The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuze's Ontology of Immanence

“If God does not exist, everything is permissible.” Deleuze likes to invert this Dostoyevskian formula from The Brothers Karamazov because, he says, the opposite is in fact the case: it is with God that everything is permissible. This is obviously true morally, since the worst atrocities have always managed to find a divine justification, and belief in God has never been a guarantor of morality. But it is also true aesthetically and philosophically. Medieval art, for example, is filled with images of God, and it would be tempting to see this merely as an inevitable constraint of the era, imposed from without by the Church. Deleuze suggests a different hypothesis. In the hands of great painters like El Greco, Tintoretto, and Giotto, this constraint became the condition of a radical emancipation; in painting the divine, one could take literally the idea that God must not be represented, an idea that resulted in an extraordinary liberation of line, color, form, and movement. With God, painting found a freedom it would not have had otherwise—a properly pictorial atheism.

The same was true in philosophy. Until the revolution of the eighteenth century, philosophers were constantly speaking of God, to the point where philosophy seemed completely compromised by theology and the demands of the Church. But in the hands of great philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, this constraint became the condition of an equally extraordinary liberation. With God, philosophical concepts were freed from the traditional task that had been imposed on them—the representation of things—and were allowed to assume fantastic dimensions. With the concept of God, everything was permissible. Or almost everything, for thinkers (like Spinoza) who went too far with the concept, or went too fast, often did so at their own peril.