Deleuze

Contemporary philosophy

A brilliant historian of philosophy, Deleuze went on to develop a thought entirely his own, ranging across fields as diverse as literature, cinema, politics, and psychoanalysis.
Professor at Paris VIII, he drew large crowds eager to encounter this committed, creative, and lucid 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 came into contact with a number of literary and philosophical figures (Bataille, Sartre, Butor, and others).

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

After the Liberation, he entered the khâgne and hypokhâgne classes at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, studying under such distinguished 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 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 made his name as a brilliant historian of philosophy, devoting essays to thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, and Spinoza, and to writers such as Proust and Kafka, approaching their thought from an original angle that illuminates decisive aspects of it.

A left-wing thinker — though he never joined the Communist Party — he threw his support behind the May '68 movement.

The Philosopher

The year 1969 was decisive: he defended his thesis, Difference and Repetition, and met Guattari, with whom he would go on to write two of his major works, 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 open to all, drew a wide audience who valued his pedagogical clarity and the directness of his expression.

In the last years of his life, he returned to the history of philosophy, turning his attention to Leibniz and devoting an essay to him: The Fold.

He agreed to take part in a documentary film devoted to him, l'Abécédaire.

In What is Philosophy?, he attempted to define the discipline to which he had devoted his life, characterising it as an activity that creates concepts.

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

While his iconoclastic, anarchic approach to philosophy drew criticism from some quarters, he was recognised as an essential thinker by many contemporaries, among them 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