(Praised for its rare combination of scholarly rigor and i...)
Praised for its rare combination of scholarly rigor and imaginative interpretation, Nietzsche and Philosophy has long been recognized as one of the most important analyses of Nietzsche. It is also one of the best introductions to Deleuze's thought, establishing many of his central philosophical positions. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze identifies and explores three crucial concepts in Nietzschean thought-multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation-and clarifies Nietzsche's views regarding the will to power, eternal return, nihilism, and difference.
(Proust and Signs is a 1964 book by the philosopher Gilles...)
Proust and Signs is a 1964 book by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in which the author explores the system of signs within the work of the celebrated French novelist Marcel Proust.
(Difference and Repetition is a 1968 book by the French ph...)
Difference and Repetition is a 1968 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Originally published in France, it was translated into English by Paul Patton in 1994.
(Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radic...)
Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions.
(Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1972 book...)
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1972 book by French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, respectively a philosopher and a psychoanalyst. It is the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the second being A Thousand Plateaus.
(A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 19...)
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1980 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
(Cinema 1: The Movement-Image is the first of two books on...)
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image is the first of two books on cinema by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the second being Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Together Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 have become known as the Cinema books, the two volumes are both complementary and interdependent.
(What is needed for something new to appear? According to ...)
What is needed for something new to appear? According to Gilles Deleuze, one of the most brilliant of contemporary philosophers, this question of "novelty" is the major problem posed by Bergson’s work. In Bergsonism, Deleuze demonstrates both the development and the range of three fundamental Bergsonian concepts: duration, memory, and the élan vital. A perfect companion book to Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Bergsonism is also of particular interest to students of Deleuze’s own work, influenced as it is by Bergson. Given his texts on Nietzsche, Kafka, and cinema, this book by Deleuze is essential to his English-reading audience. The paperback contains a new afterword prepared by the author, especially for this English-language edition.
(Called by many France's leading intellectual, Gilles Dele...)
Called by many France's leading intellectual, Gilles Deleuze is one of the most important philosophers in the Western world. His acclaimed works and celebrated collaborations with Felix Guattari have established him as a seminal figure in the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, and literary theory. The publication of What Is Philosophy? marks the culmination of Deleuze's career.
Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher. His most popular works were the two volumes co-written with Félix Guattari of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
Background
Gilles Deleuze was born on January 18, 1925, in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, a district that, excepting periods in his youth, he lived in for the whole of his life. He was the son of a conservative, anti-Semitic engineer, a veteran of World War I. Deleuze’s brother was arrested by Germans during the Nazi occupation of France for alleged resistance activities, and died on the way to Auschwitz.
Education
Due to his family's lack of money, Deleuze was schooled at a public school before the war. When the Germans invaded France, Deleuze was on vacation in Normandy and spent a year being schooled there. In Normandy, he was inspired by a teacher, under whose influence he read Gide, Baudelaire, and others, becoming for the first time interested in his studies. In a late interview, he states that after this experience, he never had any trouble academically. After returning to Paris and finishing his high school education, Deleuze attended the Lycée Henri IV, where he did his kâgne, an intensive year of study for students of promise, in 1945, and then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne with figures such as Jean Hippolyte and Georges Canguilheim. He passed his agrégation in 1948, necessary for entry into the teaching profession, and taught in a number of high schools until 1956.
Deleuze’s historically oriented study at the Sorbonne led him to devote his first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953), to Hume. In an era in which peers like Foucault and Derrida, students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, concentrated on "the three 'H's" (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger), Deleuze’s decision to write on empiricism and Hume was already a provocation, early evidence of the heterodox tendencies of his thought.
From 1953 to 1962 - which he later referred to as "a hole in my life" - Deleuze published little, moving among various teaching positions in Paris and the provinces. It was also during this time that he contracted the recurring respiratory ailment that would plague him for the rest of his life. In 1962, Nietzsche and Philosophy was published to considerable acclaim, cementing Deleuze’s reputation in academic circles. He followed this initial success with Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1963); Proust and Signs (1964); and Bergsonism (1966).
In 1968 he published Difference and Repetition as his primary thesis for the doctorat d’Etat, with Spinoza and the Problem of Expression as the secondary thesis. The next year, 1969, proved to be an important one for Deleuze. First, he found a permanent teaching position in Paris, at the experimental campus of the University of Paris VIII in Vincennes (which later moved to its current location in St. Denis); he gave weekly seminars at this institution until his retirement in 1987.
Second, he published another major text in his own name, Logic of Sense. But most importantly, it was then that he met Félix Guattari, a radical psychoanalyst and political militant, with whom he began a long collaboration. Their first joint volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), was a best seller in France, a veritable succès de scandale, and thrust Deleuze into the limelight as a public intellectual. They followed this with Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), and then a book which, at least in the eyes of some, rivals Difference and Repetition for the title of Deleuze’s masterwork, A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
The 1980s were a decade of independent works for Deleuze: Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation (1981); Cinema I: The Movement-Image (1983); Cinema II: The Time-Image (1985); Foucault (1986); and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988).
He then resumed his collaboration with Guattari for their final joint work, What is Philosophy? (1991). His final years were spent in very ill health, although he did manage to publish a remarkable short essay, "Immanence: A Life" in 1995, before taking his own life on November 4, 1995.
Deleuze was one of the most important French philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century.
He became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz, and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art.
(Difference and Repetition is a 1968 book by the French ph...)
1968
Religion
Deleuze is in general critical of religions. As early as in his first book on Hume, Empiricism, and Subjectivity, he argued that religions are nothing but a fanciful, illegitimate, and extensive use of the rules of the association. This attitude toward religions is extended in his later works such as his last book with Felix Guattari What is Philosophy? where he states that religion introduces a form of transcendence that brings sadness.
Although Deleuze was critical of religions in general, it would be a mistake to think that his attitude was simply a negative one. There are also places where he seemed to hold a positive or at least a neutral evaluation with regard to religious ideas. In Deleuze’s engagement with Kant’s thought, for instance, he introduced the possibility of an "atheistic metaphysics" arriving from within religions itself. Here Deleuze placed importance on Kant’s theory of God not as an object of belief but as the transcendental ideal of pure reason that makes belief possible in the first place.
According to Deleuze, it is the mystic who plays the whole of the universe as its "mystical soul" where philosophers can only consider such a soul "from the outside."
Politics
During the seventies, Deleuze was politically active in a number of causes, including membership in the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (formed, with others, by Michel Foucault), and had an engaged concern with homosexual rights and the Palestinian liberation movement.
Views
Deleuze is a key figure in postmodern French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference, and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of the 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity, and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics, he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence. He argued, then, that there is no good and evil, but rather only relationships that are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals. This ethics influences his approach to society and politics, especially as he was so politically active in struggles for rights and freedoms. Later in his career, he wrote some of the more infamous texts of the period, in particular, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts are collaborative works with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and they exhibit Deleuze’s social and political commitment.
Gilles Deleuze began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the Continental tradition in vogue at the time. His first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity, is a study of Hume, interpreted by Deleuze to be a radical subjectivist.
Deleuze claimed that he did not write "about" art, literature, or cinema, but, rather, undertook philosophical "encounters" that led him to new concepts.
As a constructivist, he was adamant that philosophers are creators, and that each reading of philosophy, or each philosophical encounter, ought to inspire new concepts. Additionally, according to Deleuze and his concepts of difference, there is no identity, and in repetition, nothing is ever the same. Rather, there is the only difference: copies are something new, everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.
Quotations:
"A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window."
"The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?"
"The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or even rarer, the thing that might be worth saying."
"Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject."
"Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political."
"The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?"
"I have no admiration for culture. I have no reserve knowledge, no provisional knowledge. And everything that I learn, I learn for a particular task, and once it's done, I immediately forget it, so that if ten years later, I have to get involved with something close to or directly within the same subject, I would have to start again from zero, with some few exceptions."
"Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with land surveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come."
"Things never pass where you think, nor along the paths you think"
"A creator is someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities."
"It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality."
"There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons."
Personality
Gilles Deleuze had long fingernails, as he told, it was an homage to the Russian poet Pushkin.
Interests
art, cinema, music, literature
Philosophers & Thinkers
Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault
Writers
André Paul Guillaume Gide, Charles Baudelaire
Connections
In 1948 he married Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan, a French translator of D.H. Lawrence. He is the father of Emilie Deleuze, French director, and Julien Deleuze, an English translator.