Deleuze, Gilles (1925—95)
Undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, the century his friend Foucault, Michel mischievously suggested would be named after him. Deleuze’s work became the height of fashion in the early part of the twenty-first century, spawning literally hundreds of books about his work. Although notoriously difficult to read and often frustratingly elusive, Deleuze has broad appeal as a thinker because his work invites creative application not slavish adherence. Born in Paris, Deleuze studied for his baccalauréat at the Lycée Carnot and then his khâgne at the Lycée Henri-IV. From there he went to the Sorbonne to study philosophy, graduating in 1948. His classmates included François Châtelet, Lyotard, Jean-François, Michel Butor, Klossowski, Pierre, Claude Lanzmann, maker of the epic film Shoah (1985), and the novelist Michel Tournier, who remembers Deleuze in his memoir, Le Vent Paraclet (1977), translated as The Wind Spirit (1988). His first book, Empirisme et subjectivité. Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume (1953), translated as Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature (1991), was written while he was still a student. What is interesting about this, besides the obvious fact Deleuze was a prodigy, is that in later life Deleuze repudiated everything else he wrote in this period. In his own eyes then, his work on Hume marks the true starting point of his career. As is customary in the French academic system, Deleuze then did his time in the Lycée system, first in Amiens, then Orléans, and finally back in Paris, for nearly a decade before obtaining a post as a junior lecturer at the Sorbonne in 1957. He remained there until 1964, when he moved to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. In 1962, after an eight-year publishing furlough, Deleuze published his second book, Nietzsche et la philosophie, translated as Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), which many regard as his most important. It is credited with sparking a profound ‘return to cathexis’ after more than half a century of neglect because it overturned the gloomy image of Nietzsche as the ultimate nihilist and dismissed the suspicions of those who bought the distorted picture of him as a Nazi philosopher created by his sister Elisabeth. Instead it presented Nietzsche as a philosopher of joy, calling on us to overcome our ressentiment and embrace life fully, that is to say in an active rather than reactive manner. This theme would remain constant throughout Deleuze’s work, although the terms themselves would disappear by the end of the 1960s, evolving into what many see as a vitalism philosophy. His next books explore this problematic, somewhat obliquely it has to be said, through an examination of literature. Inspired by Nietzsche’s idea that the philosopher is a kind of physician, Deleuze looked to the work of Proust and Sacher-Masoch to see whether this idea applied to literature as well. Proust et les signes (1964), translated as Proust and Signs (1972), and Presentation de Sacher-Masoch (1967), translated as Coldness and Cruelty (1971), inaugurate a trajectory in Deleuze’s work he named the ‘clinical’ that culminated in the publication of Critique et clinique (1993), translated as Essays Critical and Clinical (1997). In between the books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, Deleuze wrote on commission textbooks on Bergson and Kant. The former is generally taken as evidence that Deleuze was indeed a vitalist, while the latter is read as a sign that Deleuze’s philosophical project consisted in completing Kant’s critique---this is made explicit in Deleuze’s later collaborative works. From 1964 until 1969 Deleuze taught philosophy at the University of Lyon, during which time he prepared the requisite two theses for his Doctorat d’État, both of which appeared in the watershed year of 1968: Différence et répétition, translated as Difference and Repetition (1994), and Spinoza et le problème de l’expression, translated as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990). By his own account, Difference and Repetition was the first book in which he did his own philosophy, the first book in which he broke away from writing the history of philosophy and began to create new philosophy for himself. Written in the same period, though not published until a year later, Logique du sens (1969), translated as The Logic of Sense (1990), ostensibly a study of Lewis Carroll’s work, but really a profound meditation the philosophy of language, completes this phase of Deleuze’s career. Deleuze did not participate in the events of May ’68 and was generally ambivalent about its results. On the one hand, he was impressed by the fact that such a large number of people, some 10 million students and blue collar workers, had coordinated their action to show their dissent, but on the other hand he detected fascist elements in the operations of some of the groups. In the summer of 1969, a young psychoanalyst and political activist by the name of Guattari, Félix sought Deleuze out because he admired his work and it proved to be a meeting of true minds. Now Deleuze knew how to respond philosophically to May ‘68. He and Guattari agreed to work together and over the next several months they met and shared ideas and developed a work that was simultaneously a critique and a rethinking of both Marxism and Freud, Anna (particularly the anaclisis interpretation of the latter) and a synthesis of a new methodology they proposed to call schizoanalysis, the core concept of which is the desiring-machine. Guattari’s notebooks, Écrits pour l’Anti-Œedipe (2005), translated as The Anti-Œdipus Papers (2006), provide a partial but nonetheless illuminating picture of how they worked. On its publication in 1972, L’Anti-Oedipe, translated as Anti-Oedipus (1977), was an immediate sensation, but it divided opinion quite sharply between those like Jameson, Fredric who heralded it as a radical intervention and those like Anderson, Perry who dismissed it as irrationalist nonsense. Deleuze spent the remainder of the decade developing his collaborative project with Guattari. The next instalment was an attempt to apply schizoanalysis to literature focusing on one of their mutually favourite authors, the great Czech writer Franz Kafka. As the title suggests, Kafka: Pour une literature mineure (1975), translated as Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1986), introduced a new category of literature and a new way of thinking about minority. Minor literature has become an important concept in Postcolonial Studies. Perhaps recognizing the difficulty of his work, Deleuze next published a collection of conversations or exchanges (he refused to use the word interview) with his friend Claire Parnet, Dialogues (1977), translated as Dialogues (1987), which like the previous book served as an appetizer for the sequel to Anti-Oedipus, which finally appeared in 1980. An even more prodigious synthesis of new concepts and new ideas, Mille Plateaux (1980), translated as A Thousand Plateaus (1987), is arguably one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century. The outpouring of ideas it initiated continues to fascinate scholars today and has given rise to a veritable industry of exegetical works seeking to explain the meaning of such suggestive concepts as abstract machine, assemblage, becoming, body without organs, nomadology, rhizome, and war machine. After A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze said he needed to find himself again and his next works were in some ways quite personal. First he wrote a short book on the art of Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon, logique de la sensation (1981), translated as Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003), this book makes use of some of the concepts developed in A Thousand Plateaus, but places more emphasis on new terms like affect and sensation, which would be important to his fourth collaborative work with Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosohie? (1991), translated as What is Philosophy? (1994). He followed this with two volumes on film, Cinéma 1. L’Image-mouvement (1983), translated as Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986) and Cinéma 2. L’Image-temps (1985), translated as Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989). The books proposed not a philosophy of film, but rather to articulate the specifically philosophical dimension of film. Anglo-American film studies was very slow to appreciate these books, but has in the last couple of years become deeply fascinated by the way they reorient the discussion of film. His next two books were monographs on authors that were close to him personally and intellectually. The most personal of all these books in this period was the one he wrote about his friend Foucault, published two years after the latter’s death: Foucault (1986), translated as Foucault (1988). His next book was on Leibniz, an author not often mentioned in the rest of his work yet clearly important to him. Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (1988), translated as The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993) has been well received by creative artists and geographers who see in it a radically new way of thinking about space and spatial relations. By the end of the 1980s, Deleuze’s health had deteriorated dramatically and he found it difficult to work, yet he continued to produce new works, the already mentioned collaboration with Guattari as well as the essays on the clinical approach to literature. But perhaps his most important work in these years was the magnificent eight-hour video of him in conversation with Claire Parnet, L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. He took his own life in November 1995. It is difficult to classify Deleuze’s achievement. He saw himself as overturning Plato and creating a form of transcendental empiricist philosophy that took philosophy past the various impasses it had got itself into. How successful he was in this venture is still being decided. But it is widely agreed that he was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. Further Reading: R. Bogue Deleuze and Guattari (1989). I. Buchanan Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2008). C. Colebrook Gilles Deleuze (2002). F. Dosse Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: Biographie Croisée (2007). M. Hardt Gilles Deleuze (1993).
http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/ABCs.html • An excellent resource, which contains transcriptions in English of Gilles Deleuze’s lectures and interviews as well as links to ongoing research in the field.