Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most important French philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Born in 1925, he studied philosophy in Paris at the Lycée Carnot and the Sorbonne during the Second World War, passing the agrégation in 1949. He was trained in the history of philosophy by Ferdinand Alquié, Georges Canguilhem, and Jean Hippolyte, among others, and his early works were mostly monographs on individual philosophers, including Hume (Empiricism and Subjectivity, 1991 [1953]), Nietzsche (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1983 [1962]), Kant (Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 1983 [1963]), and Bergson (Bergsonism, 1988 [1966]). He also published a book on Proust during this early period, which signaled a lifelong preoccupation with literature (Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, 2000 [1964]). He published essays on Sacher-Masoch (“Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty by Gilles Deleuze and Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 1991 [1967]), Beckett, T. E. Lawrence, Melville, and Whitman (collected in Essays Critical and Clinical, 1997 [1993]). The end of this early period saw the publication of Deleuze’s doctoral studies, Difference and Repetition (1994 [1968]) and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990 [1968]), followed by The Logic of Sense (1990 [1969]). Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference intersected at some points with Derrida’s philosophy, but also departed from it in that Deleuze saw his practice of philosophy as straightforwardly metaphysical and constructive rather than deconstructive. In the 1960s, Deleuze taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. In 1969, at Foucault’s invitation, he took up a post at the experimental University of Paris 8 at Vincennes (later St. Denis), where he taught until his retirement in 1987. His encounter with Félix Guattari in the aftermath of May 1968 led to their two coauthored volumes under the general title Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1983 [1972]), followed by A Thousand Plateaus (1987 [1980]). This work produced a number of concepts that have been taken up in diverse fields across the humanities and social sciences. They also coauthored Kafka: For a Minor Literature (1986 [1975]), and a decade later they produced a reflective account of their practice of philosophy: What Is Philosophy? (1994 [1991]). A final phase of Deleuze’s work began after the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, and continued until his death in 1995. During this period he published an essay on the painting of Francis Bacon (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 2003 [1981]) and two short monographs: Foucault (1988 [1986]) and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993 [1988]). He also published a very influential two-volume study of the nature and history of cinema: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986 [1983]) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989 [1985]). As noted above, a collection of his literary philosophical essays, Essays Critical and Clinical, appeared in 1993 before being translated into English in 1997. After a long period of respiratory illness, Deleuze committed suicide in November 1995.