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God’s Ghost Trans-ascendence and Transcendental Empiricism Metaphysics as defined by Deleuze is ontogenetology. Metaphysics as defined by Levinas is the ethicality of the Good beyond being, ethicogenetology. This distinction leaves open the question as to the transcendence or immanence of God. One reason for this is Levinas’s temporary readiness on pedagogic grounds to say in Totality and Infinity, adapting Heidegger’s distinction, that the ethical has ontological and not merely ontic status. As the title Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence suggests, the Heideggerian distinction that Levinas finds initially useful to adopt ceases to be applied in that later work. Even so, it is arguable that the ethical at least has an ontological foundation for Levinas in the more traditional sense of the term according to which the ontic, for instance the empirical, is also ontological because it is a matter of the being or existence of something. It is arguable that for Levinas the ethical has an ontological foundation if we take him to be saying that my responsibility to another human being arises from my existing in my place in the sun, thereby either depriving someone else of the enjoyment of goods that he or she could otherwise have enjoyed, or exposing someone else to an evil from which he or she might have been protected. However, even if this is a valid reading of Levinas (which we shall discover reason to doubt), the founding of my responsibility in this ontic EIGHT 140 | marGins of reliGion and ontological state of affairs (comparable with the existenziell starting point of the existential analysis in Being and Time) does not make the responsibility itself ontic or ontological. That responsibility could have two or more equiprimordial foundations. Or it could be an anarchic disruption of any foundation and therefore of a foundation that is ontic or ontological. There is a third reason why invoking the alleged equivocality of the word “metaphysics” as employed by Levinas and Deleuze does not of itself constitute a ground for questioning the assurance with which one might assert that the metaphysics of Levinas is one of transcendence while the metaphysics of Deleuze is one of immanence. This third reason is that for Deleuze, as for Spinoza and as for Levinas in his early and temporary adaptation to his own purposes of the term “ontology,” ethics treats of beings and being, albeit in their prehypostatic becoming, their genetology. For Deleuze the ethical is the genetological. The phusis connoted by the “physical” in the expression “meta-physical” is being, but the metaphysical is not for Deleuze otherwise than being or beyond being, epekeina tēs ousias. For Deleuze the ethical is metaphysical in so far as it is the meta of phusis, the productive becoming of phusis, its phuō. That is to say, for Deleuze the ethical remains metaphysical in a sense other than that which Levinas gives to the word, other than the sense of beyond or otherwise than being. For Deleuze the ethical is what is implied in Proposition VI of Part III of Spinoza ’s Ethics, “Everything, insofar as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its being.” Except that Deleuze has a very Nietzschean interpretation of this “in itself .” And here it becomes relevant to recall Derrida’s remark that “Levinas then is very close to and very distant from Nietzsche.”1 From Levinas’s and Deleuze’s extreme proximity to Nietzsche we cannot infer Levinas’s extreme proximity to Deleuze, as the second part of Derrida’s remark already indicates. What brings Levinas close to Nietzsche may be different from what brings Deleuze close to Nietzsche. But they both share with Nietzsche a questioning of what it is to be a self. The human being is not in itself. According to Nietzsche and Deleuze at least some human beings desire to be more than merely human, where although the desire is desire for something, it is not the desire for an end, but a human being ’s desire for its own self-transcendence, the subjectively genitive overcoming of selfhood, and only in that sense the human being’s end. It is the death-wish of a supposed substantial self, hence in Nietzschean parlance the death of the transcendent God. This desire would therefore be desire spelled with a lowercase initial. Upper-case Desire would be, as Levinas sometimes puts it, reversely intentional or, as he also says, affective, meaning that what affects comes at what is affected from outside in...

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