The Self Emptying Subject Kenosis and Immanence Medieval To Modern 1st Edition Alex Dubilet Online Version
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The Self-Emptying Subject
k enosis a nd imm a n ence ,
m e d i e va l t o m o d e r n
Alex Dubilet
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20 19 18 54321
First edition
Con t en ts
Introduction 1
1. Meister Eckhart’s Kenotic Lexicon
and the Critique of Finitude 23
2. Conceptual Experimentation with the Divine:
Expression, Univocity, and Immanence in Meister Eckhart 60
3. From Estrangement to Entäußerung: Undoing the
Unhappy Consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit 92
4. Hegel’s Annihilation of Finitude 123
5. Sans Emploi, Sans Repos, Sans Réponse:
Georges Bataille’s Loss without a Why 148
Conclusion 173
Acknowledgments 179
Notes 183
Index 237
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Introduction
Over the course of the last half-century, the conceptual pair of imma-
nence and transcendence has become a site of contestation within a
number of discourses across the theoretical humanities. Building on
a complex, preexisting conceptual history, the significance, seman-
tics, and morphology of immanence and transcendence have recently
acquired an added intensity, becoming key nodes for discussions
across numerous fields, including philosophy of religion, political the-
ology, contemporary continental philosophy, and the critical reex-
amination of secularity and secularism. Some of the stakes of these
discussions are captured, to take one prominent example, by Charles
Taylor’s interpretation of modernity as fundamentally characterized
by the formation of an immanent frame.1 Taylor’s account is notable
in the way it makes quite explicit a set of associations and meanings
that the terms have assumed in recent usage: Immanence is conceptu-
ally associated with human self-sufficiency, with the enclosure of the
world, and with the secular, and is contrasted with transcendence,
which marks an outside, a beyond of the human and its world. After
noting the complex genealogy of the concepts, Taylor summarizes
these associations by writing that “‘secular’ refers to what pertains to
a self-sufficient, immanent sphere and is contrasted with what relates
to the transcendent realm (often identified as ‘religious’).”2
Here, Taylor exemplifies a tendency detectable not only in debates
over the nature of secularity and secularism, but more broadly within
critical humanities discourse, one that associates immanence with the
condition of the worldly and the modern, and conceptually opposes
1
2 Introduction
unrestrained immanence
Few have done more to reanimate the problematic of immanence
in productive ways than Gilles Deleuze. Part of the novelty of his
thought lies in decoupling immanence from the world and the sub-
ject, and thereby resisting its adequation with forms of secularism
or humanism, however they may be conceived. To take one of his
formulations on the topic: “Immanence is immanence only to itself
and consequently captures everything, absorbs All-One, and leaves
nothing remaining to which it could be immanent. In any case, when-
ever immanence is interpreted as immanent to Something, we can
be sure that this Something reintroduces the transcendent.”5 Imma-
nence does not remain immanence if it is immanent to something as
a property, be that something the modern world or the transcenden-
tal subject. Rather, it is through such acts of appropriation that it is
deformed and subjugated, becoming merely a predicate rather than
that which precedes and exceeds subjects and totalities, which seek
to possess it as a property. To consign immanence to being a name
for a property of an enclosed totality is to already have betrayed and
lost immanence. “Whenever immanence is interpreted as immanent
‘to’ something . . . the plane of immanence revives the transcendent
again: it is a simple field of phenomena that now only possesses in a
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Introduction 3
ary itself (and also the objects, tasks, and operations that are proper
for philosophy and religious discourse) is constantly reasserted, cul-
tivated, and maintained from both sides. Perhaps this should come
as no surprise, since such distinct boundaries allow for the persis-
tence and legitimation of disciplinary identities and for the resulting,
almost nationalistic in their intensity, rallying cries in defense of dis-
ciplinary territories.
Several additional characteristics that often underwrite and
uphold this contested boundary between religious discourses and
philosophical ones become visible in the paradigmatic divergence
between the conceptual grammars of Levinas and Deleuze. Levi-
nas’s thought seeks to non-reductively articulate an ethical tran-
scendence, to recover a Good beyond Being, and to recover God
as a name that would be irreducible to the ontological enclosures
of philosophy.19 By contrast, in Deleuze’s thought, God becomes a
site for radical conceptual experimentation, most vividly so in the
philosophy of Spinoza, who always stood at the center of Deleuze’s
genealogy of immanence. 20 Moreover, immanence, in Spinoza and
elsewhere, was intimately tied to a critique not only of emanative
causality but also of the hierarchy of the Good beyond Being as well
as the theologies of creation, which Deleuze found structuring Pla-
tonic, Neoplatonic, and Christian discourses. 21 Deleuze succinctly
summarizes the boundary and the distinctions it entails in The
Logic of Sense: “Philosophy merges with ontology, but ontology
6 Introduction
merges with the univocity of Being (analogy has always been a theo-
logical vision, not a philosophical one, adapted to the forms of God,
the world and the self).”22 Here again we see a determinate contrast
between philosophy and theology, between immanence and tran-
scendence, between ontology and a Go(o)d beyond Being, between
univocity and analogy—the only question remaining being which
side of the divide one will attempt to rethink creatively, inject with
new theoretical life, and, by contrast, against which side will one
polemicize to gather strength for one’s own legitimacy.
This conceptual distribution and arrangement has recently been
troubled in a rather unique way in the work of François Laruelle.
Laruelle has critiqued Deleuze’s and similar approaches for the way
they appropriate immanence exclusively for philosophy, making it
labor in the name and for the sake of philosophy and its power.23
In contrast to Deleuze’s absolute immanence, Laruelle has proposed
“radical immanence,” an immanence that is fundamentally fore-
closed to thought and discourse, challenging any attempts to capture
and appropriate it. 24 Resisting authoritative explanations of the real
as proposed by philosophy, Laruelle has instead stressed the foreclo-
sure of immanence from discourse and proposed what he has termed
a democracy of thought. 25 “A real critique of Deleuze’s conception of
immanence . . . can be carried out in the name of a form of imma-
nence that is more radical still, one that expels all transcendence out-
side itself: not only that of theological objects and entities, but also
the ultimate form of transcendence, which is that of auto-position
or survey, of the fold or the doublet, etc.”26 Laruelle offers here an
important insight, namely, that the ultimate challenge to immanence
might come not from theological discourse, but from transcendence
covertly introduced by philosophical discourse itself. Against the phil-
osophical gesture that auto-differentiates itself from theological illu-
sions, Laruelle suggests that the heart of philosophy itself contains a
number of operations that participate in transcendence while dissim-
ulating and disavowing that participation; in this particular case, the
question centers on planar topology, auto-position, and a certain kind
of possibility of surveying. 27 It is worth noting that Deleuze, in his
own way, already cautioned against the ways philosophy reintroduces
transcendence into immanence, when he described, for example, the
development of the modern transcendental subject in philosophy. 28
Philosophy has repeatedly stymied immanence throughout its his-
tory, producing reversals of values and exalting transcendence in
Introduction 7
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