Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze (Paris, 1925 – Paris, 1995) was one of the most influential French philosophers of the twentieth century. From the early 1950s until his death he wrote on ontology, history of philosophy, politics, literature, film, music and painting. He is often associated with post-structuralism, although he described himself above all as a metaphysician, and his work remains central to contemporary philosophy.

He was born into a middle-class family in Paris. During the German occupation of France, his older brother Georges was arrested for his role in the Resistance and died on the way to a concentration camp, an event that marked his youth deeply. He studied at the Lycée Carnot and then at the Sorbonne, where his teachers included Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite and Ferdinand Alquié. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1948 and taught in secondary schools for almost a decade before joining the university in 1957. His first monograph, Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953), was devoted to David Hume. It was followed by studies of Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, Bergson and Proust, and by books written with Félix Guattari, among them Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.

The core of his thought is a reversal of a tradition that subordinated difference to identity. For Deleuze, identities are not prior to differences; they are effects of differences that repeat. This led him to a metaphysics of multiplicity, in which reality is a continuous process of differentiation, and to the notion of the virtual, a field of real conditions that is not a copy of things and not a transcendent Idea. He developed this ontology in Difference and Repetition (1968), which he regarded as his most systematic work. Later, with Guattari, he proposed concepts such as the body without organs and the plane of immanence, used to criticise the repression of desire and closed forms of thought.

His influence extends to philosophy, literary theory, aesthetics, musicology and the social sciences. His two books on cinema, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, are standard references in film theory, and his view of the philosopher as a creator of concepts continues to shape current debate.