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and
functions, a minimal subject from which to extract materials, affects, and
assemblages?”1 And they answer: “Staying stratified—organized, signified,
subjected—is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you
throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back
down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself
on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous
place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of
flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out
continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at
all times.”2 Such experimentation is what we have tried to do. So what have we
accomplished? Here are some new questions and some new tasks.
Why must philosophical theology be apophatic to be philosophical? It is a
critical task of both philosophy and theology to expose the often concealed but
nevertheless functional deities or appeals to transcendence at work in accounts
of our experience and require an accounting. We have shown accordingly
that apophatism dodges all the interesting questions—questions better posed
in the “ontotheologies” of Spinoza and Leibniz. So metaphysically, kataphatic
questions about God and/or the gods reappear. How successful then is even
Deleuze’s attempt to think Spinoza’s immanence without substance? Is the
non-metaphysical reading of Nietzsche’s circulus vitiosus deus really plausible? Or
is this not how Spinoza’s one true substance appears after Darwin? What about
the Chaos, or the Virtual, or even Life, then, to which Deleuze so often recurs as
if an operative albeit impersonal deity? Or is there a hylozoic reading of Leibniz’s
a monadology that opens up a view of spirit and love that gives God as Creator
in fit continuity with creation, accessible in the immediacy of every monad’s
perception and appetite and expressed doxologically in spontaneous praise and
joy? What kind of philosophical work do notions of “God” perform here, recalling
how Spinoza can speak so elegantly of true beatitude as disinterested love of God
for God’s sake? Or how Nietzsche found a kind of rapture in his Dionysus, his
self-overcoming anthropodicy even turning into an ecstatic theodicy in the final
notations recorded in the posthumous The Will to Power? Or is “God” the abyss,
the abstraction, the absconditus, that which cannot be thought? But—pardon the
Hegel—even that is a thought! Rhetorical flourish aside, these are new questions
for philosophical theology that emerge from our juxtapositioning of Deleuze
and Christian theology on the same plane of immanence.
Philosophy therefore should be done with the boring and artificial
constructions of deists and theists and atheists that arose in the Enlightenment
to equivocate the growing inconceivability of the God of Christian Platonism.
Philosophy should have the courage to think God and/or the gods naturalistically
in metaphysics and/or to engage in real exchange about the one God with the
theologies (or jurisprudences) of the revealed religions. Philosophy should also
dare to deploy Deleuze’s critical analysis of religion as conservative of fragile
human shelterings over against the chaos. Deleuze’s analysis of religion, as we
have seen, is a double-edged sword: acknowledging both the necessity and
inevitability of “anchoring” immanence in transcendence by means of religious
figures, it also undergirds genealogical accounts of these figures, which, of
course, may be more or less successful in execution. A sterling example, as we
Conclusion 215
have presented, is Agamben’s exposé of political sovereignty in the figure of

the homo sacer—a work that comports well with the kind of dePlatonized and
reMessianized Christian theology we have advocated.
As regards Christian theology, we have shown that kataphatic theology—the
ignominy of the incarnate and crucified God as that One of the Trinity who
suffered—is what is truly interesting when taken as revelation of the self-donating
God. Giving this by the way of a positive dialectics is what is helpful in our
disenchanted and captivated world. Along with Christendom, however, Christian
Platonism is dead, not only because of modern infidelity, but also because the
analogy of being cannot and never did deliver Christ crucified as God surpassing
God for one and for all. The memory of Christendom’s unholy alliance of throne
and altar, moreover, with all the guilt-ridden and morbid subjectivities fostered
to undergird that alliance, has made Christianity toxic if not merely passé for
many contemporaries. Seeking to repristinate the analogy of being under these
conditions is not and cannot be a serious political gesture and is rather in danger
of offering a nostalgic re-enchantment of a world in actual agony. Here, urgently,
the replacements for Christendom in Hitler, Hiroshima and Stalin have not
proved hopeful. They have been as lethal as these critics of modern “nihilism”
claim. But we have shown that overcoming “nihilism” is not something as easily
or willfully accomplished as dressing out anew a bygone worldview. In this
“post-Christendom” situation Luther’s admonition to theology to become once
again genuinely Pauline remains as timely as when he wrote it 500 years ago.
“So then you will be the best philosophers and the best explorers of nature if
you learn from the apostle to consider the whole creature as it waits, groans
and travails in pain, i.e. as it turns with disgust from what now is and yearns for
what is to come. Then the science of the essence of things and of their accidental
qualities and differences will soon become worthless.”3
Theological subjectivity is to yearn for and think in anticipation of the new
epoch in a dePlatonized and reMessianized mode made possible by the penetration
into this here and now by the crucified and risen Messiah in the incognito of the
word of the cross. What a host of new and better tasks therewith arise! The total
Christ, the assemblage of Jesus and His people, forms the revolutionary political
subject as a body in the world. Agency is not the initiative and achievement of
the religious individual working her way up to a higher world. Nor is agency
the Promethean project of the Cartesian self, which might rather be called a
devastator of the web of life. But agency is this achieved transcendence within
immanence that comes by the joyful exchanges in which Jesus binds every
burdened person to Himself and therewith to one another. Agency, that is to
say, is the product of this patiency, Jesus’ own Messianic passion, and then the
same laid on each one called, gathered and so formed, hallowed and deified by
His Spirit. This agency—Christ in His body—therefore challenges and delimits
political sovereignty by seeking and finding and claiming and empowering the
banished as the rejected whom God now elects. To think all this, not “as if,”
but rather as “having and yet not having,” that is, in non-possessive because
self-surrendering faith is the thinking of a form of life that rhizomatically erupts
ubi et quando Deo visum est. So theology asks philosophy to whom the earth
belongs. And theology prays its answer, Thy kingdom come!
Notes
Introduction
1 On the Genealogy of Morals, 44–5.
Chapter 1
1 Critique of Pure Reason, Aviii–x. For references to Kant, we will use the Cambridge
Edition translations. References to the first Critique will use the standard A/B
references, while citations of Kant’s other works will use the volume and page
numbers from the Gesammelte Schriften Hrsg.: Bd. 1–29.
2 Deiter Henrich was the first to raise this possibility in “Kant’s Notion of a
Deduction and the Methodological Background of the First Critique,” in E. Förster,
Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, 20–46. See also, Aaron Bunch’s helpful expansion
on this in “‘Objective Validity’ and ‘Objective Reality’ in Kant’s B-deduction of the
Categories,” Kantian Review, 14(2), 67–92.
3 Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxx.
4 Critique of Pure Reason, A235/B294.
5 8:134.
6 8:142.
8 8:142.
9 8:143, emphasis in original.
10 5:174.
11 5:167.
12 5:175.
13 5:172.
14 5:176.
15 Critique of Pure Reason, Aix.
16 Ibid., Bviii.
17 Ibid., Bxxiv–xxv.
18 7:6.
19 Ibid.
20 7:10, Kant’s emphasis.
218 Notes
21 7:10n, Kant’s emphasis.

22 7:20n.
23 Ibid.
24 7:21.
25 7:23
26 7:31.
27 7:32.
28 7:35.
29 Critique of Pure Reason, Axi n.
31 6:26–8.
33 8:328.
34 6:38.
35 The Works of Ralph Cudworth V1: Containing the True Intellectual System of the
Universe, Sermons, Etc, Thomas Birch, ed. (Whitefish, MT: Kessenger Publishing,
2010).
36 Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity,
1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
37 2:330.
38 John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992), 189–92.
39 28:275.
40 2:394.
41 2:418.
42 Ibid.
43 2:419.
45 5:374.
46 5:434, emphasis added.
47 189–90, 203.
48 MS 6:419.
49 5:394.
50 5:391.
51 6:301.
52 6:341–2.
53 5:434n. Thanks to Andrew Cutrofello for pointing this passage out to me.
54 Thanks to Aaron Bunch for suggesting this as a possible reading of Kant’s odd turn
of phrase.
Notes 219
Chapter 2
1 See for example, “Das Realitätsproblem in der Modernen Philosophie,” GA

1:1–15. Translated as “The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy,” in Becoming
Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927.
2 See Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of
California, 1995).
3 Of course Heidegger taught numerous seminars and gave numerous lecture courses
on Kant leading up to Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
(1915–16, 1916, 1923, 1925–6, 1926–7), including a seminar on Kant’s Religion book
in 1923.
4 We are translating Sein as “being” in order to foreclose on what I take to be an
unnecessarily “mystical” and “personal” interpretation of Sein that often arises,
especially in discussions of the later Heidegger.
5 SZ 326, We are using the Macquarrie and Robinson translation of Being and
Time. The citations refer to the German pagination found in the margins of
the translation. See Sheehan’s “How (Not) to Read Heidegger” for an extended
discussion of temporality in Heidegger
6 In, Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter, tr. (New York: Harper & Row,
1971), 145.
7 Ibid., 148, emphasis in original.
9 Also in Poetry, Language, Thought, 196.
10 Ibid., 202.
11 In English the essay is collected in The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays, William Lovitt, tr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).
12 Also in The Question Concerning Technology.
13 The English translation is found in Pathmarks, William McNeill, ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39–62.
15 Vessey, “Heidegger’s Existential Domestication of Luther,” The Devil’s
Whore, 133.
16 “Phenomenology and Theology,” 45–6.
18 I take “pre-Christian” (vorchristlicher) in an ontological sense not a historical
one. Thus, more in line with Heidegger’s use of vor- in vorhaben (forehaving)
in Being and Time than the more typical use in words such as “pre-Socratic”
(vorsokratischen).
19 “Phenomenology and Theology,” 51.
20 Ibid.
220 Notes
21 The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Matthias Fritsch and Jenifer Anna

Gosetti-Ferencei, trs. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
22 Ibid., 8.
24 Ibid., 56.
25 Ibid., 73.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 74.
28 Of Grammatology, 269–316.
29 “Différance,” 6.
30 A position Heidegger repudiates in On Time and Being (1962).
31 Also from this same period are “Force of Law” (1989) and The Other Heading (1992).
32 Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, Peggy Kamuf, tr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 59.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 65.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 The English translation is in Acts of Religion, Gil Anidjar, ed. (New York: Routledge,
2002), 40–101.
39 Ibid., 80, n. 27.
40 Ibid., 86.
42 Aporias, 19.
Chapter 3
1 Logic of Sense, Mark Lester, tr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 179.
2 Being and Event, Oliver Feltham, tr. (New York: Continuum, 2005), 189.
3 Ibid., 190.
4 Ibid., 95.
5 Logic of Sense, 179.
6 A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi, tr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987), 7.
7 Ibid., 12.
8 Ibid., 20.
9 What is Philosophy?, Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, trs. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 209.
Notes 221
10 A Thousand Plateaus, 265.

11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 265–6.
13 Ibid., 266.
14 Ethics II.Lemma i.
16 Ibid., 311.
17 What is Philosophy?, 201.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 327.
23 Ibid., 48.
24 Ibid., 101.
25 Ibid., 30.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 16.
28 Ibid., 91.
29 DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 219–22.
31 Ibid., 89.
32 Ibid., 91.
33 God without Being, Thomas A. Carlson, tr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), 17.
34 Ibid., 20.
35 Ibid., 21.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 www.fascicle.com/issue03/essays/lawrence1.htm (accessed July 13, 2012).
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 204.
Interlude
1 Tom Greggs, Theology against Religion: Constructive Dialogues with Bonhoeffer and
Barth (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2011).
222 Notes
2 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and Implications of a Christian

Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitsch (NY and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1967),
50–68.
3 Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Complexity: The Rise of Creedal Christianity (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2010), 25–68.
4 Christopher Morse, The Logic of Promise in Moltmann’s Theology (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1979), 141.
5 Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2011). See also from a Christian philosophical
perspective Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, The Gifford
Lectures (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
6 This felicitous expression comes from Christine Helmer, The Trinity and Martin
Luther: A Study on the Relationship between Genre, Language and the Trinity in
Luther’s Works (1523–1546) (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1999), for example,
120, 135, 146. 151.
7 For this claim and its constitutive relation to the formation of the Christian canon
of Scripture, see Hinlicky, Divine Complexity, 69–108.
Chapter 4
1 Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Francaise—Italian Fascism—National

Socialism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York, Chicago, San Francisco: Holt,
Reinhart and Winston, 1966).
2 Ned Wisnefske, God Hides: A Critique of Religion and a Primer for Faith (Eugene,
OR: Pickwick, 2010).
3 “‘To orient oneself in thought’ implies neither objective reference point nor moving
object that experiences itself as a subject and that, as such, strives for or needs the
infinite. Movement takes in everything, and there is no place for a subject and
an object that can only be concepts.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is
Philosophy? trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (NY: Columbia University Press,
1994), 37.
4 Ibid., 48.
5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Berlin: 1932–1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 12, ed.
L. Rassmussen (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 423.
6 John J. Thatamanil, The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the
Human Predicament. An East-West Conversation (Minneapolis: Fortress,
2006), 22–3.
7 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1967), II:5–10.
Notes 223
8 David H. Hopper, Divine Transcendence and the Culture of Change (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 61–118.
9 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: I/1, The Doctrine of the Word of God, trans.
G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1975), 227–47.
10 Jeffery Stout, The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality and the Quest for
Autonomy (Notre Dame, IN and London: University of Notre Dame Press,
1981), 147.
11 Paul R. Hinlicky, Paths Not Taken: Fates of Theology from Luther through Leibniz
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 82–6.
12 Michael P. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation: Berlin, Barth, & Protestant
Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 89.
13 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage, 1968), 550. Compare to Luther, “But God hidden in majesty
neither deplores nor takes away death, but works life, and death, and all in all;
nor has He set bounds to Himself by His Word, but has kept Himself free over all
things.” Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. J. I. Packer and
O. R. Johnston (Fleming H. Revel, 2000), 170.
14 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. D. W. Smith (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997).
15 Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, 419–20.
16 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 126–7.
17 Brent Adkins, Death and Desire in Hegel, Heidegger and Deleuze (Edinburgh, UK:
Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 186–7.
18 Nietzsche and Philosophy, 48.
19 Ibid., 72.
20 Rüdiger Safrankski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. S. Frisch (New York
and London: Norton, 2002), 284–98.
21 Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994), 322–30.
22 Micahel Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 221–31.
23 Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with
Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2004), 301.
24 Reading Nietzsche, ed. R. C. Solomon and K. M. Higgins (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 20. See here also the incautious but empirically
rich study of Richard Weikart, From Hitler to Darwin: Evolutionary Ethics,
Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004).
224 Notes
25 Cited in Aschheim, 317. See forthcoming Paul R. Hinlicky, Before Auschwitz:

What Christian Theology Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism (Eugene, OR:
Cascade, 2013).
26 Reading Nietzsche, 7.
27 See the highly useful work of Ashley Woodward, Understanding
Nietzscheanism (Durham, UK: Acumen: 2011), with excellent succinct
statements of the variety of appropriations with her analyses of their contending
claims.
28 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (NY: Vintage, 1966), 3.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 18–19 (BGE, I:11).
31 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/ The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Penguin Books, 1990), 80–1.
32 Reading Nietzsche, 38.
33 Nietzsche and Philosophy, 18.
34 “That the History of the World, with all the changing sciences which its annals
present, is this process of development and the realization of Spirit—this is the true
Theodicaea, the justification of God in History. Only this insight can reconcile Spirit
with the History of the World—viz., that what has happened, and is happening
every day, is not only not ‘without God,’ but is essentially His Work.” Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 457.
35 Beyond Good and Evil, 66.
36 Ibid., 68.
37 Ibid., 67.
38 Postcard to Overbeck, dated July 30, 1881, in The Portable Nietzsche trans. and ed.
W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1969), where Nietzsche announces his discovery
of a “precursor,” who makes “knowledge the most powerful affect . . . [and] denies
the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic and evil.”
40 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
41 Ibid., 29.
42 Ibid., 105.
43 Ibid., 106.
44 Ibid., 107.
45 Ibid., 89.
46 Ibid., 30.
47 “Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad,
including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far
Notes 225
our nation’s violation of human rights has extended . . . Recent legislation has made
legal the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation
with terrorist organizations or ‘associated forces,’ a broad, vague power that can
be abused without meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress . . . Despite
an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the
death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable . . . We don’t
know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks,
each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been
unthinkable in previous times.” Jimmy Carter, “A Cruel and Unusual Record,”
New York Times, June 25, 2012.
48 Homo Sacer, 125.
49 Ibid., 143.
50 Ibid., 148.
51 Ibid., 142.
52 Ibid., 140.
53 Ibid., 149.
54 Ibid., 147.
55 On Hobbes’ banning of “enthusiasm,” see Paul R. Hinlicky, “Irony of an Epithet:
The Reversal of Luther’s Enthusiasm in the Enlightenment,” A Man of the Church:
Festschrift for Ralph Del Colle, ed. Michel Barnes (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock,
2013), 302–15.
56 John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, Creston Davis with Catherine Pickstock: Paul’s New
Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand
Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2010), 33.
57 Milbank is assuredly aware of this: “Of course, Paul’s solution here is incredibly drastic
and to most people today must appear to pay an impossible price.” Ibid., 46. The
solution under discussion is Paul’s politics of the Beloved Community, “an infinite
ecstatic community,” “lured by an infinite transcendent harmony: God . . .” Ibid.
Milbank is right about this; in dispute is whether one can adopt this as a worldview by
an act of will as opposed to being called and captured for it by the word of the cross.
59 Beloved Community, 249–54.
60 Tillich, ST I: 205.
61 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, trans. A. W. Wood and
G. M. Clark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 32–4.
62 Ibid., 32.
63 Immanuel Kant, “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” in Religion
and Rational Theology, trans. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 15, though Kant argues here that this
excludes “the Spinozist concept of God.”
226 Notes
64 Anthony J. La Vopa, “The Philosopher and the Schwärmer: On the Career of a

German Epithet from Luther to Kant,” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 60, nos 1
and 2 (1997), 88.
65 See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties 7.63 in Religion and Rational
Theology, 283, and the discussion in Paths Not Taken, 44–57.
66 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vols one and two, trans. D. F. Krell (San Francisco:
Harper, 1991), 3.
67 Jasper Hopkins, A New Interpretive Translation of St. Anselm’s Monologion and
Proslogion (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1986). All citations are taken
from this edition, which also provides the Latin text.
68 Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quarens Intellectum (Faith in Search of Understanding),
trans. I. W. Robertson (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1962).
69 See chapter five, “The Confrontation of Biblical and Philosophical Monotheism,” in
Divine Complexity, 159–200.
70 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).
71 Giles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester (NY: Columbia University Press,
1990), 257–8.
72 Luther, Bondage, 192.
73 Beyond Good and Evil, 47.
74 Ibid., 67.
75 Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. S. Shirley (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 1998), 88ff.
76 As one who abandons modern, dualistic subjectivity in the name of Aristotelian
and Augustinian traditions of embodied teleology, Alisdair MacIntyre rightly sees
that at root his “tradition” conflicts with “genealogy” over rival “presuppositions
about continuing personal identity through time.” Three Rival Versions of Moral
Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1990), 196. The problem is whether his move to tradition
philosophically requires a borrowing from theology—a borrowing that is not illicit
or inconceivable in a rhizomatic cartography, provided only that its genealogy is
forthrightly acknowledged.
77 Paths Not Taken, 24–31, 202–14.
78 Robert W. Jenson, Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology
(Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), 139, 143.
79 Celsus, On the True Doctrine: A Discourse against the Christians, trans.
R. J. Hoffmann (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). See also
Margaret R. Miles, Plotinus on Body and Beauty: Society, Philosophy, and Religion in
Third Century Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
80 Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 33.
Notes 227
81 Moreover this Augustinian conception was recovered in the Renaissance and

deployed against the hierarchical model of the rational soul assumed in medieval
thought. See Jan Lindhardt, Martin Luther: Knowledge and Mediation in the
Renaissance, Texts and Studies in Religion, vol. 29 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin
Mellen Press, 1986), 25.
82 Gary Wills, Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives, 1999), 10–13.
83 Harrison, 33–5.
84 Arthur Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and
Action from Augustus to Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).
85 Augustine, On the Trinity, trans. E. Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991) (VII:1),
217–21.
86 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2 vols (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), I:146–9.
87 Luther: Lecture on Romans, trans. Wilhelm Pauck (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1961), 236.
88 That is to say, one who retrieves Augustine’s theology of grace grounded in the
Trinity after the rise of the via moderna in Scotus, Occam, and Biel.
89 For the source of this differentiation of theology as the new language of the
Spirit in relation to the old language of philosophy, see Paul R. Hinlicky, “Luther’s
Anti-Docetism in the Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi (1540),” in
Creator est creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation,
ed. O. Bayer and Benjamin Gleede (Berlin and New York: Walter De Gruyter, 2007),
139–85. For a previous formulation of this proposal, see “The New Language of the
Spirit: Critical Dogmatics in the Tradition of Luther,” chapter three, ed. D. Bielfeldt,
M. Mattox and P. Hinlicky, The Substance of the Faith: Luther’s Doctrinal Theology
for Today (Minneapolis: Fortress, Forthcoming ,March 2008), 131–90.
90 Adkins, Death and Desire, 133ff.
91 Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?,
ed. C. Davis (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2009), 247. This
characterization comes from Žižek’s summary at the beginning of the third part of
the book, which is his rejoinder to Milbank in the second part.
92 Žižek in the end acknowledges, “I am effectively on the Protestant side.” Ibid., 293.
Is the Slovenian philosopher aware of his national ancestor, the “radical” Lutheran
Reformer, Matthias Flacius? The latter’s theological positions much anticipate Žižek
and may even be the source of the “Protestant” narrative. See Oliver K. Olson,
Matthias Flacius and the Survival of Luther’s Reform (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz
Verlag, 2002), 256–79, 297–308, 329–36.
93 Ibid., 19.
94 Ibid., 247.
95 Ibid., 215.
96 Ibid., 235–6.
228 Notes
97 Monstrosity, 250, 253.

98 There are already hints of that in this exchange, particularly on the part of
Milbank; see Monstrosity, 158, 177, 192, especially 209, where Milbank urges his
retrieval of Eckhart as an “alternative modernity,” a “road not taken,” explicitly
against “Kant” and “the way in which Kant has been read by secular thinkers.”
99 Ibid., 163. See also 112, 159.
100 Ibid., 212, emphasis added.
101 Ibid., emphasis added.
102 Ibid., 112, 117, 122, 126ff, 218.
103 Ibid., 114.
104 Ibid., 200.
105 Ibid., 286.
106 Ibid., 74.
107 Ibid., 237; see also 248–9.
108 Ibid., 60.
109 Lewis Ayres, Nicea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian
Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 384–429.
110 Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1994). Milbank calls attention to Hegel’s inspiration in the theosophical
speculation of Jakob Boehme, 139, 194.
111 Monstrosity, 198. Milbank’s own doctrine, that God simultaneously is not, and is,
the world (ibid., 214) so that evil is only privative (215) is his equivocal alternative
to the univocity of being.
112 Ibid., 29. On the significance of this distinction, see Divine Complexity, 201–36.
113 Monstrosity, 32.
114 Ibid., 179.
115 Marcus Pound, Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2008), 93–6, 103–25.
117 Ibid., 76–7.
118 Ibid., 188–9.
119 Ibid., 101. The logic reminds of Rudolf Bultmann’s interpretation of faith as
existential leap, but also of the charge of incoherence made against him that
his retention of the very notion of God as the object of faith was an arbitrary
restriction to the scope of his own program of demythologization.
120 Paul R. Hinlicky, “Luther’s Atheism,” in The Devil’s Whore: Reason and Philosophy
in the Lutheran Tradition, ed. J. Hockenberry Drageseth (Minneapolis: Fortress,
2011), 53–60.
122 Ibid., 248.
123 Ibid., 182.
Notes 229
124 Ibid., 256, 257.

125 Ibid., 260.
126 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 27.
127 Ibid.
Chapter 5
1 1 Cor. 1.18–25 is the locus classicus. For the exegesis, and also a significant instance
of the Bultmann school’s reduction of Paul’s cognitive claim to existential attitude,
see Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, trans. J. W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1975), 40–8.
2 Heidegger’s view of Paul will be discussed below.
3 For a sympathetic, but critical account see James F. Kay, Christus Praesens: A
Reconsideration of Rudolf Bultmann’s Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1994). See also Divine Complexity, 49–59.
4 Ernst Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul, trans. Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1978), 7. In this essay, Käsemann acknowledged that Bultmann “is
passionately opposed to an identification of self-understanding with what
the idealist tradition calls self-consciousness,” (13), as also would Heidegger,
his teacher on these matters. But as we saw above in Chapter 2, this intended
differentiation cannot be sustained.
5 Ibid., 24–5.
6 Ibid., 26.
7 Ibid., 1, cited from Theology of the New Testament, I, 1952, p. 191.
8 J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary,
The Anchor Bible, vol. 33A (New York: Doubleday/Random House, 1997), 98.
9 Ibid., 570–4.
10 Divine Complexity, 109–28.
11 George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000).
12 Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community: A Path for Christian
Theology after Christendom (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 66–104.
13 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center: A New Translation, trans. E. H. Robertson
(New York: Harper & Row, 1978). See also Beloved Community, 31–65.
14 For the full account and argument, see Divine Complexity, especially 159–200.
15 Jenson, Systematic Theology, I:7.
16 The act of being on which the analogia entis depends privileges divine power (in
the sense of causing persistence through time) as the universal indicator of true
230 Notes
deity. The more coherently Trinitarian indication of deity is not power alone, nor
power as causal efficacy, but power as having all possibilities with wisdom and love.
17 David C. Burrell makes a parallel observation about St Thomas, when he notes
that the very strong Creator-creature distinction is not discovered by natural
reason but borrowed from “a pre-philosophical stance which marks the thought
and practice of all the Abrahamic faiths . . . [so] that creation is the ‘hidden
element’ [Pieper] in the philosophy, or here, the epistemology, of Aquinas.”
“Analogy, Creation and Theological Language,” chapter four, in The Theology of
Thomas Aquinas, ed. R. van Nieuwenhove and J. Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 78. Burrell accordingly has recognized
that avowal of a “free creation” in dialogue with the philosophical tradition makes
“philosophical theology” less a “subsection of the philosophy of religion” and
“more properly a subdiscipline of theology, since it cannot hope to make any
progress without attending to the religious traditions which animate its inquiry.”
Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1993), 1.
18 Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity
and Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also Divine
Complexity, 92–105; 119–39.
19 Oyvind Nordeval, “The Emperor Constantine and Arius: Unity in the Church
and Unity in the Empire,” Studia Theologica, 42 (1988), 113–50. See also Divine
Complexity, 159–200.
20 Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being is in Becoming (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976).
21 T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient
Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), 88.
22 Pseudo-Dionysios: The Complete Works, ed. and trans. C. Luibheid (Mahwah, NJ:
Paulist Press, 1987), 75, 284.
23 Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. M. Fritsch and J. A.
Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004),
212–13.
24 Benjamin D. Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006).
25 For example, Luthers Works: The American Edition, 58 vols (St. Louis: Concordia
and Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955–2011), 7: 175. (Hereafter LW followed by volume
and page number.)
26 Eberhard Jüngel, “Metaphorical Truth,” in Theological Essays, I ed. J. Webster
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 67. Jüngel incidentally makes a point of saying
that the “freedom of metaphorical language in no way excludes the desire for a
conceptual language in which this freedom is controlled and which makes it possible
to articulate the correspondence of discovery and that which is discovered” (70).
Notes 231
27 Janet Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1987),
58.
28 Ibid., 63.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 70. For an illustration from Saint Thomas, see ibid., 86. For the same in
Luther, see LW 37: 172–3. Luther requires both reference and univocity for
example, ibid., 164.
31 “. . . the prototype of a humanity well-pleasing to God . . . refers, in itself, to a moral
idea of reason . . .” in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (6:118) in
Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Allen W. Wood and George
Di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 149.
32 Stressing the semantic rather than ontological valence of univocity Richard
Cross in the appendix, “Religious Language and Divine Ineffability” to his
Duns Scotus on God (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 249–59, clarifies that:
“. . . discussion about God could not get started unless the univocity theory
were true” in that “if there are concepts applicable only to God and not to
creatures, we could not know what these concepts are since we have no
cognitive mechanism for constructing them. This, of course, would not be of
concern to the apophatic theologian . . .” Cross goes on to include Aquinas in
this latter category (ibid., 252). See also from the same author the devastating
dismantling of Radical Orthodoxy’s narrative of the fall of theology beginning
in Scotus, “ ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’: Duns Scotus and Radical Orthodoxy”
Antonianum LXXVI (2001), 7–41.
33 See Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L. K.
Shook, C. S. B. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956), 84–146.
We follow the gravamen of Karl Barth’s objections in Church Dogmatics: I/1, The
Doctrine of the Word of God, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975),
227–47. “The Word of God becomes knowable in making itself known” (ibid., 246),
which, if we might nuance Barth’s sometimes exaggerated polemic, is precisely not
to deny that religious notions of transcendence are available by which the Christian
discourse can be launched in the world—but this launch consists precisely in
saying to them, as to idols, Nein! The “point of contact” for the Word of God is our
self-congratulating talk about transcendence, but this is the contact of Destruktion.
It is to affirm that by means of this Nein! God may speak His own Word to us and
by His own Spirit may hear it aright in us.
34 Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (Washington, DC: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2001).
35 Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of
God in the Modern World (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2006), 110–20.
Russell’s mischievous reading of Leibniz as a crypto-Spinozist has been subjected
to systematic refutation by Nicolas Rescher, The Philosophy of Leibniz (Englewood
232 Notes
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). Adkins has called attention to the theological
motive in Spinoza by recalling its resonance with biblical wisdom literature.
See Brent Adkins, True Freedom: Spinoza’s Practical Philosophy (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2009), 7–9.
36 John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspective (Cambridge,
UK, Cambridge University Press, 1993).
37 See Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation: Reason and
Revelation in the Seventeenth Century, trans. G. Parks (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2007), who not only succeeds in vindicating the theological
motive in Leibniz but also accounts for the reserve with which Leibniz expressed
himself in his chosen genre of “natural theology,” that is, philosophical apologetics
for the possibility of revealed theology.
38 For example, Stewart, 80, 111. For an infinitely more sophisticated account of
Leibniz’s ethics and politics, see Patrick Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence:
Justice as the Charity of the Wise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
39 For example, Stewart, 52.
40 Ibid., 118.
41 G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the
Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1998),
359–60.
42 Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity
1650–1750 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001).
43 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected
Letters, trans. S. Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 58.
44 On amor concupiscentiae see the Pauck’s Introduction in Luther: Lecture on
Romans, lv.
45 Spinoza, Ethics, 59.
46 Ibid, 62.
47 Ibid., 45.
48 G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis:
Hacket, 1989), 242.
49 Ibid., 278.
50 Leibniz: Political Writings, ed. P. Riley, Second Edition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
51 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 40.
52 Ibid., 41.
53 Ariew and Garber, 242.
54 Jean-Luc Marion, “The Idea of God,” chapter 10 in The Cambridge History of
Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Vol. 1, Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, eds
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 265.
Notes 233
55 Ibid., 282–3.
56 It was Kant who first Kantianized Leibniz. See Paths Not Taken, 70–6.
58 Leibniz and the Two Sophies: The Philosophical Correspondence, ed. and trans. Lloyd
Stickland (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 355–6.
60 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 79.
62 Two Sophies, 321.
63 Theodicy, 350.
64 Two Sophies, 290.
65 Ibid., 316.
66 Leibniz, Theodicy, 418–19.
67 Adriaan T. Peperzak, The Quest for Meaning: Friends of Wisdom from Plato to
Levinas (New York: Fordam University Press, 2003), 170–94.
Chapter 6
1 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. R. Brassier

(Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) correctly argues that a “claim
to truth” attends Paul’s claim to the universal, though I shall below criticize his
imposition of a non-dialetical relation of whole and part onto Paul’s messianism.
2 The Messianic distinction between ultimate and penultimate things is Bonhoeffer’s.
See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. N. H. Smith (New York: MacMillan, 1978),
120–87.
3 Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. M. J. O’Connell (New York:
Seabury), 129–31.
4 What is Philosophy? 51.
5 The Fold, 76.
7 Ibid., 74.
8 For Luther on the “joyful exchange” see Paths Not Taken, 145–8, and Beloved
Community, 60–5.
9 Royce, Problem, 99–163.
10 Paul R. Hinlicky, “The Reception of Luther in Pietism and the Enlightenment,”
Oxford Handbook to Martin Luther, ed. R. Kolb, I. Dingel, and L. Batka (Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2013).
234 Notes
11 As Agamben concludes, “the dialectic between these two senses of the word
[‘law’] is essential. If, as it inevitably happens and seems to be happening again
today, the [word of grace] falls to the wayside leaving only the word of nomos in
absolute force . . . then the law itself stiffens and atrophies and relations between
men lose all sense of grace and vitality. The juridicizing of all human relations in
their entirety, the confusion between what we may believe, hope, and love, and
what we are supposed to know and not know, not only signal the crisis of religion
but also, above all, the crisis of law.” Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A
Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. P. Dailey (Standford, CA: Stanford
12 LW 26: 277–90; see also Beloved Community, 249–54.
13 Agreeing with Jenson that “God’s eternity is temporal infinity,” ST I: 218.
14 See forthcoming Paul R. Hinlicky, “Verbum Externum: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
Bethel Confession,” International Bonhoeffer Interpretations, ed. R. Wüstenberg
(Berlin: Peter Lang, 2012).
15 Of course, we have no way of knowing that Horkheimer was literally thinking of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though he is certainly thinking of what Bonhoeffer modeled
in the 1930s.
16 “In the theological language of Paul, I want to put the soma back into the sarx.”
Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming a Postmaterial Citizen (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 225.
17 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, New Greatly Enlarged Edition,
ed. E. Bethge (New York: Macmillan Collier, 1972).
18 Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill & Wang,
2007).
19 See here the incisive analysis of the “biopolitical” machine in Fritz Oehlschlaeger,
Procreative Ethics: Philosophical and Christian Approaches to Questions at the
Beginning of Life (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011).
20 See Michel Foucault’s preface to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guarttari, Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane
(Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1983), xiii.
21 Ibid., 63.
22 Paths Not Taken, 177–222.
23 Ethics, 17–56.
24 Already the apostolic father, Ignatius of Antioch, articulated this dialectic. In
the words of his commentator, “Such world affirmation and world denial are not
contradictory. Both are rooted in Ignatius’s emphasis on the inescapable obligations
of faith and love—and the incarnation—entail.” William R. Schoedel, Ignatius of
Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia Series
(Fortress, 1985), 64. In recent theology, no one has better articulated this dialectic
Notes 235
than Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, ed. R. T.
Walker (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Press, 2008) and Atonement: The Person and
Work of Christ, ed. R. T. Walker (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Press, 2009).
25 Gilles Deleuze, “To Have Done with Judgment,” Essays: Critical and Clinical,
trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), 135.
26 Divine Complexity, 114–19.
27 In refutation of mindless even if au courant dismissals of Paul as misogynist
and/or anti-Semite (Saint Paul, 98–106), Alain Badiou nicely captures this. “With
regard to the world in which truth proceeds, universality must expose itself to all
differences and show, through the ordeal of their division, that they are capable
of welcoming the truth that traverses them. What matters, man or woman, Jew
or Greek, slave or free man, is that differences carry the universal that happens to
them like a grace” (106).
28 “To Have Done . . .” 132.
29 Ibid., 133.
30 Woodward, 160–5.
31 See Luther and the Beloved Community, 39–46.
32 Weiss, Johannes. Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, trans. Richard H. Hiers
and David L. Holland (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971).
33 Eberhard Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus: Eine Untersuchung zur Praezisierung der Frage
nach dem Ursprung der Christologie (Tuebingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck),
1979).
34 H. R. Trevor-Roper (ed.), Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944: His Private Conversations,
New Updated Version, trans. N. Cameron and R. H. Stevens (New York: Enigma
Books, 2008), 60–3.
35 Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi
Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
36 Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
37 “After centuries during which [the ‘division of the subject’ in the combat of the
Spirit and the flesh] has been subjected to Platonizing (and therefore Greek)
amendment, it has become almost impossible to grasp what is nevertheless a
crucial point. The opposition between spirit and flesh has nothing to do with the
opposition between the soul and the body.” Badiou, St Paul, 56; cf. 80ff.
38 Deleuze, “To Have Done,” 132.
39 Ibid., 133.
40 Ibid., 127–8.
41 Ibid., 126.
42 Ibid., 129.
236 Notes
43 Ibid., 131.
44 Ibid., 134.
45 This too has its Pauline parallel: “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to
what is good” (Rom. 12.9).
46 “To Have Done,” 135.
47 Ibid., 126.
48 Beloved Community, 66–104.
49 Badiou, St Paul, 61–2. But we do not concur with his antidialectical interpretation.
50 Ibid., 71.
51 Ibid., 72, cf. also 111.
52 Badiou, St Paul, 4.
53 Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural
Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2010), 155–67.
55 Bultmann, Rudolf, Theology of the New Testament, Complete in One Volume, vol. I,
trans. K. Grobel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 187–8.
57 Ibid., 15.
58 Ibid., 5.
59 For example, ibid., 107–8.
60 Ibid., 66.
61 Ibid., 5.
62 Ibid., 108.
63 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (London: Continuum, 2010), 216.
65 Ibid., 14–15.
66 Ibid., 17.
67 Ibid., 37.
68 Ibid., 45.
69 Ibid., 49.
70 Ibid., 84–5.
71 Ibid., 73.
72 Ibid., 110.
73 Ibid., 23.
74 Ibid., 63.
75 Ibid., 42.
76 Ibid., 88.
77 Ibid, 50–4.
78 Ibid., 32–3, 60.
Notes 237
79 Ibid, 63.
80 Ibid., 33.
81 Ibid., 31, 38.
82 Ibid., 59. Cf. also 73, 102.
83 Ibid., 47.
84 Paul’s New Moment, 93.
85 Ibid., 98.
86 Ibid., 175.
87 Ibid., 98.
89 Ibid., 227.
90 Ibid., 91.
91 Ibid., 110.
92 See Beloved Community, 221–57 and Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and
New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2004).
93 Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Standford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 53–4, 111–12, 148–50, 303–13.
94 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. H. Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1968), 260.
95 Time that Remains, 2.
96 Ibid., 35–7.
97 Ibid., 38.
98 Ibid., 51.
99 Ibid., 52.
100 Andrew Benjamin, Place, Commonality and Judgment: Continental Philosophy and
the Ancient Greeks (New York: Continuum, 2010), 136.
101 Ibid., 149.
102 Citing W. Benjamin, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of
exception’ in which we live is the rule” in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 55. A dialectical
exception to the state of exception is the Messianic intervention that is accordingly
required to institute an alternative sovereignty, the Lordship of the Crucified
Messiah.
103 Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination (University of Kentucky
Press, 2011) has shown on the basis of new archival materials available since 1989
that the genocide of the Jews and others arose out of the total-war attack on the
Soviet Union that calculated on a “hunger policy.” This contextualizes, but does
not eliminate, the role of anti-Semitism, and Christian culpability for that, as an
independent variable in the Holocaust.
104 Time That Remains, 1.
238 Notes
105 “Signum philosophicum est nota absentis rei, signum theologicum est nota
praesentis rei.” WA TR 4:666.8f. (no. 5106, 1540). See Oswald Bayer, Martin
Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. T. H. Trapp (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 52–3.
106 Time That Remains, 100.
107 In an intervening discussion of Derrida, Agamben judges deconstruction as
“a thwarted messianism, a suspension of the messianic,” a continuation after
disillusionment with the Kantian “as if,” a sober Hegelianism (ibid., 102–3).
For theological appreciation of Derrida, see Paul R. Hinlicky, “Sin, Death, and
Derrida,” Lutheran Forum, vol. 44, no. 2 (Summer 2010), 54–9.
108 Ibid., 103–4.
109 Ibid., 95. Cf. also 114, 118. This is, as Agamben points out, by no means a dialectic
imposed on the Jewish law from the outside. The Kabbalists also distinguish
between the law of creation and the law of the unredeemed world (49).
110 Ibid., 95.
111 Ibid., 108.
112 Ibid.
113 Ibid., 122.
114 Ibid., 103.
115 Ibid., 127.
116 Ibid., 128.
117 Ibid., 136.
118 Adam Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche (Hampshire,
England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 176–83.
119 Time That Remains, 126–37.
120 Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987).
121 Ralph Del Colle, “The Triune God,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian
Doctrine, ed. C. E. Gunton (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
122 Ibid., 133.
123 Ibid., 136.
Conclusion

2 Ibid., 161.
3 Commentary on Romans, 236.
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Index
Agamben, Giorgio 2, 6, 8, 49, 62, 105, boundary 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19, 24, 25,
114–17, 178, 187, 194, 200–9, 215, 28, 36, 42, 43–5, 48, 49, 53, 54, 56,
224, 233, 238 61–3, 65, 80, 81–7, 90, 97, 98, 100,
agency 99, 128, 140, 191, 215 111, 115, 121, 130
see also patiency Boyarin, Daniel 236
analogia entis 157–8, 215 Brooke, John Hedley 231
analogy 5, 6, 68–72, 73, 75, 77, 83, 86, 91, Bultmann, Rudolf 99, 134, 144–5, 193–4,
107, 108, 119, 133–40, 149, 155, 157, 198, 207–8, 229, 236
158, 171, 208, 215, 229 Burrell, David C. 229
see also analogia entis; equivocity; figure;
univocity Caputo, John 140
Anselm of Canterbury 121–2, 124–6, 128, Carter, Jimmy 225
149, 192, 199, 226 Celsus 226
Antognazza, Maria Rose 231 chaos 3, 81, 83, 84, 85, 92–5, 97, 107, 108,
apocalyptic theology 99, 141–2, 144–6, 112, 122, 123, 130, 154, 177, 179, 180,
149, 188, 194, 205 181, 193, 214
apophatic theology 99, 149, 152, 154, 157, Christian theology 1–8, 11, 19–22, 36–7,
163, 183, 199, 202, 208–11, 214
46–8, 50–1, 65, 67, 74, 79–80, 83, 87,
see also kataphatic theology; negative
90, 98–101, 105–9, 114–15, 118–21,
theology
126–8, 131–4, 140–1, 143–51, 153, 157,
Aquinas, Thomas 69–70, 71, 72, 135, 159,
176–9, 181, 183–6, 192–3, 195, 198,
160, 169, 229–31
200, 204–6, 208–10, 215–16
Aristotle 1, 29, 41, 46, 51, 82, 169, 208
Cochrane, Arthur Norris 227
assemblage 1–8, 48, 65, 74, 75, 77, 78–80,
concept 4, 49, 68, 87–92, 97, 182
86, 87, 88, 92, 93, 95, 99, 208, 215
Aufhebung 200–6 continuity 1, 3–8, 11, 28–36, 37, 39, 44,
Augustine 98, 118, 128–31, 137, 146, 148, 49, 58, 62, 63–5, 67, 68–72, 73, 75, 80,
150, 172, 174–5, 208, 227 84, 87, 94, 97, 105, 107, 110, 113, 128,
Ayres, Lewis 228 130, 153, 168, 169, 171, 184, 211, 214
see also discontinuity
Badiou, Alain 2, 8, 49, 62, 68–71, 87, 91, continuum 3, 4, 5, 68–72, 73, 75, 76, 80,
139, 176, 187, 189, 192–201, 207–9, 90, 92, 94, 97, 105, 106, 213
233, 235–6 see also continuity
Barth, Karl 99, 147, 157, 222, 226, 231 Conzelman, Hans 229
Bayer, Oswald 237 Cross, Richard 231
Benjamin, Andrew 237 cross, theology/word of 144, 146–7, 149,
Benjamin, Walter 56, 116, 201, 237 151–9, 175–6
Bergen, Doris 235 Crowe, Benjamin D. 230
Berger, Peter 177 Cudworth, Ralph 29
Bergson, Henri 58
biopolitics 117–18, 126 Danto, Arthur 110
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 183, 222, 229, 233–4 Davis, Creston 133, 225
250 Index
de/reterritorialize 3, 8, 16–19, 24, 26, 28, 42, Gillespie, Michael Allen 223
65, 73, 74, 75, 80–7, 93, 95, 97, 177, 213 Gilson, Etienne 231
DeJonge, Michael P. 223 God, concept of 99–100, 145–7, 152, 161,
Del Colle, Ralph 210, 225, 228 165–7, 174, 178–9, 181–3, 189–93,
Deleuze, Gilles 2–4, 7, 8, 44, 63, 67–95, 198, 199, 201, 204–5, 209–11, 214
97, 98, 99, 105–10, 112, 114, 115, 119, as imminent 98, 100, 157, 183–4, 200, 206
120, 127, 131, 132, 133, 147, 150, 158, as infinite 154
164, 169, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, as substance 160, 214
186–93, 213, 214, 223, 226, 232–5 as summum bonum 154
Derrida, Jacques 8, 37, 52–63, 64, 72, 84, as Trinity 100, 182, 201, 209–10
87, 99, 110, 140, 143, 157, 202, 237–8 see also Deus – absconditus
Destruktion 153 Greggs, Tom 221
Deus – absconditus 104, 108, 119, 122, 132, Guattari, Felix 2–4, 7, 8, 67–95, 179, 180,
144, 214 181, 213, 234
circulus vitiotus 106, 130, 162, 214 Gura, Philip F. 234
exlex 130, 136, 140
incarnatus 141, 143–9, 152–3, 157, 159, Hamann, J. G. 32, 184, 185
172, 175–6, 180, 207 Harrison, Carol 226
revelatus 141, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, Hart, David Bentley 157
198–9, 204–5, 208–10 Hegel, G. W. F. 6, 52, 58, 68, 94, 95, 110,
Dilthey, Wilhelm 37 112, 115, 119, 133–40, 179, 180–2,
discontinuity 1, 3–8, 30, 32, 33, 36, 38, 42, 197, 199, 204, 205, 210, 214, 224
44, 49, 52, 63, 71–2, 73, 75, 76, 77, 84, Heidegger, Martin 8, 37–52, 54, 55, 57, 61,
86, 87, 163 62, 64, 72, 84, 87, 123, 124, 140–1, 143,
see also continuity 144, 145, 153, 154, 157, 159, 166, 167,
disruptive grace 132, 147–54, 157–9, 175, 172, 194, 198, 200, 206, 225, 228, 230
180, 195–6 Helmer, Christine 222
Drozdek, Adam 238 Herder, J. G. 32
Durantaye, Leland de la 237 Heschel, Susannah 235
Higgins, R. M. 223
Eckhart, Meister 227 Hitler, Adolf 234, 237
Elshtain, Jean Bethge 222 homoousios 125–6, 128
Epicurus 29, 32, 33 Hopkins, Jasper 223
equivocity 68–72, 73, 76, 136 Hopper, David H. 222
see also analogy; univocity Hunsinger, George 229
event 106–8, 119–20, 122–7, 129, 133, 135, Husserl, Edmund 37, 40, 64
139–40, 143, 147–9, 151, 156, 159–60, hylomorphism 5, 11, 28–36, 37, 41, 50, 52,
165, 172, 174, 177, 179, 182, 187–8, 61, 68–72, 75, 76, 77, 82, 86, 92, 94,
193–200, 204, 207, 209–10 159, 160, 169
see also magic; miracle; repetition see also hylozoism
experiment 1–2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 37, 74, 79, 86, hylozoism 5, 11, 28–36, 37, 68–72, 77, 80,
95, 98, 101, 119, 132, 178, 213–14 82, 84, 100, 112, 169, 171, 176, 214
see also hylomorphism
figure 87–92, 93–5, 99, 106, 107, 114, 140,
150, 177, 178, 182, 184, 214 Ignatius of Antioch 234
see also concept immanence 3, 5, 76–8, 79, 80, 86–8,
Flacius, Matthias 227 90–2, 93–5, 98–9, 105–9, 113, 114–15,
Foucault, Michel 234 118–20, 121, 122, 126–32, 133, 136,
Freud, Sigmund 52, 74 141–2, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150,
Fritz, Stephen G. 237 154, 159, 164, 169, 177, 178, 179–86,
Index 251
189, 190, 192, 195–9, 202, 205, 206–9, matter, concept of 100, 105, 107, 110, 112,
209–10, 214, 215 126–32, 168–9, 173, 184–5
see also transcendence; transcendental see also spirit, concept of
Israel, Jonathan I. 232 Mendelssohn, Moses 33
metaphor 108, 119, 135, 137, 143, 150,
Jacobi, F. H. 14, 20, 34 153–9, 179, 182, 185, 198–9, 206,
Jenson, Robert W. 150, 183, 226–7, 229, 234 209
see also paradox; simile, similitude
Kant, Immanuel 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11–36, 37, 38, metaphysics 1, 2, 9, 11, 12, 19, 37, 52–5,
39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49–52, 53, 56, 61, 63–5, 90, 98, 99, 106, 108, 112,
54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63–5, 67–8, 114, 124, 127, 128, 133, 143, 153, 157,
71–2, 73, 80, 81–4, 87, 88, 89, 91, 94, 158, 161, 162, 166, 167, 168, 170, 175,
95, 99, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 176, 179, 185, 191, 195, 201, 214
121–6, 133, 134, 136–40, 148, 157, 166, Milbank, John 118–20, 133–40, 199, 208,
179–81, 185, 188, 194, 201, 202, 208, 225, 227
209–11, 225, 231 Miles, Margeret R. 226
Käsemann, Ernst 229 miracle 108, 174, 188, 195–6
kataphatic theology 7, 63, 99, 106, 121, see also event; magic; superstition
123–41, 149–51, 154, 163, 184, 202, Moltmann, Jürgen 99, 221
208, 214–15 Monadology 130, 160, 169, 173, 214
see also apophatic theology; negative Morse, Christopher 221
theology
naturalism 107, 127, 132, 162
Kay, James F. 228
natural theology 167, 185
Kermode, Frank 228
negative dialectics 68–9, 108, 119–20, 133,
Klossowski, Pierre 223
136–8, 181–2, 192, 199, 202–3
see also positive dialectics
Lacan, Jacques 62, 140
negative theology 7, 37, 65, 70–1, 95, 167–74
La Vopa, Anthony J. 225
see also apophatic theology; kataphatic
Lawrence, D. H. 92–5, 192
theology
Lee, Philip J. 238
Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 4–5, 52, 98, 99, 105,
Leibniz, Gottfried 158–76, 180, 185, 231–3 106, 108, 109–10, 110–14, 115, 118,
liberal theology 141, 177, 183, 188, 196, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 127, 130, 131,
200–1, 204 134, 141, 143, 148, 149, 150, 156, 162,
Lindhardt, Jan 226 164, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188–9, 190,
Locke, John 11, 59 192, 195, 199, 214
Lovejoy, Arthur O. 226 Nolte, Ernst 222–3
Luther, Martin 98, 107, 119–20, 123, 127, Nordeval, Oyvind 230
132, 146, 148–50, 153–4, 175, 215,
223, 226–7, 230, 232, 237 O’Reagan, Cyril 228
Oehlschlaeger, Fritz 234
MacIntyre, Alisdair 226 Olson, Oliver K. 227
magic 199 ontotheology 46–52, 100, 120–6, 129, 140,
see also event; miracle; superstition 153, 154, 159, 165–7, 198, 206
Marion, J.-L. 62, 90–1, 157, 165–7, 173,
174, 176 paradox 100, 129, 132–3, 135–7, 139, 141,
Martyn, J. Louis 144–6, 229 145, 149, 155–7, 172, 175, 178, 182,
Marx, Karl 56–8, 110, 118, 120, 139, 179, 186, 201–2, 204
181, 184, 196 see also metaphor; simile, similitude
252 Index
patiency 99, 151, 158, 176, 216 Royce, Josiah 231, 233
see also agency Russell, Bertrand 160, 175, 231
Peperzak, Adrian T. 233
philosophy 1–8, 11, 14, 19, 20–2, 24–8, Safranski, Rüdiger 223
36, 37, 38, 42, 46, 47, 48–9, 51, 52, Schoedel, William R. 234
54, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63–4, 67, 69, 70–4, Schweitzer, Albert 188
77, 79–80, 82, 83, 86–7, 87–92, 93–5, Scotus, Duns 69–70, 77, 136, 150, 157, 158,
97–101, 105, 106, 108, 111, 114, 118, 164
119, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, see also territory; territorialize
136, 141–4, 146, 150, 151, 153, 154, Sharp, Hasanna 222
163, 165, 169, 172, 175, 176, 177, 179, simile, similitude 108, 119, 135, 149–50,
183, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 201, 204, 155–7, 179, 206, 208
206, 208, 211, 213, 214, 216 see also metaphor; paradox
Pickstock, Catherine 225 Solomon, R. C. 223
plane 76–8, 79, 80, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, sonship, divine 146, 148, 151–3, 198–200,
105–9, 114, 115, 119, 121, 122, 126, 204, 207–10
127, 131, 132, 133, 135–6, 141, 143, Soskice, Janet 155, 230
147, 149, 150, 179, 180, 186, 189, 190, Spinoza, Benedict de 2, 4, 14, 15, 28, 29,
194, 204, 206, 209, 214 32, 33, 63–5, 67, 68, 69, 78–80, 81, 82,
Plato 4, 23, 28, 29, 30, 51, 53, 54, 73, 82, 88, 83, 86, 98, 99, 100, 105, 107, 114, 128,
89, 91, 92, 99, 100, 108, 109, 110–14, 131, 134, 140, 148, 150, 159–65, 166,
120–1, 124, 125, 127–30, 140–1, 144–7, 167–74, 175, 176, 214, 231–2
150, 153, 154, 159, 175, 183, 188, 201, spirit, concept of 100, 105, 112, 123,
214, 215 126–32, 134, 136–9, 141–2, 146–9,
political sovereignty 116–17, 145, 152, 153, 158, 166, 169, 171, 176, 189, 192,
157–8, 160, 178–9, 181, 183–4, 191, 200, 208, 210, 216
201, 203–5, 207, 209, 216 see also matter, concept of
positive dialectics 179–86 Stewart, Matthew 160, 231–2
see also negative dialectics Stout, Jeffrey 222
Pound, Marcus 228 Strato of Lampsacus 29, 33
Pseudo-Dionysios 230 subject/subjectivity 97–9, 111, 126–8,
138–40, 150–1, 158–60, 169, 179,
radical orthodoxy 136, 140–1, 231 192–7, 199, 200–1, 204, 210–11
religion 1, 3, 5–8, 14, 15, 19, 20, 23, 24–8, the theological subject 106–7, 120,
36, 37, 42, 45, 48–52, 54, 56, 57–63, 65, 125, 143–4, 147, 150–1, 154, 156,
72, 73, 74, 77, 79, 80–7, 87, 90, 91, 92, 158, 176–7, 187, 196, 205, 207, 209,
94–5, 97, 98–100, 106, 107, 109, 112, 215
113, 118, 120, 124, 126, 141, 147, 150, superstition 160, 171
151, 161, 162, 163, 167, 172, 177, 178,
181, 183, 186, 194, 199, 202, 203, 206, territory/territorialize 3, 8, 16–19, 24, 26,
208, 214, 215 28, 42, 65, 73, 74, 75, 80–7, 93, 95, 97,
repetition 105, 131, 164–5, 185, 193, 196, 177, 213
200, 204 see also de/reterritorialize
revealed theology 175–6, 208 Thatamanil, John 222
rhizome 2, 65, 72–6, 77, 80, 88, 179, 191, theodicy 144, 174–6, 214
213, 216 Tillich, Paul 107, 120–1, 222, 225
Riley, Patrick 232 Torrance, T. F. 230, 234
Rousseau, J.-J. 53 Trakl, Georg 43
Index 253
transcendence 3, 5, 70–2, 76, 77, 79, 80, 86, univocity 5, 6, 44, 68–72, 94, 121, 135,
87, 90–2, 93–5, 99, 105–9, 111, 113, 138, 141, 146, 150–9, 161, 163, 164,
114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 127, 129, 131, 173
140, 146, 148, 149, 154, 157, 163, 164, see also analogy; equivocity
166, 169, 177, 179–80, 183–6, 195,
198, 202, 208, 210, 211, 214, 215 Ward, Graham 234
see also immanence; transcendental Weikart, Richard 223
transcendental 5, 11, 13, 37, 40, 41, 45, Weiss, Johannes 234
46, 49, 52, 56, 62, 63–5, 67, 68, 73, Westerholm, Stephen 237
77, 79, 80, 84, 86, 87, 94, 97, 99, 106, Wisnfeske, Ned 222
108, 111, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125, Wolin, Richard 223, 236
133, 134, 135, 143, 147, 150, 154, 157, Woodward, Ashley 223, 234
158, 159, 173, 180, 184, 185, 192, 206,
210 Zammito, John 30, 32
see also immanence; transcendence Žižek, Slavoj 2, 6, 8, 49, 62, 119–20, 133–40,
Trever-Roper, H. R. 235 225, 227–8

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Acknowledgments

This book is an experiment in metaphysics. What we have in mind by metaphysics

these assemblages, however, is not merely discursive. It is experimental,

difference from both religion and philosophy. As a result, Christian theology

The Boundaries of the Kantian Problematic

It is impossible to overestimate Kant’s importance for both philosophy and

Geography and law in the critical project

importantly morality, reason in its practical deployment. The delimitation of

However, before the complete articulation of his practical philosophy, Kant

Kant pursues (and complicates) this image of proper boundaries in the

The Conflict of the Faculties as border dispute

it is the philosophy faculty’s duty to be constantly vigilant with regard to these

Religion and philosophy—a legal settlement

Orientation and hylozoism

As Zammito argues in The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Kant’s

from the explanation of phenomena.”41 In the third principle of harmony,

the formal ground of matter lies outside of matter in substance, Spinoza in

From Geography to Ontology: Heidegger

In this chapter we will pursue the breadth of Kant’s influence in philosophy. In

Heidegger and the limits of metaphysics

Before becoming fully engaged with Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger

process of writing Being and Time, however, Heidegger becomes increasingly

boundary. It is not a boundary that requires enforcement. It is not a boundary

being/nothing, dif-ference is what Heidegger is trying to think in the term

The limits of ontotheology

1. Theology is the science of that which is disclosed in faith, of that which is

on philosophy (as phenomenological ontology) to correct its concepts, but

In his analysis of Thessalonians, Heidegger takes up the theme of temporality,

Derrida, difference, and discontinuity

The work of Jacques Derrida is characterized by a scrupulous reading of texts, texts

in which he seeks a ground for metaphysics that lies outside of metaphysics.

Messianism and the limit

sometimes calls this boundary “quasi-transcendental,” a phrase that both brings

Metaphysics without discontinuity

internal, which greatly complicates his account of what is other to Western

Hylozoism and Rhizomatics: Deleuzian

Continuity, hylozoism, univocity

power of the negative in Spinoza real difference is impossible. Saving difference

motivations for taking up discontinuity, hylomorphism, or equivocity, and taking

The affirmation of the continuity thesis as well as its necessary correlates,

incorporates a whole host of nonlinguistic connections. Language is a semiotic

Plans and planes

Bodies and assemblages

not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, a

This entire process of territory formation and its concomitant assemblages,

Concepts and figures

rhizome, an assemblage that gathers together diverse and heterogeneous elements.

The concept is also characterized by its internal connections or “internal

In contrast to concepts, figures are (1) paradigmatic, (2) projective, (3)

Chaos and umbrellas

In his “Introduction” to Harry Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun, D. H. Lawrence is

thinking that dominates post-Kantian thought. Third, the conflict between

How to Orient Oneself in Thinking . . .

When a contemporary Christian theologian first encounters Deleuze’s notion of

thought regresses infinitely (as Nietzsche’s “Vicious Circle”—circulus vitiotus

ultimate goal, however, is to determine whether and how on Nietzsche’s

Early in his career, Deleuze published an influential study on Nietzsche that,

of reactive forces. The eternal return teaches us that becoming-reactive has

Platonism for the people