4 - Releasing Theological Events
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
Summary
Iconoclastie theology breaks religious Images that are interpreted as mediators of transcendence, clearing the field of dogmatic idols so that Friends can set out a plane of immanence. It also loosens the shackles that have imprisoned thought within sacerdotal coalitions and the philosophies bound to them, liberating thinking from the Platonic domain of representation. Although these forces clearly have a destructive effect, they are also intrinsically constructive. We turn now to a third way of using a theological hammer, which maintains the element of critique but is perhaps even more explicitly creative: extending the crack on the metaphysical surface of sense with an affirmative ethic of counter-effectuation that releases the eternal truth within events.
This new vocabulary comes from Deleuze's Logic of Sense, published one year after Difference and Repetition. Both books argue for and enact the inversion of Plato's “secret dualism,” which privileges copies over simulacra (LS, 4). Just as Difference and Repetition insists that it is the encounter with “demons” (rather than “gods”) that generates thinking, so Logic of Sense postulates a “diabolical” (rather than a “divine”) principle that conditions the release of events (LS, 201). However, there are significant formal and material differences between them. Logic of Sense is not divided into traditional chapters, but into thirty-four “series,” which are intertwined in complicated ways.
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- Iconoclastic TheologyGilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism, pp. 101 - 139Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014