Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze (French: [il dlz]; 18 January 1925

4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who,
from the early 1960s until his death, wrote inuentially on philosophy, literature, lm, and ne 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
Flix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Dierence and
Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be
his magnum opus.[2] A.W. Moore, after citing Bernard
Williams's criteria for qualifying as a great thinker, ranks
him among the greatest philosophers.[3]

drew a number of talented scholars, including Foucault

(who suggested Deleuzes hiring), and the psychoanalyst
Flix Guattari. Deleuze taught at Vincennes until his retirement in 1987.

Deleuze, who had suered from respiratory ailments

from a young age,[6] developed tuberculosis in 1968 and
underwent a thoracoplasty (lung removal).[7] He suffered increasingly severe respiratory symptoms for the
rest of his life.[8] In the last years of his life, simple
tasks such as handwriting required laborious eort. In
1995, he committed suicide, throwing himself from the
window of his apartment.[9] Prior to his death, Deleuze
had announced his intention to write a book entitled La
Grandeur de Marx, and left behind two chapters of an
1 Life
unnished project entitled Ensembles and Multiplicities
(these chapters have been published as the essays Imma[10]
Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in Paris and nence: A Life and The Actual and the Virtual). He
the cemetery of the village of Saint-Lonardlived there for most of his life. His initial schooling is buried in[11]
de-Noblat.
was undertaken during World War II, during which time
he attended the Lyce Carnot. He also spent a year in Deleuze himself found little to no interest in the comkhgne at the Lyce Henri IV. During the Nazi occu- position of an autobiography. When once asked to talk
pation of France, Deleuzes older brother, Georges, was about his life, he replied: Academics lives are seldom
arrested for his participation in the French Resistance, interesting.[12] When a critic seized upon Deleuzes unand died while in transit to a concentration camp.[4] In usually long, uncut ngernails as a revealing eccentricity,
1944, Deleuze went to study at the Sorbonne. His teach- he replied: I haven't got the normal protective whorls, so
ers there included several noted specialists in the his- that touching anything, especially fabric, causes such irritory of philosophy, such as Georges Canguilhem, Jean tation that I need long nails to protect them.[13] Deleuze
Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alqui, and Maurice de Gandil- concludes his reply to this critic thus:
lac, and Deleuzes lifelong interest in the canonical gures of modern philosophy owed much to these teachers.
What do you know about me, given that I beIn addition, Deleuze found the work of Jean-Paul Sartre
lieve in secrecy? ... If I stick where I am, if I
attractive.[5]
don't travel around, like anyone else I make my
inner journeys that I can only measure by my
Deleuze passed the agrgation in philosophy in 1948,
emotions, and express very obliquely and cirand taught at various lyces (Amiens, Orlans, Louis le
cuitously in what I write. ... Arguments from
Grand) until 1957, when he took up a position at the Sorones own privileged experience are bad and rebonne. In 1953, he published his rst monograph, Emactionary arguments.[14]
piricism and Subjectivity, on Hume. He married Denise
Paul Fanny Grandjouan in 1956. From 1960 to 1964
he held a position at the Centre National de Recherche Like many of his contemporaries, including Sartre and
Scientique. During this time he published the seminal Foucault, Deleuze was an atheist.[15][16]
Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and befriended Michel
Foucault. From 1964 to 1969 he was a professor at the
University of Lyon. In 1968 he published his two disser- 2 Philosophy
tations, Dierence and Repetition (supervised by Gandillac) and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (super- Deleuzes works fall into two groups: on one hand,
vised by Alqui).
monographs interpreting the work of other philosophers
In 1969 he was appointed to the University of Paris VIII at (Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, David
Vincennes/St. Denis, an experimental school organized Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergto implement educational reform. This new university son, Foucault) and artists (Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka,
1

2 PHILOSOPHY

Francis Bacon); on the other, eclectic philosophical

tomes organized by concept (e.g., dierence, sense,
events, schizophrenia, cinema, philosophy). Regardless
of topic, however, Deleuze consistently develops variations on similar ideas.

lectual categories (such as causality). Assuming the content of these forms and categories to be qualities of the
world as it exists independently of our perceptual access,
according to Kant, spawns seductive but senseless metaphysical beliefs (for example, extending the concept of
causality beyond possible experience results in unveriable speculation about a rst cause). Deleuze inverts
2.1 Metaphysics
the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of
Deleuzes main philosophical project in the works he dierence actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior catwrote prior to his collaborations with Guattari can egories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking (see
be baldly summarized as an inversion of the tradi- below, Epistemology).
tional metaphysical relationship between identity and
dierence. Traditionally, dierence is seen as deriva- Simultaneously, Deleuze claims that being is univocal,
tive from identity: e.g., to say that X is dierent from i.e., that all of its senses are armed in one voice.
Y assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable Deleuze borrows the doctrine of ontological univocity
identities (as in Platos forms). To the contrary, Deleuze from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus. In meclaims that all identities are eects of dierence. Identi- dieval disputes over the nature of God, many eminent theties are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to dif- ologians and philosophers (such as Thomas Aquinas) held
ference, Deleuze argues, given that there exist dier- that when one says that God is good, Gods goodness
ences of nature between things of the same genus.[17] is only analogous to human goodness. Scotus argued to
That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the cat- the contrary that when one says that God is good, the
egories we use to identify individuals in the rst place goodness in question is exactly the same sort of goodderive from dierences. Apparent identities such as X ness that is meant when one says Jane is good. That is,
are composed of endless series of dierences, where X God only diers from us in degree, and properties such
= the dierence between x and x'", and x'" = the dif- as goodness, power, reason, and so forth are univocally
ference between..., and so forth. Dierence, in other applied, regardless of whether one is talking about God,
words, goes all the way down. To confront reality hon- a person, or a ea.
estly, Deleuze argues, we must grasp beings exactly as Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that
they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, re- being is, univocally, dierence. With univocity, howsemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail ever, it is not the dierences which are and must be: it
to attain what he calls dierence in itself. If philoso- is being which is Dierence, in the sense that it is said
phy has a positive and direct relation to things, it is only of dierence. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal
insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, ac- in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality
cording to what it is, in its dierence from everything it which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being.[22]
is not, in other words, in its internal dierence.[18]
Here Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza, who
Like Kant and Bergson, Deleuze considers traditional no- maintained that everything that exists is a modication of
tions of space and time as unifying forms imposed by the one substance, God or Nature. For Deleuze, there is
the subject. He therefore concludes that pure dier- no one substance, only an always-dierentiating process,
ence is non-spatio-temporal; it is an idea, what Deleuze an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding.
in the paradoxical forcalls the virtual. (The coinage refers to Prousts def- Deleuze summarizes this ontology
[23]
mula
"pluralism
=
monism".
inition of what is constant in both the past and the
present: real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.[19] ) While Deleuzes virtual ideas supercially resemble Plato's forms and Kants 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 dierence in itself.
The concept they [the conditions] form is identical to its
object.[20] A Deleuzean idea or concept of dierence is
therefore not a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced
thing, it is a real system of dierential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations.[21]

Dierence and Repetition (1968) is Deleuzes 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.

Thus, Deleuze at times refers to his philosophy as a transcendental empiricism, alluding to Kant and Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. In Kants transcendental idealism, experience only makes sense when organized by
forms of sensibility (namely, space and time) and intel-

Deleuzes unusual metaphysics entails an equally atypical

epistemology, or what he calls a transformation of the
image of thought. According to Deleuze, the traditional
image of thought, found in philosophers such as Aristotle,
Ren Descartes, and Edmund Husserl, misconceives of

2.2 Epistemology

2.3

Values

thinking as a mostly unproblematic business. Truth may

be hard to discoverit may require a life of pure theorizing, or rigorous computation, or systematic doubtbut
thinking is able, at least in principle, to correctly grasp
facts, forms, ideas, etc. It may be practically impossible
to attain a Gods-eye, neutral point of view, but that is the
ideal to approximate: a disinterested pursuit that results
in a determinate, xed truth; an orderly extension of common sense. Deleuze rejects this view as papering over the
metaphysical ux, instead claiming that genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary
rupture of established categories. Truth changes what we
think; it alters what we think is possible. By setting aside
the assumption that thinking has a natural ability to recognize the truth, Deleuze says, we attain a thought without
image, a thought always determined by problems rather
than solving them. All this, however, presupposes codes
or axioms which do not result by chance, but which do
not have an intrinsic rationality either. Its just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you accept sin,
the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason
is always a region carved out of the irrationalnot sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only
dened by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and
drift.[24]
Deleuzes peculiar readings of the history of philosophy
stem from this unusual epistemological perspective. To
read a philosopher is no longer to aim at nding a single,
correct interpretation, but is instead to present a philosophers 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.[25]
Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze denes philosophy as the creation of concepts. For Deleuze, concepts
are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that dene a range of thinking, such as
Platos ideas, Descartess cogito, or Kants doctrine of the
faculties. A philosophical concept posits itself and its
object at the same time as it is created.[26] In Deleuzes
view, then, philosophy more closely resembles practical
or artistic production than it does an adjunct to a denitive scientic 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 analyzing reality in dierent
ways. While philosophy creates concepts, the arts create novel qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what Deleuze calls percepts and aects), and
the sciences create quantitative theories based on xed

3
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:[27] they are dierent ways of organizing the
metaphysical ux, separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another.[28] For example, Deleuze does
not treat cinema as an art representing an external reality, but as an ontological practice that creates dierent
ways of organizing movement and time.[29] 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?"[30]

2.3 Values
In ethics and politics, Deleuze again echoes Spinoza, albeit in a sharply Nietzschean key. In a classical liberal
model of society, morality begins from individuals, who
bear abstract natural rights or duties set by themselves or
a God. Following his rejection of any metaphysics based
on identity, Deleuze criticizes the notion of an individual
as an arresting or halting of dierentiation (as the etymology of the word individual suggests). Guided by
the naturalistic ethics of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze
instead seeks to understand individuals and their moralities as products of the organization of pre-individual desires and powers. In the two volumes of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari describe history as
a congealing and regimentation of "desiring-production"
(a concept combining features of Freudian drives and
Marxist labor) into the modern individual (typically neurotic and repressed), the nation-state (a society of continuous control), and capitalism (an anarchy domesticated
into infantilizing commodication). Deleuze, following
Karl Marx, welcomes capitalisms destruction of traditional social hierarchies as liberating, but inveighs against
its homogenization of all values to the aims of the market.
But how does Deleuze square his pessimistic diagnoses
with his ethical naturalism? Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or immanent: to live well is to
fully express ones power, to go to the limits of ones potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical,
transcendent standards. Modern society still suppresses
dierence and alienates persons from what they can do.
To arm reality, which is a ux of change and dierence, we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can becomethough we cannot know
what that is 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?"[31]

2.4

3 RECEPTION

Deleuzes interpretations

quently 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).[42] Like his contemporaries Foucault,
Derrida, and Jean-Franois Lyotard, Deleuzes inuence has been most strongly felt in North American
humanities departments, particularly in literary theory,
where Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are oft
regarded as major statements of post-structuralism and
postmodernism,[43] though neither Deleuze nor Guattari
described their work in those terms. Likewise in the
English-speaking academy, Deleuzes work is typically
classied as continental philosophy.[44]

Deleuzes studies of individual philosophers and artists

are purposefully heterodox. In Nietzsche and Philosophy,
for example, Deleuze claims that Nietzsches On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is an attempt to rewrite Kants
Critique of Pure Reason (1781),[32] even though Nietzsche nowhere mentions the First Critique in the Genealogy, and the Genealogy's moral topics are far removed
from the epistemological focus of Kants book. Likewise, Deleuze claims that univocity is the organizing principle of Spinozas philosophy, despite the total absence of
the term from any of Spinozas works. Deleuze once famously described his method of interpreting philosophers Deleuze has attracted critics as well. The following list is
as "buggery (enculage)", as sneaking behind an author and not exhaustive, and gives only the briefest of summaries.
producing an ospring which is recognizably his, yet also
In Modern French Philosophy (1979), Vincent Demonstrous and dierent.[33]
scombes argues that Deleuzes account of a dierence
The various monographs thus are not attempts to present that is not derived from identity (in Nietzsche and Phiwhat Nietzsche or Spinoza strictly intended, but re- losophy) is incoherent, and that his analysis of history
stagings of their ideas in dierent and unexpected ways. in Anti-Oedipus is 'utter idealism', criticizing reality for
Deleuzes peculiar readings aim to enact the creativity he falling short of a non-existent ideal of schizophrenic
believes is the acme of philosophical practice.[34] A paral- becoming.[45]
lel in painting Deleuze points to is Francis Bacons Study
after Velzquezit is quite beside the point to say that In What Is Neostructuralism? (1984), Manfred Frank
Bacon gets Velasquez wrong.[35] Similar considerations claims that Deleuzes theory of individuation as a process
apply, in Deleuzes view, to his own uses of mathemati- of bottomless dierentiation fails to explain the unity of
cal and scientic terms, pace critics such as Alan Sokal: consciousness.
I'm not saying that Resnais and Prigogine, or Godard and In The Decline and Fall of French NietzscheoThom, are doing the same thing. I'm pointing out, rather, Structuralism (1994), Pascal Engel presents a wholesale
that there are remarkable similarities between scientic condemnation of Deleuzes thought. According to Engel,
creators of functions and cinematic creators of images. Deleuzes metaphilosophical approach makes it impossiAnd the same goes for philosophical concepts, since there ble to reasonably disagree with a philosophical system,
are distinct concepts of these spaces.[36]
and so destroys meaning, truth, and philosophy itself. Engel summarizes Deleuzes metaphilosophy thus: When
faced with a beautiful philosophical concept you should
just sit back and admire it. You should not question it.[46]
3 Reception
In the 1960s, Deleuzes portrayal of Nietzsche as a metaphysician of dierence rather than a reactionary mystic
contributed greatly to the plausibility and popularity of
left-wing Nietzscheanism as an intellectual stance.[37]
His books Dierence and Repetition (1968) and The Logic
of Sense (1969) led Michel Foucault to declare that one
day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian.[38]
(Deleuze, for his part, said Foucaults comment was a
joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make
everyone else livid.[39] ) In the 1970s, the Anti-Oedipus,
written in a style by turns vulgar and esoteric,[40] oering
a sweeping analysis of the family, language, capitalism,
and history via eclectic borrowings from Freud, Marx,
Nietzsche, and dozens of other writers, was received as
a theoretical embodiment of the anarchic spirit of May
1968. In 1994 and 1995, L'Abcdaire de Gilles Deleuze,
an eight-hour series of interviews between Deleuze and
Claire Parnet, aired on Frances Arte Channel.[41]

In The Mask of Enlightenment (1995), Stanley Rosen objects to Deleuzes interpretation of Nietzsches eternal return.[47]
In Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1997), Alain Badiou
claims that Deleuzes metaphysics only apparently embraces plurality and diversity, remaining at bottom relentlessly monist. Badiou further argues that, in practical
matters, Deleuzes monism entails an ascetic, aristocratic
fatalism akin to ancient Stoicism.[48]
In Reconsidering Dierence (1997), Todd May argues
that Deleuzes claim that dierence is ontologically primary ultimately contradicts his embrace of immanence,
i.e., his monism. However, May believes that Deleuze
can discard the primacy-of-dierence thesis, and accept
a Wittgensteinian holism without signicantly altering his
practical philosophy.[49]

In Fashionable Nonsense, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

accuse Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientic
In the 1980s and 1990s, almost all of Deleuzes books terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical
were translated into English. Deleuzes work is fre- meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in

5
his philosophical system. (But see above, Deleuzes interpretations.) Sokal and Bricmont state that they don't object to metaphorical reasoning, including with mathematical concepts, but mathematical and scientic terms are
useful only insofar as they are precise. They give examples of mathematical concepts being abused by taking
them out of their intended meaning; rendering the idea
into normal language reduces it to banality, truism or nonsense. In their opinion, Deleuze and Guattari used mathematical concepts about which the typical reader might be
not knowledgeable, and thus served to display erudition
rather than enlightening the reader. Sokal and Bricmont
state that they only dealt with the abuse of mathematical
and scientic concepts and explicitly suspend judgment
about Deleuzes wider contributions.[50]
In Organs without Bodies (2003), Slavoj iek claims that
Deleuzes ontology oscillates between materialism and
idealism,[51] and that the Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus (arguably Deleuzes worst book),[52] the political Deleuze
under the "'bad' inuence of Guattari, ends up, despite
protestations to the contrary, as the ideologist of late
capitalism.[53] iek 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 iek, denes subjectivity.[54]
In Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (2006), Peter Hallward argues that Deleuzes insistence that being is necessarily creative and alwaysdierentiating entails that his philosophy can oer no insight into, and is supremely indierent to, the material,
actual conditions of existence. Thus Hallward claims that
Deleuzes thought is literally other-worldly, aiming only at
a passive contemplation of the dissolution of all identity
into the theophanic self-creation of nature.

Dirence et rptition (1968). Trans. Dierence

and Repetition (1994).
Spinoza et le problme de l'expression (1968). Trans.
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990).
Logique du sens (1969). Trans. The Logic of Sense
(1990).
Spinoza - Philosophie pratique (1970, 2nd ed. 1981).
Trans. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988).
Dialogues (1977, 2nd exp. ed. 1996, with Claire
Parnet). Trans. Dialogues II (1987, 2nd exp. ed.
2002).
'One Less Manifesto' (1978) in Superpositions (with
Carmelo Bene).
Francis Bacon - Logique de la sensation (1981).
Trans. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
(2003).
Cinma I: L'image-mouvement (1983).
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986).

Trans.

Cinma II: L'image-temps (1985). Trans. Cinema 2:

The Time-Image (1989).
Foucault (1986). Trans. Foucault (1988).
Le pli - Leibniz et le baroque (1988). Trans. The
Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993).
Pricls et Verdi: La philosophie de Francois Chtelet
(1988). Trans. in Dialogues II, revised ed. (2007).
Pourparlers (1990). Trans. Negotiations (1995).
Critique et clinique (1993). Trans. Essays Critical
and Clinical (1997).

Bibliography

Pure Immanence (2001).

L'le dserte et autres textes (2002). Trans. Desert
Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (2003).

By Gilles Deleuze
Empirisme et subjectivit (1953). Trans. Empiricism
and Subjectivity (1991).
Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962). Trans. Nietzsche
and Philosophy (1983).
La philosophie critique de Kant (1963).
Kants Critical Philosophy (1983).

Trans.

Proust et les signes (1964, 2nd exp. ed. 1976).

Trans. Proust and Signs (1973, 2nd exp. ed. 2000).

Deux rgimes de fous et autres textes (2004). Trans.

Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews
1975-1995 (2006).
In collaboration with Flix Guattari
Capitalisme et Schizophrnie 1.
L'Anti-dipe
(1972). Trans. Anti-Oedipus (1977).

in Pure Immanence

Kafka: Pour une Littrature Mineure (1975). Trans.

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986).

Le Bergsonisme (1966). Trans. Bergsonism (1988).

Rhizome (1976). Trans., in revised form, in A Thousand Plateaus (1987)

Prsentation de Sacher-Masoch (1967).

Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1989).

Nomadology: The War Machine (1986). Trans. in

A Thousand Plateaus (1987)

Nietzsche (1965).
(2001).

Trans.

Trans.

7
Capitalisme et Schizophrnie 2. Mille Plateaux
(1980). Trans. A Thousand Plateaus (1987).
Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (1991). Trans. What
Is Philosophy? (1994).

In collaboration with Michel Foucault

The Intellectuals and Power: A Discussion Between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. TELOS
16 (Summer 1973). New York: Telos Press
(Reprinted in L'le dserte et autres textes / Desert
Islands and Other Texts, above.)

Documentary
L'Abcdaire de Gilles Deleuze, with Claire Parnet,
produced by Pierre-Andr Boutang. ditions Montparnasse.

See also
Deleuze and Guattari
Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation
Minority (philosophy)
Percept
Problem of future contingents
Virtuality (philosophy)

Notes and references

NOTES AND REFERENCES

[3] 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 supercially
reassuring; and, in an unusually lucky case, the gifts of a
great writer.'
[4] Franois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 89.
[5] Dialogues, p. 12: At the Liberation we were still
strangely stuck in the history of philosophy. We simply
plunged into Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger; we threw ourselves like puppies into a scholasticism worse than that of
the Middle Ages. Fortunately there was Sartre. Sartre was
our Outside, he was really the breath of fresh air from the
backyard.
[6] Francois Dosse, Deleuze and Guattari: Intersecting Lives,
trans D. Glassman, CUP 2010, p98
[7] Francois Dosse, Deleuze and Guattari: Intersecting Lives,
trans D. Glassman, CUP 2010, p178
[8] Gilles Deleuze et les mdecins
[9] Gilles Deleuze. Encyclopdia Britannica. Retrieved
July 8, 2009.
[10] F. 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.
[11] Communaut de Communes de Noblat Archived October
18, 2014 at the Wayback Machine
[12] Negotiations, p. 137.
[13] Negotiations, p. 5.

[1] Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II pp.57-8, trans. Hugh

Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam: Apart from Sartre,
the most important philosopher in France was Jean Wahl.
Deleuze goes on to credit Wahl for introducing him to English and American thought. Wahl was among the very
rst to write about Whitehead and James - both arguably
very important to Deleuze - in French. The idea of AngloAmerican pluralism in Deleuzes work shows inuence of
Jean Wahl (see also Mary Frances Zamberlin, Rhizosphere
(New York: Routledge, 2006))
[2] Gilles Deleuze. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Retrieved 17 February 2011. See also: "Dierence and
Repetition is denitely the most important work published
by Deleuze. (Edouard Morot-Sir, from the back cover
of the rst edition of the English translation), or James
Williams judgment: It is nothing less than a revolution
in philosophy and stands out as one of the great philosophical works of the twentieth century (Williams, Gilles
Deleuzes Dierence and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide [Edinburgh UP, 2003], p. 1).

[14] Negotiations., pp. 11-12.

[15] Deleuzes atheist philosophy of immanence is an artistic (or creative) power at work on theology Deleuze and
Religion. Mary Bryden (2002). Routledge, p. 157.
[16] Deleuzes atheist critique is powerful (...)" Iconoclastic
Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism.
F. LeRon Shults (2014). Edinburgh University Press, p.
103.
[17] Bergsons Conception of Dierence, in Desert Islands,
p. 33.
[18] Desert Islands, p. 32.
[19] Proust, Le Temps Retrouv, ch. III: see the fourth line from
the bottom of this page, or, in English translation, the thirteenth paragraph here: I began to discover the cause by
comparing those varying happy impressions which had the
common quality of being felt simultaneously at the actual

moment and at a distance in time, because of which common quality the noise of the spoon upon the plate, the unevenness of the paving-stones, the taste of the madeleine,
imposed the past upon the present and made me hesitate
as to which time I was existing in. Of a truth, the being
within me which sensed this impression, sensed what it
had in common in former days and now, sensed its extratemporal character, a being which only appeared when
through the medium of the identity of present and past,
it found itself in the only setting in which it could exist
and enjoy the essence of things, that is, outside Time.
[...] Nothing but a moment of the past? Much more
perhaps; something which being common to the past and
the present, is more essential than both. [...] a marvellous expedient of nature had caused a sensation to ash to
mesound of a spoon and of a hammer, uneven pavingstonessimultaneously in the past which permitted my
imagination to grasp it and in the present in which the
shock to my senses caused by the noise had eected a
contact between the dreams of the imagination and that
of which they are habitually deprived, namely, the idea
of existenceand thanks to that stratagem had permitted that being within me to secure, to isolate and to render static for the duration of a lightning ash that which
it can never wholly grasp, a fraction of Time in its pure
essence. When, with such a shudder of happiness, I heard
the sound common, at once, to the spoon touching the
plate, to the hammer striking the wheel, to the unevenness
of the paving-stones in the courtyard of the Guermantes
mansion and the Baptistry of St. Marks, it was because
that being within me can only be nourished on the essence
of things and nds in them alone its subsistence and its delight. It languishes in the observation by the senses of the
present sterilised by the intelligence awaiting a future constructed by the will out of fragments of the past and the
present from which it removes still more reality, keeping
that only which serves the narrow human aim of utilitarian purposes. But let a sound, a scent already heard and
breathed in the past be heard and breathed anew, simultaneously in the present and in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, then instantly the
permanent and characteristic essence hidden in things is
freed and our true being which has for long seemed dead
but was not so in other ways awakes and revives, thanks
to this celestial nourishment.
[20] Desert Islands, p. 36.
[21] See The Method of Dramatization in Desert Islands, and
Actual and Virtual in Dialogues II.
[22] Dierence and Repetition, p. 39.
[23] A Thousand Plateaus, p. 20.
[24] Desert Islands, p. 262.
[25] Negotiations, p. 136.

[29] Cinema 1: The Movement Image

[30] Negotiations, p. 21: We're strict functionalists: what
we're interested in is how something works.
[31] Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 135.
[32] Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 88.
[33] Negotiations, p. 6. See also: Daniel W. Smith, The Inverse Side of the Structure: Zizek on Deleuze on Lacan,
Criticism (2004): Deleuzes all-too-well-known image of
philosophical buggery, which makes thinkers produce
their own monstrous children"; Robert Sinnerbrink (in
Nomadology or Ideology? Zizeks Critique of Deleuze,
Parrhesia 1 (2006): 62-87) describes the popular topic
of Deleuzes notorious remarks"; Donald Callen (in The
Dicult Middle, Rhizomes 10 (Spring 2005)) describes
intellectual buggery as what Deleuze himself famously
said about his encounters with the works of other philosophers. Deleuzes buggery analogy is also cited by, among
many others, Brian Massumi, A Users Guide to Capitalism
and Schizophrenia (MIT Press, 1992), p. 2; Slavoj iek,
Organs without Bodies (Routledge, 2003), p. 48; Ian
Buchanan, A Deleuzian Century? (Duke UP, 1999), p. 8;
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (Macmillan, 2002), p. 37; Gregg Lambert, The Non-Philosophy
of Gilles Deleuze (Continuum, 2002), p. x; Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Allen & Unwin, 2003),
p. 73; and Charles Stivale, Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts
(McGill-Queens, 2005), p. 3.
[34] Desert Islands, p. 144.
[35] Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, pp. 46f: "[Bacon]
let loose ... presences already in Velzquezs 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.
[36] Negotiations, pp. 124-125.
[37] See, e.g., the approving reference to Deleuzes Nietzsche
study in Jacques Derrida's essay "Dirance", or Pierre
Klossowski's monograph Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, dedicated to Deleuze. More generally, see D. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (MIT Press, 1985), and L.
Ferry and A. Renaut (eds.), Why We Are Not Nietzscheans
(University of Chicago Press, 1997).
[38] Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, Critique 282, p.
885.
[39] Negotiations, p. 4. However, in a later interview, Deleuze
commented: I don't know what Foucault meant, I never
asked him (Negotiations, p. 88).

[26] What Is Philosophy?, p. 22.

[40] Sometimes in the same sentence: one is thus traversed,

broken, fucked by the socius (Anti-Oedipus, p. 347).

[27] Negotiations, p. 123.

[41] An English language summary can be found here

[28] Negotiations, p. 125. Cf. Spinozas claim that the mind

and the body are dierent modes expressing the same substance.

[42] The most cited authors of books in the humanities.

timeshighereducation.co.uk. 2009-03-26. Retrieved
2010-07-04.

[43] See, for example, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory (Guilford Press, 1991), which devotes a
chapter to Deleuze and Guattari.
[44] See, e.g., Simon Glendinning, The Idea of Continental
Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 54.
[45] Descombes, Vincent (1998). Modern French Philosophy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 155, 175
178. ISBN 0-521-29672-2.
[46] Barry Smith (ed.), European Philosophy and the American
Academy, p. 34.
[47] Rosen, Stanley (1995). The Mask of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. ixx. ISBN 0521-49546-6.
[48] Badiou, Alain (2000). Deleuze: the clamor of being. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. ISBN 0-81663139-5.
[49] May, Todd (1997-07-01). Reconsidering Dierence:
Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze. Pennsylvania State
Univ Pr. ISBN 978-0-271-01657-3.
[50] Alan Sokal; Jean Bricmont (29 October 1999).
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse
of Science. St Martins Press (ny). pp. 2225, 154169.
ISBN 978-0-312-20407-5.
[51] Slavoj iek, Organs without Bodies, 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 Deleuzes
oscillation between the two models of becoming.
[52] iek, p. 21
[53] iek, pp. 32, 20, and 184.
[54] iek, p. 68: This brings us to the topic of the subject
that, according to Lacan, emerges in the interstice of the
'minimal dierence,' in the minimal gap between two signiers. 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.

External links
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Gilles
Deleuze", by Daniel Smith & John Protevi.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Deleuze", by Jon Roe.

Gilles

CapitalismAndSchizophrenia.org, a wiki about the

works of Deleuze and Guattari

EXTERNAL LINKS

Webdeleuze - Courses & audio (French), (English),

(Italian), (Spanish), (Portuguese), etc.
Near complete bibliography, including various
translations
A/V the International E-Journal for Deleuze Studies,
with a network/community, streamed video lectures
and a catalogue of links and online papers.
Alain Badiou, "The Event in Deleuze." (English
translation).
Lectures and notes on work by Deleuze and Guattari.
Rhizomes. Online journal inspired by Deleuzian
thought.
The Journal of French Philosophy - the online home
of the Bulletin de la Socit Amricaine de Philosophie de Langue Franaise
Web resources from Wayne State University.
"A hypertext glossary of Deleuzean/Guattarian
terms" by Rob Shields and Mickey Vallee.
La mtaphysique de Deleuze, by Arnaud Villani
(French text)

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