Gilles Deleuze

Introduction

Gilles Deleuze is the French philosopher whose work across four decades produced one of the most distinctive bodies of late-twentieth-century continental philosophy. The individual work — the early monographs on Hume (Empiricism and Subjectivity, 1953), Nietzsche (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962), Kant (Kant's Critical Philosophy, 1963), Bergson (Bergsonism, 1966), Proust (Proust and Signs, 1964), Spinoza (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 1968), the systematic works Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969), the late books on cinema (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 1983; Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 1985), Foucault (Foucault, 1986), Leibniz (The Fold, 1988), and the final What Is Philosophy? (with Guattari, 1991) — constitutes one of the most extensive single corpuses in twentieth-century French philosophy.

The collaboration with the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari produced four major books: Anti-Oedipus (1972), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and What Is Philosophy? (1991). The Deleuze-Guattari corpus has been one of the most influential single bodies of work in late-twentieth-century continental philosophy and has shaped contemporary work in philosophy, cultural studies, political theory, art theory, and the broader engagement with the conditions of contemporary life.

Life

Gilles Deleuze was born on January 18, 1925, in Paris to a middle-class family. The early biographical record is comparatively unremarkable: a Parisian childhood, secondary education at the Lycée Carnot, philosophical studies at the Sorbonne under Ferdinand Alquié (the major French Cartesian) and Jean Hyppolite (the major French Hegelian and translator of the Phenomenology of Spirit). Deleuze took his agrégation in 1948 and his doctorate (with the Difference and Repetition primary thesis and the Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza secondary thesis) in 1968.

Deleuze taught at various French lycées and universities through the 1950s and 1960s before being appointed to the new University of Paris VIII (Vincennes) in 1969, which became one of the institutional homes of the French post-1968 intellectual reorganization. The Vincennes years saw the collaboration with Felix Guattari that produced Anti-Oedipus (1972) and the subsequent collaborative works. Deleuze remained at Vincennes (which became Paris VIII Saint-Denis after a 1980 move) until his retirement in 1987.

Deleuze suffered from chronic respiratory illness through much of his adult life. The condition worsened in the late 1980s and limited his mobility through the 1990s. On November 4, 1995, Deleuze committed suicide by jumping from the window of his Paris apartment; the immediate cause was his deteriorating health and the inability to continue working.

The problem he worked on

Deleuze's project across the major works was the development of a philosophy of difference — a philosophical framework that takes difference as the primary metaphysical category rather than identity. The dominant Western philosophical tradition, on Deleuze's diagnosis, has organized itself around the primacy of identity: things are first of all what they are (self-identical), and differences are secondary modifications of self-identical things. The Deleuzean reversal: difference is primary; identity is the effect produced by difference; the philosophical task is to develop the conceptual apparatus capable of thinking difference without subordinating it to identity.

The positive project draws on a counter-tradition that Deleuze constructs through his readings of Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bergson, and Leibniz. Each of these figures had, on Deleuze's reading, developed conceptual resources for thinking difference, multiplicity, and becoming in ways that the dominant tradition (organized around Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel) had marginalized. Deleuze's readings of these figures are at once interpretive and constructive: they recover resources for the philosophy of difference that Deleuze is developing.

Contributions

Difference and Repetition

The 1968 Différence et répétition is Deleuze's major systematic work and the canonical statement of the philosophy of difference. The book is organized in five chapters: Difference in Itself, Repetition for Itself, The Image of Thought, Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference, Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible. The framework develops the argument that difference and repetition are the metaphysical primitives from which identity and representation derive, rather than the other way around.

The argument against the image of thought (Chapter 3) is one of the most influential single portions of the book. The dominant Western philosophical tradition has operated with a particular image of thought — the assumption that thought is naturally oriented toward truth, that the philosopher recognizes the truth when it is presented, that the errors of thought are correctable through proper method. Deleuze's attack: this image of thought is itself an ideological construction that conceals the conditions under which thought actually occurs; the genesis of thought is not a calm recognition of the truth but a confrontation with what forces one to think, what resists thought, what disrupts the conditions of the conventional image.

The framework has been continuously generative. The influence on the contemporary continental engagement with the conditions of thought, the engagement with the philosophy of mind, the extension into political and aesthetic theory through subsequent Deleuze scholarship have all developed the framework substantially.

The Logic of Sense

The 1969 Logique du sens (The Logic of Sense) is the companion work to Difference and Repetition and the development of the philosophy of difference into the philosophy of language and meaning. The book is organized as a series of thirty-four series (Deleuze's term for his non-systematic philosophical investigations) that engage figures (the Stoics, Plato, Lewis Carroll, Antonin Artaud, the Freudian and Lacanian frameworks) in pursuit of a theory of sense (meaning as an event distinct from both the words that express it and the things they refer to).

The framework develops the concept of event (événement) — the register of meaning that is neither linguistic (it is what the linguistic signs express but not the signs themselves) nor material (it is what occurs in the world but not the physical conditions of occurrence). The influence on the contemporary engagement with the philosophy of language, with the philosophy of art, and with the broader engagement between continental and analytic philosophy of language has been substantial.

Anti-Oedipus

The 1972 L'Anti-Œdipe (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia) is the first major Deleuze-Guattari collaboration and one of the most influential single books of the post-1968 French intellectual landscape. The book is the critique of the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition through the framework of schizoanalysis (the analytic alternative to psychoanalysis that the book proposes).

The argument: the Freudian-Lacanian framework treats the Oedipus complex as the structural condition of all human desire; the argument of Anti-Oedipus is that the Oedipus complex is not a universal structural feature but a historical and cultural product of capitalist social organization that reduces the productive possibilities of desire to the confined family structure of bourgeois society. The alternative — schizoanalysis — takes desire as productive, as flowing through social and political formations, as exceeding the family structure that psychoanalysis treats as foundational.

The book is famously difficult. The prose proceeds through neologisms (desiring-machines, body without organs, deterritorialization, reterritorialization), engagement with both philosophical and scientific sources (Marx, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Foucault, but also biology, physics, anthropology, ethology), and refusal of the conventional structures of academic argument. The difficulty is itself integral to the project: the linear argument of conventional academic philosophy is precisely the intellectual form the book is criticizing.

A Thousand Plateaus

The 1980 Mille plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia) is the second volume of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project and the major Deleuze-Guattari work. The book is organized as a series of fifteen plateaus (each numbered with a date and an event) that develop concepts — rhizome, assemblage, plane of consistency, war machine, nomadology, minor literature, becoming-animal, body without organs — across domains (linguistics, anthropology, geology, music, literature, politics, biology).

The framework develops a alternative to the dominant Western philosophical organization through trees (substantial hierarchical structures with roots and branches) toward rhizomes (substantial non-hierarchical structures with multiple, lateral, non-centered connections). The framework has been continuously generative for contemporary thought across multiple disciplines.

Cinema

The two-volume Cinema (1983, 1985) is Deleuze's late work on film. The framework develops the Bergsonian analysis of time and movement into a taxonomy of cinematic images. Volume 1 (The Movement-Image) analyzes the pre-war cinema in terms of movement-images; Volume 2 (The Time-Image) analyzes the post-war cinema in terms of time-images that emerge after the crisis of the action-image in the post-war period.

The work has been continuously influential in film theory and in the contemporary engagement between continental philosophy and the visual arts.

Key works

Individual:

• Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953, on Hume)
• Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962)
• Kant's Critical Philosophy (1963)
• Proust and Signs (1964)
• Bergsonism (1966)
• Difference and Repetition (1968)
• Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968)
• The Logic of Sense (1969)
• Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983)
• Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985)
• Foucault (1986)
• The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988)
• Essays Critical and Clinical (1993)

With Felix Guattari:

• Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972)
• Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975)
• A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980)
• What Is Philosophy? (1991)

The Minuit editions are the French standard. The Athlone Press / Continuum / Columbia University Press editions are the principal English translations (mostly by Paul Patton, Mark Lester, Hugh Tomlinson, Brian Massumi).

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Nietzsche (the major philosophical influence; Nietzsche and Philosophy reshaped the French Nietzsche reception); Spinoza (the source of the philosophy of immanence and the alternative to the Cartesian tradition); Henri Bergson (the French predecessor whose philosophy of duration and multiplicity Deleuze recovered); Henri Maldiney (the phenomenological influence); Gilbert Simondon (the French philosopher of individuation whose work shaped Deleuze); Jean Hyppolite and Ferdinand Alquié (his Sorbonne teachers); the French historians of science (especially Georges Canguilhem); Marx (modified through the Deleuze-Guattari collaboration); Felix Guattari (the major collaborator whose psychiatric and political engagement shaped the joint work).

Influenced: Almost all post-1980 continental philosophy. The Italian engagement through Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri (whose collaboration with Michael Hardt in Empire, 2000, and the Multitude and Commonwealth sequels develops Deleuzean frameworks), Roberto Esposito; the American reception through Brian Massumi, Manuel DeLanda (whose Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 2002, gives a major analytic-friendly reading), Eugene Holland, Constantin Boundas, Daniel Smith; the influence on contemporary art theory through Pierre Levy, Lev Manovich; the influence on architecture through Greg Lynn, Peter Eisenman; the influence on contemporary continental political theory through Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau; the influence on the contemporary engagement with affect theory through Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant.

Reception

Deleuze's reception during his lifetime was within French philosophical circles from the late 1960s onward but slower in the Anglo-American world. The American reception developed through the 1980s and 1990s, especially through Brian Massumi's translations and through the broader engagement with the post-structuralist tradition. The contemporary reception is across multiple disciplines and continues to develop.

Critical reception has come from multiple directions. The analytic engagement has been limited but has produced work (Manuel DeLanda's work is the most-engaged analytic-friendly reading). The post-Deleuzean continental engagement (Badiou's critique in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, 1997) has both extended and contested the Deleuzean framework. The contemporary affect theory engagement has both developed and complicated the Deleuzean inheritance.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Daniel Smith's Essays on Deleuze (2012), James Williams's work on Difference and Repetition (2003) and The Logic of Sense (2008), the work of Eugene Holland, Constantin Boundas, Paul Patton, Brent Adkins, and the Deleuze Studies journal (since 2007). The Deleuze seminars at Vincennes (the recordings of which have been made available through the Vox Deleuziana project) provide major scholarly resources. Active debates concern the relation between the individual Deleuze and the Deleuze-Guattari collaboration, the political dimensions of the work, the relation between Deleuze and the post-Deleuzean engagement (especially through Badiou and Meillassoux), and the contemporary applicability of the Deleuzean framework across contemporary thought.

Further reading

• Nietzsche — the major philosophical predecessor Deleuze recovered
• Spinoza — the source of the philosophy of immanence
• Foucault — the contemporary on whom Deleuze wrote his major late book
• Marx — the political predecessor modified in the Deleuze-Guattari collaboration
• Leibniz — the early modern predecessor of Deleuze's The Fold

The French philosopher whose individual work and collaboration with Felix Guattari produced one of the most distinctive bodies of late-twentieth-century continental philosophy.