In a commentary on Deleuze’s last essay, “L’immanence: une vie” (1995), Giorgio Agamben arrives at the following diagrammatic conclusio, which schematizes a certain sequence in modern philosophy:
TRANSCENDENCE IMMANENCE
Kant Spinoza
Husserl Nietzsche
Heidegger
Lévinas, Derrida Foucault, Deleuze
It is correct, of course, to distinguish, as Agamben does, between a “line of immanence” and one “of transcendence.” It is equally correct to have the two lines cross, not like parallels that meet in infinity, nor only in “Heidegger,” who limns the figure of an enigmatic chiasm, as the site of an intersection of transcendence and immanence. It is already true of Spinoza, of Kant, of Nietzsche, of Husserl, of Lévinas, of Derrida, of Foucault and Deleuze that they represent such intersections, that their thinking represents an embracing of transcendence and immanence, though we must know that this brace their thinking represents, like the brace it reflects, is equally connecting and separating. Spinoza’s one substance divides into natura naturans and natura naturata, into creative and created nature; Kant’s world shatters into a noumenal and a phenomenal sphere; Nietzsche’s reality knows no world-behind-the-world but the difference between Apollonian homogeneity and Dionysian groundlessness; Husserl, finally, opens up to the kinaesthetic body and the presence of the other in the perspective of phenomenological immanence; Lévinas addresses the wholly other (tout autre) in the immanentic here and now; Derrida inquires into the indeconstructible (justice, etc.) within the horizon of a deconstruction that seizes everything; Foucault directs his thinking to the unthinkable unthought; Deleuze distinguishes between history/ historia and transhistoric becoming. Each one of these thinkers opens immanence within itself. Not in order to join the thinking of transcendence the onthotheological tradition (if the latter ever existed as a uniform and unified tradition) has handed down, but in order to complicate its alternative, the immanentism of the finite, by supplying an element of integral infinity, i.e., implicit transcendence. To open up to this infinity and transcendence does not mean to resurrect God or an absolute subject. It means to challenge the absolutization of a given transcendence as much as the immanentism that absolutizes itself, by letting it border on its outside, which we can call transcendence, as long as that word marks not a reality but the brittleness of the consistency-zone reality. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory moves on this fault line by going through the declensions of the antinomy between immanence and transcendence. The aim is throughout to compromise the illusion of immanence in pure art by bringing in an element heterogeneous to it, but in such a way that the work of art breaks even with this heterogeneity by integrating it into itself. The heterogeneous may be social reality, the communal aspect art simply cannot transcend in order to enclose itself in a sort of l’art pour l’art aestheticism. At the same time, art must maintain a certain measure of incommensurability to this same aspect, not by being ignorant of it but by virtue of a form of heightened attention that furnishes it with an infinitesimal autonomy vis-à-vis everything that is not art. The goal, Adorno writes, is to “absorb even the negation of art by its own force.” Just as it is the task of philosophy to use the concept to go beyond it, art seeks to integrate everything that limits it and makes it impossible into its self-conception. The “pure immanence” of the work of art explodes under the pressure of realities that prevent its self-enclosure in aesthetic autonomy; at the same time it is the work of art itself that denies itself this self-enclosure, while offering opposition to the pleasing empiricisms, i.e., the homogeneity of the social-political order with its diktat subordinating everything to the primacy of consumptibility, as incommensurable to itself: “art possesses its other immanently because, like the subject, immanence is socially mediated in itself.”