We have seen that Deleuze had several uses for a theological hammer. He broke icons of transcendence, pried apart the dogmatic shackles of thought, extended the crack that releases the eternal truth of events, and assembled nomadic war machines to combat the psycho-social repression of desiring-production. Deleuze had other ways of utilizing a hammer that we have not explored here; we might have added chapters, for example, on “forging theological intuitions” (Bergsonism) or “moving theological pictures” (Cinema 1 and Cinema 2). All of his efforts contributed to the inversion of the Platonic Eidetic framework, to overturning the domain of representation in which philosophy has labored so long, by creating and connecting new concepts in the immanent field of univocal being.

Christian monotheistic coalitions live, breathe, and have their analogical being in that domain; they are held together, in part, by requiring their members to select one true Icon among rival images of idealized divine transcendence. This is why hammering theology of the Deleuzian sort inevitably increases the secretion of atheism. Throughout this book, I have explored how the eidolon of Christ (as one example of a Figure of transcendence) functions in the mental and social space of religious coalitions in a way that binds thinking, acting, and feeling. I have tinkered around with Deleuzian philosophy, attempting to amplify its liberating force by coupling it to a conceptual heuristic derived from the bio-cultural study of religion.