This is the third in a series of extracts from my forthcoming book on Deleuze (to be published in the same P&R ‘Great Thinkers’ series as the Derrida and Foucault volumes). It comes at the end of a section on Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, and it discusses what “belief in God” could mean from a Deleuzian point of view. To see all the excerpts released so far, please click here.
Deleuze seeks to expel all traces of theological thinking from his philosophy. It would be a mistake, however, to think that Deleuze defines his account of eternal return, or indeed any aspect of his thought, in explicit contradistinction to Christianity. In fact, he works hard to resist Christian theology setting the agenda. Deleuze is very aware of the need for philosophy to escape theology’s shadow, and one way for it to remain in that shadow is to retain the fundamental structure of the dogmatic image of thought while seeking to change particular concepts within that structure. This is what I have elsewhere called “imitative atheism”,[1] a purportedly atheistic thought continuing to work within structures given to it by theology.
Figure A.16: Imitative atheism.
Deleuze seeks to rid philosophy not only of God, but also of all the traces and echoes of God in the god-like structures of the unified human subject, the hierarchical state and the idea of a unified and harmonious nature: “the death of God, the possibility of replacing God with humanity, all the God-Human permutations, etc. It’s like Foucault said, we are no more human than God, the one dies with the other” (DI 137).
In Deleuze’s own terms, it is not quite right to say that he does not believe in God, as if God were a concept in relation to which one still had to take a position. Deleuze’s aim is to set out a plane of immanence in which the very question of belief in God is no longer relevant, for the one who actively disbelieves in God “would still belong to the old plane as negative movement” (WIP 74).
Figure A.17: The plane of immanence does not lack God. It is complete in itself.
The danger Deleuze is seeking to avoid here is that immanence becomes negatively defined by transcendence, and that in vacating the space of transcendence it leaves that space unoccupied, ready for God to return. Deleuze does not want merely to reject belief in God, but to leave no place within his thought where God could be, to make the very idea of God unintelligible in the image of thought he sets forth. Getting rid of God in this way is not easily accomplished, however, and “[i]t may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today” (WIP 75). The victory of atheism will be proclaimed when the death of God ceases to be a live question for philosophy: “For philosophers neither atheism nor the death of God are problems. [… ] It is astonishing that philosophers still take the death of God to be tragic. Atheism is not a drama but the philosopher’s serenity and philosophy’s achievement.” (WIP 92, my translation).
[1] See Christopher Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
