May, Todd. Gilles Deleuze: an introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.
What is an ontology of immanence? Its first requirement is the univocity of being: “expressive immanence cannot be sustained unless it is accompanied by a thoroughgoing conception of univocity, a thoroughgoing affirmation of univocal Being.” The substance of being is one and indivisible. There are no distinctions to be made into different substances, different layers of substance, different types of substance, or different levels of substance. All hierarchy and division is banished from ontology. The term “being” (or “Being”) is said in one and the same sense of everything of which it is said. Without univocity, transcendence will inevitably return to haunt the construction of any ontology (34-35).
Emanation is an example of the haunting of ontology by transcendence. One starts with a single substance, God. He is univocal. There are no distinctions among its substance. One can imagine that it could emanate itself and yet remain univocal. That would be expressionism. In the medieval tradition in which the concept of emanation arises, however, that is not what happens. In order to preserve the transcendence of God, emanation introduces the twofold distinction into substance: God is different from what is emanated, and higher. No matter how close the created comes to the creator, there must remain an ontological gap between them, a distance that allows for the superiority of the creator because of its transcendence (35).
It is only through the denial of that ontological gap, through the rigorous commitment to the univocity of being, that an ontology of immanence can be created. 35
The univocity of being threatens the Judeo-Christian conception of God by maintaining the equality of all being. For Deleuze, this is good news. If there is no longer a transcending God whose dictates we must follow or whose substance we must seek in our own lives to resemble, if there is no longer a transcending Other that can lay claim upon our faith or our behavior, then the door is open to an ontology of difference. Whatever our relation to the Spinozist God might be, it will
not be articulated in terms of following or subordinating or resembling. These concepts imply an identity to which our actions, thoughts, and beliefs must return rather than a difference that can give them play, draw them farther afield of themselves (35).