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Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His Metaphysics treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered to be his magnum opus.
An important part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the reading of other philosophers: the , Leibniz, David Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Henri Bergson. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers".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.' Although he once characterized himself as a "pure metaphysician",Beaulieu, Alain; Kazarian, Edward; Sushytska, Julia (eds.): Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014) his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across the humanities, including philosophy, art, and literary theory, as well as movements such as post-structuralism and postmodernism.See, for example, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory (Guilford Press, 1991), which devotes a chapter to Deleuze and Guattari.
In 1970, he was appointed to the University of Paris VIII, an experimental school organized to implement educational reform. 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.
He married Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan in 1956 and they had two children.
According to James Miller, Deleuze portrayed little visible interest in actually doing many of the risky things he so vividly conjured up in his lectures and writing. Married, with two children, 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".James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York: Harper Collins, 1993, p. 196.
When once asked to talk about his life, he replied: "Academics' lives are seldom interesting." Negotiations, p. 137. Deleuze concludes his reply to this critic thus:
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").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. He is buried in the cemetery of the village of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.
Like Kant, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as unifying forms imposed by the subject. He, therefore, concludes that pure difference is non-spatiotemporal; it is an idea, what Deleuze calls "the virtual". (The coinage refers to Proust's definition of what is constant in both the past and the present: "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.")Proust, Le Temps Retrouvé, ch. III. While Deleuze's virtual ideas superficially resemble Plato's forms and Kant's ideas of pure reason, they are not originals or models, nor do they transcend possible experience; instead they are the conditions of actual experience, the internal difference in itself. "The concept they the form is identical to its object." Desert Islands, p. 36. A Deleuzean idea or concept of difference is therefore not a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced thing, it is a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations.See "The Method of Dramatization" in Desert Islands, and "Actual and Virtual" in Dialogues II.
Thus, Deleuze at times refers to his philosophy as a transcendental empiricism (empirisme transcendantal), alluding to Kant.Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Continuum, 20041968, pp. 56 and 143.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." In Kant's transcendental idealism, experience only makes sense when organized by intuitions (namely, space and time) and concepts (such as causality). Assuming the content of these intuitions and concepts to be qualities of the world as it exists independently of human perceptual access, according to Kant, spawns seductive but senseless metaphysical beliefs (for example, extending the concept of causality beyond possible experience results in unverifiable speculation about a first cause). Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds human concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by prior categories, forcing the invention of new ways of thinking (see Epistemology).
Simultaneously, Deleuze claims that being is univocal, i.e., that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze borrows the doctrine of ontological univocity from the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus. In medieval disputes over the nature of God, many eminent theologians and philosophers (such as Thomas Aquinas) held that when one says that "God is good", God's goodness is only analogous to human goodness. Scotus argued to the contrary that when one says that "God is good", the goodness in question is exactly the same sort of goodness that is meant when one says "Jane is good". That is, God only differs from humans in degree, and properties such as goodness, power, reason, and so forth are univocally applied, regardless of whether one is talking about God, a person, or a flea.
Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. "With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being." Difference and Repetition, p. 39. Here Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance theory, God or Nature. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "pluralism = monism". A Thousand Plateaus, p. 20.
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".
The Logic of Sense, published in 1969, is one of Deleuze's most peculiar works in the field of epistemology. Michel Foucault, in his essay "Theatrum Philosophicum" about the book, attributed this to how he begins with his metaphysics but approaches it through language and truth; the book is focused on "the simple condition that instead of denouncing metaphysics as the neglect of being, we force it to speak of extrabeing". In it, he refers to epistemological : in the first series, as he analyzes Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, he remarks that "the personal self requires God and the world in general. But when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names of pause and rest are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God." The Logic of Sense, p. 3.
Deleuze's peculiar readings of the history of philosophy stem from this unusual epistemological perspective. 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." Negotiations, p. 136.
Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines philosophy as the creation of . For Deleuze, concepts are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that define a range of thinking, such as Plato's ideas, Descartes's cogito, or Kant's doctrine of the faculties. A philosophical concept "posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created." What Is Philosophy?, p. 22. In Deleuze's view, then, philosophy more closely resembles practical or artistic production than it does an adjunct to a definitive scientific description of a pre-existing world (as in the tradition of John Locke or Willard Van Orman Quine).
In his later work (from roughly 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each relating to reality in different ways. While philosophy creates concepts, the arts create novel qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what Deleuze calls "" and "affects"), and the sciences create quantitative theories based on fixed points of reference such as the speed of light or absolute zero (which Deleuze calls "functives"). According to Deleuze, none of these disciplines enjoy primacy over the others: Negotiations, p. 123. they are different ways of organizing the metaphysical flux, "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another." Negotiations, p. 125. For example, Deleuze does not treat cinema as an art representing an external reality, but as an ontological practice that creates different ways of organizing movement and time. Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical. Hence, instead of asking traditional questions of identity such as "is it true?" or "what is it?", Deleuze proposes that inquiries should be functional or practical: "what does it do?" or "how does it work?" Negotiations, p. 21: "We're strict functionalists: what we're interested in is how something works".
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 drives and Marxism Labour economics) 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, following Karl Marx, welcomes capitalism's destruction of traditional social hierarchies as liberating but inveighs against its homogenization of all values to the aims of the market.
The first part of Capitalism and Schizophrenia undertakes a universal history and posits the existence of a separate socius (the social body that takes credit for production) for each mode of production: the earth for the tribe, the body of the Despotism for the empire, and capital for capitalism.").Daniel W. Smith, Henry Somers-Hall (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 137.
In his 1990 essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" ("Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle"), 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.
But how does Deleuze square his pessimistic diagnoses with his ethical naturalism? Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or Immanence: 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—though 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?" Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 135.
The various monographs thus are not attempts to present what Nietzsche or Spinoza strictly intended, but re-stagings of their ideas in different and unexpected ways. Deleuze's peculiar readings aim to enact the creativity he believes is the acme of philosophical practice. Desert Islands, p. 144. A parallel in painting Deleuze points to is Francis Bacon's Study after Velázquez—it is quite beside the point to say that Bacon "gets Velasquez wrong". Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, pp. 46f: "Bacon let loose ... presences" already in Velázquez's painting. Cf. the passage cited above, from Negotiations, p. 136: "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." Similar considerations apply, in Deleuze's view, to his own uses of mathematical and scientific terms, pace critics such as Alan Sokal: "I'm not saying that Alain Resnais and Ilya Prigogine, or Jean-Luc Godard and Thom, are doing the same thing. I'm pointing out, rather, that there are remarkable similarities between scientific creators of functions and cinematic creators of images. And the same goes for philosophical concepts, since there are distinct concepts of these spaces." Negotiations, pp. 124–125.
" Difference and Repetition could be read as a response to Being and Time (for Deleuze, Being is difference, and time is repetition)."Bahoh continues in saying that: "...then Beiträge could be read as Difference and Repetition
"...the unity and univocity of being (in the sense of being), its 'selfsameness,' paradoxically consists exclusively in difference."This mutual apprehension of a differential, Evental ontology lead both thinkers into an extended critique of the representation characteristic to Platonic, Aristotelian, and Cartesian thought; as Joe Hughes states: " Difference and Repetition is a detective novel. It tells the story of what some readers of Deleuze might consider a horrendous crime ...: the birth of representation." Heidegger formed his critiques most decisively in the concept of the fourfold German:, a non-metaphysical grounding for the thing (as opposed to "object") as "ungrounded, mediated, meaningful, and shared" united in an "event of appropriation" Ereignis . This evental ontology continues in Identität und Differenz , where the fundamental concept expressed in Difference and Repetition , of dethroning the primacy of identity, can be seen throughout the text. Even in earlier Heideggerian texts such as Sein und Zeit'', however, the critique of representation is "...cast in terms of the being of truth, or the processes of uncovering and covering (grounded in Dasein's existence) whereby beings come into and withdraw from phenomenal presence." In parallel, 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."
Time and space, for both thinkers, is also constituted in nearly identical ways. Time-space in the Beiträge and the three syntheses in Difference and Repetition both apprehend time as grounded in difference, whilst the distinction between the time-space of the world Welt and the time-space as the eventual production of such a time-space is mirrored by Deleuze's categorization between the temporality of what is actual and temporality of the virtual in the first and the second/third syntheses respectively.
Another parallel can be found in their utilization of so-called "generative paradoxes," or rather problems whose fundamental problematic element is constantly outside the categorical grasp fond of formal, natural, and human sciences. For Heidegger, this is the Earth in the fourfold, something which has as one of its traits the behaviour of "resisting articulation," what he characterizes as a "strife"; for Deleuze, a similar example can be spotted in the paradox of regress, or of indefinite proliferation in the Logic of Sense.
In the 1980s and 1990s, almost all of Deleuze's books were translated into English. Deleuze's work is frequently cited in English-speaking academia (in 2007, e.g., he was the 11th most frequently cited author in English-speaking publications in the humanities, between Freud and Kant). In the English-speaking academy, Deleuze's work is typically classified as continental philosophy.See, e.g., Simon Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 54.
However, some French and some Anglophone philosophers criticised Deleuze's work.
According to Pascal Engel, Deleuze's metaphilosophical approach makes it impossible to reasonably disagree with a philosophical system, and so destroys meaning, truth, and philosophy itself. Engel summarizes Deleuze's metaphilosophy thus: "When faced with a beautiful philosophical concept you should just sit back and admire it. You should not question it."Barry Smith (ed.), European Philosophy and the American Academy, p. 34.
American philosopher Stanley Rosen objects to Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return.
Vincent Descombes argues that Deleuze's account of a difference that is not derived from identity (in Nietzsche and Philosophy) is incoherent.
Slavoj Žižek states that the Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus ("arguably Deleuze's worst book"),Žižek 2004, p. 21 the "political" Deleuze under the "'bad' influence" of Guattari, ends up, despite protestations to the contrary, as "the ideologist of late capitalism".Žižek 2004, pp. 32, 20, and 184.
Descombes argues that his analysis of history in Anti-Oedipus is 'utter idealism', criticizing reality for falling short of a non-existent ideal of schizophrenic becoming.
Žižek claims that Deleuze's ontology oscillates between materialism and idealism.Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 2004, pp. 19–32, esp. p. 21: "Is this opposition not, yet again, that of materialism versus idealism? In Deleuze, this means The Logic of Sense versus Anti-Oedipus." See also p. 28 for "Deleuze's oscillation between the two models" of becoming.
American philosopher Todd May argues that Deleuze's claim that difference is ontologically primary ultimately contradicts his embrace of immanence, i.e., his monism. However, May believes that Deleuze can discard the primacy-of-difference thesis, and accept a holism without significantly altering his practical philosophy.
It has more recently been argued by the Swedish philosopher that Deleuze's criticism of the history of philosophy as the metaphysical priority of identity over difference is a false distinction, and that Deleuze inadvertently reaches conclusions akin to such idealist philosophers of identity as Schelling.
Žižek also calls Deleuze to task for allegedly reducing the subject to "just another" substance and thereby failing to grasp the nothingness that, according to Lacan and Žižek, defines subjectivity. What remains worthwhile in Deleuze's oeuvre, Žižek finds, are precisely Deleuze's engagements with virtuality as the product of negativity.Žižek 2004, p. 68: "This brings us to the topic of the subject that, according to Lacan, emerges in the interstice of the 'minimal difference,' in the minimal gap between two signifiers. In this sense, the subject is 'a nothingness, a void, which exists.' ... This, then, is what Deleuze seems to get wrong in his reduction of the subject to (just another) substance. Far from belonging to the level of actualization, of distinct entities in the order of constituted reality, the dimension of the 'subject' designates the reemergence of the virtual within the order of actuality. 'Subject' names the unique space of the explosion of virtuality within constituted reality."
Smith, Protevi and Voss note "Sokal and Bricmont’s 1999 intimations" underestimated Deleuze's awareness of mathematics and pointed out several "positive views of Deleuze’s use of mathematics as provocations for ... his philosophical concepts", and that Deleuze's epistemology and ontology can be "brought together" with dynamical systems theory, chaos theory, biology, and geography.
| 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) | (1989) |
| Différence et répétition (1968) | Difference and Repetition (1994) |
| Spinoza et le problème de l'expression (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968 & 1985) | (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) | (1988) |
| Francis Bacon – Logique de la sensation (1981) | (2003) |
| Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement (1983) | (1986) |
| Cinéma II: L'image-temps (1985) | (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) |
In collaboration with Félix Guattari
In collaboration with Michel Foucault
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