May, Todd. Gilles Deleuze: an introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.
Foucault and Derrida teach us that if we think of our lives solely in terms of what appears to us, and if we think of what appears to us as exhausting our possibilities, we are already hedged in, already committed to conformism. Their response is to say that we ought to stop thinking in terms of ontology, at least in the analytic sense, because ontology teaches us that what appears to us is natural and inevitable. Things cannot be otherwise. Deleuze agrees with their diagnosis, but not with their cure. If the question is how might one live, the way to approach it is with another ontology, one that offers possibilities as yet undreamed of, one whose soil is far richer than those plants to which it has yet given rise (23).
Transcendence (boo, no good boo)
In the history of philosophy, a history dominated by the motif of transcendence, it is the transcendence of God that forms the longest legacy. But it is not the only one. Before there is God there are the Platonic Forms. The Forms stand outside human experience; they transcend the world, not only the experienced world but the world itself. (Difference, it turns out, transcends the experienced world but does not transcend the world itself. It is transcendent to our knowledge, but not to that which gives knowledge.) The role of the philosopher is to seek to understand the Forms. The philosopher seeks cognitive participation in them, wanting to grasp intellectually their nature and, ultimately, to mold the world in their likeness. The latter task belongs to the philosopher king: to apply the lessons of transcendence to this world. Philosophers are required as rulers for a just society because there is a transcendence to be understood and learned from. That is the lesson of the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic (27).
With these last considerations we can begin to glimpse the role of transcendence. It is to allow the universe tobe explained in such a way as to privilege one substance at the expense of another, to preserve the superiority of certain characteristics and to denigrate others. What is to be recognized as superior is not of this world: the infinite, the nonphysical, the unlimited, and the unity of a self-identity. But what is of more moment for Deleuze’s thought is what is to be denigrated: the physical, the chaotic, that which resists identity. Only that which submits to participation in the identity of the Forms, or that which follows the narrow dictates of God, or that which conforms to the conceptual categories of human thought is to be admitted into the arena of the acceptable. Physicality, chaos, difference that cannot be subsumed into categories of identity: all these must deny themselves if they would seek to be recognized in the privileged company of the superior substance (31).
What concerns Deleuze is not what Spinoza criticizes but the model of immanence he constructs in its stead. It is not that Spinoza has detailed the difficulties of transcendence that fascinates Deleuze. Rather, it is that Spinoza has successfully changed the subject, gone on to something else. He has done so by employing a concept that allows thinking to abandon
transcendence: the concept of expression (33).
There is a religious necessity pushing ontology into the arms of transcendence. Without transcendence, what do we make of God? In what sense is God superior to the creatures of this world, if not by being beyond them? God cannot compel us, cannot command our devotion, unless he transcends the boundaries of our world. Just as for Plato the Forms take their aura of superiority in being beyond the world of shadows that we inhabit, for the Judeo-Christian tradition God finds his luster in transcending the parameters of our universe. Spinoza is a heretic, but his heresy lies not in pantheism but in the denial of transcendence and in the construction of an ontology of immanence. It was for this that the Christ of philosophers was crucified (34).