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.
Key facts
- Nationality
- French
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Post-Structuralism, Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.”
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“Philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.”
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.”
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“Becoming is the action by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other while continuing to be what they are.”
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“Multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system.”