Gilles Deleuze 1925 – 1995

Gilles Deleuze was a 20th-century French philosopher, one of the most influential figures of post-structuralist continental philosophy. His early monographs on Hume, Bergson, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kant, and Foucault each developed an idiosyncratic reading aimed at extracting a usable conceptual machinery from the canonical figure. His major systematic works, Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, set out a metaphysics of difference, multiplicity, and becoming, in opposition to identity-based ontology. With the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari he co-wrote Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which developed a critique of psychoanalysis, capitalism, and structures of representation. He taught at the experimental University of Paris VIII at Vincennes from 1969 until his retirement in 1987.

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was the most original French philosopher of the post-1968 generation. Born in Paris, he taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes) from 1969 until his retirement in 1987 and produced a body of work that ranges across the history of philosophy, literature, cinema, and political theory.

Deleuze's early monographs — on Hume, Bergson, Kant, Nietzsche, and Spinoza — read each philosopher as a constructive resource rather than as an object of historical commentary. Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969) presented the constructive metaphysics — a positive philosophy of difference, multiplicity, and becoming — that the historical readings had been preparing. The vocabulary of immanence, the rhizome, the body without organs, deterritorialization, and lines of flight has been enormously influential in continental philosophy and in the wider humanities.

Deleuze's collaboration with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari produced Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two-volume project Capitalism and Schizophrenia that combined philosophical metaphysics with a critique of psychoanalysis and an ambitious analysis of capitalism. His later work on cinema — the two-volume Cinema (1983, 1985) — and his books on Foucault, Leibniz, and Francis Bacon round out the body of work. He took his own life in 1995 during the late stages of a respiratory illness.