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{{Infobox philosopher
||region = [[Western philosophy]]
|era     = [[20th-century philosophy]]
|image   = Gilles_Deleuze_in_1987.png
|caption =
|name       = Gilles Deleuze
|birth_date = 18 January 1925
|birth_place = [[Paris]], [[France]]
|death_date  = {{death date and age|df=yes|1995|11|4|1925|1|18}}
|death_place = [[Paris]], [[France]]
|school_tradition  = [[Continental philosophy]]<br>Transcendental [[empiricism]]
|main_interests    = [[Aesthetics]], [[history of Western philosophy]], [[metaphilosophy]], [[metaphysics]]
|notable_ideas     = [[Affect (philosophy)|Affect]], [[Assemblage (philosophy)|assemblage]], [[body without organs]], [[deterritorialization]], [[line of flight]], [[plane of immanence]], [[Rhizome (philosophy)|rhizome]], [[schizoanalysis]]
|influences        = [[Gilbert Simondon]], [[Henri Bergson]], [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], [[Baruch Spinoza]], [[Gottfried Leibniz]], [[David Hume]], [[Immanuel Kant|Imm. Kant]], [[Karl Marx]], [[Sigmund Freud]], [[Jacques Lacan]], [[Louis Althusser]], [[Michel Foucault]], [[Marcel Proust]], [[Georges Canguilhem]], [[Jean Hyppolite]], [[Ferdinand Alquié]], [[Maurice de Gandillac]], [[Carl Jung]] [[Jean Wahl]]<ref>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 first to write about Whitehead and James - both arguably very important to Deleuze - in French. The idea of Anglo-American pluralism in Deleuze's work shows influence of Jean Wahl (see also Mary Frances Zamberlin, ''Rhizosphere'' (New York: Routledge, 2006))</ref>
|influenced        = [[Michel Foucault]], [[Pierre Klossowski]], [[Jean-Jacques Lecercle]], [[Brian Massumi]], [[Félix Guattari]], [[Peter Hallward]], [[John Protevi]], [[Michael Hardt]], [[Antonio Negri]], [[Manuel DeLanda]], [[Bernard Stiegler]], [[Peter Sloterdijk]]
}}

'''Gilles Deleuze''' ({{IPA-fr|ʒil dəløz|lang}}; 18 January 1925&nbsp;– 4 November 1995) was a French [[philosopher]] who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially 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 [[Félix Guattari]]. 

== Life ==
Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in [[Paris]] and lived there for most of his life. His initial schooling was undertaken during [[World War II]], during which time he attended the [[Lycée Carnot]]. He also spent a year in [[khâgne]] at the [[Lycée Henri IV]]. During the [[Nazi occupation of France]], Deleuze's older brother, Georges, was arrested for his participation in the [[French Resistance]], and died while in transit to a concentration camp.<ref>[[François Dosse]], ''Gilles Deleuze and [[Felix Guattari]]: Intersecting Lives,'' trans. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 89.</ref> In 1944, Deleuze went to study at the [[University of Paris|Sorbonne]]. His teachers there included several noted specialists in the history of philosophy, such as [[Georges Canguilhem]], [[Jean Hyppolite]], [[Ferdinand Alquié]], and [[Maurice de Gandillac]], and Deleuze's lifelong interest in the canonical figures of modern philosophy owed much to these teachers. In addition, Deleuze found the work of non-academic thinkers such as [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] attractive.<ref>''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."</ref> He [[agrégation|agrégated]] in philosophy in 1948.

Deleuze taught at various [[Secondary education in France|lycées]] (Amiens, Orléans, [[Lycée Louis le Grand|Louis le Grand]]) until 1957, when he took up a position at the Sorbonne. In 1953, he published his first monograph, ''Empiricism and Subjectivity'', on [[David Hume|Hume]]. He married Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan in 1956. From 1960 to 1964 he held a position at the [[French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique|Centre National de Recherche Scientifique]]. During this time he published the seminal ''[[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 dissertations, ''[[Difference and Repetition]]'' (supervised by Gandillac) and ''Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza'' (supervised by Alquié).

In 1969 he was appointed to the [[University of Paris VIII]] at Vincennes/St. Denis, an experimental school organized to implement educational reform. This new university drew a number of talented scholars, including Foucault (who suggested Deleuze's hiring), and the psychoanalyst [[Félix Guattari]]. Deleuze taught at [[Vincennes]] until his retirement in 1987.

Deleuze, who had suffered from respiratory ailments from a young age,<ref>Francois Dosse, ''Deleuze and Guattari: Intersecting Lives'', trans D. Glassman, CUP 2010, p98</ref> developed tuberculosis in 1968 and underwent a [[thoracoplasty]] (lung removal).<ref>Francois Dosse, ''Deleuze and Guattari: Intersecting Lives'', trans D. Glassman, CUP 2010, p178</ref> He suffered increasingly severe respiratory symptoms for the rest of his life.<ref>[http://www.ammppu.org/litterature/deleuze.htm#(4) Gilles Deleuze et les médecins]</ref> In the last years of his life, simple tasks such as handwriting required laborious effort. In 1995, he committed suicide, throwing himself from the window of his apartment.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/156476/Gilles-Deleuze|title=Gilles Deleuze|work=[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]|accessdate=July 8, 2009}}</ref>  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 unfinished project entitled ''Ensembles and Multiplicities'' (these chapters have been published as the essays "Immanence: A Life" and "The Actual and the Virtual").<ref>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''.</ref> He is buried in the cemetery of the village of [[Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat]].<ref>[http://www.ccnoblat.fr/otsi_v2/images/publications/guides/Saint%20Leonard%20de%20Noblat.pdf Communauté de Communes de Noblat]{{dead link|date=July 2013}}</ref>

Deleuze himself found little to no interest in the composition of an autobiography. When once asked to talk about his life, he replied: "Academics' lives are seldom interesting."<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 137.</ref> When a critic seized upon Deleuze's unusually long, uncut fingernails as a revealing eccentricity, he replied: "I haven't got the normal protective whorls, so that touching anything, especially fabric, causes such irritation that I need long nails to protect them."<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 5.</ref> Deleuze concludes his reply to this critic thus:

:"What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? ... If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. ... Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments."<ref>''Negotiations''., pp. 11-12.</ref>

== Philosophy ==
Deleuze's works fall into two groups: on one hand, monographs interpreting the work of other philosophers ([[Baruch Spinoza|Spinoza]], [[Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz|Leibniz]], [[David Hume|Hume]], [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]], [[Nietzsche]], [[Bergson]], [[Michel Foucault|Foucault]]) and artists ([[Proust]], [[Franz Kafka|Kafka]], [[Francis Bacon (artist)|Francis Bacon]]); on the other, eclectic philosophical tomes organized by concept (e.g., difference, sense, events, schizophrenia, cinema, philosophy). Regardless of topic, however, Deleuze consistently develops variations on similar ideas.

=== Metaphysics ===
Deleuze's main philosophical project in the works he wrote prior to his collaborations with Guattari can be baldly summarized as an inversion of the traditional [[metaphysics|metaphysical]] relationship between [[Identity (philosophy)|identity]] and [[Difference (philosophy)|difference]]. Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities (as in Plato's forms). To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, "given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus."<ref>"Bergson's Conception of Difference", in ''Desert Islands'', p. 33.</ref> That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from differences. Apparent identities such as "X" are composed of endless series of differences, where "X" = "the difference between x and x'", and "x'" = "the difference between...", and so forth. Difference, in other words, goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze argues, we must grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain what he calls "difference in itself." "If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words, in its ''internal difference''."<ref>''Desert Islands'', p. 32.</ref>

Like Kant and Bergson, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as unifying forms imposed by the [[subject (philosophy)|subject]]. He therefore concludes that pure difference is non-spatio-temporal; 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."<ref>Proust, ''Le Temps Retrouvé'', ch. III: see the fourth line from the bottom of [http://gallica.bnf.fr/proust/folios/NAF16725fol123.jpg this page], or, in English translation, the thirteenth paragraph [http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96t/chapter3.html 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 extra-temporal 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 flash to me—sound of a spoon and of a hammer, uneven paving-stones—simultaneously 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 effected a contact between the dreams of the imagination and that of which they are habitually deprived, namely, the idea of existence—and thanks to that stratagem had permitted that being within me to secure, to isolate and to render static for the duration of a lightning flash 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. Mark’s, it was because that being within me can only be nourished on the essence of things and finds 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."</ref>) 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 conditions] form is identical to its object."<ref>''Desert Islands'', p. 36.</ref> 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.<ref>See "The Method of Dramatization" in ''Desert Islands'', and "Actual and Virtual" in ''Dialogues''.</ref>

Thus, Deleuze at times refers to his philosophy as a ''transcendental empiricism'', alluding to Kant and [[Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling|Schelling]]. In Kant's [[transcendental idealism]], experience only makes sense when organized by forms of sensibility (namely, space and time) and intellectual 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 unverifiable speculation about a first cause). Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking (see below, ''[[#Epistemology|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 [[John 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. [[Duns Scotus|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 us in degree, and properties such as [[good and evil|goodness]], [[Power (philosophy)|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."<ref>''[[Difference and Repetition]]'', p. 39.</ref> Here Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one [[substance theory|substance]], [[God]] or [[Nature]]. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating [[process philosophy|process]], an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "[[pluralism (philosophy)|pluralism]] = [[monism]]".<ref>''A Thousand Plateaus'', p. 20.</ref>

''[[Difference and Repetition]]'' (1968) is Deleuze's most sustained and systematic attempt to work out the details of such a metaphysics, and is considered by at least one scholar to be his [[magnum opus]],<ref name="SEP">{{cite web|title=Gilles Deleuze|url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/|work=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|accessdate=17 February 2011}}</ref> 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".

=== Epistemology ===
Deleuze's 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]], [[Descartes]], and [[Husserl]], misconceives of thinking as a mostly unproblematic business. Truth may be hard to discover—it may require a life of pure theorizing, or rigorous computation, or systematic doubt—but thinking is able, at least in principle, to correctly grasp facts, forms, ideas, etc. It may be practically impossible to attain a God's-eye, [[Objectivity (philosophy)|neutral point of view]], but that is the ideal to approximate: a disinterested pursuit that results in a determinate, fixed truth; an orderly extension of common sense. Deleuze rejects this view as papering over the metaphysical flux, 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. It's 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 irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift."<ref>''Desert Islands'', p. 262.</ref>

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."<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 136.</ref>

Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines philosophy as the [[Concept#Gilles Deleuze's definition of Philosophy|creation of concepts]]. For Deleuze, concepts are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that define a range of thinking, such as Plato's [[theory of forms|ideas]], [[Descartes]]'s [[cogito ergo sum|cogito]], or Kant's doctrine of the faculties. A philosophical concept "posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created."<ref>''What Is Philosophy?'', p. 22.</ref> 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|Locke]] or [[Willard Van Orman Quine|Quine]]).

In his later work (from roughly 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each analyzing reality in different ways. While philosophy creates concepts, the arts create novel qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what Deleuze calls "percepts" 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:<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 123.</ref> they are different ways of organizing the metaphysical flux, "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another."<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 125. Cf. Spinoza's claim that the mind and the body are different modes expressing the same substance.</ref> 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.<ref>''[[Cinema 1: The Movement Image]]''</ref> 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?"<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 21: "We're strict functionalists: what we're interested in is how something works".</ref>

=== Values ===
In ethics and politics, Deleuze again echoes Spinoza, albeit in a sharply Nietzschean key. In a [[Classical liberalism|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 differentiation (as the etymology of the word "individual" suggests). Guided by the [[Ethical naturalism|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 [[Sigmund Freud|Freudian]] drives and [[Marxism|Marxist]] [[Labour economics|labor]]) 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|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.

But how does Deleuze square his pessimistic diagnoses with his ethical naturalism? Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or [[Immanence|immanent]]: 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 persons from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can become—though 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?"<ref>''Essays Critical and Clinical'', p. 135.</ref>

=== Deleuze's interpretations ===
Deleuze's studies of individual philosophers and artists are purposely heterodox. In ''Nietzsche and Philosophy'', for example, Deleuze claims that [[Nietzsche]]'s ''[[On the Genealogy of Morality]]'' is an attempt to rewrite [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]]'s ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]]'',<ref>''Nietzsche and Philosophy'', p. 88.</ref> 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 Kant's book. Likewise, Deleuze claims that univocity is the organizing principle of Spinoza's philosophy, despite the total absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. Deleuze once famously described his method of interpreting philosophers as "[[buggery]] (''enculage'')", as sneaking behind an author and producing an offspring which is recognizably his, yet also monstrous and different.<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 6. See also: Daniel W. Smith, "The Inverse Side of the Structure: Zizek on Deleuze on Lacan", ''Criticism'' (2004): "Deleuze's all-too-well-known image of philosophical "buggery," which makes thinkers produce their own "monstrous" children"; Robert Sinnerbrink (in "Nomadology or Ideology? Zizek’s Critique of Deleuze", ''Parrhesia'' 1 (2006): 62-87) describes the "popular topic" of Deleuze's "notorious remarks"; Donald Callen (in "The Difficult Middle", ''Rhizomes'' 10 (Spring 2005)) describes "intellectual buggery" as "what Deleuze himself famously said about his encounters with the works of other philosophers." Deleuze's buggery analogy is also cited by, among many others, Brian Massumi, ''A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia'' (MIT Press, 1992), p. 2; Slavoj Žižek, ''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-Queen's, 2005), p. 3.</ref>

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.<ref>''Desert Islands'', p. 144.</ref> A parallel in painting Deleuze points to is Francis Bacon's ''[[Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X|Study after Velázquez]]''—it is quite beside the point to say that Bacon "gets Velasquez wrong".<ref>''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."</ref> 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|Resnais]] and [[Ilya Prigogine|Prigogine]], or [[Jean-Luc Godard|Godard]] and [[René Thom|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."<ref>''Negotiations'', pp. 124-125.</ref>

== Reception ==
In the 1960s, Deleuze's portrayal of Nietzsche as a metaphysician of difference rather than a reactionary mystic contributed greatly to the plausibility of "left-wing Nietzscheanism" as an intellectual stance.<ref>See, e.g., the approving reference to Deleuze's Nietzsche study in [[Jacques Derrida]]'s essay "''Différance''", 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).</ref>  His books ''[[Difference and Repetition]]'' (1968) and ''[[The Logic of Sense]]'' (1969) led [[Michel Foucault]] to declare that "one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian."<ref>Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum", ''Critique'' 282, p. 885.</ref> (Deleuze, for his part, said Foucault's comment was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid."<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 4. However, in a later interview, Deleuze commented: "I don't know what Foucault meant, I never asked him" (''Negotiations'', p. 88).</ref>)  In the 1970s, the ''Anti-Oedipus'', written in a style by turns vulgar and esoteric,<ref>Sometimes in the same sentence: "one is thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius" (''Anti-Oedipus'', p. 347).</ref> offering 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 France|May 1968]].  In 1994 and 1995, ''L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze'', an eight-hour series of interviews between Deleuze and Claire Parnet, aired on France's [[Arte]] Channel (a still from the program appears in the infobox above).<ref>[http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/ABC1.html An English language summary can be found here]</ref>

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).<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=405956&sectioncode=26 |title=The most cited authors of books in the humanities |publisher=timeshighereducation.co.uk |date=2009-03-26 |accessdate=2010-07-04}}</ref>  Like his contemporaries Foucault, [[Derrida]], and [[Lyotard]], Deleuze's influence 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]],<ref>See, for example, [[Steven Best]] and [[Douglas Kellner]], ''Postmodern Theory'' (Guilford Press, 1991), which devotes a chapter to Deleuze and Guattari.</ref> though neither Deleuze nor Guattari described their work in those terms. Likewise in the English-speaking academy, Deleuze's work is typically classified as [[continental philosophy]].<ref>See, e.g., Simon Glendinning, ''The Idea of Continental Philosophy'' (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 54.</ref>

Deleuze has attracted critics as well. The following list is not exhaustive, and gives only the briefest of summaries.

In ''Modern French Philosophy'' (1979), [[Vincent Descombes]] argues that Deleuze's account of a difference that is not derived from identity (in ''Nietzsche and Philosophy'') is incoherent, and that his analysis of history in ''Anti-Oedipus'' is 'utter idealism', criticizing reality for falling short of a non-existent ideal of schizophrenic becoming.

In ''What Is Neostructuralism?'' (1984), [[Manfred Frank]] claims that Deleuze's theory of individuation as a process of bottomless differentiation fails to explain the unity of consciousness.

In "The Decline and Fall of French Nietzscheo-Structuralism" (1994), [[Pascal Engel]] presents a wholesale condemnation of Deleuze's thought. According to 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."<ref>Barry Smith (ed.), ''European Philosophy and the American Academy'', p. 34.</ref>

In ''The Mask of Enlightenment'' (1995), American philosopher [[Stanley Rosen]] objects to Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche's [[eternal return]].<ref>{{cite book|last=Rosen|first=Stanley|title=The Mask of Enlightenment|year=1995|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|isbn=0-521-49546-6|pages=ix-x}}</ref>

In ''Deleuze: The Clamor of Being'' (1997), [[Alain Badiou]] claims that Deleuze's metaphysics only apparently embraces plurality and diversity, remaining at bottom relentlessly [[monism|monist]]. Badiou further argues that, in practical matters, Deleuze's monism entails an ascetic, aristocratic [[fatalism]] akin to ancient [[Stoicism]].<ref>{{cite book|last=Badiou|first=Alain|title=Deleuze: the clamor of being|year=2000|publisher=University of Minnesota|location=Minneapolis, MN|isbn=0-8166-3139-5}}</ref>

In ''Reconsidering Difference'' (1997), [[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 [[Wittgenstein]]ian [[holism]] without significantly altering his practical philosophy.

In ''[[Fashionable Nonsense]]'' (1997), Alan Sokal and [[Jean Bricmont]] accuse Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientific terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in his philosophical system. (But see above, ''[[#Deleuze's interpretations|Deleuze's interpretations]]''.) Deleuze's writings on subjects such as [[calculus]] and [[quantum mechanics]] are, according to Sokal and Bricmont, vague, meaningless, or unjustified. However, by Sokal and Bricmont's own admission, they suspend judgment about Deleuze's philosophical theories and terminology.

In ''Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy'' (2002), [[Manuel De Landa]] argues that Deleuze's philosophy of difference anticipates recent developments in science such as dynamical systems theory. De Landa reconstructs Deleuze's ontology from [[Difference and Repetition]] and [[The Logic of Sense]], particularly the distinction between the virtual, intensive, and actual, as an important contribution to the philosophy of science. Deleuze's most undervalued insight, De Landa claims, is in understanding philosophy like science as a process of correctly posing a problem rather than offering a solution, or discovering the distribution of "singularities" (like "strange attractors" in systems theory) in a conceptual field. De Landa, abandoning the circular style of Deleuze and other French philosophers, positions this work as a bridge between the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy.

In ''Organs without Bodies'' (2003), [[Slavoj Žižek]] claims that Deleuze's ontology oscillates between materialism and idealism,<ref>Slavoj Žižek, ''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 "Deleuze's oscillation between the two models" of becoming.</ref> and that the Deleuze of ''[[Anti-Oedipus]]'' ("arguably Deleuze's worst book"),<ref>Žižek, p. 21</ref> the "political" Deleuze under the "'bad' influence" of Guattari, ends up, despite protestations to the contrary, as "the ideologist of late capitalism".<ref>Žižek, pp. 32, 20, and 184.</ref> 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.<ref>Žižek, 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."</ref>  What remains worthwhile in Deleuze's oeuvre, Žižek finds, are precisely those concepts closest to Žižek's own ideas.

In ''Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation'' (2006), [[Peter Hallward]] argues that Deleuze's insistence that being is necessarily creative and always-differentiating entails that his philosophy can offer no insight into, and is supremely indifferent to, the material, actual conditions of existence. Thus Hallward claims that Deleuze's thought is literally other-worldly, aiming only at a passive contemplation of the dissolution of all identity into the [[theophany|theophanic]] self-creation of nature.

In ''Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence'' (2008), [[Levi Bryant]] explores the philosophical problems that generated what Deleuze called his "transcendental empiricism," condemning partisans both for and against Deleuze's philosophy who do not bother to fully parse Deleuze's often difficult prose. Like De Landa, he argues that Deleuze's most radical element is the critique of the "Image of Thought" in favor of an "encounter" with difference that engenders thought within thought and discloses a philosophical "problem." Bryant therefore situates Deleuze's own philosophical problem as an attempt to correct Kant's transcendental idealism by positing difference rather than the unified subject as the element proper to the transcendental. Second, Bryant interprets Deleuze's philosophy as a "phenomenology of the encounter" which corrects the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and the 20th-century French philosophers who were Deleuze's peers - and separates Deleuze from the accusations of relativism and postmodernism levied against the latter.

== Bibliography ==
([http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=187&groupe=Bibliographie%20et%20mondes%20in%E9dits&langue=2 Near complete bibliography], including various translations)

; By Gilles Deleuze
* ''Empirisme et subjectivité'' (1953). Trans. ''Empiricism and Subjectivity'' (1991).
* ''Nietzsche et la philosophie'' (1962). Trans. ''[[Nietzsche and Philosophy]]'' (1983).
* ''La philosophie critique de Kant'' (1963). Trans. ''Kant's Critical Philosophy'' (1983).
* ''Proust et les signes'' (1964, 2nd exp. ed. 1976). Trans. ''Proust and Signs'' (1973, 2nd exp. ed. 2000).
* ''Nietzsche'' (1965). Trans. in ''Pure Immanence'' (2001).
* ''Le Bergsonisme'' (1966). Trans. ''Bergsonism'' (1988).
* ''Présentation de Sacher-Masoch'' (1967). Trans. ''Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty'' (1989).
* ''Différence et répétition'' (1968). Trans. ''[[Difference and Repetition]]'' (1994).
* ''Spinoza et le problème 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'' (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).
* ''Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement'' (1983). Trans. ''[[Cinema 1: The Movement Image|Cinema 1: The Movement-Image]]'' (1986).
* ''Cinéma 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).
* ''Périclès et Verdi: La philosophie de Francois Châtelet'' (1988). Trans. in ''Dialogues II,'' revised ed. (2007).
* ''Pourparlers'' (1990). Trans. ''Negotiations'' (1995).
* ''Critique et clinique'' (1993). Trans. ''Essays Critical and Clinical'' (1997).
* ''Pure Immanence'' (2001).
* ''L'île déserte et autres textes'' (2002). Trans. ''Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974'' (2003).
* ''Deux régimes de fous et autres textes'' (2004). Trans. ''Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995'' (2006).

; In collaboration with [[Félix Guattari]]:
* ''Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe'' (1972). Trans. ''[[Anti-Oedipus]]'' (1977).
* ''Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure'' (1975). Trans. ''Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature'' (1986).
* ''Rhizome'' (1976). Trans., in revised form, in ''[[A Thousand Plateaus]]'' (1987)
* ''[[Nomadology: The War Machine]]'' (1986). Trans. in ''[[A Thousand Plateaus]]'' (1987)
* ''Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 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 (journal)|TELOS]]'' 16 (Summer 1973). New York: [http://www.telospress.com Telos Press] (Reprinted in ''L'île déserte et autres textes'' / ''Desert Islands and Other Texts'', above.)

Most of '''Deleuze's courses''' are available, in several languages, [http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html here].

== Documentary ==
* ''[[L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze]]'', with Claire Parnet, produced by Pierre-André Boutang. Éditions Montparnasse.

== See also ==
{{Columns-list|2|
* [[Deleuze and Guattari]]
* [[Gilbert Simondon]]'s theory of [[individuation]]
* [[Minority (philosophy)]]
* [[Percept]]
* [[Problem of future contingents]]
* [[Virtuality (Philosophy)]]
}}

== Notes and references ==
{{reflist|colwidth=35em}}

== External links ==
{{commons category}}
{{wikiquote}}
* [[Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]]: "[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/ Gilles Deleuze]", by Daniel Smith & John Protevi.
* [[Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]]: [http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/deleuze.htm Gilles Deleuze]", by Jon Roffe.
* [http://capitalismandschizophrenia.org CapitalismAndSchizophrenia.org, a wiki about the works of Deleuze and Guattari]
* [http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html Webdeleuze] - Courses & audio {{fr icon}}, {{en icon}}, {{it icon}}, {{es icon}}, {{pt icon}}, etc.
* [http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/deleuze-studies/ 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]], "[http://www.lacan.com/baddel.htm The Event in Deleuze.]" (English translation).
* [http://www.protevi.com/john/DG/index.html Lectures and notes on work by Deleuze and Guattari.]
* [http://www.rhizomes.net Rhizomes.] Online journal inspired by Deleuzian thought.
* [http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~smith132/French_Philosophy/French_Philosophy.html The Journal of French Philosophy ] - the online home of the Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française
* [http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/index.html Web resources] from [[Wayne State University]].
* "[http://www.deleuzeguattari.com A hypertext glossary of Deleuzean/Guattarian terms]" by Rob Shields and Mickey Vallee.
* [http://multitudes.samizdat.net/La-metaphysique-de-Deleuze.html La métaphysique de Deleuze], by Arnaud Villani (French text)
* ''Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage'', Edited by Graham Jones and Jon Roffe, University of Edinburgh Press, 2009.

{{Deleuze-Guattari}}
{{Philosophy topics}}
{{continental philosophy}}
{{Relational art}}

{{Authority control|VIAF=22140703}}

{{Persondata <!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]]. -->
| NAME              = Deleuze, Gilles
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES =
| SHORT DESCRIPTION = French philosopher
| DATE OF BIRTH     = 18 January 1925
| PLACE OF BIRTH    = Paris, France
| DATE OF DEATH     = 4 November 1995
| PLACE OF DEATH    = Paris, France
}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Deleuze, Gilles}}
[[Category:Gilles Deleuze| ]]
[[Category:1925 births]]
[[Category:1995 deaths]]
[[Category:Writers from Paris]]
[[Category:Lycée Henri-IV alumni]]
[[Category:Lycée Carnot alumni]]
[[Category:Nietzsche scholars]]
[[Category:University of Paris alumni]]
[[Category:French political philosophers]]
[[Category:French historians of philosophy]]
[[Category:Philosophers of art]]
[[Category:Empiricists]]
[[Category:Poststructuralists]]
[[Category:Continental philosophers]]
[[Category:20th-century French philosophers]]
[[Category:Anti-psychiatry]]
[[Category:Franz Kafka scholars]]
[[Category:Suicides in France]]
[[Category:Philosophers who committed suicide]]
[[Category:Deaths by defenestration]]
[[Category:Philosophers of science]]
[[Category:Male suicides]]