Yes—poststructuralism, and especially Gilles Deleuze, offers a profound and subversive engagement with theological thought. While Deleuze is not a theologian in any traditional sense, his philosophy often inhabits theological terrain—only to disrupt, rewire, and deterritorialize it. We might call this a-theology, non-theology, or even schizo-theology.
Let’s break it down.
🔧 1.
Deleuze’s Core Relation to Theology: Not Rejection, but Subversion
Deleuze doesn’t reject theology outright—he often draws from it, especially from:
- Mystical theology (e.g. Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa)
- Baroque thought (e.g. Leibniz, Spinoza)
- Catholic figures like Pascal and Duns Scotus
But he refuses theology as an authority-grounded system. For Deleuze, theology is interesting not when it speaks of God, but when it opens toward immanence, difference, and becoming.
🧨 2.
God as Problem, Not Solution
For Deleuze (esp. with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and What is Philosophy?):
- “God” is often the name of a transcendent arrest—a halting point in thought.
He critiques “theology of the One”, the God of judgment, and the model of lack. - Traditional theology often functions like Oedipus in psychoanalysis: it closes desire, turns multiplicity into identity, and disciplines difference.
This is why Deleuze aligns more with Spinoza’s God = Nature than with any personal deity.
🌊 3.
A Deleuzian A-Theology: Immanence, Multiplicity, and Creation
Instead of a transcendent creator, Deleuze proposes:
|
Traditional Theology |
Deleuzian “Theology” |
|
Transcendence |
Radical Immanence |
|
Creator God |
Life creating itself (via desire, becoming) |
|
Original sin |
Desiring-production blocked by the socius |
|
The One |
The Multiple / the Rhizome |
|
Final judgment |
Eternal return of difference |
|
Revelation |
Unfolding of the virtual / potential |
He would prefer mystical univocity (Duns Scotus) to hierarchical analogia entis.
💡 4.
Deleuze’s Theological Sources and Resonances
- Spinoza: God is not a person but substance = nature = immanence. Ethics becomes a mode of expressing joy in this necessity.
- Meister Eckhart: The God beyond God—Gelassenheit, emptiness—resonates with Deleuze’s non-teleological becoming.
- Nietzsche: The “death of God” is not just atheism but the opening to affirmation and the eternal return of difference.
- Simone Weil: Though not cited often, her notion of decreation mirrors Deleuze’s notion of becoming-imperceptible.
Even Christian mysticism appeals to him when it unhooks God from moral command, such as in the ecstatic annihilation of the self in Angela of Foligno or Marguerite Porete.
📖 5.
Key Concepts that Reshape Theology
- Immanence: There is no “outside” or “higher” reality. God is not above, but folded into the world.
- Desire: A creative, productive force (not lack-based). This stands against the ascetic theology of sin.
- Multiplicity: Truth is not singular or linear. There is no Logos or absolute Word.
- Becoming: Theology must abandon essences and embrace the processual, the nomadic, the incomplete.
In Immanence: A Life…, Deleuze writes of a “pure immanence,” which some readers interpret as a sacred this-worldliness, a kind of divinity without God.
✝️ 🌀 Bonus: Deleuzean Christ?
In Logic of Sense, Deleuze refers to Jesus as the great Event, a pure surface-effect, a paradoxical figure of immanence breaking through historical striation. This is not orthodox Christology, but a Christ as line of flight, not redeemer but transformer.
🧩 In Summary
Does Deleuze have anything to say about theology?
Yes, but not in a doctrinal or apologetic sense. His work deconstructs theology’s traditional categories—yet resonates deeply with the mystical, the poetic, and the immanent divine.
We might call it:
✧ A theology after the death of God
✧ A mysticism without dogma
✧ A metaphysics of creation without Creator
Would you like a comparison between Deleuze and more explicit “radical theologians” like John Caputo or Thomas J.J. Altizer? Or perhaps Deleuze vs. Levinas on God and the ethical?
