Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 - 4 November 1995, and pronounced: “Deluzz”) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on Philosophy, Literature, Film, and Fine Art. Two of his most popular works were the volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered to be his magnum opus.^[1][a][b] Equally important are Deleuze's works devoted to other philosophers: Lucretius and the Stoics, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, and Henri Bergson. Foucault had said that “Someday, [the Twentieth Century] will be known as Deleuzean”, as M.R.M. Parrott described in his summary of these monographs, which represent a complex journey of Being that “moves us toward the affirmative, positive spirit of thought”.^[2] A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the “greatest philosophers”.^[3] His work has influenced a variety of disciplines across the humanities, including of course Philosophy, as well as Art, Literary Theory and related movements “Post-Structuralism” and “Postmodernism”.^[4]

Life and Works

Gilles Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in Paris and lived there for most of his life. His mother was Odette Camaüer and his father, Louis, was an engineer.^[5] His initial schooling was during World War II at Lycée Carnot, with a year in khâgne at the Lycée Henri IV. During the Nazi occupation of France, Deleuze's brother Georges, three years his senior, was arrested for his participation in the French Resistance, then died in transit to a concentration camp.^[6] In 1944, Deleuze went to study at the Sorbonne, and his professors included several noted specialists in the History of Philosophy, such as Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alquié, and Maurice de Gandillac. Deleuze's lifelong interest in the canonical figures of Modern Philosophy owed much to these mentors.

Deleuze passed the agrégation in Philosophy in 1948, and taught at various lycées (Amiens, Orléans, Louis le Grand) until 1957, when he took a position at the Sorbonne. He had married Denise Paul “Fanny” Grandjouan in 1956 and they had two children, while in 1953, he had published his first monograph, Empiricism and Subjectivity, on David Hume. This monograph was based on his 1947 diplôme d'études supérieures thesis,^[7] roughly equivalent to an M.A. thesis, which was conducted under the direction of Jean Hyppolite and Georges Canguilhem.^[8] From 1960 to 1964, he held a research fellow position at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. During this time he published the seminal Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and befriended Michel Foucault. From 1964 to 1969, he was a professor at the University of Lyon. In 1968, Deleuze defended his two DrE (doctoral) dissertations amid the ongoing May 68 demonstrations, later publishing them as Difference and Repetition (supervised by Gandillac) and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (supervised by Alquié). In 1969, he was appointed to the University of Paris VIII, an experimental school organized to implement educational reform.^[9] This new university drew a number of well-known academics, including Foucault (who suggested Deleuze's hiring) and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Deleuze taught at Paris VIII until his retirement in 1987.

Deleuze's outlook on life was sympathetic to Transcendental ideas, and he outwardly lived the life of a conventional French professor. He kept his fingernails untrimmed because, as he once explained, he lacked “normal protective fingerprints”, and therefore could not “touch an object, particularly a piece of cloth, with the pads of my fingers without sharp pain”.^[10] When once asked to talk about his life, he replied: “Academics' lives are seldom interesting.”^[11] Deleuze concluded his reply to this critic:

Deleuze suffered from respiratory ailments from a young age,^[13] developed tuberculosis in 1968 and underwent lung removal.^[14] He suffered increasingly severe respiratory symptoms for the rest of his life^[15][16] and in his last years, simple tasks such as writing required laborious effort. Overwhelmed by his respiratory problems he committed suicide on 4 November 1995.^[17] throwing himself from the window of his apartment.^[18] Before his death, Deleuze had announced his intention to write a book entitled La Grandeur de Marx (The Greatness of Marx), and left behind two chapters of an unfinished project entitled Ensembles and Multiplicities (these chapters have been published as the essays “Immanence: A Life” and “The Actual and the Virtual”).^[19] He is buried in the cemetery of the village of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.^[20]

Philosophy

Deleuze's eclectic works fall into two overlapping groups, with the monographs interpreting the work of other philosophers (Plato, Lucretius, Spinoza, Liebniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Proust, Masoch, Fouault), along with those organized by concept (Difference, Sense, Event, Economy, Cinema, Desire, Philosophy). His prose and the unique mapping of his books allow for multifaceted readings. For Deleuze, to read a philosopher is no longer to aim at finding a single, correct interpretation, but is instead to present a philosopher's attempt to grapple with the problematic nature of reality. “Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don't tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. [...] The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn't say but is nonetheless present in what he did say.”^[21] Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines Philosophy as the creation of Concepts.

Metaphysics

Like Kant, Deleuze considers traditional notions of Space and Time as unifying forms imposed on experiences by the subject. Pure “Difference” (ie. diversity, or “différance” in French) is what Deleuze calls “Virtuality”, referring to Proust's definition of what is constant in both the past and the present, what is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”^[22] While Deleuze's Virtuallity resembles Plato's Forms and Kant's Pure Reason, it is not an original or a model, nor does it transcend possible experience. Virtuality conditions actual experience, the internal difference in itself, whereby “the concept [these conditions] form is identical to [their] object.”^[23]

Thus, Deleuze's philosophy is a Transcendental Empiricism^[24][25], alluding to Immanuel Kant's Transcendental Idealism, meaning that our experiences only make sense to us when organized by the Forms of Sense, Space and Time, and Concepts of Intuition, such as Causality. For Kant, our common assumptions that the content of these forms and concepts are actual qualities of the World as it exists, independently of human perception, thus spawns errors and “amphibolies” of reasoning. For example, extending the concept of Causality beyond possible experience results in unverifiable speculation about a First Cause, an “Unmoved Mover”, or a “God”. For Deleuze, Experience exceeds human concepts by presenting novelty and difference (ie. diversity). The raw experience of difference actualizes ideas for us without prior categories, forcing the invention of new ways of thinking.

Such identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, “given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus.”^[26] That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the categories used to identify individuals in the first place derive from differences. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze argues, beings must be grasped exactly as they are. Concepts of Identity (Forms, Categories, Resemblances, Unities of Apperception, Predicates) fail to attain what he calls “difference in itself”. “If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words, in its internal difference.”^[27]

Difference and Repetition (1968) is Deleuze's most sustained and systematic attempt to work out the details of such a metaphysics, but his other works develop similar ideas. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), for example, reality is a play of forces; in Anti-Oedipus (1972), a “body without organs”; in What is Philosophy? (1991), a “plane of immanence” or “chaosmos”.

For Deleuze, Epistemology is a transformation of “the image of thought”. Contrasting from such philosophers such as Aristotle, René Descartes, and Edmund Husserl, the act of thinking itself is problematic. Truth may be hard to discover, it may require a life of pure theorizing, rigorous computation, or systematic doubt, and thinking is not able to grasp Fact, Forms, Ideas as “objective” truths. “All this, however, presupposes codes or axioms which do not result by chance, but which do not have an intrinsic rationality either. It's just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift.”^[28]

Deleuze and Martin Heidegger can be compared on the topics of Difference and the Event. Where, for Heidegger, an “evental” being is constituted in part by difference as ”...an essential dimension of the concept of event.” For Deleuze, being is Difference, and Difference “differentiates by way of events.” This mutual apprehension of a differential, Evental Ontology led both thinkers into an extended critique of the representation characteristic to Platonic, Aristotelian, and Cartesian thought. “Difference and Repetition is a “detective novel”. It tells the story of what some readers of Deleuze might consider a horrendous crime, which is the birth of representation.^[29]

Deleuze's extended critique of representation (in the sense of detailing a “genealogy” of the antiquated beliefs as well) is given ”...in terms of being or becoming as difference and repetition, together with genetic processes of individuation whereby beings come to exist and pass out of existence.”^[30]

Ethics

In Ethics and Politics Deleuze again echoes Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche, criticizing the notion of an individual as an arresting or halting differentiation (as the etymology of the word “individual” suggests). Guided by the Ethical Naturalism of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze instead seeks to understand individuals and their moralities as products of the organization of pre-individual desires and powers.^[31]

In the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari describe History as a congealing and regimentation of “desiring-production” (a concept combining features of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx) into the modern individual (typically neurotic and repressed), the nation-state (a society of continuous control), and Capitalism (an anarchy domesticated into infantilizing commodification). Deleuze welcomed the capitalist destruction of traditional social hierarchies as liberating.

The first part of Capitalism and Schizophrenia undertakes a Universal History and posits the existence of a separate socius for each mode of production, with the Earth for the tribe, the body of the despot for the Empire, and capital for Capitalism.”^[32][33] In his 1990 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, Deleuze builds on Foucault's notion of the society of discipline to argue that society is undergoing a shift in structure and control. Where societies of discipline were characterized by discrete physical enclosures (such as schools, factories, prisons, office buildings, etc.), institutions and technologies introduced since World War II have dissolved the boundaries between these enclosures. As a result, social coercion and discipline have moved into the lives of individuals considered as “masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks'.” The mechanisms of modern societies of control are described as continuous, following and tracking individuals throughout their existence via transaction records, mobile location tracking, and other personally identifiable information.^[34]

For Deleuze, to live well is to fully express one's power, to go to the limits of one's potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society still suppresses difference and alienates people from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, established identities must be overturned and so become all that they can become exactly what cannot be known in advance. The pinnacle of Deleuzean practice, then, is creativity. “Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary, because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?”^[35]

Deleuze's Reception and Influence

In the 1960s, Deleuze's portrayal of Nietzsche as a metaphysician of difference rather than a reactionary mystic contributed greatly to the plausibility and popularity of “Left-Wing Nietzscheanism” as an intellectual stance.^[36] His books Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969) had led Michel Foucault to declare that “Someday, [the Twentieth Century] will be called Deleuzian.”^[37] In the 1970s, Anti-Oedipus was written in a vulgar and esoteric style^[38] offering a sweeping analysis of Family, Language, Capitalism, and History in eclectic tones from Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Nietzsche, but also featuring insights from dozens of other writers. It was received as a theoretical embodiment of the anarchic spirit of May 1968. In 1994 and 1995, L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, an eight-hour series of interviews between Deleuze and Claire Parnet, aired on France's Arte Channel.^[39] During the 1980s and 1990s most of Deleuze's books were translated into English, which are frequently cited.

Bibliography

{|

Original French

English Translation
Empirisme et Subjectivité (1953)	Empiricism and Subjectivity (1991)
Nietzsche et la Philosophie (1962)	Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983)
La Philosophie Critique de Kant (1963)	Kant's Critical Philosophy (1983)
Proust et les Signes (1964, 3rd exp. ed. 1976)	Proust and Signs (1973, 2nd exp. ed. 2000)
Nietzsche (1965)	Pure Immanence (2001)
Le Bergsonisme (1966)	Bergsonism (1988)
Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (1967)	Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1989)
Différence et Répétition (1968)	Difference and Repetition (1994)
Spinoza et le Problème de l'Expression (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968 & 1985)	Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990)
Logique du Sens (1969)	The Logic of Sense (1990)
Dialogues (1977, 2nd exp. ed. 1996, with Claire Parnet)	Dialogues II (1987, 2nd exp. ed. 2002)
One Less Manifesto (1978)	In Superpositions (with Carmelo Bene)
Spinoza - Philosophie pratique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981)	Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988)
Francis Bacon - Logique de la Sensation (1981)	Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003)
Cinéma I: l'Image-Mouvement (1983)	Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1986)
Cinéma II: l'Image-Temps (1985)	Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989)
Foucault (1986)	Foucault (1988)
Le Pli - Leibniz et le Baroque (1988)	The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993)
Périclès et Verdi: La Philosophie de Francois Châtelet (1988)	In Dialogues II, revised ed. (2007)
Pourparlers (1990)	Negotiations (1995).
Critique et Clinique (1993)	Essays Critical and Clinical (1997)
L'île Déserte et Autres Textes (2002)	Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (2003)
Deux Régimes de Fous et Autres Textes (2004)	Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (2006)

With Félix Guattari

• Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe (1972). Trans. Anti-Oedipus (1977).
• On the Line, New York: Semiotext(e), translated by John Johnson (1983).
• Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure (1975). Trans. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986).
• Rhizome (1976). Trans., in revised form, in A Thousand Plateaus (1987).
• Nomadology: The War Machine (1986). Trans. in A Thousand Plateaus (1987).
• Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille Plateaux (1980). Trans. A Thousand Plateaus (1987).
• Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (1991). Trans. What is Philosophy? (1994).
• Part I: Deleuze and Guattari on Anti-Oedipus of Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-77 (2009) Edited by Sylvere Lotringer. (pp. 35-118).

With Michel Foucault

• “Intellectuals and Power: A Discussion Between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault”. Telos 16 (Summer 1973). New York: Telos Press (reprinted in L'île déserte et autres textes / Desert Islands and Other Texts; see above)

Scholarship by M.R.M. Parrott

Synthetic A Priori: Philosophical Interviews Interviews, Discussion ©1998-1999 M.R.M. Parrott First Published: 99,00,02,08,11 Published by rimric press 0-9662635-6-1 | 978-0-9662635-6-5 232 Pages, Paperback & eBook, 2025 2025 Edition Extras: Both Prefaces, Notes on the Text and Cover Art Amazon Paperback (author) Barnes & Noble Paperback (author) Waterstones Paperback (author)

The Empiricism of Subjectivity: Deleuze and Consciousness Philosophical Monograph ©1996-1997 M.R.M. Parrott First Published: Oct 2002 Published by rimric press 0-9662635-3-7 | 978-0-9662635-3-4 128 Pages, Paperback & eBook, 2025 2025 Edition Extras: Afterword Amazon Paperback (author) Barnes & Noble Paperback (author) Waterstones Paperback (author)

References

1. Encyclopedia, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/, 17 February 2011, Smith, Daniel W., Daniel W. Smith (philosopher), , Protevi, John, Voss, Daniela.
2. Book, The Empiricism of Subjectivity: Deleuze and Consciousness, Parrott, M.R.M, rimric press, 1997, 2025, mrmparrott.com/-title=0-9662635-3-7.
3. A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 543: 'intellectual power and depth; a grasp of the sciences; a sense of the political, and of human destructiveness as well as creativity; a broad range and a fertile imagination; an unwillingness to settle for the superficially reassuring; and, in an unusually lucky case, the gifts of a great writer.'.
4. See, for example, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory (Guilford Press, 1991), which devotes a chapter to Deleuze and Guattari..
5. Book, Beckman, Frida, Gilles Deleuze: Critical Lives, Reaktion Books, 2017, 9781780237770, 15.
6. François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 89..
7. Alan D. Schrift (2006), Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers, Blackwell Publishing, p. 117..
8. Daniela Voss, Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, p. 76..
9. Web, Gilles Deleuze, plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 16 Feb 2025.
10. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York: Harper Collins, 1993, p. 196..
11. Negotiations, p. 137..
12. Negotiations, pp. 11-12..
13. François Dosse, Deleuze and Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans D. Glassman, CUP 2010, p. 98..
14. François Dosse, Deleuze and Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans D. Glassman, CUP 2010, p. 178..
15. Web, Bolzinger, Jean-Michel, 26 December 2003, Gilles Deleuze et les médecins, ammppu.org/litterature/deleuze.htm, Association Médicale Mosellane de Perfectionnement Post Universitaire, 4 October 2006, 5 May 2019, web.archive.org/web/20190505050918/http://www.ammppu.org/litterature/deleuze.htm, dead.
16. Web, ammppu.org/litterature/deleuze.htm#(4), Gilles Deleuze et les médecins, 4 October 2006, 5 May 2019, web.archive.org/web/20190505050918/http://www.ammppu.org/litterature/deleuze.htm#(4), dead.
17. Encyclopedia, britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/156476/Gilles-Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze, Encyclopædia Britannica, 8 July 2009.
18. Web, French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze Commits Suicide at 70, apnews.com/article/bdba0e6c95bf6c5368be01fedfcff197, 2021-04-15, AP NEWS.
19. François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, pp. 454-455. “Immanence: A Life” has been translated and published in Pure Immanence and Two Regimes of Madness, while “The Actual and Virtual” has been translated and published as an appendix to the second edition of Dialogues..
20. Web, ccnoblat.fr/otsi_v2/images/publications/guides/Saint%20Leonard%20de%20Noblat.pdf, web.archive.org/web/20141018104643/http://www.ccnoblat.fr/otsi_v2/images/publications/guides/Saint%20Leonard%20de%20Noblat.pdf, dead, Communauté de Communes de Noblat, 18 October 2014.
21. Negotiations, p. 136..
22. Proust, Le Temps Retrouvé, ch. III..
23. Desert Islands, p. 36..
24. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Continuum, 2004[1968], pp. 56 and 143..
25. Adrian Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary (Revised Edition), Edinburgh University Press, 2010, p. 289: “Unlike Kant, Deleuze does not conceive of [...] unthought conditions as abstract or necessary philosophical entities, but as contingent tendencies beyond the reach of empirical consciousness.”.
26. “Bergson's Conception of Difference”, in Desert Islands, p. 33..
27. Desert Islands, p. 32..
28. Desert Islands, p. 262..
29. Book, Hughes, Joe, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, Continuum, 2009, 978-0-8264-2112-8, London, 24, EN.
30. Book, Bahoh, James, Heidegger and Deleuze: The Groundwork of Evental Ontology, Duquesne University, 2016, 113, EN.
31. {{Citation, Love's Lessons: Intimacy, Pedagogy and Political Community, Timothy, Laurie, Hannah, Stark, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 22, 4, 69-79, 2017, academia.edu/35349930.
32. Encyclopedia, Gilles Deleuze, plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1 July 2018)..
33. Daniel W. Smith, Henry Somers-Hall (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 137..
34. Journal, Deleuze, Gilles, Postscript on the Societies of Control, October, October 1992, 59, 3-7, 778828.
35. Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 135..
36. See, e.g., the approving reference to Deleuze's Nietzsche study in Jacques Derrida's essay “Différance”, or Pierre Klossowski's monograph Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, dedicated to Deleuze. More generally, see D. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (MIT Press, 1985), and L. Ferry and A. Renaut (eds.), Why We Are Not Nietzscheans (University of Chicago Press, 1997)..
37. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum”, Critique 282, p. 885..
38. Sometimes in the same sentence: “one is thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 347)..
39. Web, langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/ABC1.html, Charles J. Stivale -- A-F Summary of L'Abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze, www.langlab.wayne.edu, 6 December 2021.

Additional Links, Secondary Literature

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Gilles Deleuze”, by Daniel Smith & John Protevi.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Gilles Deleuze”, by Jon Roffe.
• Alain Badiou, “The Event in Deleuze.” (English translation).
• Lectures and notes on work by Deleuze and Guattari.
• Rhizomes. Online journal inspired by Deleuzian thought.
• Web resources from Wayne State University.
• Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium (1995)
• Institute of Art and Ideas: “Deleuze and the Time for Non-Reason”, by James R. Williams.
• Parrott, M.R.M., books on Deleuze and other philosophers, including “The Empiricism of Subjectivity” (1997, focused on Deleuze's monographs), “Synthetic A Priori” (1999)