Philosopher
Gilles Deleuze
1925–1995
French philosopher of difference who called himself a "pure metaphysician", replacing substance with multiplicity, and who wrote Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus with Félix Guattari.
Gilles Deleuze was born in Paris in 1925 and lived in the same part of the city almost all his life. His elder brother, arrested by the Nazis for resistance work, died on the train to Auschwitz. After studying the history of philosophy at the Sorbonne he chose, against the fashion for Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, to write his first book on Hume, followed by studies of Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson and Spinoza that were already building his own thought.
His own system arrived with Difference and Repetition (1968). That year he met Félix Guattari, an activist and radical psychoanalyst, and together they wrote the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the deliberately shocking Anti-Oedipus and the sprawling, non-linear A Thousand Plateaus, and finally What Is Philosophy? He also wrote on cinema, Proust and the painter Francis Bacon, as philosophy rather than criticism, and his ideas have been taken up well beyond philosophy, in architecture, geography, film and gender studies.
Key ideas
- Difference before identity
- Western thought, and Hegel above all, has put identity first and treated difference as a falling-away from it. Deleuze reverses the order: difference comes first, and in his metaphysics multiplicity replaces substance, the event replaces essence and the virtual replaces the possible.
- The genesis of real experience
- Where Kant sought the conditions of any possible experience, Deleuze, following Maimon’s criticism, asks how this actual experience of this individual comes about, and looks for a principle of genesis that is itself differential.
- Desiring-production
- With Guattari, he joins Marx and Freud without reducing either to the other: desire is productive and works directly in the social and natural world. This “desiring-production” is the basic process beneath nature, society and the psyche alike.
- Philosophy creates concepts
- Philosophy, science and art are three equal ways of thinking against chaos. Science builds functions, art builds blocs of sensation, and philosophy invents concepts.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- France
- Period
- Contemporary
- Themes
- What is ultimately real
Influences
Influenced by
1400 – 1800
- Baruch Spinoza1632–1677
- David Hume1711–1776
- Immanuel Kant1724–1804
- Salomon Maimon1753–1800
- G. W. F. Hegel1770–1831criticised
1800 – 1900
1900 onwards
Gilles Deleuze1925–1995
Influenced
Influenced by
1400 – 1800
- Baruch Spinoza1632–1677
- David Hume1711–1776
- Immanuel Kant1724–1804
- Salomon Maimon1753–1800
- G. W. F. Hegel1770–1831criticised
1800 – 1900
1900 onwards
Gilles Deleuze1925–1995
Influenced
Where these links come from
- Gilles Deleuze drew on Baruch Spinoza. Source: Daniel Smith, John Protevi and Daniela Voss, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Gilles Deleuze drew on David Hume. Source: Daniel Smith, John Protevi and Daniela Voss, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Gilles Deleuze drew on Immanuel Kant. Source: Daniel Smith, John Protevi and Daniela Voss, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Gilles Deleuze drew on Salomon Maimon. Source: Daniel Smith, John Protevi and Daniela Voss, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Gilles Deleuze argued against G. W. F. Hegel. Source: Daniel Smith, John Protevi and Daniela Voss, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Gilles Deleuze drew on Friedrich Nietzsche. Source: Daniel Smith, John Protevi and Daniela Voss, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Gilles Deleuze drew on Henri Bergson. Source: Daniel Smith, John Protevi and Daniela Voss, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Gilles Deleuze drew on Jean-Paul Sartre. Source: Daniel Smith, John Protevi and Daniela Voss, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Gilles Deleuze drew on Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Source: Ted Toadvine, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Jean-François Lyotard drew on Gilles Deleuze. Source: Peter Gratton, Jean François Lyotard, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Empiricism and Subjectivity, 1953
- Difference and Repetition, 1968
- Anti-Oedipus (with Félix Guattari), 1972
- A Thousand Plateaus (with Félix Guattari), 1980
- What Is Philosophy? (with Félix Guattari), 1991
Sources
- Daniel Smith, John Protevi and Daniela Voss, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Ted Toadvine, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy