Gilles Deleuze
born January 18, 1925, Paris, France
died November 4, 1995, Paris
French writer and antirationalist philosopher.
Deleuze began his study of philosophy at the Sorbonne in
1944. Appointed to the faculty there in 1957, he later
taught at the University of Lyons and the University of
Paris VIII, where he was a popular lecturer. He retired from
teaching in 1987.
Two of Deleuze’s early publications, David Hume (1952;
with Andre Cresson) and Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962),
were historical studies of thinkers who, though in different
ways, emphasized the limited powers of human reason and
mocked the pretensions of traditional philosophy to discern
the ultimate nature of reality. In the 1960s Deleuze began
to philosophize in a more original vein, producing two major
works, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of
Sense (1969). In the former he argued against the
devaluation of “difference” in Western metaphysics and tried
to show that difference inheres in repetition itself.
A central theme of Deleuze’s work during this period was
what he called the “Eleatic-Platonic bias” of Western
metaphysics—i.e., the preference, which originated with the
pre-Socratic school of Eleaticism and the subsequent
philosophy of Plato, for unity over multiplicity (“the one”
over “the many”) and for sameness over difference. According
to Deleuze, this bias, which manifests itself in the
characteristic philosophical search for the abstract
“essences” of things, falsifies the nature of experience,
which consists of multiplicities rather than unities. In
order to do justice to reality as multiplicity, therefore, a
completely new set of philosophical concepts is required.
Deleuze also criticized traditional metaphysics for its
“arboreal” or “treelike” character—i.e., its conception of
reality in terms of hierarchy, order, and linearity—and
compared his own thought, by contrast, to the structure of a
rhizome, an underground plant stem whose growth is aimless
and disordered.
Following the student uprising in Paris in May 1968,
Deleuze’s thought became more politically engaged.
Anti-Oedipus (1972), the first volume of a two-volume work
(Capitalism and Schizophrenia) written with the radical
psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (1930–92), is an extended
attack on traditional psychoanalysis and the concept of the
Oedipus complex, which the authors contend has been used to
suppress human desire in the service of normalization and
control. The book concludes with a rather naive celebration
of schizophrenia as a heroic expression of social
nonconformity. In the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus
(1980), which they present as a study in “nomadology” and
“deterritorialization” (the former term suggesting the
nomadic lifestyle of Bedouin tribes, the latter a general
state of flux and mobility), Deleuze and Guattari condemn
all species of rationalist metaphysics as “state
philosophy.”
In 1995, depressed by chronic illness and his generally
deteriorating health, Deleuze committed suicide.
Richard Wolin
