Crowned Anarchy and Nomadic Distribution: Gilles Deleuze's Transformative Appropriation of Duns Scotus

I wish to highlight here at the outset the issues of "appropriation" and "transformation" as they relate to the history of philosophy. In appropriating a figure or argument from the depths of the historical past, it seems only natural to ask "for what reason?" or "to what end?" do we wish to appropriate this thinker's ideas or arguments. Is our desire to study the history of philosophy simply out of an antiquarian interest in the past? Is it because we feel philosophers in the past lack something that we might share with them (e.g., the advantages of modern science or logic)? By retooling their arguments with the most up-to-date discoveries, we then can engage them as peers.¹ Do we wish to appropriate these past ideas because, even from the cold recesses of multiple centuries past, they still manage to exert some influence over us today? And by appropriating their ideas, we repeat such past possibilities and thereby transform the present.² Or, finally, do we wish to recover something from the depths of the past that has been lost or occluded from the present's view?³

I do not claim that this is an exhaustive list of possibilities, or even that one possibility necessarily excludes another. Instead, I highlight as question-worthy the reasons for appropriation and transformation in the history of philosophy. In recent years, this question has re-emerged in the history of medieval philosophy, quite vehemently, around the figure of John Duns Scotus—that is, if it ever went underground in the first place.⁴ Duns Scotus—whose very name gave rise in the Renaissance to the popular insult "dunce" due to his students' hairsplitting pedantry in introducing distinctions upon distinctions—continues to form a basis of contested appropriation. How to read and understand this complex and dangerously innovative thinker marks a perennial debate between his apologists and accusers alike. He is—if nothing else—a figure of great controversy in part because of his nuanced and innovative ideas. After briefly surveying some of the disputed terrain of the Scotistic legacy, I will follow an unlikely course, suggested by Gilles Deleuze, of appropriating and transforming two key Scotistic ideas: univocity and "virtual" communality. Both ideas, I will argue, along with their peculiarly Scotistic distinctions (i.e., the modal and formal distinctions) find new life within Deleuze's thought.

In many circles loosely affiliated with the scholarship of the twentieth-century French philosopher and Thomist extraordinaire Etienne Gilson, the name "Duns Scotus" signifies the worst trends of scholastic intellectualism and essentialism. That is, Scotus represents a shift toward an unraveling of the medieval synthesis, which held together faith and reason, intellect and will, essence and existence as a set of dynamic harmonies. Scotus, Gilson charges, is guilty of a "conceptual imperialism." Gilson states:

the first and most necessary condition for things to become objects of scientific knowledge is to be purified of the slightest trace of existence. A perfect case of conceptual imperialism, if there ever was one! And all this owing to Avicenna, who begot Scotus, who begot Suarez, who begot Kleutgen; and the list still remains open.⁵

"Conceptual imperialism" means that all reality, including the transcendent and sacred reality of the divine, can be adequately grasped by means of conceptualization. Being as a univocal concept, or one that applies equally to God and creatures alike without preference of one to the other, holds a direct key to understanding the bankruptcy of contemporary thought. Once God becomes just one more object of conceptual cognition, the distance afforded by divine transcendence becomes increasingly "mundane." God as first is in fact what the Princeps was only in name: first amongst equals.⁶ Thus an appropriation of the past, for Gilson, means renewing and revitalizing our situation with respect to this oft unnoticed history and the consequences entailed by its secularization.

More recently Jean-Luc Marion and the proponents of what is called "Radical Orthodoxy" (most notably, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock) have lodged a similar charge against Scotus.⁷ That is, they argue...