Bataille’s Negative Dialectic of Desire:

Immanence, Time and Eschatological Desire

I
Rowan G. Tepper
Written and Presented at Boston College, at the request of Prof. Richard Kearney, on 27 April 2005

If we are to speak of Georges Bataille’s thought on desire in terms of influence and

the historical traditions from which he borrows, we must first note that Bataille stood at the

crossroads of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, as well as that of the

traditions of ontological and eschatological desire. In epigraphs he quotes from Theresa of

Avila and Alexandre Kojeve and throughout his writings can be found numerous discussions

of Hegel and Nietzsche. While Bataille’s account of desire refuses to conform strictly to

either the ontological or the eschatological model, it is evident that his is a primarily

eschatological account, bearing more similarities to the Christian mystics than to the Platonic

tradition, despite appearances to the contrary.

To be sure, a cursory reading of Bataille might leave one with the impression that

desire is, for him, not only ontological but rather radically so. In so far as anguish and loss

are constitutive elements of this account of desire, a surface reading would indicate that not

only is desire for that which is lacking but instead that desire, being desire for the impossible,

cannot overcome this lack. This misconception is shown for what it is by means of a closer

look at the structure and movement of Bataillean desire.

In the introduction to Erotism, Bataille writes:

We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an

incomprehensible adventure but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of
affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear. Along
with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our
obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is. (Erotism 15)

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This lost continuity is for Bataille to be found exemplified in the manner in which animals

exist in continuity with the world, with no knowledge of transcendence. This parallels the

judeo-Christian conception of the prelapsarian edenic world. Much like in the judeo-

Christian myth, desire, for Bataille, aims at the restoration of this prelapsarian state.

By contrast we may see how Bataille’s interpretation constitutes an inversion of the

Hegelian dialectic. The endpoints are reversed. We begin as subjects with objects and desire

entreats us and impels us to fragment this identity until we arrive at pure experience, and

more radically, at pure inner experience – which re-establishes this lost immanence of the

world. This lost immanence can be construed as the godless analogous to the god of the

mystics. In Erotism, Theory of Religion, and The Accursed Share Volume II, we may find explicit

statements to this effect; however, it is key to see how we first depart from this state of

immanence and how we may return to it, in order for it to be seen how this desire is

eschatological in nature.

Death is the only manner in which immanence is materially restored (Erotism 13-17,

Theory of Religion Chapter 3, “Sacrifices,” The Accursed Share Volume II 79-86, Tears of Eros, etc)

However, death itself destroys the self who dies and as such permanently annuls desire in its

fulfillment. However, for Bataille some portion of desire’s satisfaction is its own desiring, so

despite desire’s remaining fixed upon the horizon of death, means by which this desire can

be fulfilled had to be devised. The first and simpler form produced to address this difficulty

constitutes the sacrifice and the second, more complex form constitutes eroticism. This

forms, like the idea of slipping ‘slipping’ words introduces in Inner Experience (Inner Experience

16), permit a slippage between the profane, day-to-day world of things into the sacred

immanent world, much as ‘slipping’ words such as the word ‘silence’ introduces a slippage

from discourse to pre-discursive reality.

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 Bataille’s immanent, sacred world is the same as what a world consisting of mere

sense-certainty would be for Hegel. I cannot emphasize enough that by contrast to Hegel,

we initially find ourselves in a world of already constituted subjects and objects; Bataille’s

dialectic must operate in reverse. Here the subject is initially given as absolutely existent and

the world given as nothing. In the Discussion on Sin, held in 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean

Hyppolite tag-team Bataille on the issue of negativity and nothingness. In his responses to

their questioning, we may see Bataille’s position in contrast to Hegel. In response to

Hyppolite’s questioning, Bataille responds “In relation to this ego, there exists an absence of

this ego, which one might call nothingness if one so desired and toward which desire doesn’t

exactly carry us as though it were toward an object, since this object is nothing, but as

though toward a region through which the beings of others appear.” (Discussion 50) He

continues to say “I simply wanted to indicate that nothingness can be found at any point in

the experience, and nothingness is always the annihilation of being, the point at which being

annihilates itself.” (50-1) This is to say that this nothingness is at once the fundamental

character of the world beyond us, but it is also a medium to be traversed by desire.

In a hypothetical first experience of this nothingness we experience a horror vacuii and

in order to contain this caustic nothingness set up prohibitions, limits and taboos: regions

beyond which it is forbidden to go; limits determining where beings end and nothingness

begins. These are the great prohibitions on murder, incest and derivatively all sexual

prohibition. Bataille sees in the relation to death the common denominator in all forms of

prohibition and taboo, because the traversal of being into nothingness always puts the

integrity of the self at risk. Prohibitions and taboos as it were set up ‘safety zones’ beyond

which to be is simultaneously to risk not being.

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 Once again, in this same experience the world of subjects and objects is initially

posited on the grounds of time operating according to its own course (and aiming at its own

annulment in permanent). Without passing time there can be no subject-object distinction. Bataille

writes in Theory of Religion:

The objective and in a sense transcendent (relative to the subject) positing of the
world of things has duration as its foundation: no thing in fact has a separate
existence, has a meaning, unless a subsequent time is posited, in view of which it is
constituted as an object. The object is defined as an operative power only if its
duration is implicitly understood. (46)

Thus, transcendent objects are constituted in view of their use – this food in front of me

only becomes an object for me in view of preserving it for later consumption; without view

to the future it is immanent to me in that I eat it immediately and its meaning is only

manifest in the nutrition I derive from it not from reflective knowledge of its value as object.

Thus, time without view to future preservation or use induces the opposite movement.

We may now see the first stage in the movement of desire, which in the case of the

sacrifice delivers us to immanence (however, in terms of erotic desire this is only the first

half). In order to reach its object desire must cross nothingness to find its negation in some

other. This negation is carried out through the transgression of a prohibition, i.e. in the case

of the sacrifice the prohibition of murder. This transgression is also known in the form of

sin outside of the festival of sacrifice. In the ‘Discussion on Sin’ Bataille notes that all

transgressions, all traversals of the nothingness constitute sin and it is the identification with

the object that transforms sin into ecstasy, carnal eros into divine eros. (Discussion 53). In

the sacrifice the object is annihilated in death, but at the antecedent moment, the sacrificer

and the spectators identify with the object and experience its death vicariously and achieve

ecstasy. However, after the festival, the subject takes over the nothingness of the world into

itself as guilt and sin. We find the same structure in erotic desire in the paradigmatic example

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of sex without love. The subject finds the object of desire amid the nothingness of the

world. In order to achieve ecstasy with this object, it becomes necessary to break down the

boundaries of individuation so that subject and object may lose themselves. This is achieved

through the negation of the nothingness in the transgression of sexual prohibitions. The self

and other identify with one another in transgression and achieve ecstasy. At this juncture,

however, they turn away from one another and desire is left opened onto the void and the

self takes on this nothingness in the form of anguish. “Anguish is an effect of desire that by

itself and form within engenders a loss of being.” (Guilty 92) Time first betrays us by

producing and insisting on the stability and duration of subjects and object, and then betrays

us again by negating ecstasy and the object of desire.

The second betrayal, however, is not as it seems. In betraying us, time, like Janus,

shows its other face and shows itself to be the motor driving the dialectic and more generally

as that which produces the lack of desire. And properly Janus-like, time will also show itself

to bring about the return of prelapsarian immanence through the desire of the beloved. At

the first stage the self is not fully lost; ecstasy is achieved but is un-repeatable and

incomplete; in the first stage immanence is revealed as immanence to me as a heterogeneous

being. I have pure external experience, but am left short of pure inner experience and

absolute immanence.

Anguish, as the negative moment in desire, plays a crucial role in this second stage.

In Inner Experience Bataille writes:

In anguish, there appears a nudity which puts one into ecstasy. But ecstasy itself
(nudity, communication) is elusive if anguish is elusive. Thus ecstasy only remains
possible in the anguish of ecstasy, in this sense, that it cannot be satisfaction, grasped
knowledge. (Inner Experience 52)

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Thus, prior anguish is the condition of possible for ecstasy, and the anguish that initially

permits ecstasy in the first form is the horror of death. Anguish in the second stage,

however, is the anguish of desire.

It is in the second stage that the figure of the lovers becomes the dominant one and

in which the eschatological nature of desire becomes fully clear. It is also in this stage that

ecstasy results in pure immanence without subject or object and pure inner experience. In the

first instance, here we have two anguished desires, desiring one another’s desire. The other

chosen here by the self is absolutely unique and irreplaceable and the significance of this

uniqueness is amplified by the fact that the improbability of by chance meeting such an

other and that the other should desire the self is so high as to be effectively an impossibility.

Bataille writes in On Nietzsche that “In love, chance is first sought out by the lover in the

beloved. Though chance is also given as the two meet. In a sense the love uniting them

celebrates a return to being…” (On Nietzsche 74) Moreover, in an earlier essay entitled “The

Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Bataille writes more emphatically “Simple coincidences arrange the

meeting and constitute the feminine figure of destiny to which a man feels bound… the

value of this figure is dependent on long term obsessive exigencies, which are so difficult to

satisfy that they lend the loved one the colors of extreme luck” (VOA 230) The

improbability infinitely valorizes the beloved.

This may seem at first glance tangential. However, it is crucially important; the

affirmation of chance and luck in the selection and meeting of the beloved is at the same

time an affirmation of time in its second face.

Chance in us takes form as time (loathing the past). Time is freedom. Despite the
constraints that fear erects against it… Time is chance insofar as requiring the
individual, the separate being. (ON 114)

Time makes ‘what is’ occur in individuals… chance is the individual’s duration in his
or her ruin. (134)

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 The combination of exceeding love and the desire to lose (actually the continuous
state of this loss) IS TIME AND IS CHANCE. (130)

Time brings about the chance appearance of the beloved and permits the beloved to slip

from the world of things into the sacred. Time has already brought us to anguish and now

time brings the object of desire. My beloved arrives by chance and at a given time always in

the future until her arrival.

The impossible coincidence of anguished desires desiring one another permits

ecstasy to erupt through erotic transgression. These transgressions enable a loss of self to

ensue because in anguish we have already put ourselves into question and revealed

nothingness within us. By virtue of this prior laceration of our beings the force of

transgression is redoubled and permits me to identify with my beloved at the same moment

at which she identifies with me. Since we have both already been de-centered in anguish, this

reciprocal identification results in an ephemeral fused state neither in the lover nor in the

beloved, but in the world which is then revealed as continuous with the lovers.

If the being that I embrace has taken on the meaning of the totality, in that fusion
which takes the place of the subject and object, of the lover and the beloved, I
experience the horror without whose possibility I cannot experience the movement
of the totality. There is horror in being: this horror is repugnant animality… [this]
does not repel me… on the contrary, [I] thirst for it; far from escaping, I may
resolutely quench my thirst with this horror… for this I have filthy words at my
disposal, words that sharpen the feeling I have of touching on the intolerable secret of
being. I may say these words in order to cry out the uncovered secret, wanting to be
sure I am not the only one to know it; at this moment I no longer doubt that I am
embracing the totality without which I was only outside: I reach orgasm (The Accursed
Share Volume II 118)

In this loss of self and fusion with my beloved, I experience a ‘death’ that both is and is not

mine. Our separate existences have temporarily died in the embrace. Thus the link between

death and eroticism here becomes clear and the moniker ‘la petit mort’ becomes all the more

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poignant. However, as my beloved turns away in the afterglow of eroticism, I am thrown

back into my heterogeneity and anguish.

In fusion and ecstasy is a pure inner experience of immanence. The world is not

immanent to me, but rather I and the world am in immanence to one another. It is this

immanent unity with the world that Sartre and Hyppolite, the good Hegelians that they are,

cannot seem to wrap their minds around. In the final result, the distinction between

interiority and exteriority breaks down. What is important here is the fact that this inner

experience of immanence, the totality of the real that is the object of desire comes only out

of the future and through the intercession of the beloved. My beloved means the world to

me, quite literally. Only through her can I experience the profound intimacy of the world. It

is always only through the desire of an other for my desire that comes about through the

whims of heterogeneous time that brings desire to its fulfillment. Thus, corresponding to

Bataille’s atheology we have in his work an eschatology of desire.

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 Eros and Immanence: Bataille and Deleuze
II

When reading Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, one is struck equally by the

affinities between his thought and that of Georges Bataille and the utter lack of direct

references to Bataille, despite the fact that the affinities are unmistakable and that in his book

on Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze cites Bataille extensively with

respect to the literary language of the Marquis de Sade. For both Deleuze and Bataille, desire

as such is intrinsically linked with a state of immanence as well as a particular multi-layered

conception of time. Most importantly, both of these thinkers explicitly repudiate the

ontological conception of desire as lack and refer all lack to imagination on the basis of a

previous having. Herein I will attempt to elucidate Bataille’s remarks of the Song of Songs

and divine desire and show the transition from the conception of divine desire latent in the

Song of Songs to mystical theopathy and its identity with immanence. Then, I will show the

relation between Eros, time and immanence in the second chapter of Deleuze’s Difference and

Repetition, so that we can explicitly see the affinities and tensions between his conception and

that of Bataille.1

In volume two of The Accursed Share, Bataille writes that the structure of desire

produces a natural movement evinced in the Song of songs, by which desire passes through

the individual beloved toward the purification of the beloved which renders the other

symbolic of god. Additionally and more radically, it can land the lover in the realm of

theoerotics, in which the beloved is actually replaced by god. Bataille writes: “if the beloved

emerges from the abyss of death where eroticism revealed her (or projected her), she

1
Due to space and time constraints, I cannot treat Deleuze’s co-authored books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand
Plateaus. Desire is treated far more extensively and explicitly in these works, however, this conception seems to
be an outgrowth of the conception put forth in Difference and Repetition. I can (and probably will), of course, look
into that in more depth at a later date.

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immediately loses the virtue of opening up the totality of being to the subject.” 2 Thus, if the

beloved is sought as opposed to immanence being sought through her, then she no longer

symbolizes the totality. This purification of the other in desire yields two possibilities: “either

we allow this love to be reduced to vulgarity (kept nonetheless in a halo of consumption by

the birth of children or the constant threat of death; or, holding resolutely to purity, but at

the same time to the desire for the other, for that which is missing and which alone might

yield us the totality of being, we are in search of God.”3 It must be emphasized that this

missing part, this lack is a consequence of the purification of desire, not a condition of desire

as such; lack is the self-problematization of desire.

For Bataille, surprisingly enough, the Song of Songs is in fact about desire for god.

He writes that this purification process strips away “everything that has the appearance of

contingency, in which case the whole of reality is denied on behalf of the single absolute, the

logically formulated supreme being.” 4 However, this purification strips eroticism from desire

and results in sacrifice becoming the sole mode to achieve the experience of God (which, as

Bataille has written in Inner Experience and elsewhere is the identity of ipse with the totality of

the real). Thus, the direction of desire indicated by the Song of Songs is for Bataille a blind

alley, insofar as it reduces the object of desire from totality to a logically purified absolute.

This is why Bataille accords such high regard to the experiences of the mystics such

as Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. He accords central importance to their erotic

language:

Whatever one makes of the erotic language of the mystics, it must be said that their
experience, having no limitation, transcends its beginnings and that pursued with the
greatest energy, it finally retains only eroticism’s transgression in a pure state, or the
complete destruction of the world of common reality, the passage from the perfect
2
Georges Bataille The Accursed Share Volume II & III ,translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books,
1991), pg 168
3
Ibid, pg 169
4
Ibid

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 Being of positive theology to that formless and modeless God of a ‘theopathy’ akin
to the ‘apathy’ of Sade. 5

The crucial question then becomes that of the nature of this theopathy. Tellingly, Bataille

had introduced this concept some thirty years before volume two of The Accursed Share saw

the light of day. In On Nietzsche, we find the most lucid account of theopathy. Therein

Bataille writes:

The same passivity and absence of effort – and an erosion that is suffering – belong
to the theopathic state. In the theopathic state the worshipper is himself/herself God,
and the rapture in which this identification with God is experienced is a simple and
‘uncomplicated’ state…

It was only recently that I slipped into theopathy. Immediately I thought of the
simplicity of the new state known to Zen, to Proust, and (in a final phase) to St.
Teresa and St. John of the Cross…

In the state of immanence – or the theopathic state – falling into nothingness isn’t
required. The mind itself is wholly steeped in nothingness, it identifies with
nothingness. The object is meanwhile dissolved into identification with the mind.
Time absorbs everything. Transcendence no longer grows at the expense of, or
above, nothingness while hating it. 6

This is to say that theopathy is the same as an immediate experience of immanence, and as

such subject to the same conditions of existence, i.e. sacrifice, eroticism and death. The

theopathic state is, as I have said before, a short circuiting of desire – it is an immediate

experience of immanence that is achieved passively. This is because desire opens onto a void

in cases of theopathy – it opens onto nothingness, it thus evades the dialectics of desire. It is

at this point that we can move from Bataille’s discussions of desire, theopathy and

immanence to Deleuze’s more robust conceptions of desire and immanence.

Reading Deleuze’s last essay (published the month prior to his suicide) I cannot help

but imagine him smiling as he fell to his death. I imagine him casting a fond gaze upon the

world and bidding it farewell in a parting reminiscent of the suicide of Septimus in Mrs.

5
Ibid, pg 171
6
Georges Bataille On Nietzsche, translated by Bruce Boone (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1992), pg 141

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Dalloway, whose author and more generally the anglo-american literary tradition, Deleuze had

praised at length. I imagine him welcoming the moment of his death as a moment of

jouissance, bliss. Like Bataille, immanence is revealed in ones encounter with death, but with a

slight displacement – it is not a material return to immanence that is important to Deleuze –

rather than the moment of death constituting immanence, it is the moment before “Between

his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death…. [the

characteristics of an individual] fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to a man

who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken for no other. A singular essence, a

life…”7 Earlier in this essay, Deleuze writes “We will say of pure immanence that it is A

LIFE, and nothing else. IT is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is

itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete

power, complete bliss.”8

Deleuze effectively inverts the Bataillean schema; immanence is neither death, nor

nothingness, but rather singular, pre-personal life, not immanent to anything but itself. As

subject and object are “transcendents” constituted in an event on the basis of immanence,

immanence is immanent to itself and the singular, pre-personal life is no more separated

from its world than in an infant’s experience of the world before the development of object

relations or the withdrawal of the mother. Singular, differentiated from others, a life is no

less in immanence for these facts. Death serves to strip away the characteristics of an

individual to the point where the singularity of a life becomes visible and the pre-personal

plane of immanence is disclosed.

Immanence is at once the condition of possibility for desire and its fulfillment. The

primacy of immanence explicitly repudiates at once the ontological model of and at the same
7
Gilles Deleuze “Immanence: A Life…” in Pure Immanence, translated by John Rajchman, (New York: Zone
Books, 2001), pg 28-9
8
Ibid, pg 27

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time the eschatological model. As subject and object are constituted on the basis of

immanence, all lack is constituted on the basis of a prior immanent having. This permits

Deleuze to regard desire in terms of a radical plurality of possible objects – immanence no

longer is the object, as was in Bataille, but rather it is the fulfillment and the condition of

possibility for the same. In Difference and Repetition, written nearly thirty years prior to

“Immanence: A Life,” Deleuze makes much of this polyvalency of desire, going so far as to

express it as “object = x,” the virtual component of the object of desire which qualitatively

alters the real object of desire (differentiates it), to make it the object of desire.

But what, for Deleuze, constitutes our choice of the object of desire? The “object

= x” is not, as with Bataille, constituted arbitrarily by an unexplained faculty of

imagination. Here, memory pays the decisive role. For Deleuze, Eros is bound equally to the

past and memory and is a constitutive aspect of time: “the second synthesis of time which

united Eros and Mnemosyne (Eros as the seeker after memories, Mnemosyne as the treasure

of the pure past).”9 The pure past is distinguished from the past of voluntary memory,

representation in the present and from the past present. The ‘object = x’ is a fragment of the

pure past in “its double irreducibility to the present that has been (perception) and to the

present present in which it might reappear or be reconstituted (voluntary memory)” 10 The

‘object = x’ is the fragment of the pure past torn from the past by involuntary memory (as in

the taste of the madeleine evokes the involuntary memory of Combray in itself, in Proust, as

the object = x), and can be expressed as the specific difference from the two series

constituted by voluntary memory and perception;

Combray in itself as the ‘object = x’ which causes them [the series’[ to resonate.
Moreover, the resonance of the series may give rise to a death instinct which
overruns them both… Eros is constituted by the resonance, but overcomes itself in
9
Giles Deleuze Difference and Repetiton, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),
pg 274
10
Ibid, pg 122

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 the direction of the death instinct which is constituted by the amplitude of a forced
movement… The Proustian formula ‘a little time in its pure state’ refers first o the
pure past, the in-itself of the past or the erotic synthesis of time, but more
profoundly to the pre and empty form of time, the ultimate synthesis, that of the
death instinct which leads to the eternity of the return in time. 11

There is far more in the above passage than can adequately be unpacked here, however, what

is essential is that Eros is enabled by the object ‘torn from the pure past’ and that memory is

in itself erotic and constitutes the past as the ground of time. Eros also necessarily points

toward a third synthesis of time (the first being the Humean constitution of the present

through the habitual contraction of repeated cases “tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock”) which

constitutes the groundlessness of time and its empty form (which is essentially immanence),

which is tellingly represented by Thanatos and the Eternal Return. It is the third synthesis

that constitutes the future as such, and it is thus the possibility of death that constitutes

immanence and the condition of possibility for desire.

At this point, Deleuze’s position remains exceedingly abstruse. However, in his

discussion of Eros-Mnemosyne as the second synthesis of time, this becomes a little more

concrete. Before continuing, let us recapitulate: desire aims as an ‘object = x’ 12 which is

constituted in the synthesis of time yielding the pure past, which is neither voluntary

memory nor, strictly speaking, a past present; this ‘object = x’ is the virtual component of

the object of desire, however the real object of desire is variable and qualitatively altered by

this ‘object = x.’. Deleuze writes “In short, there is no ultimate term – our loves do not refer

back to the mother; it is simply that the mother occupies a certain place in relation to the

virtual object in the series which constitutes our present, a place which is necessarily filled by

another character in the series which constitutes the present of another subjectivity, always

taking into account the displacements of that object = x. In somewhat the same manner, by

11
Ibid
12
Deleuze likens his conception of the object =x to Lacan’s conception of the phallus.

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loving his mother the hero of In Search of Lost Time repeats Swann’s love for Odette.”13 Thus,

even the mother is only privileged by virtue of a relation to a displaced and displacable

virtual object – Deleuze’s conception of desire here is very similar to Lacan’s account of

metonymic desire.

However, Deleuze’s conception of desire, centering on this diplacable, virtual object

= x is more than merely a metonymic chain, rather it is a pluralizing series, in which the

displacements of the virtual object determine the line of actualization, and “just as desire

finds the principle of its difference from need in the virtual object, so it appears neither as a

power of negation nor as an element of an opposition, but rather as a questioning,

problematizing and searching force which operates in a different domain than that of desire

and satisfaction.”14

Thus, desire differs from need insofar as it is determined by the virtual object = x.

This is of absolutely crucial import because of the relationship between the virtual and the

plane of immanence: in his essay “The Actual and the Virtual,” Deleuze writes “The plane of

immanence, upon which the dissolution of the actual object occurs, is itself constituted

when both object and image are virtual…”15 And: “memory is a virtual image contemporary

with the actual object, its double… This perpetual exchange between the virtual and the

actual is what defines a crystal; and it is on the plane of immanence that crystals

appear.”16This is to say that it is only on the condition of the plane of immanence,

constituted initially by the virtual, that desire can operate and actualize a particular path of its

search. The object = x , combined with the actual object crystallizes into the object of desire

on the plane of immanence. This crystallization process is not unidirectional – it releases

13
Ibid, pg 105-6
14
Ibid, pg 106
15
Gilles Deleuze, “The Virtual and The Actual” in Dialogues, Translated by Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara
Habberjam and Eliot Ross Albert, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pg 149
16
Ibid, pg 150

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clouds of virtual objects and possibilities and as such, we have not a metonymic chain, but

rather a metonymic tree, branching off at each moment in every direction with possible lines

of actualization. It is immanence, as a life that permits this radical plurality of possibilities.

It is thus that we see that while both Deleuze and Bataille place desire under the

Aegis of immanence, Bataille’s model of desire is radically simpler than that of Deleuze.

While for Bataille, immanence is the object of desire for which all particular objects, even

God are intermediaries or stand-ins, for Deleuze it is not nearly so simple. For Deleuze,

immanence is present in each aspect of desire, from its inception in the determination of the

virtual object = x, to its fulfillment, which is immanence itself. We do not aim at immanence

or desire it, but rather we are in immanence and it is the pseudo-transcendencies of subjects

and objects that in the process of actualization, which obscure this from us. He writes in

“Immanence: A Life…”: “When the subject or the object falling outside the plane of

immanence is taken as a iuniversal subject or any object to which immanence is attributed, the

transcendental is entirely denatured, for it then simply redoubles the empirical, and

immanence is distorted, for it then finds itself enclosed in the transcendent.” 17 Thus, for

Deleuze, by contrast to Bataille, we have never truly left the state of immanence, we need

not strive impossibly for it, for as absolute immanence, it is acceptable through a receptivity

that Bataille merely hinted at in his discussions of theopathy. I imagine Deleuze in a

theopathic state when he threw himself to his death nearly ten years ago.

17
Deleuze, “Immanence…”, pg 26-7

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