Deleuze

Contemporary philosophy

A brilliant historian of philosophy, Deleuze ended up producing a thought of his own, which took as its subject areas fields as diverse as literature, cinema, politics and psychoanalysis.
Professor at Paris VIII, he attracted crowds, eager to discover this committed, creative and educational mind.

Bibliography

Here are the essential books if you wish to better understand this author's thought:

Daniel W. Smith, Henry Somers-Hall (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, Cambridge University Press, 2012
Adrian Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary (Revised Edition), Edinburgh University Press, 2010
Daniela Voss, Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas, Edinburgh University Press, 2013
François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010
Smith, Daniel (2012). Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh University Press

Biography: life of Deleuze

Youth

Gilles Deleuze was born in Paris, in 1925.

In 1941, he entered the Lycée Carnot in Paris. Through his friend Michel Tournier, he met a number of literary and philosophical figures (Bataille, Sartre, Butor, etc.).

His brother, a member of the Resistance, died in deportation, which had a profound effect on him.

At the Liberation, he was admitted to the khâgne and hypokhâgne classes at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He studied under such prestigious teachers as F. Alquié, G. Canguilhem and J. Beaufret. He was not admitted to the ENS, but prepared for the agrégation at the Sorbonne, graduating second in 1948.

He spent a year studying in Germany, at the University of Tübingen, before returning to France. For four years, he taught at the Lycée d'Amiens, until his appointment at the Lycée Louis-le Grand.

Historian of philosophy

In 1957, he was appointed assistant professor at the Faculté de Lettres in Paris, and seven years later became a lecturer at the Faculté de Lettres in Lyon.

This was the period during which he established himself as a brilliant historian of philosophy, devoting essays to thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, or writers like Proust or Kafka, approaching their thought from an original angle that sheds light on decisive elements of it.

A left-wing thinker, even though he never joined the Communist Party, he supported the May 68 movement.

The philosopher

The year 1969 was crucial, as it was the year he defended his thesis, Difference and Repetition, and met Guattari, with whom he would write two of his major works a few years later, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

Until 1987, he taught as a professor at the University of Paris VIII. His lectures, which were freely accessible, attracted a wide audience who appreciated his pedagogical clarity, and the simplicity of his way of expressing himself.

In the last years of his life, he returned to the history of philosophy, taking an interest in Leibniz, and devoting an essay The Fold to him.

He agrees to appear in a documentary film devoted to him, l'Abécédaire.

He attempts to define the discipline to which he has devoted his life, in What is philosophy?, as an activity that creates concepts.

In 1995, the respiratory illness that had affected him since childhood worsened, and he chose to take his own life, in Paris.

While his iconoclastic, anarchistic approach to philosophy provoked criticism, he was recognised as an essential thinker by many contemporaries, such as G. Agamben, J. Derrida and J.F. Lyotard.

Main works

Empiricism and Subjectivity
Difference and Repetition
The Logic of Sense
Anti-Oedipus
A Thousand Plateaus
The Fold