On the surface, “immanence” would appear to favor certain religiosities (paganisms, pantheisms, animisms, earth spiritualities) over others (transcendentalist monotheisms, rigid dualisms, Buddhist “extinctionism,” et al). But its resonance works within traditions as well: towards panentheistic strains of Christianity, where the Christ is seen as in-dwelling, where Easter is the rebirth of nature and life as well as of social relations after the long hard winter, where Mary is the cosmos; or toward a boddhisattvic liberationist Buddhism that cherishes life rather than seeking to flee from it.<\/p>\n
Immanentism redirects our attention to what is going on in the moment-to-moment shaping of the world, to our experience and ability to shift things in one direction or another, to karmic conditions as open-ended rather than fixed. When we grasp something (the self, political power, the object of our desire), we lose it. Immanentism redirects us to the between: the grasping, the finding and losing, the power-to and power-with, the swelling current that pushes for change (e.g., in the build-up to the last US election) rather than the icon of change it gives rise to (Obama) though that icon be instrumental to the change.<\/p>\n
\nFavoring immanence over transcendence is situational (because <\/i>it’s immanent to the situation, not fixed for all time). I see nothing wrong, in principle, with transcendence; I just prefer to see it as situated: we transcend our circumstances, things break into our ossified systems, bringing light through the cracks (as Leonard Cohen sings, “There is a crack in everything; it’s where the light comes in”). Transcendence, like Derrida’s diff\u00e9rance<\/i>, is a necessary concept, but once we predefine it it’s no longer transcendent; so a predefined transcendent God becomes a creation of our imagination. Immanence suggests that we try to account for the many possibilities inherent in our current situation, its inner capacity for swerving in one direction or another, and ours for acting to contribute to one or another swerve, to follow it and take responsibility for it as we do, all the while not knowing quite where it will lead. That’s where the deconstructionism of Derrida, John Caputo, Mark Taylor, Robert Magliola (all theologians of sorts), Drucilla Cornell (feminist legal scholar), Gayatri Spivak, et al. meets the Spinozian immanentism of Deleuze, Connolly, DeLanda, et al., meets the post-Marxism of J. K. Gibson-Graham meets Buddhist nonduality and its latter-day interpreters (David Loy, Francesco Varela, et al).<\/p>\n
Most of these connections, minus the Buddhism, are known within the radical-democracy literature, but what I find missing is an acknowledgment of the role of imagination — that immanent capacity to work in and through images (not just discourses), to shape the world according to bodily-affective-sensorial forms which include visual images as well as sound-forms and the many combinations of modes made possible by our sensory-cognitive overlays. The Lacanian\/Zizekian contribution works too much from the single understanding that the symbolic is a language that fills the original ‘lack’ with socially shaped content; what’s missing there is the ethology that connects humans with other animals. (See Tonder & Thomassen’s Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack<\/a><\/i> on the difference between that and the Deleuzian\/Connolian thread.) Deleuzians like Elizabeth Grosz (Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth<\/a><\/i>), Brian Massumi, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and others are developing a more immanentist and ethologically informed understanding of the imagination. Building on (and in some ways breaking with) the post-phenomenological work of Edward Casey, Richard Kearney, John Sallis, et al, this Deleuzian wave is poised to propel the imagination (the imaginal, in Henry Corbin’s terms) into the center of cultural theory. Click on the Reading List to the left, on the Main page of this blog…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the surface, “immanence” would appear to favor certain religiosities (paganisms, pantheisms, animisms, earth spiritualities) over others (transcendentalist monotheisms, rigid dualisms, Buddhist “extinctionism,” et al). But its resonance works within traditions as well: towards panentheistic strains of Christianity, where the Christ is seen as in-dwelling, where Easter is the rebirth of nature and life as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4415,688977,691847],"tags":[4413,4414,228,374,201,4410,376,4416,416,417,377],"class_list":["post-1012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecophilosophy","category-geo_philosophy","category-religion-spirituality","tag-animism","tag-deconstruction","tag-deleuze","tag-derrida","tag-immanence","tag-immanent-naturalism","tag-lacan","tag-paganism","tag-pantheism","tag-religion","tag-zizek"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-gk","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1008,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2008\/12\/01\/immanence\/","url_meta":{"origin":1012,"position":0},"title":"Immanence","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 1, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Immanence suggests co-implication, the implication of one thing in another (spirit in matter, mind in body, movement in repose, humans in nature), nonduality, the vitality of becoming rather than the stasis of being, the sufficiency of life in its generative relational flux, its vessels of light scattered for our gathering\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7032,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/11\/20\/imminently-in-baltimore\/","url_meta":{"origin":1012,"position":1},"title":"Imminently in Baltimore","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 20, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Get ready for the lively parliament of immanent Gaianly agents... \"Querying Natural Religion: Immanence, Gaia, and the Parliament of Lively Things\" will take place this Saturday afternoon in the Baltimore Convention Center (right after Karen Armstrong's plenary in the same room, on \"The Science of Compassion\"). The revised speaker line-up\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/eFUHXJF9wVE\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1024,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/24\/atheism-and-immanence\/","url_meta":{"origin":1012,"position":2},"title":"atheism and immanence","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 24, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's an interesting conversation developing on nature and immanence on an atheist blog. Incidentally, I liked Obama's nod to non-Christians and \"non-believers\" in his inauguration speech. It felt like a refreshing breath of fresh air in the constricted atmosphere of American public religious discourse. With the recent growth of religious\/spiritual\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Spirit matter"","block_context":{"text":"Spirit matter","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/religion-spirituality\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6415,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/01\/07\/immanence-goes-to-scoop-it\/","url_meta":{"origin":1012,"position":3},"title":"Immanence goes to Scoop.it","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 7, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The Immanence Shadow Blog -- that space where I scoop up little things of interest found on the internet -- has been reinvented and reloaded as scoop.it\/t\/immanence. You can subscribe to it here. The latest piece I've added is the following bit of prescient (or perhaps eternally relevant) American humor:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/CLjNJI54GMM\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2100,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/01\/03\/planes-of-immanence\/","url_meta":{"origin":1012,"position":4},"title":"Planes of immanence","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 3, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Concepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them. ... Concepts are the archipelago or skeletal frame, a spinal column rather than a skull, whereas the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts.\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/01\/blb31-400x266.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1386,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/03\/welcome-to-immanence-2-0\/","url_meta":{"origin":1012,"position":5},"title":"welcome to immanence 2.0","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 3, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the new, improved version of Immanence. If you came here from the old one and had been a feed subscriber, blogroll linker, or just a regular reader of that one, I would love it if you'd do the same here. I'll still be tweaking things here and there\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}