Gilles Deleuze: Philosophy, Quotes & Legacy

Biography

Gilles Deleuze was born on January 18, 1925, in Paris, into a middle-class family of Alsatian origin. He grew up in the seventeenth arrondissement, and he would later describe his childhood as unremarkable, marked above all by the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War. His brother was arrested by the Gestapo for his activities in the Resistance and died in deportation — a loss Deleuze rarely discussed but which shadowed his sense of what a life can be. At the Lycée Carnot he was a brilliant but restive student, and after the war he entered the Sorbonne, where he studied philosophy under Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, and Ferdinand Alquié, and where he formed friendships with Michel Tournier and others who would populate the French intellectual world.

Deleuze taught at a series of lycées and universities — Amiens, Orléans, the Sorbonne, and finally the experimental University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, where he taught from 1969 until his retirement in 1987. At Vincennes he was surrounded by a generation of radical students and by colleagues such as Michel Foucault, who famously remarked that one day the century would be Deleuzian. Deleuze's early career was devoted to monographs on the history of philosophy — on Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kant, and Bergson — books that were themselves already acts of creation, because Deleuze never simply commented on a thinker but extracted from each the concepts that made him possible to think differently.

In 1968 and 1969 Deleuze published the two books that made his reputation as an original philosopher: Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. In 1969 he met Félix Guattari, a psychoanalyst and political militant, and the two began a collaboration that produced the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia — Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) — as well as Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) and What Is Philosophy? (1991). Deleuze suffered from respiratory illness throughout his adult life, and in 1995, at the age of seventy, he took his own life, leaping from the window of his apartment on the rue de Bizerte. His final essay, "Immanence: A Life…," had appeared that same year.

Historical Context

Deleuze's philosophy was forged against the background of the French philosophical scene of the 1950s and 1960s, dominated by three forces: the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger as filtered through Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the Hegelianism revived by Kojève's famous lectures, and the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and Althusser. Deleuze's work is a polemic against all three. Against phenomenology he insisted on the priority of being over consciousness; against Hegel he insisted on the priority of difference over contradiction; against structuralism he insisted on the priority of becoming over structure.

What Deleuze found in the history of philosophy were the thinkers who had resisted the philosophy of identity and representation: the Stoics, Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, and Bergson. He treated these thinkers not as a canon of doctrines but as a battery of concepts for thinking difference, force, and becoming. His famous self-description — "I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist" — captures the project: philosophy is the creation of concepts, and concepts are tools for encountering the new rather than mirrors of the given.

Core Ideas

Difference and Repetition

Deleuze's masterwork, Difference and Repetition (1968), attacks what he calls the "image of thought": the assumption, running from Plato through Kant, that thought is the recognition of identities and that difference is derivative — a relation between pregiven things. Against this, Deleuze argues that difference is primary and identity is an effect. Repetition, likewise, is not the return of the same but the production of the new; what repeats is difference itself. The book's famous conclusion — "a system of simulacra" — announces a metaphysics in which the model-copy distinction collapses and everything is a variation on a variation.

The Rhizome

In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), co-written with Guattari, Deleuze opposes the rhizome to the tree. The tree is the image of hierarchical, arborescent thought: roots, branches, origins, genealogies. The rhizome is the image of a different kind of multiplicity: a stem that grows in all directions, that connects any point to any other, that has no center and no origin. The rhizome is the model of thought and social life that Deleuze and Guattari oppose to state thought, to psychoanalysis, and to the whole logic of representation. "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other," they write, "and must be."

Desire as Production

The first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1972), presents the theory of desire that made Deleuze famous. Against the psychoanalytic account of desire as lack — the subject desires because it is incomplete — Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is a machine: a productive force that connects, assembles, and creates. The book attacks the Oedipus complex as the central myth by which psychoanalysis domesticates desire, and it proposes "schizoanalysis" as a practice that follows desire's lines of flight instead of forcing them back into the family triangle. The result is at once a theory of the unconscious, a critique of capitalism, and a manifesto for a politics of becoming.

The Plane of Immanence

Deleuze's Spinozism comes to the fore in his account of immanence. In What Is Philosophy? (1991) he defines philosophy as the creation of concepts, and the plane on which concepts are created is the plane of immanence — a field of pure multiplicity that is not relative to a transcendent principle. Deleuze reads Spinoza's God, or Nature, as the paradigm of such a plane: one substance, infinite attributes, no hierarchy, no lack. The politics of immanence is a politics without transcendence: no sovereign, no law above the field, no redemption from outside. This is why Deleuze and Guattari can write that "there is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made" — form and content are equally immanent.

Philosophy

Deleuze's philosophy is a philosophy of life in a double sense: life as the object of thought and life as the activity of thinking. His ethics, like Spinoza's, is an ethics of joy: what can a body do? The question is not what a thing is (its essence) but what it is capable of (its powers). Deleuze's famous account of the body — "we do not know what a body can do" — is not a slogan of liberation but a research program: the task of philosophy is to discover and compose the relations that increase a body's power of acting, and to avoid the relations that decompose it.

This ethics is inseparable from Deleuze's critique of the state and of all forms of transcendence. His later work with Guattari develops a political philosophy of "becoming-minor": the minor is not a smaller version of the major but a movement that destabilizes majoritarian identity from within. A "minor literature" — Kafka's — is one that deterritorializes a major language, that is political in every statement, and that enacts the collective enunciation of a people to come. Deleuze's philosophy is therefore at once the most abstract of systems and a practical guide to thinking and living against the hierarchies of identity, family, and state.

Major Works

Deleuze's major works include the monographs Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970), and Bergsonism (1966); the two masterpieces of his "critical" period, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969); the collaborative works with Guattari — Anti-Oedipus (1972), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and What Is Philosophy? (1991); and the two-volume Cinema (1983, 1985), a philosophy of the moving image that remains influential in film theory. Foucault (1986), his luminous book on his friend and rival, is among the finest studies of Foucault's thought ever written.

Famous Quotes

Deleuze is quoted above all for the formulations that condense his philosophy. "Desire does not lack anything," he and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus; "it is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire." The opening of A Thousand Plateaus announces that "the two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd." And his final essay, "Immanence: A Life…," closes with the sentence that serves as his epitaph: "A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through." The most cited of all is probably his remark that "philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts."

Related Thinkers

Deleuze is inseparable from Spinoza, whom he called the "prince" or "Christ" of philosophers and from whom he took the concepts of immanence, affect, and the body's powers. He is equally indebted to Nietzsche, whose critique of identity and celebration of becoming he radicalized. His relation to Michel Foucault was one of mutual influence and friendship — Foucault reviewed Difference and Repetition enthusiastically and called Anti-Oedipus "a book of ethics" — while his relation to Jacques Derrida, marked by a notorious and partly theatrical rivalry, helped define the internal differences of post-structuralism.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Gilles Deleuze" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Gilles Deleuze" (iep.utm.edu/deleuze)
• Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.