Transformation and Transcending: Falque, Deleuze, and the Experience of Becoming‐Other

Abstract In his insistence (with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Martin Heidegger) that human experience is defined by a “plane of immanence” and an unsurpassable horizon of finitude, Emmanuel Falque has elaborated a theological and philosophical concept of transformation as the experience proper to the finitude of immanence. His proposed notion of “ extra‐phenomenon ” develops a Deleuzean concept of transformation and problematizes the usual paths to transcendence as an “opening” to alterity, as receptivity, and as incompletion. Rather, he challenges thought to remain anchored within the forces of transformation at work in human finitude. Transformation, envisaged radically as an irreversible, ontological change, encapsulates an immanent logic of a surpassing, or a “trans‐” function known both in the impossibility of anticipating the path of transformation and of return. This essay constructs the path of Falque's proposals in relation to Deleuze, and argues that the phenomenology of “Transformation Itself,” without a preemptive anticipation of transcendence, provides a hermeneutic of human experience for a discourse of transcendence. If there is no longer an easy pathway to transcendence by any account of exit, the immanent experience of forces of transformation ultimately provide a hermeneutic for a possible transcendence, where God would be “Transformation Itself.”