We began with a series of puzzles about Deleuze's use of the term ‘immanence’. In Spinoza and the Problem of Expression (1968), Deleuze presents the notion of immanence as rooted in Neo-Platonic conceptions of the metaphysical ‘One-All’, and as waiting for Spinoza to liberate it from the transcendence implied in traditional conceptions of emanation. He presents Spinoza as reclaiming the thesis of univocity of being, so that hierarchy is abolished in the Absolute. But in Difference and Repetition, published in the same year, where eternal return is presented as the completed ‘realization’ of the univocity of being (DR 304/388), the concept of immanence is hardly discussed. In the preceding chapters, we have attempted to present an account of Kant that is in conformity with Deleuze's own moves in his interpretation of Kant and German idealism. But now we have to turn directly to Deleuze himself and ask whether his own ideas about immanence are themselves consistent.

One answer to the problem of the relation between Spinozist and Kantian immanence is suggested in ‘What Is Grounding?’, where, as we have seen, there is an emphasis on the break between modern philosophy (Hume, Kant and the post-Kantians) and traditional metaphysics. We could grasp the nettle and state that the apparent contradiction between the two forms of immanence can be resolved by simply situating Spinoza as a pre-modern philosopher. In opposition to Hardt and Negri, who claim that Spinoza's ‘discovery of the plane of immanence’ is the ‘primary event of modernity’, Deleuze would be implicitly saying that Spinoza was the last philosopher in the tradition of metaphysical thinking based around the metaphysical idea of God.