No Werewolves in Theology? Transcendence, Immanence, and Becoming‐divine in Gilles Deleuze

Abstract

The world is deep: deeper than day can comprehend. . . .-Friedrich Nietzsche 1Is there a mysticism of the Event, and if so, what does it look like? Does such a mysticism take us out of the world of bodies and politics, of relationships and locales, or does it somehow give these things back to us? Surprisingly, these questions have recently been raised by revisionist studies of the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Radicalizing and improving upon the earlier critiques of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Peter Hallward argues that there is a theophanic philosophy or spiritual theology waiting to be extracted from Deleuze's writings. For Hallward, this theological element contaminates and cripples the political and social value of Deleuze's work, transforming him from a thinker of materiality, corporeality, and relation into a theorist of "contemplative and immaterial abstraction," 2 a philosopher who "is most appropriately read as a spiritual or subtractive thinker, a thinker preoccupied with the mechanics of dis-embodiment and de-materialization." 3 Hallward claims that the centre of Deleuze's project is a process philosophy that equates being simply with creativity and issues in a kind of philosophical mysticism that dismantles the daylight world in order to find union with the dark eternal flux of pure becoming, casting aside all our relations, bodies, projects, and political aspirations. 4 Hallward's reading of Deleuze seems to demand a theological response. In what follows, I first introduce Hallward's critical reading of Deleuze, and then

Gilles Deleuze, Simone Weil and the Stoic Apprenticeship: Education as a Violent Training

“…11. My reading of Deleuze is here largely in agreement with Jacob Holsinger Sherman's (2009) response to Peter Hallward. The third term of productivity, which raises the apprentice above the dyadic depth of action-passion, does not betray a longing to escape 'out of this world' (as Hallward argues); rather, it reveals the more modest goal of reconfiguring the apprentice's attitude towards this world, allowing them to participate in it more fully (becoming-imperceptible).…”