“This is what Deleuze saw in Whitehead: that, in a creative world, “unification” is always “multiplication”—the creation of folds of difference. Any attempt to freeze this movement produces imperialism, that is, the “will to power” to conquer manifoldness. But the imperial desire for a “perfect” world “under control” only earns a dead world. It was either guided by fantasies of necrophilia or misled by rigid conservativism, which Whitehead considers profoundly against the grain of the Universe. This means: Neither is there, nor can we ever know of, any static, world-capturing unity that would not be surpassed by ever vaster difference in becoming.

In a profoundly creative world—as in Whitehead and Deleuze—no power can unify everything by occupying everything’s self-creativity—not even God! Against any imperial transcendence, Whitehead considers God to be the opposition against any such attempt to control the world.

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The imperialism in Western Christianity may well be a consequence of this naiveté in which the fusion of post-exile, Israelite monotheism with Greek metaphysics felt pray to the needs of the Empire.

Indeed, as contemporary research by Jan Assmann has established regarding Israel and Egypt, monadic imperialism prevailed precisely by erasing rhizomatic traces of the multireligious environment. This exclusivist monotheism of Akhenaton and post-exile Israel declared the gods irrelevant, except Aton or YHVH. Thereby, the monotheistic reforms created a suppression of religious manifoldness and tried to eradicate the multiplicity of uncontrollable appearances of the Divine.

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If there is only one, true God, all other manifestations of the Divine must be either violently transformed into nothingness or demonized as temptations of evil. Hence, this “monadic monotheism” developed aggressive strategies to erase the manifoldness of (what Assmann calls) cosmotheism, otherwise found in ancient Mediterranean cultures.”

The above excerpts are from this paper by process philosopher, Rolland Faber, titled “In the Wake of False Unifications: Whitehead’s Creative Resistance Against Imperialist Theologies.” The paper is phenomenal. In fact, I caught myself wanting to copy and paste even larger portions of the paper here to my blog (larger than the ones above that is), so I had to restrain myself…

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Art above: Mandalas made from electronic components by Leonardo Ulian

Tags:deleuzeEmpireprocess philosopherroland faberwhitehead