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Bloomsbury Studies in
Continental Philosophy
Immanent Transcendence
Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy
Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Bloomsbury. The
series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy.
Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research.
Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastiar Morgan

Adorno’s Poetics of Critique, Steven Helmling
Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno
Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller
Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach
Crisis in Continental Philosophy, Robert Piercey
Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan
Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Jay Lampert
Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes
Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham
Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston
Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure, Nicole Anderson
Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri
Encountering Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham
Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner
Foucault’s Legacy, C.G. Prado
Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope, Jill Graper Hernandez
Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi
Gilles Deleuze, Constantin V. Boundas
Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy
Heidegger and Authenticity, Mahon O’Brien
Heidegger and Happiness, Matthew King
Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard
Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, Michael Lewis
Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis
Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin
Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte
In the Shadow of Phenomenology, Stephen H. Watson
Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas
Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics, Edward Willatt
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer
Michel Henry, Jeffrey Hanson
Nietzsche and the Anglo-Saxon Tradition, Louise Mabille
Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, James Luchte
Phenomenology, Institution and History, Stephen H. Watson
Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms
Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman
Simultaneity and Delay, Jay Lampert
Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant, Edward Willatt
Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, Gregg Lambert
Zizek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman
Immanent Transcendence
Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy
Patrice Haynes
LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2012
© Patrice Haynes, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or

refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2152-3

e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-6290-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haynes, Patrice.
Immanent transcendence: reconfiguring materialism in continental
philosophy/Patrice Haynes.
p. cm. – (Continuum studies in continental philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-2152-3 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4411-6290-8 (ebook (pdf))
1. Materialism. 2. Immanence (Philosophy) 3. Transcendence (Philosophy)
4. Continental philosophy. I. Title.
B825.H39 2012
111–dc23
2012010761
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Anthia and in memory of Jocelyn George and Laura B. Knight
vi
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
List of Abbreviations x
Introduction: Rethinking Materialism and Transcendence 1

1 Deleuze and Spinoza: The Metaphysics of Pure Immanence 13
2 Becoming-Other 55
3 Irigaray’s Sensible Transcendental 87
4 Adorno, Negative Dialectics and Materialism 127
5 Towards a Theological Materialism 151
Notes 161
Bibliography 191
Index 201
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to, and would like to acknowledge, a number of people who have helped
me in various ways during the writing of this publication. First, I wish to thank
J’annine Jobling who supervised my doctoral thesis, the arguments of which I have
sought to develop in this book. I also wish to thank Michael McGhee and Gillian
Howie for their truly inspirational teaching and for supporting me in my graduate
studies and beyond.
My colleagues at Liverpool Hope University also deserve acknowledgement for
their interest in my work and their encouraging words during the writing of this book.
In particular, special thanks must go to Steven Shakespeare for patiently listening to
my inchoate ideas and for helping me to sharpen them and to Charlie Blake for many
discussions on Deleuze. Also, I am most grateful to Mary Mills for her support of my
work and for reading much of this manuscript, providing me with some helpful advice.
I am also indebted to Ursula Leahy who kindly compiled the bibliography. I also wish
to thank Philip Goodchild for our discussions on Deleuze and immanence and Pamela
Sue Anderson for both her inspirational, ground-breaking work on feminist philoso-
phy of religion and for her thoughtful support of my own work.
I have tremendous gratitude to all my friends who have had to put up with my
hermitage while I have been writing this book. To my best friend Sharon Morse and
her husband Gary and daughter Evelyn (my adopted niece), and to Kate O’Shea, Hilka
Querl, Ruth Knox, Hannah Bacon and all at Christ Church, Liverpool, thank you for
your incredible patience and for your encouragement. Special mention must be given
to Guy Tourlamain who has shared a similar writing journey with me and whose
friendship has helped me through the testing times.
My final thanks must go to my family: to my lovely sister Janine for being one of the
funniest and most generous persons I know; and to my father for always encouraging
my love of learning. I have chosen to dedicate this book to my mother, Anthia and
to the loving memory of my two grandmothers, Jocelyn George and Laura Knight,
who both sadly passed away during the writing of this book. Thank you so much
Anita (I couldn’t resist), for your unfailing confidence in me, for your patience dur-
ing my long absences, for your constant encouragement in all I do, and for your love.
I also want to acknowledge the lives of my two grandmothers, strong women full of
love and faith, and who always supported my decisions. I miss, and will not forget,
either of you.
Parts of Chapter Three draws on an earlier paper published as ‘The Problem of
Transcendence in Irigaray’s Philosophy of Sexual Difference’, in New Topics in Feminist
Philosophy of Religion: Contestations and Transcendence Incarnate, ed. Pamela Sue
Anderson (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, New York: Springer, 2010), pp. 279–96
Acknowledgements ix
and is reused here with kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media.
Chapter Four contains excerpts from ‘Transcendence, Materialism, and the Reenchant
ment of Nature: Toward a Theological Materialism’ in Women and the Divine: Touching
Transcendence, eds. Gillian Howie and J’annine Jobling (New York and Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
List of Abbreviations
The following abbreviations will be used in text and notes.
Gilles Deleuze
AO Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, co-written with Felix Guat-
tari, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London and New
York: Continuum, 2004).
ATP A Thousand Plateaus, co-written with Felix Guattari, trans. Brian Massumi
(London and New York: Continuum, 2004).
B Bergsonism, trans. Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone
Books, 1998).
D Dialogues II with Claire Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam, ‘The Actual and the Virtual’, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (London
and New York: Continuum, 2006).
DI Desert Island and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans.
Michael Taormina (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004).
DR Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London and New York:
Continuum, 2004).
EPS Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York:
Zone Books, 1992).
ES Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Nature, trans.
Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
IAL ‘Immanence: A Life’, in Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne
Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), pp. 25–33.
LS Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles
Stivale (London and New York: Continuum, 2004).
N Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995).
NP Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Althone Press,
1983).
List of Abbreviations xi
SPP Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights
Books, 1988).
WP What is Philosophy?, co-written with Felix Guattari, trans. Graham Burchell
and Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso 1994).
Irigaray
BEW Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen
Pluháček (New York Columbia University Press, 2002).
EP Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (London: Athlone
Press, 1992).
ESD Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London
and New York: Continuum, 2004).
ILTY I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, trans. Alison Martin
(London: Routledge, 1996).
S Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985).
SG Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993).
TBT To Be Two, trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc
(London: Althone Press, 2000).
TD Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, trans., Karin Montin
(London: Althone Press, 1994).
TS This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyne Burke
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
WD Why Different? A Culture of Two Subjects: Interviews with Luce Irigaray, ed.
Sylvére, trans. Camille Collins (New York: Semiotext(e), 2000).
WL The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček (London and
New York: Continuum, 2002).
Adorno
AP ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 24–29.
DOE Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Max Horkheimer, trans. John
Cumming, (London and New York: Verso, 1997).
xii List of Abbreviations
MM Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1999).

ND Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973).
SO ‘Subject and Object’, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), pp. 138–51.
Kant
CPR Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Basingstoke:
Macmillan Press, 1929).
Introduction: Rethinking Materialism and
Transcendence
At first glance, it may seem that an inquiry on materialist theories in contemporary

continental philosophy would have little to say on the notion of transcendence. Given
its age-old association with otherworldliness, transcendence is a concept that appears
to be fundamentally incompatible with any serious commitment to matter and mate-
riality. In western thought, the term ‘transcendence’ is a controversial and overdeter-
mined one with a long history in both philosophy and theology. Nevertheless, in its
most general sense, transcendence signals ‘the beyond’, with the noun form of the term
denoting a reality beyond the world – the transcendent – and the verb form denoting
the activity of moving beyond – to transcend. Transcendence is thus a relative term
since it implicitly calls up that which is transcended, namely, immanence understood
as that which remains within certain limits or bounds. From Plato onwards, the west-
ern imaginary has typically figured immanence pejoratively in terms of the limits
of matter, the body, sensibility, being, worldliness, etc. This devaluation of material
immanence is thoroughly consolidated, according to Nietzschean lines of critique, by
the theistic notion of divine transcendence used to express God’s radical otherness from
the world. The transcendent God of theism, so the argument runs, invites a ‘rhetoric
of ascent’,1 which promotes the aspiration to disengage from material finitude, deemed
lowly and base, in order to reach up towards spiritual union with the divine, deemed
eminent and superior.
Given the ominous shadows cast by transcendence over worldly immanence, it may
seem that a properly figured materialist philosophy must reject the notion of tran-
scendence. However, while sensitive to the controversies surrounding the category of
transcendence, this book hopes to show how theorizing matter in contemporary con-
tinental philosophy often involves some sort of transvaluation of transcendence. Jean
Wahl suggests something like this when he remarks ‘Perhaps the greatest transcend-
ence is that which consists in transcending transcendence, that is, of falling back into
immanence.’2 If materialism requires transcending transcendence this need not mean
the elimination of transcendence altogether but rather, I claim, its recovery to matter
itself in ways that radicalize our very understanding of material immanence.
It was while trying to grapple with Luce Irigaray’s enigmatic notion of a ‘sensi-
ble transcendental’ (‘transcendental sensible’) that I became intrigued by what I would
identify as a growing trend in continental philosophy: the attempt to materialize tran-
scendence. This curious theme is, I believe, evident in the materialist philosophies of
the aforementioned Irigaray, as well as Theodor Adorno, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek
and even Gilles Deleuze. Why, I wondered, might such thinkers wish to rehabilitate
2 Immanent Transcendence
transcendence for their materialist projects given the term’s unwelcome reputation as
that which is opposed to the material world?
As Charles Taylor emphasizes in his recent book A Secular Age, a defining
characteristic of western modernity is the eclipse of transcendence – or what, after
Nietzsche, is called the ‘death of God’. Modern society is an ‘immanent order’, Taylor
observes, one capable of understanding itself entirely in terms of natural laws, thus
without reference to a transcendent principle, namely God. Furthermore, not only
is transcendence considered to be metaphysically untenable, given the idea of self-
sustaining nature, it is also viewed as problematic on ethical and political grounds. In
the words of one commentator, ‘Immanence means relevance.’3 Whereas, it may be
said, longings for the heavens of transcendence results in political quietism, the turn to
immanence focuses attention on this world, motivating social transformation in order
to maximize human flourishing. Indeed, such optimistic expectations would inspire
much Marxist thinking up until the collapse of communism in the 1980s.
A number of feminists also target transcendence on ethical and political grounds;
the concept is charged with serving to cement the entire patriarchal edifice. Femi-
nist theorizing points out that the transcendence/immanence distinction prevailing in
western thought is not just hierarchically ordered but construed in gendered terms. It
is ‘woman’ who is ‘doomed to immanence’,4 to borrow Simone de Beauvoir’s apt expres-
sion, with the female body symbolizing the prison of material immanence. ‘Man’, on
the other hand, is said to represent the power of transcendence, or freedom. On this
account, not only does the valorization of transcendence – particularly its archetypal
expression in terms of divine transcendence – encourage the denigration of material-
ity in general, it also sustains a patriarchal vision of gender which feminists wish to
overcome.
As I indicated above, this book emerges from my fascination with questions con-
cerning attempts at the materialization of transcendence evident in certain streams
of post-war continental philosophy. Why would any materialism fund the career of
transcendence, with all its theological baggage and historical antipathy towards mat-
ter? How exactly can transcendence be materialized, and what sense can be made of
the term ‘transcendence’ thus modified? What sort of materialism would result from a
materialist reappraisal of transcendence?
In a paper which explores the interplay between transcendence and materialism in
recent European thought – particularly French Marxist thinking – John Milbank offers
some helpful insights as to how we might begin to tackle such questions.5 He starts
by noting, rightly in my view, that all political theorizing presuppose some kind of
ontology; otherwise emancipatory projects would be rendered insecure because there
would be no basis on which to claim something needed liberation, or that any pro-
posed form of liberation could be successful. Milbank then goes on to say that, since
the 1950s, efforts to reform Marxist and socialist theory within continental philosophy
importantly involve the elaboration of a ‘non-reductive materialism’. Contra reductive
materialism – which sees matter as passive, inert and mechanistic – non-reductive
materialism ‘imagines matter as that which can itself occasion subjectivity and mean-
ing, because it is the site for the emergence of a spontaneous and unpredictable energy’.6
There are two main factors prompting the search for a non-reductive materialism in
recent political thought. First, it challenges the ‘vulgar materialism’ undergirding

Soviet Marxism. Moreover, it challenges the mechanistic, Newtonian model of nature
in which matter is conceived only in the quantitative terms of mass.7 Second, by iden-
tifying creative forces within matter itself, a non-reductive materialism wishes to avoid
turning matter into a mere reflection of the subject’s determinations characteristic
of idealist and humanist philosophies. Indeed, a non-reductive materialism aims to
confound the traditional dualistic framework through which spirit and matter, mind
and body, are conceived dichotomously and hierarchically. In striving to do justice to
matter, so that it is no longer regarded as homogeneous, inert hyle, a non-reductive
approach to materialism offers a fresh ontological vision that can inform a radical poli-
tics and guide practical reasoning in new directions.
Central to constructing a non-reductive materialism is, I argue, what I have been
calling the materialization of transcendence, or what can also be seen as the affirma-
tion of the paradoxical notion of immanent transcendence. Admittedly, few material-
ist thinkers in contemporary continental philosophy would consider their work to be
in any way concerned with recovering the concept of transcendence. Nevertheless,
I maintain that the task of advancing a non-reductive materialism is implicitly con-
cerned with rethinking transcendence and materiality in ways that reject their tra-
ditional opposition. Matter may then be conceived as that which possesses its own
powers of becoming, of self-transcending – powers we may even consider divine. This
book is a critical exploration of how the terms ‘transcendence’ and ‘matter’ inform one
another in recent attempts to offer a renewed materialism, one which could provide
the foundations for certain political, ethical and even theological aspirations.8
Beyond transcendence via Kant and Hegel

In the introduction to their recent edited volume Transcendence and Beyond: A Post-
modern Inquiry, John Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon identify two main tendencies in
postmodern responses to the classic idea of transcendence.9 The first is a move towards
what they call ‘hypertranscendence’. Here traditional images of transcendence are criti-
cized for not being transcendent enough since they fail to escape the immanence of
being. Philosophies of hypertranscendence invoke the notion of the ‘Wholly Other’
typical in works by Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion. The sec-
ond tendency develops the idea of what Caputo and Scanlon call ‘post-transcendence’.
Instead of seeking to purify the category of transcendence from the taints of imma-
nence, this position insists on relocating transcendence to ‘the plane of immanence’,
to borrow Deleuze’s phrase. By wresting the forces of transcendence from theological
and humanist categories, advocates of post-transcendence seek to re-vitalize imma-
nent, material life. In their transvaluation of transcendence, the philosophies of Michel
Foucault, Gianni Vattimo, Michel Henry, Deleuze, Irigaray and Adorno offer perspec-
tives on the idea of post-transcendence – an idea I have been expressing in terms of an
immanent or materialist transcendence.
Although there are a number of thinkers who could be seen as representatives of
the post-transcendence tendency in continental philosophy, for the purposes of this
book I have chosen to study the works of Deleuze, Irigaray and Adorno. At first blush,
the grouping of these three figures may seem somewhat eclectic, given their rather
different agendas and methodologies. Nevertheless, examining these three thinkers
alongside each other offers a basic trajectory to my inquiry concerning immanent tran-
scendence and its implications for materialism; a trajectory moving from the planes of
pure immanence (Deleuze) towards increasingly dialectical conceptions of material
immanence (Irigaray and Adorno).
Despite their differences, these three philosophers do share important common-
alities. First is their commitment to materialism. Now the term ‘materialism’ is fre-
quently deployed in continental thought yet its meaning is far from obvious. Indeed,
there are several positions which can be described as materialist. These include (i) the
assertion of a mind-independent world, whether conceived of as stuff and forces or as
stable objects persisting over time; (ii) the claim that only matter exists (physicalism);
and (iii) historical or dialectical materialism – a method and ontology which rests on
Marx’s response to Hegel’s Absolute Idealism and emphasizes human transformative
action and the significance of the socio-historical context of a thing. There is another
sense of the term materialism, which is more attitudinal than doctrinal, and refers
more generally to any theorizing dedicated to avowing embodiment, flesh, nature, sen-
sibility, desires, affects, material processes and so forth. To begin with, we can attribute
this somewhat imprecise sense of materialism to the works of Deleuze, Irigaray and
Adorno. However, a clearer picture of the type of materialism developed by these three
thinkers will emerge from the analysis of their respective philosophies undertaken in
this book.
Concomitant with their materialist agendas, Deleuze, Irigaray and Adorno can also
be labelled philosophers of immanence. Like transcendence and materialism, the term
‘immanence’ is far from straightforward. As we noted earlier, it broadly means ‘remain-
ing within’. Immediately, two issues are raised by this definition. First is the question
‘remaining within what?’ Second is an idea we have already touched on, namely, the
association of immanence with that which is limited or constrained, closed off from the
beyond (transcendence), thus in some way fallen, incomplete. Traditionally, in western
philosophy at least, these two issues have led to a picture of immanence as a prison –
specifically, the prison of the material world, usually represented by the female body. A
number of commentators have pointed out how in the last twenty years or so there has
been a striking resurgence of philosophies of immanence in continental philosophy
(notably in France).10 This turn to immanence, which is more or less synonymous with
the shift to post-transcendence observed by Caputo and Scanlon, contests the denigra-
tion of material immanence entrenched in much western thought. One principal way
in which philosophies of immanence redeem the status of immanence is by insisting
that it is not to be described as immanent to something else beyond it: the transcend-
ent. Whenever immanence is framed in this way, it is claimed, a hierarchical dualism
is instituted between transcendence and immanence, to the detriment of the latter.
Against this outcome, philosophies of immanence assert that immanence is all there
is; there is no beyond ‘out there’, no exteriority, no divine otherness viewed as separate,
independent and superior in relation to mundane immanence. As a result, immanence
no longer signifies limitedness and confinement but a site of movement, excess and
c reative transformations – the motifs of immanent transcendence. Although envisaging

immanence in quite different ways, our three thinkers are nevertheless united in their
rejection of the Wholly Other: an otherworldly, supernatural transcendence in relation
to which material immanence is held to be subordinate.
(Theists could rightly argue that the depiction of divine transcendence and material
immanence presented above is no more than a caricature that fails to consider theolo-
gies of creation, as well as the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, which holds that
bodiliness and matter is affirmed and redeemed in Christ who is God made flesh. I
would agree that materialist philosophies of immanence often oversimplify theistic
formulations of the God-world relation. That said, as Nietzsche discerned, it remains
the case that theism has perpetuated images of divine transcendence which emphasize
God’s radical otherness and distance from the world.11 However partial and even dis-
torted such images are, the point for philosophies of immanence is that their potency
lies in their continued validation of western culture’s persisting dreams of liberation
from the mire of earthly immanence, as witnessed in the philosophies of Plato through
to Sartre and Levinas).
Finally, as philosophers of immanence, our three thinkers share a post-Kantian
approach to immanence. Interestingly, Kant’s transcendental idealism insists on both
immanence and transcendence – the former in the service of epistemology, the latter
in the service of ethics. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant writes: ‘We shall enti-
tle the principles whose application is confined entirely within the limits of possible
experience, immanent; and those, on the other hand, which profess to pass beyond
these limits transcendent’ (CPR, A295-6/B352). It is by trying to establish the possibil-
ity of knowledge that Kant constructs a philosophy of immanence. His critical project
introduces limits to the powers of reason such that epistemically it is precluded from
transcending the bounds of possible experience. Were it to do so, it would generate
illusions, namely, the transcendent Ideas of Soul, World and God. According to Kant,
the possibility of knowledge is by virtue of the conditions of experience, conditions
which he famously describes as ‘transcendentally ideal’. While such conditions are
non-empirical, they are not, however, transcendent, that is, existing beyond the realm
of experience. Rather, they are the a priori conditions which must be presupposed
for any possible experience. Kant’s epistemology therefore founds a philosophy of
immanence by distinguishing the ‘transcendental’ from the ‘transcendent’. In this way,
immanence is no longer figured in relation to the transcendent (namely, supersensible
or metaphysical postulates) but to the transcendental, which remains within the orbit
of immanence precisely as the logical basis of its self-grounding. Kantian immanence
(experience, the phenomenal world) is not determined by a transcendent, external
principle but is the product of reason’s own activity.
Of course, Kant cannot be perceived simply as a partisan of immanence. Although
his transcendental idealism sought to ward off Humean scepticism, he nevertheless
would concede the idea of things in-themselves, noumena: a world beyond the phe-
nomenal reality constituted by human cognition. In the ‘Preface to the Second Edition’
of the Critique of Pure Reason, he wrote, ‘I have therefore found it necessary to deny
knowledge, in order to make room for faith’ (CPR, Bxxx). For Kant, critical philoso-
phy must deny the possibility of knowledge of things-in-themselves; however, it could
grant the subject’s capacity to think noumena in terms of transcendent Ideas. Indeed,
while these have no theoretical purchase, they must be postulated for the guiding of
practical reason. The Idea of God, for example, cannot, Kant claimed, be an object of
knowledge since it is not an object of possible experience, but it is perfectly legitimate
for practical reason to postulate God as the being who ensures that moral actions will
be rewarded by happiness. For the sake of ethics, Kant’s philosophy preserves the idea
of transcendence.
Following the first wave of post-Kantians, Hegel would revolutionize Kant’s tran-
scendental idealism by dissolving the distinction between knowable phenomena and
unknowable noumena. For Hegel, it makes no sense to claim that reason can impose
limits on itself, pace Kant, since in order to set a limit, reason must have access to both
sides of that limit thus exceeding that limit in the very act of establishing it. With Hegel,
reason is limitless: it is no longer restricted to human consciousness but is Absolute, the
constituting power of things-in-themselves. In other words, reason is not just subjec-
tive but is the very essence of being: the real is rational, and the rational is real.12 Impor-
tantly, while Kant’s philosophy rendered God transcendent to reason, Hegel’s Objective
Idealism returned knowledge of God to reason, thus making God immanent in the
world. His philosophical system aimed to reconcile immanence and transcendence
such that ‘heaven is transplanted to earth below.’13 Pushing the immanentist direction
of Kant’s philosophy to its extreme, Hegel thus constructs a thoroughgoing philosophy
of immanence. Nothing can surpass the life of Reason which in the Phenomenology of
Spirit eventually attains a point of Absolute Knowing: full self-consciousness whereby
Reason – the cosmic or divine Subject – would come to realize itself manifested in all
there is, all seeming otherness having been restored to it.
Deleuze, Irigaray and Adorno are post-Kantian because they continue the tran-
scendental project at the same time as they modify it in radical and distinctive ways.
According to Clare Colebrook ‘the transcendental point of view involves stepping
back from the experience of things as real, and asking how such a real is possible’.14
To put it another way, transcendental projects consider the question of ground: what
are the conditions of experience? Certainly, our three thinkers welcome Kant’s libera-
tion of immanence from the dictates of a transcendent God. However, in surrendering
immanence to the fixed, formal categories of the transcendental subject, Kant is criti-
cized for his failure to do justice to immanence. Prima facie, it might seem that Hegel’s
philosophy manages to resolve this problem. For Hegel, reason’s dialectical logic con-
stitutes immanence over time by manifesting itself, not in abstract categories (Kant),
but in concrete historical forms. Whereas Kantian immanence can be charged with
being static and abstract, with Hegel the immanent whole is in a dynamic process of
becoming.
Yet, Deleuze, Irigaray and Adorno, among others will complain that Hegelian
immanence only appears to be dynamic while in actual fact it remains rigidly bound to
the necessities of dialectical logic. For Hegel, reason, through a process of mediation,
integrates the sensuous otherness, particularity and contingency of Nature into the
unified and total system that is the Absolute Idea. Both Kant and Hegel can, therefore,
be charged with formulating immanence as a closed totality wherein matter is subordi-
nated to mind, and difference to identity. Challenging this picture, the philosophies of
Deleuze, Irigaray and Adorno strive to render immanence an open whole rather than a
closed one: open because it is capable of self-transcendence or becoming, thus creating
space for difference; whole because it nevertheless retains a certain degree of coherence
and integrity, albeit in a fairly unsystematic way. The attempt to think immanence as
an open whole wherein materiality is not forsaken in favour of ideality actually leads
us back to transcendence. My claim is that by relocating transcendence to the plane of
immanence, our three thinkers hope to develop a non-reductive materialism that does
not lapse into a totalized, logicized immanence.
Towards an immanent transcendence

For some readers, it may seem that out of the three thinkers I have chosen to study
Deleuze is strikingly incongruous. At best bemused, they might ask: ‘Isn’t Deleuze
the philosopher of pure immanence par excellence?’ ‘How could anyone overlook
Deleuze’s numerous calls to ‘hunt down transcendence’ wherever it is found’? Certainly
Deleuze wants to eliminate any reference to the transcendent from his metaphysics –
specifically, an otherness or exteriority beyond the whole – whether in the guise of the
transcendent God of theism, Platonic Forms or Kantian regulative Ideas. However, we
shall see that the question of transcendence – specifically, in its verb form of ‘moving
beyond’ – remains pertinent for Deleuze in his attempt to revitalize those finite forma-
tions of life that have become hardened by habit and memory and so resistant to new
modes of becoming, that is, resistant to transcendence.
The concept of immanent transcendence manifests itself in the work of all three
philosophers discussed in this book, be it through notions such as becoming imper-
ceptible (Deleuze), sexual difference (Irigaray) or historical possibility (Adorno).
However, it is true that Deleuze departs from the other two thinkers in one crucial
respect. This is due to his insistence on pure immanence. In a nutshell, this means
that immanence must be immanent to itself alone. It cannot be immanent to God, the
subject or any other thing. He complains that
In this modern moment we are no longer satisfied with thinking immanence as

immanent to a transcendent; we want to think transcendence within the immanent,
and it is from immanence that a breach is expected . . . immanence itself is made to
disgorge the transcendent everywhere. (WP, 47)
Deleuze denounces the rediscovery of transcendence in immanence that he finds in

the phenomenological tradition, thus seeming to throw cold water on my claim that
he offers a materialist reinterpretation of transcendence, that is, an immanent tran-
scendence. However, his real target is not so much transcendence per se – if by this
we mean the process of ‘moving beyond’, or ‘the refusal of all borders’,15 descriptors we
could easily attach to Deleuze’s characterization of pure immanence. Rather, he is criti-
cal of attributing immanence, the ‘movement of the infinite’ (WP, 47), to the subject
conceived as the ground of immanence. The point for Deleuze, as we shall see, is that
the subject is an effect of pure immanence. It is thus wrong-headed to presume that
there is an otherness (transcendence) which escapes consciousness, for consciousness

is constituted by the a-subjective, impersonal Life that is pure immanence.
A significant consequence of Deleuze’s philosophy of pure immanence is that it
generates an immanent whole characterized by ‘internal differentiation’. In agreement
with Henri Bergson, one of his most important interlocutors, Deleuze asserts, ‘A differ-
ence of nature is never between two products or between two things, but in one and the
same thing between two tendencies that traverse it’ (DI, 26). Similarly, ‘[I]t is only with
itself that life differs’ (DI, 41, my emphasis). From this, Deleuze’s vision of pure imma-
nence might look quite Hegelian. But we will see that he espouses a non-dialectical
theory of immanence. According to Deleuze, pure immanence is the immediate self-
differing of Life; it is thus not mediated by a moment other than it – there is no nega-
tivity constitutive of pure immanence. Free from negativity – a ‘differencing-from’16
what something is not – pure immanent becoming occurs at infinite speed through
intensive dynamics and not through a process of concrete (read historical) mediation
between determinate forms. To skip ahead, I will be arguing that the refusal of negativ-
ity in Deleuze’s non-dialectical elaboration of immanence results in the affirmation of
differences ‘without (actual) others’,17 which risks producing a politics unable to recog-
nize the socio-historical exclusions and construction of actual others.18
The philosophies of Irigaray and Adorno, on the other hand, do not posit pure
immanence. While, like Deleuze, they both reject any appeal to the Wholly Other they
attempt to maintain what Merleau-Ponty called ‘the paradox of transcendence and
immanence’.19 What this means for Irigaray and Adorno is that immanence is not envis-
aged as immediate self-differing but rather as that which is produced in and through
the co-determining interplay of two distinct, irreducible terms – namely, Irigaray’s two
of sexual difference, and Adorno’s subject and object. The paradox arises because the
terms must maintain the immanence of their relation as well as the transcendence of
their difference. Whereas Deleuze seeks to guarantee the pureness of immanence such
that difference is the internal self-differing of the one reality, Irigaray and Adorno, I
maintain, try to think immanence dialectically such that immanence is marked by a
negativity or interval which grants space to irreducible others and thinks their mutual
determination.
In view of this important distinction between Deleuze’s approach to immanence
and that of Irigaray’s and Adorno’s, it may be helpful to keep in mind a distinction
between two basic kinds of immanent transcendence as we proceed with our discus-
sions in this book. The first acknowledges what can be called ‘relational’ transcend-
ence and refers to a material otherness that is a specific, irreducible reality within the
immanent whole. The notion of ‘relational’ transcendence can be used to articulate
Irigaray’s other of sexual difference or the sensuous otherness of objects (including
human beings) highlighted by Adorno.
The second kind of immanent transcendence highlights what can be called ‘tem-
poral’ transcendence and denotes the power of becoming, a movement towards an
open future: the new. This notion of transcendence marks a critical shift away from
the common association of transcendence with static, spatial metaphors, whereby
the movement of ‘going beyond’ is frozen as ‘THE beyond’. While appeals to spatial
imagery are almost unavoidable when discussing transcendence, the idea of temporal
transcendence serves to remind us of its vitality and creative dynamism. Unlike our
other two thinkers, Deleuze’s philosophy of pure immanence cannot accommodate
relational transcendence to the plane of immanence because this would sabotage the
univocity of being. However, his emphasis on the differential becoming of immanent
Life is at once an emphasis on temporal transcendence. Because the philosophies of
Irigaray and Adorno also stress the importance of becoming, their work can similarly
be read as developing the idea of temporal transcendence, but in ways that have more
in common with Aristotle’s theory of becoming than with Deleuze’s.
An outline
When I first began to tackle the cluster of questions surrounding the interrelations
between transcendence, immanence and materialism in recent continental phi-
losophy, I was quite confident that I would discover a compelling account of a non-
reductive, immanent materialism. Indeed, I was particularly hopeful that Adorno’s
negative dialectics would satisfactorily address some of the reservations I had with the
materialisms arising from Deleuze’s and Irigaray’s philosophies. I was thus surprised
to find that, on close scrutiny, all three immanentist formulations of materialism and
transcendence ultimately seemed unable to formulate a satisfactory metaphysics for
material finitude.
Given my own materialist commitments, I initially regarded immanentist re-
conceptions of materialism and transcendence with much sympathy. I should admit
here that an important criterion in my appraisal of such re-conceptions is the extent
to which the appeal to immanent transcendence can enable social transformation.
Regardless of how exactly we understand transcendence, the term must, I believe,
concern the attempt to transcend the unjust society – not by taking flight from the
material world, but by transforming it in ways that increasingly establish non-coercive
relations between human beings, as well as between human beings and the wider envi-
ronment. To my mind, such an aspiration for transcendence requires a theory capable
of appreciating the social-historical mediation of material reality.
While I originally envisaged this book to end with a defence of Adorno’s negative
dialectics – since his conception of immanent transcendence seemed to yield the sort
of materialism I wished to endorse – my adventures with transcendence unexpectedly
(and yet aptly) led me beyond the conclusion I first had in mind. Instead of settling
with a suitably articulated account of immanent transcendence, I found myself return-
ing to a position I did not plan to advocate in this work: theology. As it turns out then,
the book ends by calling for a serious reconsideration of the relationship between the-
ology and materialism thus pointing towards the idea of a ‘theological materialism’. By
seeking to clarify what I suspect is a structural problem with immanentist formula-
tions of materialism and transcendence, this study will conclude by suggesting that
there are some good philosophical reasons to hold that the theistic appeal to divine
transcendence can deliver a non-reductive materialism, one where material reality
matters in a practical sense.
Immanent Transcendence is divided into three parts. Parts One and Two examines
non-dialectical (Deleuze) and dialectical (Irigarary and Adorno) approaches to imma-
nence, respectively. The very short Part Three is more of a promissory note for further
development of my initial speculations on what may be called a theological material-
ism. The two chapters comprising Part One are devoted to my analysis of Deleuze’s
philosophy, whose work in this book receives greater attention than the other two
thinkers discussed. This is not only because it is his writings that have given philoso-
phies of immanence something of a renaissance among certain strands of contem-
porary theory, but also because I have had to dig deep into the foundations of his
complex metaphysical system in order to discover what I believe are serious defects in
his construction of an immanent ontology. After first outlining his critique of classic
conceptions of transcendence, Chapter 1 goes on to examine Deleuze’s metaphysics of
pure immanence, particularly as this takes its cue from Spinoza’s philosophy. Although
Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence is importantly inspired by Bergson and Nietzsche,
I chose to concentrate on his engagement with Spinoza’s Ethics for two main reasons.
First, the concept of expression that Deleuze gleans from Spinoza’s metaphysical sys-
tem is instructive in showing how the former goes about developing a non-dialectical
account of pure immanence. And second, by observing how Deleuze attempts to avoid
Spinoza’s privileging of substance over modes (which reinstates the transcendent) we
can determine how well his philosophy is able to avow the significance of finite mate-
riality. This chapter will argue that while Deleuze carries out a number of important
innovations to the ontological framework detailed in the Ethics, he nevertheless con-
tinues to face problems surrounding the question of the relationship between the infi-
nite and the finite. The chapter thus revisits one of the most taxing areas in Deleuze
scholarship: the relation between the virtual and the actual. We will see that Deleuze
appeals to the ideas of reciprocal determination and immanent causation in order to
address this problematic; however, I will contend that in doing so he unwittingly ends
up restoring transcendence as that which upholds immanence.
In Chapter 2, we consider Deleuze’s practical project which he articulates in terms
of a transcendental empiricism based upon the model of expressive immanence
he develops through his engagement with Spinoza. In this chapter, we will see that
Deleuze’s account of becoming-other is a form of immanent transcendence. This is
a movement within immanence. It is the intensification of the creative power that is
Life itself. However, I maintain that while Deleuze does manage to advance a non-
reductive materialism, it is one that abstracts becoming from finite, actual things and
their socio-historical contexts in order to affirm the abstract force that is Life. Standing
on the shoulders of Peter Hallward’s recent sagacious study, my view is that Deleuze’s
immanentism undercuts the basis from which to develop a politics attentive to actual,
material relations of oppression or solidarity.20
Since I believe that it is Deleuze’s non-dialectical conception of immanence that is
primarily responsible for undermining his materialist project, in Part Two I turn to the
works of Irigaray and Adorno, respectively, in order to see whether a dialectical con-
strual of immanence can overcome the problems encountered in Deleuze’s work. Thus,
in Chapter 3, I explore the materialist philosophy developed by Irigaray through a
careful consideration of her notion of a ‘sensible transcendental’. I undertake two main
tasks in this chapter. First, I aim to clarify Irigaray’s materialist ontology, particularly
as this develops a philosophy of sexuate nature which will inform her understand-
ing of a sensible transcendental. It is this metaphysics of sexual difference that allows
Irigaray to think immanent transcendence in terms of the otherness of the other of
sexual difference, an otherness which is at the heart of the ethics and spirituality of
sexual difference she develops. Second, I examine her account of ‘becoming divine’ in
which she attempts to subvert dualistic conceptions of transcendence and immanence,
mind and body, in order to propose the spiritualization or cultivation of embodied
(sexuate) subjects, and nature more widely. I shall commend Irigaray for her insist-
ence on thinking becoming as an embodied process in ways that affirm the concrete
specificity of corporeal actuality (contra Deleuze’s depiction of those somewhat tragic
finite actualities that becoming – Life – must pass through). However, I will contend
that, not only does she risk oversimplifying material differences by determining these
exclusively through the pre-eminent categories of sexual difference (which thereby
become overburdened and distorted), her emphasis on the immense otherness of the
other of sexual difference risks precluding the mutual recognition of differently sexed
subjects, a consequence that can only blight practical attempts to realize just relations
between the sexes.
In Chapter 4, I turn to the materialism emerging from Adorno’s negative dialectics.
I find his approach highly promising. Like Irigaray, he will stipulate that we can only
make sense of becoming given its dialectical relationship to ‘a moment of the identi-
cally persisting’,21 which is to say finite actualities. However, it is my contention that
Adorno’s emphasis on the socio-historical determinations of material immanence bet-
ter expresses material complexity than does Irigaray’s appeal to the broad categories of
sexual difference. With Adorno immanent transcendence is the object in its sensuous
particularity (which includes embodied subjects) and its potential for becoming. He
thus expands the locus of transcendence beyond the terms of sexual difference, pace
Irigaray, such that transcendence is signalled by no less than the irreducible particular-
ity of things.
However, in the final section of Chapter 4, I argue that Adorno struggles to uphold
the primacy of the object which his negative dialectics demands. Because of his attempt
to think materialism via negativa, Adorno refuses to submit a fundamental ontology,
preferring instead to articulate a ‘critical materialism’ by holding subject and object,
history and nature, in critical, dialectical tension with one another. But I maintain
that the thesis of the primacy of the object which drives negative dialectics calls for
an explicit realist ontology with respect to material objects. More contentiously, I then
suggest in Chapter 5, the final part of the book, that theism offers ways to articulate the
primacy of the object such that a non-reductive materialism can be developed which
both maintains the concrete specificity of finite things and avoids jeopardizing the
object’s material otherness, that is, its powers or generativity which, along with human
productivity (theoretical and practical), contribute to processes of materialization, or
world-making.
Part Three has two main objectives. The first is to provide a coda for Parts One
and Two. (To anticipate: I will argue that immanent materialisms rely on some sort of
quasi-transcendental – for example, Life, sexual difference, history – that is constitutive
of immanence as an open whole. The problem is such quasi-transcendentals are

abstracted from material finitude in a move that effectively de-materializes a dimen-
sion of the material world in order to ground it.) The second is to offer the very briefest
of sketches as to the sort of thing we might expect from the idea of a theological mate-
rialism in contradistinction to secular, immanent materialisms.
The chief goal of this book is to bring clarity to the materialist philosophies of
Deleuze, Irigaray and Adorno, three thinkers who remain important interlocutors for
twenty-first century ‘new materialists’. The book will show how, far from being aban-
doned, the idea of transcendence retains its potency for our three authors precisely
because it is recovered to immanence as that which can help articulate matter’s creative
agency and the irreducible singularity of embodied subjects and things. The expecta-
tion of all three thinkers is that only an immanent approach to thinking material real-
ity can succeed in doing it justice: once the creative power of transcendence is retrieved
to worldly immanence, materialism can be reconfigured in non-reductive ways –
bodiliness, material processes and forces can be fully affirmed and a radical materialist
ethics, politics and even religion promoted. This book ends by questioning this expec-
tation. Going against the grain of the immanent materialisms offered by the thinkers
discussed in this book – and by atheist ‘new materialists’ ranging from Jane Bennett’s
Deleuze-inspired ‘vital materialism’22 to the various materialisms proliferating under
the ‘speculative realism’ banner23 – I invite us to reconsider divine transcendence as
that which can offer a non-reductive materialism without de-materializing part of the
material world. It may thus turn out that materialism requires a passage to theology.
1
Deleuze and Spinoza:

The Metaphysics of Pure Immanence
‘Immanence’ is an important hallmark of Deleuze’s philosophy. One writer even goes

so far as to describe him as the poet-laureate of immanence.1 Indeed, the insistence
on immanence which characterizes much recent continental philosophy is due in no
small part to its significance in Deleuze’s influential work. But Deleuze warns us that
to embrace immanence is to embrace a dangerous idea, one that ‘engulfs sages and
gods’ (WP, 45). What then motivates a turn to immanence? Moreover, what are we to
understand by immanence, and why is it so dangerous?
Part of the problem of trying to make sense of immanence is that the term is so
time-worn in both philosophy and theology. In Deleuze’s oeuvre, the concept of imma-
nence mutates in ways that make it difficult to know what exactly we are to understand
by this central aspect of his thought. That said, it is clear that his avowal of immanence
is, above all else, a profoundly ethical gesture: it concerns ‘a mode of living, a way
of Life’ (SPP, 122).2 However, for Deleuze, immanence has ontological as well ethical
significance. This is not so surprising once we appreciate that to Deleuze’s mind ethics
is ontology – a position he shares with Spinoza and Nietzsche. Where being is power,
the exercise of power (ethics) is at once the expression of being itself. This chapter will
examine Deleuze’s attempt to construct a metaphysics of pure immanence, particularly
as this is shaped by his reading of Spinoza.
Given its critical role in Deleuze’s philosophy, the concept of immanence has natu-
rally received much attention by commentators.3 Despite their varying emphases and
insights, what these commentaries typically share is the identification of Spinoza as a
principal figure informing Deleuze’s immanentism. It is Spinoza’s philosophy which
offers the basic conceptual framework that, with certain modifications, will enable
Deleuze’s formulation of ontological immanence. Certainly, by lauding Spinoza as the
‘Christ of Philosophers’, the one who ‘drew up, and thought the “best” plane of imma-
nence’ (WP, 60), Deleuze himself testifies to the significance of Spinoza on his own
thought.
However, Deleuze’s Spinozism seems to have divided his readers into two opposing
camps. For those such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Philip Goodchild and
Daniel W. Smith, Deleuze’s appeal to Spinoza effects a radical re-orienting of thought,
liberating it from the normative regimes of transcendence and, in doing so reclaiming
for thought the creative powers of this world. Importantly, those thinkers who welcome
Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence insist that it can make a practical difference to Life.
Once properly figured along, more or less, Spinozist lines, it is held that Deleuze’s abso-
lute immanence can establish a non-reductive materialism that confounds the classic
split between spirit and matter, theory and praxis. Political projects aimed at social
transformation cannot then be simply aligned to the agency of either the body or the
mind viewed independently of each other.
While a Spinozist plane of immanence is regarded by a number of those studying
Deleuze’s work to be the primary condition for a revolutionary materialist politics,
there is another set of voices who sound out quite a different note to this aspect of
Deleuze’s philosophy. Philosophers such as Agamben, Hallward, Badiou and Žižek
have presented important critiques of Deleuze’s Spinozism, claiming that the plane
of immanence it institutes is incompatible with emancipatory aspirations concerned
with realizing material transformations in the world. In his book Out of this World,
Hallward sums up such worries when he claims that the creative powers of Deleuze’s
absolute immanence lead not to socio-political practices capable of producing con-
crete changes but rather ‘towards a contemplative and immaterial abstraction’4 that
draws us out of the world of actual, determinate forms. It may turn out that, in spite of
itself, Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence invites a kind of pantheistic or ‘theophanic’
mysticism that, arguably, spirits away the means by which the social transformation of
the world may be realized.
Debates surrounding the implications of Deleuze’s immanentism for articulating a
non-reductive, politically efficacious materialism generally focus on the vexed prob-
lem of how to construe the relationship between ‘the virtual’ and ‘the actual’ – two
key terms in his ontological repertoire. I shall inevitably revisit this contentious issue
as I attempt to clarify his metaphysical system. This chapter begins with a survey of
Deleuze’s critique of transcendence. I then turn to his reading of Spinoza where we will
see how Deleuze utilizes the logic of expressionism he finds in the Ethics in order to
articulate a non-dialectical and immanent account of difference. The chapter ends with
a critical appraisal of his attempt in Difference and Repetition to overcome the vestiges
of transcendence that remain even in Spinoza’s ontology.
The critique of transcendence

Deleuze understands ‘transcendence’ to designate ‘the transcendent’: that which lies
beyond, outside or external to the world.5 Since, Deleuze maintains, there is only
immanent Life, there cannot be anything exterior to this Life.6 Transcendence is thus
merely an illusion, one constituted within the plane of immanence (IAL, 31). Whenever
thought posits a concept – God, Truth, Being, Subject, etc. – as the ground or founda-
tion of all things, it effects a plane of transcendence, an imaginary position beyond
immanent Life which casts immanence as that which is immanent to something other
than itself (WP, 45). According to Deleuze:
Any organisation that comes from above and refers to a transcendence, be it a hid-
den one, can be called a theological plan: a design in the mind of a god, but also an
Deleuze and Spinoza: The Metaphysics of Pure Immanence 15
e volution in the supposed depths of nature, or a society’s organization of power. It

always involves forms and their developments, subjects and their formations . . . it
always implies a dimension supplementary to the dimensions of the given. (SPP, 128)
In the western tradition, the otherworldly God of theism has tended to monopolize the
concept of transcendence which is why Deleuze often associates transcendence with
theology and religion.7 That said, transcendence, for Deleuze, lurks everywhere and
need not adopt a theological countenance. While Levinas will lament that ‘The history
of western philosophy has been a destruction of transcendence’,8 Deleuze, on the other
hand, criticizes transcendence for subjecting Life to the logic of identity and sameness,
thus precluding the affirmation of difference in itself, which is immanent Life. For
Deleuze, concepts that serve transcendence dictate in advance the form or expression
that Life may take by assuming an absolute standpoint removed from immanence, and
thus impervious to any critique. Of course, the political correlate of transcendence is
the sovereign: the absolute legislator. For Deleuze, philosophy has failed to extricate
thought from transcendence and so has been unable to realize itself as the principal
mode by which pure immanence can be wholly affirmed.
In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze gives a brief historical survey of philosophy’s fail-
ure to fully commit to immanence (WP, 44–9) – from neo-Platonism, which attributes
immanence to the transcendent One, to phenomenology, which sees the persistence
of transcendence within immanence as some sort of excess or ungraspable otherness
irreducible to the subject. According to Deleuze, immanence will remain ‘no more
than a reservoir for eruptions of transcendence’ (WP, 47) so long as it is constructed as
immanent to a subject other than itself – even if the subject is conceived as an embodied
self belonging to the very flow of immanence, rather than its fixed transcendental
condition as in phenomenology.
For Deleuze, then, the dominant trend in the history of philosophy is the reign of
transcendence. However, by turning to philosophy’s counter-history, he is able to high-
light and commend Spinoza as the philosopher who first ascertains that immanence
must be immanent to itself if it is to root out all transcendence. After Spinoza, philoso-
phy must, Deleuze insists, ‘hunt down transcendence’ wherever it is found in order for
immanence to be realized (WP, 48).
But why must we think that transcendence is necessarily hostile to immanence?
Indeed, there is a major strand in the western tradition which views transcendence
as precisely that which enables the realization of immanent life by providing it with
a power or horizon shaping its processes and development in particular ways. Taking
their cue from Aristotle, contemporary thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha
Nussbaum and Charles Taylor argue that life in its immediacy cannot be truly lived and
affirmed but must be directed towards actualizing a telos or an ideal of life that is yet
to be.9 The monotheistic faiths also insist that it is by virtue of the world’s relationship
with a transcendent God that life is able to thrive and flourish. Far from diminishing
immanent life, transcendence can be envisaged as that which secures the consumma-
tion of life.
Such positive visions of the relationship between transcendence and immanence
are not shared by Deleuze. There are two main interrelated reasons why Deleuze is
critical of transcendence and both of these have an ontological as well as an ethical

dimension. First, transcendence is charged with instituting a logic of negation rather
than affirmation with respect to being; and second, it serves as a principle of identity
locking being within a closed system.
Transcendence and negativity

Echoing Nietzsche, Deleuze maintains that once reality is understood in terms of the
transcendence and immanence dualism then immanent Life must be denied – for in
seeking that which lies beyond Life, Life effectively turns against itself. Transcendence
thus easily becomes an absolute opposed to Life. Nietzsche puts these points well when
he writes of the life-denying attitude of the ascetic individual, the predominate type of
human being:
The idea at issue in this struggle is the value which the ascetic priests ascribe to
our life: they juxtapose this life (along with what belongs to it, ‘nature’, ‘world’, the
whole sphere of becoming and the ephemeral) to a completely different form of
existence, which it opposes and excludes, unless it somehow turns itself against
itself, denies itself .10
Seemingly, transcendence demands that we negate Life. For Deleuze, this has unwel-
come implications for how we think about ‘desire’ and ‘materiality’.
Desire
In his seminar of 26 March, 1973, Deleuze presents a clear summary of the theory of
desire he details in Anti-Oedipus, one of his (and Guattari’s) most influential texts.11
According to Deleuze, in the history of western thought, desire has generally been
defined in terms of ‘lack’. As such, it becomes a ‘function of transcendence’12 because it
strives for the transcendent, that which is Wholly Other than the world. In the Platonic
Christianity of St. Augustine, for instance, the embodied soul desires God but since
God is outside the world this is an impossible desire, thus the embodied soul remains
in a state of permanent restlessness for the object it can never reach. With Lacan, the
subject constituted by the ‘Law of the Father’ desires the plenitude of the Real, but this
signifies the beyond of the symbolic order and cannot be attained without the loss
of subjectivity itself. Deleuze goes on to point out that when desire is conceived as
lack, we can only hope for a temporary discharge of desire by pursuing pleasure – the
orgasm is the paradigmatic case here. But this means that the discharge of desire is illu-
sory because the pursuit of pleasure only brings temporary satisfaction; we are thereby
condemned to pursue an ‘impossible jouissance’ (that is, a mythic plenitude) whereby
the fulfilment of desire is forever delayed.
The trouble with such an account, for Deleuze, is that it imposes limits on desire,
restricting it to ‘a thirsting after transcendence’ (N, 144) and so directing it towards
an impossibility, a nothingness, given the standpoint of immanence.13 However, when
desire is no longer seen as a function of transcendence but of immanence it becomes ‘a
desire that produces, not a desire that is lacking’ (DI, 223). As we shall see in Chapter
2, Deleuze rethinks desire as a creative, productive power.
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random, or deliberately conceal their most sacred institutions, or have
never paid any attention to the subject? (l.c., p. 41).
To remove this reproach was the work of Professor Tylor.

Edward Burnett It is difficult to express in adequate terms what
Tylor. Professor E. B. Tylor has done for ethnology. He is
the founder of the science of comparative ethnology; and his two
great works, Early History of Mankind (1865) and Primitive Culture
(1871), while replete with vast erudition, are so suggestive and
graced by such a charming literary style and quiet humour that they
have become “classics,” and have profoundly influenced modern
thought. From their first appearance it was recognised that a master-
mind was guiding the destinies of the nascent science. Some idea of
the magnitude and diversity of his work may be gathered from the
bibliography of 262 items, published between 1861 and 1907,
collected by Miss Freire-Marreco, Anthropological Essays Presented
to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honour of his Seventy-first Birthday, Oct.
2, 1907. An appreciation of the labours of Professor Tylor is given by
Andrew Lang in this volume. The true significance of the aims of “Mr.
Tylor’s Science,” as Max Müller called it, may be best gathered from
Professor Tylor’s own words:—
For years past it has become evident that the great need of
anthropology is that its methods should be strengthened and
systematised. The world has not been unjust to the growing science, far
from it. Wherever anthropologists have been able to show definite
evidence and inference, for instance, in the development series of arts in
the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford, not only specialists, but the educated
world generally, are ready to receive the results and assimilate them into
public opinion. Strict method has, however, as yet, only been introduced
over part of the anthropological field. There has yet to be overcome a
certain not unkindly hesitancy on the part of men engaged in the precise
operations of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, to admit that the
problems of anthropology are amenable to scientific treatment. It is my
aim to show that the development of institutions may be investigated on a
basis of tabulation and classification.
This is the opening of a masterly paper “On a Method of

Investigating the Development of Institutions; applied to Laws of
Marriage and Descent.”[100]
100. J. A. I., xviii., 245, 1889.
The tabular method is not applicable to much of the vast mass of
material with which Tylor dealt; but the accuracy and systematising
of method are found throughout, and were of invaluable service to a
science peculiarly attractive to the vague speculator and enthusiastic
dilettante.
Tylor (1871) insisted on the necessity of sifting and testing all the
evidence, relying to a great extent on “the test of recurrence,” or of
undesigned coincidence in testimony; he says: “the more odd the
statement, the less likely that several people in several places
should have made it wrongly. This being so, it seems reasonable to
judge that the statements are in the main truly given, and that their
close and regular coincidence is due to the cropping-up of similar
facts in various districts of culture. Now the most important facts of
ethnography are vouched for in this way” (2nd ed., 1873, p. 10).
Avebury. A further stimulus to the study of comparative
ethnology in this country was given by the
publication of Sir John Lubbock’s (Lord Avebury’s) Origin of
Civilisation (1870), and opened the eyes of a large public to the
interest of ethnology and its value in throwing light upon the earlier
stages of culture of civilised peoples.
Sociology. The question as to the influence of environment
on the development of social organisation is as old
as the world’s oldest thinkers, and finds expression in Aristotle and in
Plato, though Sociology, as a science, is a product of the last
century. The word “Sociology” was first used by Auguste Comte
(1798-1857), who showed its aim to be to discover the nature, the
natural causes, and the natural laws of society. With the
development of natural science came the insistence on a naturalistic
interpretation of social differences, demonstrated by Guyot (1807-
1884) and Draper (1811-1882), and over-emphasised by Buckle
(1821-1862).
Comte Buckle.
Comte’s method was that of deductive construction and
prescription. Buckle’s plan was to evolve a social science inductively
through a study of history, with the help of economics and statistics.
His History of Civilisation answers the great question which he sets
himself: “Are the actions of men, and therefore of societies,
governed by fixed laws, or are they the result either of chance or of
supernatural interference?” He attempted to show how “Climate,
Food, Soil, and the General Aspect of Nature” were the dominant
influences in early societies, determining the food supply, the degree
of population, and the economic condition.
Unfortunately, in pursuit of this idea Buckle was apt to overlook the
influences of culture-contact, and of economic factors; thus
deserving, to some extent, the censure of Jevons: “Buckle referred
the character of a nation to the climate and the soil of its abode.”[101]
At the same time Buckle must be regarded as the first historical
sociologist of the modern scientific movement.
101. Letters and Journal of Stanley Jevons, 1866, p. 454.
Herbert Spencer. The evolutionist explanation of the natural world
as applied to sociology found its fullest exponent
in Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who studied the anatomy of the
social frame. He derived the principles of sociology from the
principles of psychology and of biology, and regarded social
development as a super-organic evolution.
But all these earlier attempts to discover a social science were
speculative rather than practical. The solid foundations of inductive
sociology were laid by Bachofen, Morgan, J. F. McLennan, and
others.
Bachofen, Bachofen (1861) was the first to study the
Morgan, system of filiation through the mother, or mother-
McLennan, and right, which was widely distributed among ancient
others.
peoples, and still occurs in many regions in a
more or less developed condition. McLennan frankly states that “the
honour of that discovery, the importance of which, as affording a new
starting-point for all history, cannot be over-estimated, must, without
stint or qualification, be assigned to him” (1876, p. 421).
Independently, however, J. F. McLennan (1827-1881), in his
Primitive Marriage (1865), arrived at the conclusion “that the most
ancient system in which the idea of blood-relationship was embodied
was a system of kinship through females only.”[102] He points out
more than once that “Mr. Maine seems not to have been able to
conceive of any social order more primitive than the patriarchal.”[103]
This book was reprinted with additions in 1876, and his two other
books were published posthumously (1885, 1896). In these and
more fugitive writings McLennan was a keen controversialist, and
with unnecessary vigour and animus attacked Morgan, Sir Henry
Maine, and Dr. Howitt. McLennan’s attitude may be partly explained
by the fact that he was a lawyer and a theorist, but he possessed
great enthusiasm, with which he infused those who came into
contact with him, and his labours served to advance the study of
sociology.
102. P. 124 of 1876 ed.
103. P. 181, ibid.
“From the time of Plato downwards, theories of human society

have been current in which the family living under the headship of a
father is accepted as the ultimate social unit. These theories have
taken various shapes ... with Sir Henry Maine (Ancient Law, 1861)
the theory becomes a theory of the origin of society, or at least of the
earliest stage of society in which Comparative Jurisprudence is
called upon to take interest.”[104]
104. D. McLennan, The Patriarchal Theory, 1885, p. x.
Morgan was undoubtedly the greatest sociologist of the past
century, and in his monumental work (1871) laid a solid foundation
for the study of the family and kinship systems; he formulated a
scheme of the evolution of the family based on a study of the
classificatory system of relationships,[105] of which he was the
discoverer. According to this scheme, human society has advanced,
through gradual evolution, from a state of complete promiscuity to
one characterised by monogamy. Dr. Rivers[106] points out that “In
recent years the scheme has encountered much opposition.... The
opponents of Morgan have made no attempt to distinguish between
different parts of his scheme, but, having shown that certain of its
features are unsatisfactory, they have condemned the whole.” The
greater part of Morgan’s work is, however, of lasting value. Morgan
based his conclusions on an enormous number of kinship terms
collected by himself and others from every available source. Dr.
Rivers has introduced[107] a new method of collecting similar data by
means of recording exhaustive genealogies from a limited area. In
this way not only can kinship terms be collected with accuracy, but a
large number of other sociological data are obtained with a
readiness and precision not hitherto possible. Indeed, it is no
exaggeration to say that this method is producing a revolution in the
method of sociological field work.
105. W. H. R. Rivers, “On the Origin of the Classificatory System of
Relationships,” Anthropological Essays (Tylor Volume), 1907.
106. Jour. Anth. Inst., xxx., 1900, p. 74; Sociological Rev., 1910.
107. In the classificatory system most of the kin in the same generation are
grouped under one general term; e.g., all the males of the grandfather’s
generation are called by one term—another term includes father, father’s
brothers, father’s male cousins, mother’s sisters’ husbands, mother’s female
cousins’ husbands, and so on.
In a later book (1878) Morgan summarised his earlier conclusions

and proposed a classification of culture consisting of a lower, middle,
and an upper Status of Savagery, a lower, middle, and an upper
Status of Barbarism, and the Status of Civilisation based upon
certain inventions and industries.
About this time various students wrote on marriage and the family,
of whom the foremost were Giraud Teulon (1867, 1874, 1884), H.
Post (1875), Letourneau (1888), Von Hellwald (1889), and others,
the conclusions of the earlier writers being summed up by Professor
E. Westermarck in his masterly History of Human Marriage (1891);
but much has been written since that date on this subject of
perennial interest.
Professor F. H. Giddings, in his Principles of Sociology, sums up in
the following words the trend of modern writers on ethnological
sociology:—
Professor Ludwig Gumplowicz [1883] has tried to demonstrate that the
true elementary social phenomena are the conflicts, amalgamations, and
assimilations of heterogeneous ethnical groups. M. Novicow [1893],
generalising further, argues that social evolution is essentially a
progressive modification of conflict by alliance, in the course of which
conflict itself is transformed from a physical into an intellectual struggle.
Professor De Greef [1886], looking at the question in a very different way,
finds the distinctive social fact in contract, and measures social progress
according to the displacement of coercive authority by conscious
argument. Mr. Gabriel Tarde [1890], in an original and fascinating study,
which has made an enduring impress on both psychological and
sociological thought, argues that the primordial social fact is imitation, a
phenomenon antecedent to all mutual aid, division of labour, and
contract. Professor Émile Durkheim [1895], dissenting from the
conclusions of M. Tarde, undertakes to prove that the characteristically
social process, and therefore the ultimate social phenomenon, is a
coercion of every individual mind by modes of action, thought, and feeling
that are external to itself (p. 14).
According to Giddings, the original and elementary subjective fact in

society is “the consciousness of kind.”
Social psychology offers a vast and fertile field which has been but
little worked, and there was needed an introduction to the subject
which should afford that general point of view which is the starting-
point of further studies. This Dr. W. McDougall has attempted in a
recently published little book.[108] His general conclusion is that the
life of societies is not merely the sum of the activities of individuals
moved by enlightened self-interest, or by intelligent desire for
pleasure and aversion from pain; but that the springs of all the
complex activities that make up the life of societies must be sought
in the instincts and in the other primary tendencies that are common
to all men and are deeply rooted in the remote ancestry of the race.
Professor E. A. Ross, of Wisconsin, simultaneously attacked the
same subject, on the problems of which he had previously written.
[109]
Magic and Magic and religion are very generally held to be
Religion. not only distinct from one another, but antithetical.
There is, however, a tendency among certain living students to
regard them as analogous phenomena, both being expressions of a
belief in a power or energy which may be designated by the
Melanesian term “mana,” or the American “orenda.” It has more than
once been pointed out that it is in some cases very hard—perhaps
impossible—to determine whether certain actions can be classed as
either magical or religious, as they appear to belong to both
categories. As in the case of religion from the ethnological
standpoint, magic has been investigated in the field, and immediate
references to it are to be found in ethnological literature—the
comparative study of magic has to some extent been undertaken by
Frazer, Jevons, and others; but one of the most important
contributions to the subject is by Hubert and Mauss,[110] who treat it
from a sociological aspect.
108. An Introduction to Social Psychology, 1908.
109. Congress of Arts and Sci., St. Louis, 1904, v. (1906), p. 869.
110. H. Hubert et M. Mauss, “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie,”

L’Année sociologique, vii., 1904. M. Mauss, “L’Origine des pouvoirs
magiques dans les sociétés Australiennes,” École pratique des Haute Études
(Sec. Relig.), 1904.
Anthropology Parson Thwackum in Tom Jones says: “When I
and Religion. mention religion I mean the Christian religion; and
not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not
only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.”
Anthropology, by a reverse process, passes “in larger sympathy from
specific creeds to partake of the universal spirit which every creed
tries to embody.”[111] The interest of Anthropology in religion was
defined by Huxley.[112] “Anthropology has nothing to do with the truth
or falsehood of religion—it holds itself absolutely and entirely aloof
from such questions—but the natural history of religion, and the
origin and growth of the religions entertained by the different tribes of
the human race, are within its proper and legitimate province.”
111. Clodd, Animism, 1905, p. 11.
112. Address to Dept. of Anthrop., Brit. Ass. Dublin, 1878.
This is not the place to attempt a definition of religion—a task

which has led to so many failures. We must be content with the
statement that it most frequently presents itself under the aspects of
ritual, myth, and belief. Anthropology has hitherto practically confined
its attention to ritual and myth, and but too frequently exclusively to
the last.
As Andrew Lang (1887)[113] points out, in the sixth century B.C.
Xenophanes complained that the gods were credited with the worst
crimes, and other classical writers were shocked at the
contradictions between the conception and ritual worship of the
same god. In ancient Egypt the priests strove to shift the burden of
absurdity and sacrilege from their own deities. It taxed the ingenuity
of pious Brahmans to explain the myths which made Indra the slayer
of a Brahman. Euhemerus (316 B.C.), in his philosophical romance,
Sacra Historica, in rationalising the fables about the gods was
regarded as an atheist. Certain writers like Plutarch (60 A.D.) and
Porphyry (270 A.D.) made the ancient deities types of their own
favourite doctrines, whatever these might happen to be. The early
Christians had a good case against the heathen. Eusebius, in the
Præparatio Evangelica, anticipating Andrew Lang himself, “ridiculed,
with a good deal of humour, the old theories which resolved so many
mythical heroes into the sun” (p. 20). “The physical interpreters,” said
Eusebius, “do not even agree in their physical interpretations.” The
light of the anthropological method had dawned on Eusebius. Many
centuries later Spencer, Master of Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge (1630-93), had no other scheme in his mind in his erudite
work on Hebrew ritual,[114] which he considered was but an
expurgated adaptation of heathen customs. Fontenelle[115] explained
the irrational element in myth as inherited from savagery.
113. 1899 ed., pp. 6, 7.
114. De Legibus Hebræorum Ritualibus, 1732.
115. De l’Origine des Fables: Œuvres, Vol. III., 1758.

The revival of learning made scholars acquainted with the religions
not only of Greece and Rome, but of the nations with whom the
Greeks and Romans had come in contact—Egyptians, Semites,
Persians, and Indians. Travellers gave accounts of the religions they
found in remote parts of the world, and missionaries reported on
beliefs and customs of many nations. These were the sources from
which were compiled the comprehensive works on religion, from
Alexander Ross, View of All the Religions in the World, etc., 1652, to
Dupuis, Origine de tous les cultes ou Religion Universelle, 1794. All
heathen religions were believed to be based on sun and star
worship.
New vistas were opened up by the writings of De Brosses (1760),
who investigated the beliefs of savage races and based all religion
on “Fetishism.”
To quote once more from Lang: “In the beginning of the
[nineteenth] century Germany turned her attention to mythology. In a
pious kind of spirit, Friedrich Creuzer [1771-1858] sought to find
symbols of some pure, early, and Oriental theosophy in the myths
and mysteries of Greece. The great Lobeck, in his Aglaophamus
(1829), brought back common-sense, and made it the guide of his
vast, his unequalled learning. In a gentler and more genial spirit, C.
Ottfried Müller [1797-1840] laid the foundation of a truly scientific and
historical mythology. Neither of these writers had, like Alfred Maury
[1857], much knowledge of the myths and faiths of the lower races,
but they often seem on the point of anticipating the ethnological
method.” (L.c., p. 23.)
Folklore. The mythological aspect of the subject was
illuminated by the researches of the brothers
Grimm (J. L. K., 1785-1863; W. K., 1786-1859), whose collections of
Märchen (1812-5) were found to contain Teutonic myths, and by their
resemblance to Norse, Greek, and Vedic mythology suggested that
in German folklore were remains of a common Indo-Germanic
tradition. This was the beginning of the intelligent study of Folklore.
Mannhardt (1865) and others investigated popular, and especially
peasant, customs and beliefs connected with agriculture and
vegetation; and showed that here, in what Christianity had reduced
to superstition, were to be found survivals of the religions that
Christianity had supplanted. Thenceforward the study of Folklore,
and of the “lower mythology” of beliefs, customs, and superstitions,
gradually developed into a science, which is now recognised as the
valuable ally of Anthropology. Meanwhile the anthropological
signification of religion was emerging from the mass of materials
collected from all over the globe. Anthropology established its
universality, and made many attempts to find a common factor, first
in astral worship, then in Euhemerism (Banier, 1738), Fetishism (De
Brosses, 1709-1777), Nature-worship (Max Müller, etc.), Ancestor-
worship (Herbert Spencer, Lippert [1866], etc.), and later in
Totemism. These hypotheses were based on the erroneous
assumption that savage religion represented the primitive mode of
thought, out of which civilised religions had evolved. Later it was
realised that “The Australian black or the Andaman Islander is
separated by as many generations from the beginning of religion as
his most advanced contemporaries; and in these tens or hundreds of
thousands of years there has been constant change, growth, and
decay—and decay is not a simple return to the primal state. We can
learn a great deal from the lowest existing religions, but they cannot
tell us what the beginning of religion was, any more than the history
of language can tell us what was the first human speech.”[116]
116. G. F. Moore, “The Hist. of Religions in the Nineteenth Cent.,” Congress Arts
and Sci., St. Louis, 1904, p. 440.
Comparative The study of comparative religion, though not
Religion. originated by Max Müller (1823-1900), owed much
to his energy. His lectures on Comparative Mythology (1856) were
followed by lectures on the Science of Religion (1870), and on the
religions of the world (1873). He inaugurated the annual series of the
Hibbert Lectures with a study of the origin and growth of Religion, as
illustrated by the religions of India; and as Gifford lecturer at
Glasgow (1888-1892), discussed Natural Religion, Physical Religion,
Anthropological Religion, and Theosophy or Psychological Religion.
His Contributions to the Science of Mythology appeared in 1897. His
method of investigation was almost entirely linguistic, based on
phonetic laws which later research has discredited; and his theory of
“mythology as the disease of language” is no longer tenable.
The charm of the writings of Max Müller, and the interest which
they awakened in Vedic studies, gave a new impulse to the study of
the history of religions. The hymns of the Rig-Veda are by no means
the product of a simple society, as he supposed; in his view hymns
and myths were dissociated from ritual religion, and gods were
identified with natural objects. The death-blow to this method of
studying religion in our country was given by the keen criticism of
Andrew Lang (1884, 1887). The too-narrow basis of Max Müller’s
theories was overthrown by arguments derived from comparative
ethnology; “the silly, senseless, and savage element” (as he termed
it) in classical mythology proved to be the stumbling-block over
which he fell.
A firmer foundation for the study was laid by Tylor and Lubbock.
Though Max Müller originated the name Science of Religion, it was
Tylor who first introduced into it a scientific method, and so laid the
foundations for future investigation.
Later workers in the field fall naturally into two groups. Some make
intensive studies of particular forms of religion, either historical, such
as Robertson Smith (1846-1894), or living, such as Codrington in
Melanesia, J. O. Dorsey[117] in America, Spencer and Gillen in
Australia, and many others.
117. “Omaha Sociology,” Ann. Rep. Bur. Am. Ethn. Rep. iii., 1884; “Siouan
Sociology,” xv., 1897.
Other workers attempt, by correlating the mass of material, to

discover the fundamental religious conceptions of man, and to trace
their subsequent development. Among these may be noted Grant
Allen, Crawley, Frazer, Hartland, Jevons, Andrew Lang, Marett, and
many others.
To those who are acquainted with the modern study of
comparative religion in this country it is unnecessary to point out the
influence of such workers as Mannhardt, Tylor, and Robertson Smith
on subsequent writers; nor is it needful to draw attention to the vast
erudition and eloquent writing of Professor J. G. Frazer, whose
monumental work on The Golden Bough has become a classic, or to
the memorable Legend of Perseus by E. S. Hartland.
The study of the myths of various peoples is receiving the
attention of numerous students, and in Germany certain
ethnologists, such as Ehrenreich, Foy,[118] and Frobenius,[119] find sun
and moon gods in the most unlikely places. There is, however,
considerable danger that this nature-mythology is being carried too
far.
118. Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, x., 1907, etc.
119. “Die Weltanschauung der Naturvölker,” Beitr. z. Volks-und Völkerkunde, vi.,

1898; Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes, i., 1904; The Childhood of Man, 1909.
The origin of the moral idea has also been discussed from the
ethnological point of view, as Hobhouse (1906) and Westermarck
(1906) have exemplified in their great books.
Magic, religion, and morality have, as we have seen, especially of
late years, been regarded almost entirely from the anthropological
standpoint. But a new school of French students has arisen who
maintain that these are essentially social phenomena. The writings
of Durkheim, Hubert and Mauss[120] have initiated a new method of
study which promises to have far-reaching results.
120. The work of this school is mainly to be found in L’Année sociologique (1898).
Chapter XI.
LINGUISTICS
Linguistics as a department of Anthropology may be regarded from

many points of view. To the evolutionist language forms one of the
tests dividing the Hominidæ from the other anthropoids; the
somatologist is interested in correlating the phonetic system with the
structure of the organs connected with the mechanism of speech;
and the ethnologist studies language for the evidence it affords of
ethnic affinity or social contact, or as a means of determining the
grade of culture to which a particular people has attained, or, again,
as a reflection of their character or psychology. The linguistic
classifications of Gallatin, Humboldt, and Müller are referred to later.
The Aryan The connection between linguistics and
Controversy. anthropology assumed its greatest importance in
the middle of the nineteenth century, when the discoveries and
theories of philologists were adopted wholesale to explain the
problems of European ethnology, and the Aryan controversy became
the locus of disturbance throughout the Continent. “No other
scientific question, with the exception, perhaps, of the doctrine of
evolution, was ever so bitterly discussed or so infernally confounded
at the hands of Chauvinistic or otherwise biassed writers.”[121]
121. Ripley, 1899, p. 453.
In 1786 Sir William Jones had pointed out the relationship

between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, and Celtic, and suggested
a common parentage, which was confirmed by Bopp in 1835.
Unfortunately, a primitive unity of speech was held to imply a
primitive unity of race.
Among the ethnological papers read at the meeting of the British
Association in 1847 was one “On the Results of the recent Egyptian
Researches in reference to Asiatic and African Ethnology, and the
Classification of Languages,” in which Baron Bunsen sought to show
that the whole of mankind could be classified according to language.
In fact, it was taken for granted in 1847 that the study of comparative
philology would be in future the only safe foundation for the study of
anthropology.[122] The spread of this fallacy is usually attributed to
Max Müller, whose charm of style and high reputation as a Sanskrit
scholar did much to popularise the new science of philology. He
invented the term “Aryan,” which in itself contains two erroneous
assumptions—one linguistic, that the Indo-Iranian group of
languages is older than its relatives; and the other geographical, that
its “cradle” was in ancient Ariana, in Central Asia. Moreover, in his
lectures he not only spoke of an Aryan language, but of an “Aryan
race.” He is credited with having made “heroic reparation” for these
errors when he wrote later: “To me an ethnologist who speaks of an
Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as
a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a
brachycephalic grammar. It is worse than a Babylonian confusion of
tongues—it is downright theft.” But, as he pointed out,[123] he himself
never shared the misconception that he was accused of launching
on the world. He admits that he was not entirely without blame, as he
allowed himself occasionally the freedom to speak of the Aryan or
the Semitic race, meaning the people who spoke Aryan or Semitic
languages; but as early as 1853 he had protested against the
intrusion of linguistics into ethnology, and
called, if not for a complete divorce, at least for a judicial separation
between the study of Philology and the study of Ethnology.... The
phonologist should collect his evidence, arrange his classes, divide and
combine as if no Blumenbach had ever looked at skulls, as if no Camper
had ever measured facial angles, as if no Owen had ever examined the
base of a cranium. His evidence is the evidence of language, and nothing
else; this he must follow, even though in the teeth of history, physical or
political.... There ought to be no compromise between ethnological and
phonological science. It is only by stating the glaring contradictions
between the two that truth can be elicited.[124]
122. Rep. Brit. Assoc. (Cardiff), 1891, p. 787.

The protest was in vain. The belief in an “Aryan race” became an
accepted fact both in linguistics and in ethnology, and its influence
vitiates the work of many anthropologists even at the present day.
Naturally the question of the identity of the Aryan race was soon a
subject of keen debate. The French and German schools at once
assumed opposite sides, the Germans claiming that the Aryans were
tall, fair, and long-headed, the ancestors of the modern Teutons; and
the French, mainly on cultural evidence, claiming that the language,
together with civilisation, came into Europe with the Alpine race,
which forms such a large element in the modern French population.
There are two ways in which linguistics may be studied as an aid
to Anthropology—first, with regard to structural analysis, by which
linguistic affinities may be proved; secondly, by what has been called
“linguistic palæontology,” or the study of root words, by means of
which the original culture of a people may be ascertained. Philology
pushed both these methods too far. It claimed the right, by proof of
structural analysis, to link up the racial relationships of the European
and Asiatic peoples, and, by linguistic palæontology, to determine
the culture of the original “Aryans,” and to identify their original
home. It was over the question of the “Aryan cradle” that they were
forced to relinquish their too ambitious claims.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was generally
believed that our first ancestors were created in 4004 B.C. and
spoke Hebrew, and that the origin of the European languages dated
from the migration of Japhet from the plains of Shinar, cir. 2247. The
Asiatic origin of race and language was for long unchallenged. But in
1839 Omalius d’Halloy, followed by Latham in 1851, began to cast
doubts on the Asiatic “cradle,” noting that the Asiatic languages had
no real claim to be considered older than those of Europe, and that
in many ways the Lithuanian and Armenian were the most archaic in
the family. More important still was the work of Benfey,[125] who may
be regarded as the originator of linguistic palæontology, and who
used its evidence to shift the original dispersal from Asia to Europe.
Various philologists followed, employing different methods to prove
different theories; and the Aryan cradle was located in many parts of
Europe and Asia, ranging from the Pamir plateau to the Baltic plains.
Max Müller confessed in 1888 that “the evidence is so pliant that it is
possible to make out a more or less plausible case” for almost any
part of the world.
125. T. Benfey, in preface to Fick’s Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der
Indogermanischen Sprachen, 1868.
Language and From claiming too much the swing of the
Race. pendulum brought linguistics into disrepute with
ethnologists, and for a time the evidence of language was looked
upon with suspicion. Even philologists were accused of going too far
in this direction.
Professor Sayce[126] says: “Identity or relationship of language can
prove nothing more than social contact.... Language is an aid to the
historian, not to the ethnologist.” But, as Professor Keane points out,
there are many cases in which language infallibly proves the
existence of ethnic elements which would otherwise have been
unsuspected—as, for example, in the case of the Basques of
Europe. “Language used with judgment is thus seen to be a great
aid to the ethnologist in determining racial affinities, and in solving
many anthropological difficulties” (1896, p. 205).
Although Max Müller wrote nearly twenty years ago, “I believe the
time will come when no anthropologist will venture to write on
anything concerning the inner life of man without having himself
acquired a knowledge of the language in which that inner life finds its
truest expression,” we are obliged still to echo his lament: “How few
of the books in which we trust with regard to the characteristics or
peculiarities of savage races have been written by men ... who have
learnt their languages until they could speak them as well as the
natives themselves!”[127]
126. Science of Language, ii., p. 317.

Chapter XII.
CULTURAL CLASSIFICATION AND THE INFLUENCE OF

ENVIRONMENT
We have seen that in its beginning the science of man was little
more than a branch of zoology, and that his structural characters
were the first to attract attention and to form the material of study;
hence all the earlier classifications were based on physical features.
Gallatin was one of the first to classify mankind rather by what they
do than by what they are.
Gallatin. Albert Gallatin (1761-1849) was born at
Geneva, emigrated to America before he was
twenty, and rose rapidly to the position of one of the foremost of
American statesmen, becoming United States Minister to France,
and later to England. He noted the unsatisfactoriness of groupings
by colour, stature, head-form, etc., in the case of the races of
America, and made a preliminary classification of the native tribes on
the basis of language. Major J. W. Powell (1834-1902) and Dr.
Brinton (1837-1899) elaborated the linguistic classification of the
American Indians.
Wilhelm von Classification by language had already been
Humboldt. utilised by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) in
the introduction to his great work on the Kawi language of Java,
entitled Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues
und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des
Menschengeschlechts, which was published posthumously, 1836-40.

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Immanent transcendence reconfiguring

materialism in continental philosophy

Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy

Dalit Theology after Continental Philosophy 1st Edition

Kant Kantianism and Idealism The Origins of Continental

A Guide to Heidegger's Being and Time (SUNY series in

Political Theory between Philosophy and Rhetoric:

Education and Thinking in Continental Philosophy

Land Surface Remote Sensing in Continental Hydrology

Reconfiguring Human Nonhuman and Posthuman in

Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastiar Morgan

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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First published 2012

© Patrice Haynes, 2012

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Introduction: Rethinking Materialism and Transcendence 1

The following abbreviations will be used in text and notes.

MM Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1999).

At first glance, it may seem that an inquiry on materialist theories in contemporary

recent political thought. First, it challenges the ‘vulgar materialism’ undergirding

Beyond transcendence via Kant and Hegel

c­ reative transformations – the motifs of immanent transcendence. Although ­envisaging

Towards an immanent transcendence

In this modern moment we are no longer satisfied with thinking immanence as

Deleuze denounces the rediscovery of transcendence in immanence that he finds in

there is an otherness (transcendence) which escapes consciousness, for consciousness

of immanence as an open whole. The problem is such quasi-transcendentals are

Deleuze and Spinoza:

‘Immanence’ is an important hallmark of Deleuze’s philosophy. One writer even goes

The critique of transcendence

e­ volution in the supposed depths of nature, or a society’s organization of power. It

critical of transcendence and both of these have an ontological as well as an ethical

Transcendence and negativity

To remove this reproach was the work of Professor Tylor.

This is the opening of a masterly paper “On a Method of

103. P. 181, ibid.

“From the time of Plato downwards, theories of human society

In a later book (1878) Morgan summarised his earlier conclusions

According to Giddings, the original and elementary subjective fact in

110. H. Hubert et M. Mauss, “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie,”

112. Address to Dept. of Anthrop., Brit. Ass. Dublin, 1878.

This is not the place to attempt a definition of religion—a task

114. De Legibus Hebræorum Ritualibus, 1732.

115. De l’Origine des Fables: Œuvres, Vol. III., 1758.

Other workers attempt, by correlating the mass of material, to

119. “Die Weltanschauung der Naturvölker,” Beitr. z. Volks-und Völkerkunde, vi.,

Linguistics as a department of Anthropology may be regarded from

In 1786 Sir William Jones had pointed out the relationship

122. Rep. Brit. Assoc. (Cardiff), 1891, p. 787.

123. Rep. Brit. Assoc. (Cardiff), 1891, p. 787.

124. Rep. Brit. Assoc. (Cardiff), 1891, p. 787.

127. Rep. Brit. Assoc. (Cardiff), 1891, p. 792.

CULTURAL CLASSIFICATION AND THE INFLUENCE OF

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c reative transformations – the motifs of immanent transcendence. Although envisaging

e volution in the supposed depths of nature, or a society’s organization of power. It