This is the sixth 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 compares the way in which Deleuze draws an ethics and politics out of his ontology with the biblical creation-fall-redemption schema. To see all the excerpts released so far, please click here.
Ontology, ethics and politics in Deleuze
As we move from creation to the account of the fall we begin to see how the contours of biblical temporality shape a distinctive response to the problem of nihilism and affirmation. Once more, we start by noting something that Plato, Aristotle and Deleuze have in common: an assumption that ethics and politics should be in conformity with a static ontology. There are two elements to this assumption. First, neither Deleuze nor his Greek interlocutors seek to decouple ontology from ethics; rather, they both (on Deleuze’s account) reverse engineer an ontology that will give them the politics they desire. None of them contemplates the possibility that of a politics intentionally at variance with the way things are.
Secondly, for both Deleuze and Plato the ontology that governs ethics and politics is temporally unchanging. Deleuze’s ontology is, to be sure, one of becoming and change, but the conditions that govern that becoming do not themselves change. For Plato, the forms are eternal and there is no change over time in the nature of the relationship between forms and their copies (Figure B.2). Similarly for Deleuze, the virtual remains the virtual and the actual the actual, and though becoming always becomes differently it is always becoming that becomes and it never does anything other than become (Figure B.3). This is the sense in which both Plato’s and Deleuze’s ontologies are static: the structural relationship between ontology and ethics/politics remains constant in both cases. In addition, the structural relation between ontology and ethics/politics also remains unchanging over time. For Deleuze, ethics and politics will always be about becoming and difference because ontology will always be about becoming and difference. Similarly for Plato, ethics and politics will always be about judgment and order because ontology will always be about judgment and order. Becoming is, was and ever more shall be becoming, just as Plato’s forms are, were and ever more shall be eternal.
Figure B.2: In Platonic transcendence, ethics and poilitics reflect unchanging conditions of existence.
Figure B.3: In Deleuzian immanence, ethics and poilitics reflect unchanging conditions of existence
Given this shared assumption of a static ontology, Plato is construed as straightforwardly nihilistic with respect to valuing the eternal forms over the decay and chance of this world, and Deleuze presents his own thought as straightforwardly affirmative of this world and of life. One can either deny this world and affirm a higher world, or deny the very existence of a higher world in order to affirm this one. Once more, this world and eternity find themselves in a zero sum opposition.
Sharing these assumptions with Plato as he does, Deleuze’s critique of the dogmatic image of thought can never be radical enough to address at the structural level the relationship between ontology and ethics. He is constrained to leave intact the logic which allows, for example, pre-revolutionary France to read the pre-eminence of the “Sun King” Louis XIV off the celestial hierarchy: the heavenly bodies all orbit around one unique sun, so our society should accordingly be ordered around one unique King. This logic respects the same relationship between “how things are” in the world and “how things should be” in society as Deleuze observes in his own thought. Why does it make any less sense to say “we should have absolute monarchy because the sun is the center of the solar system” then it does to say “difference is what there is, therefore our politics should be a politics of difference”? How can such a position argue convincingly against a great chain of being which claims “there is ontological hierarchy so we should reflect that in our polity”? To respond with “no, there is no hierarchy and we should reflect THAT in our polity” does nothing to disrupt the structure of the position; it merely challenges its contingent content. It does not amount to a radical rejection of the logic that makes possible the great chain of being. By changing his ontology rather than challenging the correspondence between ontology and politics per se, Deleuze does nothing to disrupt the deep logic of the dogmatic image of thought. What unites Deleuze and Plato/Aristotle here is more fundamental than what divides them.
The asymmetry of good and evil
So what would be a more radical approach? Could we simply say that ethics and politics are to be uncoupled holus bolus from any ontology? That risks being just as uninteresting as shackling them to each other, and opens the door to arbitrariness and caprice. A more sophisticated approach would be to complexify the ethical and the political by introducing temporal development into the conditions that inform the relationship between ontology and ethics/politics. This is what we see in the biblical account.
The Bible, in fact, shares neither of the assumptions that Deleuze and Plato hold in common: that the conditions of existence informing nihilism and affirmation are unchanging, or that ethics and politics must be read directly off the current conditions of being. This is where the emplotted nature of the biblical account of reality begins to make a difference.[1] Creation and fall are not co-originary in the biblical account. The “it was very good” of Genesis 1 precedes the “cursed is the ground” of Genesis 3; God and the serpent are not two co-original, equal and opposite deities but the serpent is one of God’s creatures (3:1) and bound by his curse (3:14-15). Similarly, there is an asymmetry of blessing and sin for Adam and Eve. God did not say “let us make sinners”, but “let us make man in our image” (1:26), and there is no indication that this image is negated by sin: if it were, why would God continue to communicate with Adam and Eve in a special way, make promises to them, and make them garments after the fall? Why, ultimately, would he send his son to die for Adam and Eve’s descendants?
Whereas God blesses Adam and Eve directly in Genesis 1:28, he does not curse them directly.[2] Both good and evil are present after Genesis 3, but they are present asymmetrically. Evil is not originary, and it will not persist forever. As Paul Ricœur puts it, “The etiological myth of Adam is the most extreme attempt to separate the origin of evil from the origin of the good; its intention is to set up a radical origin of evil distinct from the more primordial origin of the goodness of things”.[3] What is more, the event of evil does not negate the goodness of Genesis 1 and 2: Adam and Eve do not cease to be in God’s image; the trees do not cease to produce their fruit; animals do not cease to reproduce according to their kind, and Adam and Eve do not cease to fill the earth and subdue it. All of these aspects of God’s good creation are marred by sin, but none are negated. There is, then, a crucial asymmetry between creation and fall in Genesis 1-3.
In addition, there are two hints already in Genesis 3 that the entry of sin into the world is not the final chapter in God’s plan, in the same way that it was not the first. First of all, the proto-evangelion of Genesis 3:15[4] hints at the ultimate overcoming of Satan through Eve’s offspring, Christ, and his death on the cross. The protevangelium also introduces the temporality of promise that structures biblical time and means that a biblical outlook can never merely straightforwardly affirm or deny the present. Secondly, God’s killing of an animal in order to make garments for Adam and Eve (3:21) has been read as a foreshadowing of the sacrificial system that will culminate in the defeat of sin and death at the cross. Hart expresses this radical asymmetry with the image of a palimpsest:
Christian thought expects to find in every cultural coding a fundamental violence; no primordial innocence is displaced by the archive; but, perhaps fantastically, it treats this pervasive violence, inscribed upon being’s fabric, as a palimpsest, obscuring another text that is still written (all created being is “written”) but in the style of a letter declaring love.[5]
At every point, then, evil is overwriting but not destroying a more primordial and enduring message of blessing and love; at every point it is temporally bounded, framed and relativized by an original creation and a promise of redemption. Genesis 3 is certainly the chapter that announces the great disaster, but at the same time it works extraordinarily hard to limit evil, to say that it is not ultimate, that it has a beginning in history and that it is not a feature of humanity as originally created, however inveterate and inescapable it may be for the time being. This means that a biblical attitude to this world can neither be one of simple affirmation nor of straightforward denial.
Figure B.4: The biblical asymmetry of good and evil diagonalizes the asceticism of Deleuze’s dogmatic image of thought and his own Dionysian affirmation.
The Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer used a musical metaphor to communicate this biblical asymmetry of good and evil:
The Christian world view can be divided into what I call a major and minor theme. […] First, the minor theme is the abnormality of the revolting world. […] There is a defeated and sinful side to the Christian’s life. If we are at all honest, we must admit that in this life there is no such thing as totally victorious living. In every one of us there are those things which are sinful and deceiving, while we may see substantial healing, in this life we do not come to perfection. The major theme is the opposite of the minor; it is the meaningfulness and purposefulness of life. […] So therefore the major theme is an optimism in the area of being; everything is not absurd, there is meaning.[6]
There is futility, and there is meaning and goodness, but they are not equal and opposite realities: goodness precedes, exceeds and succeeds sin; it is the major theme to sin’s minor theme.
So to draw a Christian ethics and politics out of our present conditions of existence would be unpardonably to collapse the temporally distended biblical emplotment of the relationship between good and evil. It would collapse the asymmetrical relationship between the “it was very good” and “cursed is the ground because of you” in Genesis 1-3, and it would collapse the temporality of promise initiated in the protevangelium. Both the nihilism that Deleuze rejects and his own Nietzschean ethic of affirmation fail to grapple with this emplotted biblical account.
[1] The term “emplotment” is central to Paul Ricoeur’s three volume work Time and Narrative.
[2] God does not use the word “curse” to Eve at all, and to Adam he says “cursed is the ground because of you. This is in pointed distinction to the serpent, to whom God says “Cursed are you above all livestock” (Genesis 3:14).
[3] Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967) 233.
[4] God to the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
[5] Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite 55.
[6] Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 2009) 83-4.
