{"agent_id":"deleuze","agent_name":"Gilles Deleuze","slug":"univocity-of-being-and-the-plane-of-immanence","label":"Univocity of being and the plane of immanence: can philosophy be done without recourse to transcendence?","topic":"Univocity of being and the plane of immanence","question":"Can philosophy be done without recourse to transcendence?","position":"Being is said in a single, univocal sense of all that is — where what differs is only the modal difference of beings. The univocity thesis is articulated through the Duns Scotus / Spinoza / Nietzsche lineage. The *plane of immanence* is the absolute horizon of philosophical thought; transcendence (Plato's Idea, Christian God, Kant's noumenal subject, Hegel's Absolute Spirit) is what philosophy must always be working against. Plato's \"poisoned gift\" was to introduce transcendence into the field of immanence; modern philosophy continues to suffer from this. Each great philosopher *constructs* a plane of immanence — Spinoza's substance, Bergson's duration, Nietzsche's will to power — and the construction is the philosophical work, not the discovery of a pre-given ground.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Being is said in a single, univocal sense of all that is — where what differs is only the modal difference of beings.","n":[]},{"t":"The univocity thesis is articulated through the Duns Scotus / Spinoza / Nietzsche lineage.","n":[]},{"t":"The *plane of immanence* is the absolute horizon of philosophical thought; transcendence (Plato's Idea, Christian God, Kant's noumenal subject, Hegel's Absolute Spirit) is what philosophy must always be working against.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"Plato's \"poisoned gift\" was to introduce transcendence into the field of immanence; modern philosophy continues to suffer from this.","n":[2]},{"t":"Each great philosopher *constructs* a plane of immanence — Spinoza's substance, Bergson's duration, Nietzsche's will to power — and the construction is the philosophical work, not the discovery of a pre-given ground.","n":[3,4]}]],"texts":"*Difference and Repetition* (1968, the chapter on univocity), *Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza* (1968, Joughin's translation 1990), *Spinoza: Practical Philosophy* (1970/81), *A Thousand Plateaus* (1980, especially the plateau on the geology of morals), *What Is Philosophy?* (1991, the chapter on the plane of immanence). The late \"Immanence: A Life\" (1995, in *Pure Immanence*). Reception: Alain Badiou *The Clamor of Being* (1997, the covert-monism charge); Daniel W. Smith *Essays on Deleuze* (the chapter on the doctrine of univocity); Christian-Heideggerian critiques (Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, who hold that immanence cannot account for the constitutive event of givenness without relapsing into transcendence); Jacques Derrida (in the sense that *différance*, the trace, the messianic, the call all maintain an irreducible relation to transcendence Deleuze refuses).","works":["*Difference and Repetition* (1968, the chapter on univocity), *Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza* (1968, Joughin's translation 1990), *Spinoza: Practical Philosophy* (1970/81), *A Thousand Plateaus* (1980, especially the plateau on the geology of morals), *What Is Philosophy?* (1991, the chapter on the plane of immanence). The late \"Immanence: A Life\" (1995, in *Pure Immanence*)"],"reception":"Alain Badiou *The Clamor of Being* (1997, the covert-monism charge); Daniel W. Smith *Essays on Deleuze* (the chapter on the doctrine of univocity); Christian-Heideggerian critiques (Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, who hold that immanence cannot account for the constitutive event of givenness without relapsing into transcendence); Jacques Derrida (in the sense that *différance*, the trace, the messianic, the call all maintain an irreducible relation to transcendence Deleuze refuses).","status":"Held throughout the authorship, articulated most systematically in *Difference and Repetition* and the Spinoza books. The late essay \"Immanence: A Life\" (1995) is its purest statement: an \"absolute immediate consciousness\" that is the transcendental field stripped of subject and object. The geology-of-morals plateau in *A Thousand Plateaus* extends the immanence thesis into social-political registers; *What Is Philosophy?* gives the meta-philosophical articulation.","era":"1925-1995","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"What Is Philosophy","page":"pp. 63–64","canonical":"","quote":"The history of philosophy exhibits so many quite distinct planes not just as a result of illusions, of the variety of illusions, and not merely because each plane has its own, constantly renewed, way of restoring transcendence. More profoundly, it is because each plane has its own way of constructing immanence.","label":"What Is Philosophy, pp. 63–64"},{"n":2,"work":"Essays Critical and Clinical","page":"pp. 137–138","canonical":"","quote":"The poisoned gift of Platonism is to have introduced transcendence into philosophy, to have given transcendence a plausible philosophical meaning (the triumph of the judgment of God).","label":"Essays Critical and Clinical, pp. 137–138"},{"n":3,"work":"What Is Philosophy","page":"pp. 57–58","canonical":"","quote":"Only friends can set out a plane of immanence as a ground from which idols have been cleared. In Empedocles, Love lays out the plane, even if she does not return to the self without enfolding Hatred as movement that has become negative showing a subtranscendence of chaos (the volcano) and a supertranscendence of a god. It may be that the first philosophers still look like priests, or even kings.","label":"What Is Philosophy, pp. 57–58"},{"n":4,"work":"Expressionism in Philosophy Spinoza","page":"pp. 117–118","canonical":"","quote":"It is these survivals that Spinoza finds and contests in Descartes and the Cartesians. Herein lies the sense of Spinoza's concept of immanence; it expresses the double univocity of cause and attribute, that is, the unity of efficient and formal cause, and the identity of an attribute as constituting the essence of substance, and as implied by the essences of creatures.","label":"Expressionism in Philosophy Spinoza, pp. 117–118"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"difference-and-the-overturning-of-platonism","label":"Difference and the overturning of Platonism: is the simulacrum a degraded copy or the very being of difference itself?"},{"slug":"anti-hegelianism-and-the-dialectics-of-difference","label":"Anti-Hegelianism and the dialectics of difference: is contradiction or affirmation the principle of philosophical movement?"},{"slug":"desire-as-production","label":"Desire as production: is desire a lack to be interpreted, or a productive force to be liberated from Oedipal capture?"},{"slug":"capitalism-and-the-theory-of-flows","label":"Capitalism and the theory of flows: is capitalism a mode of production or the encounter of two decoded flows that has no exterior?"},{"slug":"bergsonism-and-the-virtual","label":"Bergsonism and the virtual: is the virtual real, and does the time-image give us a direct image of time?"}]}