Immanent Transcendence

This book clarifies and reflects upon the paradoxical notion of immanent transcendence, particularly its implications for materialist projects in politics and theology.

Reflects upon the paradoxical notion of immanent transcendence; particularly its implications for materialist projects in politics and theology. This book outlines how the notion of immanent transcendence is variously invoked in continental materialist projects as a means of radicalising the concept of matter.Over the last twenty years materialist thinkers in the continental tradition have increasingly emphasized the category of immanence. Yet the turn to immanence has not meant the wholesale rejection of the concept of transcendence, but rather its reconfiguration in immanent or materialist terms: an immanent transcendence. Through an engagement with the work of Deleuze, Irigaray and Adorno, Patrice Haynes examines how the notion of immanent transcendence can help articulate a non-reductive materialism by which to rethink politics, ethics and theology in exciting new ways. However, she argues that contrary to what some might expect, immanent accounts of matter and transcendence are ultimately unable to do justice to material finitude. Indeed, Haynes concludes by suggesting that a theistic understanding of divine transcendence offers ways to affirm fully material immanence, thus pointing towards the idea of a theological materialism.