Gilles Deleuze (pron.
Deleuze taught at various lycées (Amiens, Orléans, Louis le Grand) until 1957, when he took up a position at the Sorbonne. In 1953, he published his first monograph, Empiricism and Subjectivity, on Hume. He married Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan in 1956. From 1960 to 1964 he held a position at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. During this time he published the seminal Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and befriended Michel Foucault. From 1964 to 1969 he was a professor at the University of Lyon. In 1968 he published his two dissertations, Difference and Repetition (supervised by Gandillac) and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (supervised by Alquié).
In 1969 he was appointed to the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes/St. Denis, an experimental school organized to implement educational reform. This new university drew a number of talented scholars, including Foucault (who suggested Deleuze's hiring), and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Deleuze taught at Vincennes until his retirement in 1987.
Deleuze suffered from a debilitating pulmonary ailment throughout the last 25 years of his life. In his last decade this condition grew more severe and was compounded by respiratory problems. By the last years of his life, simple tasks such as handwriting required laborious effort. In 1995, he committed suicide, throwing himself from the window of his apartment.
The novelist Michel Tournier, who knew Deleuze when both were students at the Sorbonne, described him thus:
Deleuze himself almost entirely demurred from autobiography. When once asked to talk about his life, he replied: "Academics' lives are seldom interesting."Negotiations, p. 137. When a critic seized upon Deleuze's unusually long, uncut fingernails as an a revealing eccentricity, he drily noted a more obvious explanation: "I haven't got the normal protective whorls, so that touching anything, especially fabric, causes such irritation that I need long nails to protect them."Ibid., p. 5. Deleuze concludes his reply to this critic thus:
Like Kant and Bergson, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as categories imposed by the subject. Therefore he concludes that pure difference is non-spatio-temporal; it is an ideal, what he calls "the virtual". (The coinage refers not to the "virtual reality" of the computer age, but to Proust's definition of the past: "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.") While Deleuze's virtual ideas superficially resemble Plato's forms and Kant's categories, they are not originals or models, nor are they abstract conditions of possible experience; instead they are the conditions of real experience, the internal difference in itself. "The concept they conditions form is identical to its object.""Bergson's Conception of Difference" in Desert Islands, p. 36. A Deleuzean idea is not a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced thing, it is a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations.See "The Method of Dramatization" in Desert Islands, and "Actual and Virtual" in Dialogues.
Thus Deleuze, alluding to Kant and Schelling, at times refers to his philosophy as a transcendental empiricism. In Kant's transcendental idealism, experience only makes sense when organized by intellectual categories (such as space, time, and causality). Taking such intellectual concepts out of the context of experience, according to Kant, spawns seductive but senseless metaphysical beliefs. (For example, extending the concept of causality beyond actual experience results in unverifiable speculation about a first cause.) Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking (see below, Epistemology).
Simultaneously, Deleuze claims that being is univocal, i.e., that it has only one sense. Deleuze borrows the doctrine of ontological univocity from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus. In medieval disputes over the nature of God, many eminent theologians and philosophers (such as Thomas Aquinas) held that when one says that "God is good", God's goodness is only analogous to human goodness. Scotus argued to the contrary that when one says that "God is good", the goodness in question is the exact same sort of goodness that is meant when one says "Jane is good". That is, God only differs from us in degree, and properties such as goodness, power, reason, and so forth are univocally applied, regardless of whether one is talking about God, a man, or a flea.
Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. "With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being."Difference and Repetition, p. 39. Here Deleuze echoes Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance, God or Nature. For Deleuze, the one substance is an always differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "pluralism = monism".A Thousand Plateaus, p. 20.
Difference and Repetition is Deleuze's most sustained and systematic attempt to work out the details of such a metaphysics, but like ideas are expressed in his other works. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), for example, reality is a play of forces; in Anti-Oedipus (1972), a "body without organs"; in What Is Philosophy? (1991), a "plane of immanence" or "chaosmos".
Deleuze's peculiar readings of the history of philosophy stem from this unusual epistemological perspective. To read a philosopher is no longer to aim at finding a single, correct interpretation, but is instead to present a philosopher's attempt to grapple with the problematic nature of reality. "Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don't tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. * The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn't say but is nonetheless present in what he did say."Negotiations, p. 136. (See below, Deleuze's interpretations.)
Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines philosophy as the creation of concepts. For Deleuze, concepts are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that define a range of thinking, such as Plato's ideas, Descartes's cogito, or Kant's doctrine of the faculties. A philosophical concept "posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created."What Is Philosophy?, p. 22. In Deleuze's view, then, philosophy more closely resembles practical or artistic production than it does an adjunct to a definitive scientific description of a pre-existing world (as in the tradition of Locke or Quine).
In his later work (from roughly 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each analyzing reality in very different ways. While philosophy creates concepts, the arts create new qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what Deleuze calls "percepts" and "affects"), and the sciences create quantitative theories based on fixed points of reference such as the speed of light or absolute zero (which Deleuze calls "functives"). According to Deleuze, none of these disciplines enjoy primacy over the others: they are different ways of organizing the metaphysical flux, "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another."Negotiations, p. 125. Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical. Instead of asking, "is it true?" or "what is it?", Deleuze claims that better questions would be "what does it do?" or "how does it work?"
But how does Deleuze square his pessimistic diagnoses with his ethical naturalism? Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or immanent: to live well is to fully express one's power, to go to the limits of one's potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society still suppresses difference and alienates persons from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can become -- though we cannot know what that is in advance. The pinnacle of Deleuzean practice, then, is creativity. "Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?" Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 135.
Deleuze's ideas have not spawned a school, as Lacan's did. But his major collaborations with Guattari (Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and What Is Philosophy?) were best-sellers in France, and remain heavily cited in English-speaking academe. In the 1960s, Deleuze's portrayal of Nietzsche as a metaphysician of difference rather than a reactionary mystic contributed greatly to the plausibility of "left-wing Nietzscheanism" as an intellectual stance.See, e.g., D. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (MIT Press, 1985), and L. Ferry and A. Renaut (eds.), Why We Are Not Nietzscheans (University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Like his contemporaries Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard, Deleuze's influence has been most strongly felt in North American humanities departments, particularly in circles associated with literary theory. There, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, written in the wake of May 1968, in a style by turns vulgar and esotericSometimes in the same sentence: "one is thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius" (Anti-Oedipus, p. 347)., offering a sweeping analysis of the family, language, capitalism, and history via eclectic borrowings from Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and dozens of other theorists, were seen as major postmodern manifestos.See, e.g., Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory (Guilford Press, 1991), described by literary critic Frederic Jameson as "the most detailed introduction to postmodern social theory I have yet seen".
Deleuze's more general philosophical project has attracted fewer followers. Eric Alliez, one of Deleuze's doctoral students, wrote a defense and exposition of his teacher's thought entitled The Signature of the World, or, What Is the Philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari? (1993). Jean-Jacques Lecercle, another of Deleuze's former students, has developed a broadly Deleuzian approach to pragmatics. In works such as Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), Manuel DeLanda has applied Deleuzean concepts to critique essentialism in the philosophy of science.
Naturally, Deleuze has attracted many critics as well. The following list is not exhaustive, gives only the briefest of summaries, and refrains from any evaluation.
In Modern French Philosophy (1979), Vincent Descombes claims that Deleuze's account of a difference that is not derived from identity (in Nietzsche and Philosophy) is incoherent, and that his analysis of history in Anti-Oedipus is 'utter idealism', criticizing reality for falling short of a non-existent ideal of schizophrenic becoming.
In What Is Neostructuralism? (1984), Manfred Frank claims that Deleuze's theory of individuation as a process of bottomless differentiation fails to explain the unity of consciousness.
In "The Decline and Fall of French Nietzscheo-Structuralism" (1994), Pascal Engel makes a global condemnation of Deleuze's thought. According to Engel, Deleuze's metaphilosophical approach makes it impossible to reasonably disagree with a philosophical system, and so destroys meaning, truth, and philosophy itself. Engel summarizes Deleuze's metaphilosophy thus: "When faced with a beautiful philosophical concept you should just sit back and admire it. You should not question it."Barry Smith (ed.), European Philosophy and the American Academy, p. 34.
In Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1997), Alain Badiou claims that for Deleuze, the apparent plurality and variety of the world is only a mask for the single, self-differentiating being-process (which Badiou calls "the One-All"). Badiou further claims that, in practical matters, Deleuze's monism entails an ascetic, aristocratic fatalism akin to ancient Stoicism.
In Reconsidering Difference (1997), Todd May argues that Deleuze's claim that difference is ontologically primary ultimately contradicts his embrace of immanence, i.e., his monism. However, May believes that Deleuze can discard the primacy-of-difference thesis, and accept a Wittgensteinian holism without significantly altering (what May believes is) Deleuze's practical philosophy.
In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientific terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in his philosophical system. Deleuze's writings on subjects such as calculus and quantum mechanics are, according to Sokal and Bricmont, vague, meaningless, or unjustified. However, by Sokal and Bricmont's own admission, they suspend judgment about Deleuze's philosophical theories and terminology.
In Organs without Bodies (2003), Slavoj Žižek criticizes Deleuze and Guattari for failing to anticipate the decentralization of contemporary capitalism. Žižek attempts to use Badiou's reading of Deleuze to articulate an alternative Deleuzian politics.
In collaboration with Félix Guattari:
Most of Deleuze's courses are available, in several languages, here.
Select secondary sources:
1925 births | 1995 deaths | Deleuze-Guattari | 20th century philosophers | Continental philosophers | French philosophers | Postmodern theory | Poststructuralism | Social philosophy | Writers who committed suicide
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