Hart just critiques Deleuze’s thought as being among the ‘postmoderns’ in the line of Nietzsche who strive for a kind of ‘pure immanentism’ (there’s a sizeable intro section to Hart’s book where he just defines terms like ‘postmodern’ and beauty, etc.). Deleuze, for Hart, represents that discourse of the unrepresentable in line with what Hart critiques as the ‘cosmological sublime.’ Hart doesn’t mention it, but I think Deleuze actually has a book called Pure Immanence. He mentions something about how Deleuze wants to bring everything up to as well as down to the ‘surface’ level so there is no depth as well as no transcendence (hence immanence). Infinity cannot be conceived because all is within a ‘totality.’

For Deleuze, all rhetoric and thought is allowed except for one, that of peace. Thought then is necessarily violent. Here is a good snippet that summarizes Hart’s critique:

Deleuze never, anywhere in the course of his philosophical development, escapes the tedious dualism of the active and the reactive, the affirmation and the negative, the creative and the resentful; thus there is no place in his thought for an energy that is neither one nor the other of these things, an energy at once responsive and free, inviting and creating, analogical and expressive. Deleuzian affirmation is always an affirmation of the whole as force, never as gift or charity: not solely because a gift presumes a giver, but because being is intrinsically a violence whose intervals are not spaces where charity may be effectively enacted, but merely the shared ruptures between differences. ‘If it is true that all things reflect a state of forces then power designates the element, or rather the differential relationship, of forces which directly confront one another”*; nature is an interrelated multiplicity of forces, which are either dominant or dominating (p. 66).

• Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, xi.

Hart’s main worry is that the thought of Nietzsche, as well as those who take on his metaphysic (among others), in their ontology do not know how to rightly think of or speak of beauty—his entire book being an argument of aesthetics.

Anywho, I’d still like to get to some Deleuze at some point. I might be presenting a paper in a few months somewhere that might require it—we’ll see

Peace,

Eric

Of the two volumes of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, I’ve read the second: A Thousand Plateaus. That book is a crazy world.

What does David B. Hart have to say about Deleuze and Guattari?

I’m currently reading through Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite, and when I came to the section on his treatment of Deleuze, I remembered your recommendation of his (and Guattari’s) critiques of capitalism. But reading through your comment again, I have to point out the irony of you dismissing “postmodernism” as “[a] new beast” on the one hand, and then promoting said decidedly postmodern duo on the other (to critique their own passage through capitalism, no less?). Can the “beast” really critique another “beast” for, say, theology’s sake?

My question to you is if that language (of “beast”) is really helpful…? I think I might know where you’re going with it (and I’d probably agree), but I just thought the tension was kinda funny.

Also, how much of the ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ books have you read, if any?

Peace,

Eric

So, I’ll go with Wilson on this one, I think. Postmodernism isn’t anything to rejoice about. It’s just the rightful heir of that fine-tuned economic machine fueled by this enlightened world “come of age.” It’s the cultural logic of late capitalism. A new beast. Not a bedfellow. But Wilson can’t say that sort of thing in Christianity Today.

There is a way to make the case that this so-called “postmodern” cultural moment opens up new vistas made invisible in previous ages, but the best one’s I’ve read look the capitalist beast right in the eyes and figure out forms of revolutionary resistence: see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Platteaus.

Some see miracles, and as Kierkegaard talks about in Practice in Christianity, it makes them decide whether or not they will have faith.

Some are inspired by the witness of individual congregations as they engage in the works of mercy.

I would agree there isn’t a single, universal way this works out.

God is indeed mysterious.

Peace,

Eric

All that to say conversion definitely happens in real life, but figuring out how it works at a theoretical level is tough.

I’m still trying to work out the answer in my local community/congregation as well. I’m not entirely sure, either. I think part of the answer can’t easily be written down on the blogs (hence my platonic comment above about not removing this witness from our bodies). That kind of comment of mine will probably leave some people wanting more, and it’s supposed to, by the way.

Peace,

Eric

So, to the extent that we may find such accounts persuasive, it seems to me that it raises the question of how the gospel is to be communicated beyond the bounds of the believing community. Naturally (or supernaturally!), the Holy Spirit plays the crucial role here, but most Christians haven’t held that the work of the Spirit bypasses our faculties of will and reason, but rather works through them. In which event I think it’s worth asking how the gospel proclamation transcends the particularity of the community which proclaims it. This isn’t a rhetorical question on my part; I honestly don’t know what the answer is.

Peace,

Eric