Immanence

Immanence is less a state you are in, but more of a continuous operation, a process you inhabit, a steady dismantling and production. Spinoza produces modes and relations between propositions that reach out and grow out of themselves in the five books of the Ethics, [a production that touches the infinite, in the movement from substance to infinite substance, from a finite mode to the infinity of God].

Each operation of immanence is an experiment, a moment of risk, a throw of the dice. This risk makes the philosopher of immanence risk everything - any false move can overturn the entire game, give it all up. Any misstep—this is the fidelity to immanence, which makes immanence so unlike a method. Terence Blake describes it almost as a defiant bet. “This is my immanence,” announces the philosopher. “Where is yours? Betray me!” Immanence is never completed.

The program of philosophy is that no matter what individual philosophers would like to do, philosophy can never find this completion, this finality. When immanence is not betrayed the philosopher inhabits a new plane of philosophising—the goal is not to win or lose, but to continue playing (Finite and Infinite Games). Immanence and transcendence are not static features of a theory or school that can be specified but rather a particular dynamic of thought that inhabits it. Philosophising is always dynamics—the philosopher can never hold onto his concepts, his figures—they necessarily assume a dynamism of their own, [they move ahead of him, where he cannot catch up to them—they can affirm him or betray him]. The move of immanence is to take this dynamism and affirm it. This movement of immanence can never be stopped or completed. Each of the “philosophers of immanence”—Deleuze, Badiou, Henry, Laruelle, has betrayed immanence—immanence has to be betrayed if it can be expressed. This is not a tragic flaw or a lack inscribed in immanence but rather the positive productivity of immanence. [This is the task we inherit from immanence, to stay true to it at the same time we betray it.]

The diagram offers a vision of immanence that is not thought but is rather grasped. Wittgenstein—“Don’t think, but look!” The diagram occupies a privileged space in the [work] of immanence, in dramatizing immanence and being a material operator of immanence, [itself immanent to the world, not standing above or beside it], in its process of dismantling and reconstituting. But as we have said, not even the diagram has its own purity, its own absoluteness—but somehow, it seems, the diagram is able to approach the core [of things—Maybe it asymptotically approaches the absolute…]

To the philosopher, the figures of immanence are bathed in a warm, mild white light. A quiet joy of being. Everything is open, everything is united in a One…

[Concluding remarks: The preceding text is concerned not only with the denotative sense of “immanence”, but almost its secret rhythm and feeling it has as an operation, a particular tonality that cannot be captured in words, exactly. In that, it touches on philosophy, but isn’t quite philosophy, either.]