Univocity of Being

Univocity of Being names the philosophical claim that "being" is said in one and the same sense of everything that exists — that there is a single, flat ontological plane on which God and creature, human and non-human, self and other all share one common predicate: existence as such. Historically traced in the corpus to Duns Scotus's theological consolidation of Augustine's identification of the Hebrew "I AM" with Greek philosophical Being, the doctrine ensures that divinity becomes, in principle, a graspable object of rational thought — something whose essence can be directly named because it occupies the same ontological register as the finite things we already know. In this tradition God is not structurally inaccessible or radically Other; the very fact of shared being guarantees a continuity between the human knower and the divine known, licensing a representational, objectifying theological language.

Within the Lacanian-Hegelian-Deleuzean debate that structures the second and third occurrences, univocity of being takes on a sharper philosophical inflection. For Deleuze, the claim is not that being is simply one (a genus under which differences fall as species) but that being is difference — singular, irreducible, productive difference — which is univocal precisely because it does not divide into a hierarchy of essences and appearances, originals and copies. McGowan reads this Deleuzean "universe of pure difference" as a move that, despite its anti-hierarchical intent, covertly neutralises contradiction: if all differences coexist on a single plane, there is no structural antagonism, no irreducible gap or impossibility — in short, no Real in the Lacanian sense. The Lacanian counter-position, articulated in the second occurrence, is that the "unifying" function Deleuze assigns to univocal being is better captured by the death drive's fundamental negativity: not a flat surface of co-existing differences but a constitutive split, a void that is itself the condition of any affirmation or repetition.

The concept first appears in rollins-peter-the-fidelity-of-betrayal-towards-a-church-beyond-belief-paraclete in a theological register, where Scotus's univocity underwrites a tradition of objectifying God — placing the divine within the reach of rational comprehension and direct naming. Rollins's critique of this move implicitly aligns with the Lacanian category of the Real: by rendering God representable through shared being, the tradition forecloses precisely the structural inaccessibility — the "what resists symbolisation absolutely" — that a post-encounter theology would need to preserve. The concept reappears in subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit and todd-mcgowan-emancipation-after-hegel-achieving-a-contradictory-revolution-colum as a target of Lacanian-Hegelian critique of Deleuze. In these contexts, univocity of being is set against the Lacanian insistence on constitutive negativity, lack, and contradiction — the irreducible void that is also the structural site of das Ding and of Drive. If das Ding is an "excluded interior," a locus of pure lack that no object can fill, then a univocal ontology (where differences simply coexist on one plane) cannot account for this extimate void: it would flatten the gap between the Thing and its substitutes, dissolving the structural distance that, for Lacan, is desire itself. Similarly, where Knowledge is constitutively incomplete and non-closeable, univocity implies an ontological completeness — a plane on which everything is, in principle, sayable in the same terms — which is precisely what the Real as impossibility refuses.

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of MaterialismRussell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · 2020 (p.159)

this fundamental negativity is 'unifying' in a very specific sense which, again, bears some surprising resemblance to the Deleuzean notion of 'univocity'… Deleuze's claim is not that 'being is One,' but that being is difference, which is one (alone), singular.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it stages the precise point of proximity and divergence between Lacan and Deleuze: "fundamental negativity" (the Lacanian/Hegelian term) is granted a "unifying" function that "resembles" Deleuzean univocity, but the resemblance is immediately qualified — Deleuze's univocity is "being is difference, which is one," a formulation that still posits singularity without contradiction, whereas Lacanian negativity unifies only through a constitutive split, not through a flat co-existence of differences.