Formulating God: The ongoing place of theology in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze

In spite of common assumptions to the contrary, the debt to religion found in Deleuze’s philosophy is undeniable when one considers his use of the concept of univocity, which he takes primarily from Duns Scotus and finds at work in Spinoza. It seems to be generally accepted, however, that this concept is abandoned in Deleuze’s later career along with many of the religious overtones that necessarily accompanied this concept in his earlier work. Given that the general doxa around Deleuze is that God’s only place in Deleuze’s latter work is as the source of judgements we must resist (an interpretation that owes as much to Nietzsche as to Artaud), this is, perhaps, understandable. However, this doxa is not fair to the extent of the debt Deleuze owes to theology so, whilst Deleuze scholarship has recently turned its attention to the religious underpinnings of much of Deleuze’s thought, in this paper we wish not only to retrace these theological antecedents but to also examine the ways in which a specific concept that is rooted in philosophical theology is unpacked in the very genesis of Deleuze’s own thought. In doing this, we will ascertain the extent to which Scotus’ conception of univocal predication can be said to infuse Deleuze’s entire philosophical project, rather than just a specific portion of it, and how, then, God always inhabits the Deleuzean system even after Deleuze has forsaken an explicitly theological vocabulary