Gilles Deleuze

• 1. Introduction

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  Gilles Deleuze never trimmed his fingernails. He once explained that he lacked "normal protective fingerprints", and so could not "touch an object, particularly a piece of cloth, with the pads of my fingers without sharp pain". It is a small, strange detail about a French philosopher whose books ask what it means for anything to be itself at all.

  From the early 1950s until his death in 1995, Deleuze wrote about philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. One scholar, citing a standard for greatness set by Bernard Williams, ranks him among the "greatest philosophers". Yet Deleuze described himself as a "pure metaphysician", and his work spread into fields far from metaphysics.

  How does a thinker who treats identity as an illusion live a life of lectures, a marriage, and children? Why did he insist that reading an old philosopher should produce something monstrous? And why do admirers and critics describe the same books in such opposite terms? The answers begin in Paris, in the middle of a war.

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• 2. Paris Years

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  During the Nazi occupation of France, Deleuze's older brother Georges, three years his senior, was arrested for taking part in the French Resistance. Georges died while being transported to a concentration camp. Gilles was a schoolboy at the time, attending the Lycée Carnot after growing up in a middle-class Paris family. His mother was Odette Camaüer, and his father, Louis, was an engineer. He also spent a year in khâgne, the demanding preparatory course, at the Lycée Henri IV.

  In 1944 Deleuze went to the Sorbonne. His teachers there included Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alquié, and Maurice de Gandillac, all noted specialists in the history of philosophy. Deleuze's lifelong attention to the great modern thinkers owed much to them.

  He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1948 and taught at lycées in Amiens, Orléans, and Louis le Grand until 1957. Then he moved to the University of Paris. In 1953 he published his first monograph, Empiricism and Subjectivity, about David Hume. It grew out of a thesis from 1947, roughly equivalent to an M.A., which Hyppolite and Canguilhem had directed. He married Denise Paul Grandjouan, known as Fanny, in 1956, and the couple had two children.

  From 1960 to 1964 Deleuze held a research fellowship at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. In that period he published Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1962 and became friends with Michel Foucault. He was a professor at the University of Lyon from 1964 to 1969. In 1968 he defended two doctoral dissertations while the May 68 demonstrations went on around him. They were later published as 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, an experimental school built to put educational reform into practice. Foucault had suggested hiring him. Deleuze taught there until he retired in 1987. Another recruit to the new university was a psychoanalyst named Félix Guattari, who would reshape Deleuze's work.

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• 3. Difference All the Way Down

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  Plato's forms offer a clean picture of the world. Each thing has a stable identity, and difference is whatever separates one identity from another. Deleuze turned that picture over. In the works before his partnership with Guattari, his central project was to argue that identities are effects of difference, not the other way around.

  His reasoning went like this. Even things of the same genus differ in nature, so no two things are ever the same. The categories used to sort things are themselves products of difference. What looks like a solid "X" is really an endless series of differences between differences. Difference, in his phrase, goes all the way down. Philosophy has a direct bond with things only when it grasps a thing in its difference from everything it is not, in its "internal difference".

  This pure difference is not located in space or time. Like Kant, Deleuze took space and time to be unifying forms the subject imposes. So he called the realm of pure difference "the virtual", borrowing an idea from Proust: what is "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract". Virtual ideas may resemble Plato's forms, but they are neither models nor originals. They are the conditions of actual experience, a real system of differential relations that produces actual spaces, times, and sensations.

  Deleuze sometimes named this view transcendental empiricism. Kant had warned that stretching causality beyond experience leads to empty speculation about a first cause. Deleuze flipped the arrangement. Experience overflows our concepts by delivering novelty, and that raw encounter with difference forces the invention of new ways of thinking.

  He paired this with a medieval doctrine. John Duns Scotus argued that "God is good" and "Jane is good" use the word good in exactly the same sense. Thomas Aquinas and many others had held that divine goodness is only analogous to the human kind. For Scotus, God differs from people only in degree, and the same holds whether one speaks of God, a person, or a flea. Deleuze adapted this univocity to claim that being itself is difference.

  That moves him near Spinoza, who held that everything is a modification of one substance, God or Nature. Deleuze goes further and removes the substance. What remains is an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos that keeps folding, unfolding, and refolding. He packed the idea into a paradoxical formula: "pluralism = monism".

  Difference and Repetition, widely regarded as his magnum opus, is the most sustained attempt to work out these details. The same picture returns under other names. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, reality is a play of forces. In Anti-Oedipus, it is a "body without organs". In What is Philosophy? from 1991, it is a "plane of immanence" or a "chaosmos".

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• 4. Thought as Violence

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  Aristotle, René Descartes, and Edmund Husserl, in Deleuze's account, shared a comfortable assumption. Truth might be hard to reach, whether by pure theory, rigorous calculation, or systematic doubt, but thinking was fit for the job. Deleuze called this the traditional "image of thought" and rejected it. Real thinking, he said, is a violent confrontation with reality that breaks established categories. Truth alters what people think is possible.

  Dropping the assumption leaves what he called a "thought without image", driven by problems instead of solving them. He was blunt about the foundations of reason: "Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational". He added that "Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift."

  The Logic of Sense, published in 1969, is among his oddest works on these questions. Foucault, writing about it in the essay "Theatrum Philosophicum", observed that it begins with metaphysics but approaches it through language and truth. In its first series Deleuze reads Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. When nouns and adjectives dissolve into the verbs of pure becoming, he writes, all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God.

  This outlook shaped how he read other philosophers. A reading should not hunt for one correct interpretation. It should say what a philosopher "must have taken for granted", the problem that the concepts answer. Deleuze described his method with a deliberately shocking image: sneaking up behind an author and fathering an offspring that is recognizably his, yet monstrous. A parallel he pointed to was Francis Bacon's Study after Velázquez. It is beside the point, he suggested, to complain that Bacon gets Velázquez wrong.

  Philosophy itself, for Deleuze, is the creation of concepts. Plato's ideas, Descartes's cogito, and Kant's doctrine of the faculties are all constructions that define a range of thinking. A concept, he wrote, "posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created."

  From roughly 1981 he split human creativity into three disciplines. Philosophy makes concepts. The arts make combinations of sensation and feeling, which he called percepts and affects. The sciences make quantitative theories around fixed reference points such as the speed of light or absolute zero, which he called functives. None outranks the others. They are "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another." Cinema, on this view, does not represent an outside reality but organizes movement and time. So he preferred practical questions, such as "what does it do?" and "how does it work?", over "is it true?".

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• 5. Desire and Control

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  In 1972 and 1980, Deleuze and Guattari published the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. They told history as the hardening of "desiring-production", a concept that blends Freudian drives with Marxist labor. Out of it came three products: the modern individual, typically neurotic and repressed, the nation-state, and capitalism.

  The first volume sketches a universal history. Each mode of production gets its own socius, the social body that takes credit for what is produced. For the tribe it is the earth. For the empire it is the body of the despot. For capitalism it is capital. Deleuze, following Karl Marx, welcomed capitalism's destruction of traditional hierarchies as liberating. What he attacked was its flattening of every value into the aims of the market.

  In 1990 he published the essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control", building on Foucault's idea of the disciplinary society. Disciplinary societies worked through enclosures such as schools, factories, prisons, and office buildings. Since World War II, Deleuze argued, new institutions and technologies had dissolved the walls between them. Coercion now reaches individuals treated as "masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks'". It runs continuously, following people through transaction records, mobile location tracking, and other personal data.

  A reader may wonder how such a bleak diagnosis fits his ethics. His answer was that standards of value are immanent, not handed down from outside. To live well is to express one's power fully and reach the limits of one's potential. Modern society, meanwhile, still suppresses difference and cuts people off from what they can do. Existing identities must be overturned so that they become all they can become, though nobody can say beforehand what that will be.

  The highest Deleuzian practice is therefore creativity. As he put it: "to bring into existence and not to judge." Judging is distasteful, he wrote, because what has value can only be made or distinguished by defying judgment. He asked what expert judgment could ever bear on "the work to come".

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• 6. Echoes of Heidegger

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  Martin Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie, written in 1936-38 and published after his death in 1989, wrestles with difference, identity, representation, and the event. None of the relevant Heidegger texts had been translated into French by the time Deleuze died. That rules out any strong case that Deleuze borrowed from them. The links run through a mathematician, Albert Lautman, who drew heavily on Heidegger's Being and Time. James Bahoh says Lautman's theory of dialectical Ideas was one Deleuze appropriated and modified.

  Daniel W. Smith offers a compact summary: "Difference and Repetition could be read as a response to Being and Time (for Deleuze, Being is difference, and time is repetition)." Bahoh adds that the Beiträge could be read as the book's "unknowing and anachronistic doppelgänger". Both thinkers converge on difference and the event. Deleuze says difference "differentiates by way of events". Jussi Backman argues that Heidegger likewise finds the unity of being in difference alone.

  That shared view led both to attack representation as it appears in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Cartesian thought. Joe Hughes jokes that Difference and Repetition is a detective novel about a horrendous crime, the birth of representation. Heidegger's counterweight is the fourfold, which grounds a thing in an "event of appropriation". Deleuze traces a genealogy of the old beliefs, tracking how beings come to exist and pass out of existence.

  Their treatments of time and space also mirror each other. In the Beiträge, the time-space of the world is distinguished from the event that produces it. Deleuze draws a matching line between actual time and virtual time, across the three syntheses of Difference and Repetition.

  Each also turned to problems that slip outside the grasp of formal, natural, and human sciences. For Heidegger, the example is the Earth within the fourfold, which resists articulation in what he calls a "strife". For Deleuze, it is the paradox of regress, or indefinite proliferation, in The Logic of Sense.

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• 7. Acclaim and Attack

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  In the 1960s, Deleuze presented Nietzsche as a metaphysician of difference, not a reactionary mystic. That portrait helped make "left-wing Nietzscheanism" plausible and popular. After Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, Foucault declared that "one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian." Deleuze replied that the remark was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid."

  The 1970s brought Anti-Oedipus, a book written in a style by turns vulgar and esoteric. It swept across the family, language, capitalism, and history, borrowing mainly from Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Nietzsche. Readers took it as a theoretical embodiment of the anarchic spirit of May 1968. In the 1980s and 1990s nearly all his books were translated into English. By 2007 he was the 11th most frequently cited author in English-language humanities publications, between Freud and Kant. English-speaking academia usually files him under continental philosophy.

  The objections came from both sides of the Channel. Pascal Engel argued that Deleuze's approach makes reasonable disagreement impossible and so destroys meaning, truth, and philosophy. In Engel's paraphrase, faced with a beautiful concept, you should "sit back and admire it". Stanley Rosen objected to his reading of Nietzsche's eternal return. Vincent Descombes called his account of non-derived difference incoherent, and called his history in Anti-Oedipus "utter idealism". Slavoj Žižek named Anti-Oedipus "arguably Deleuze's worst book" and cast its author as "the ideologist of late capitalism".

  Peter Hallward argued that a philosophy of endless differentiation has nothing to say about material conditions, and is aimed at passive contemplation. Alain Badiou claimed that Deleuze's pluralism hides a monism with an aristocratic, Stoic fatalism. Todd May saw a contradiction between the primacy of difference and monism. Rafael Holmberg suggested Deleuze ends up near idealists such as Schelling. Manfred Frank said bottomless differentiation cannot explain the unity of consciousness.

  The sharpest dispute concerned science. In Fashionable Nonsense, published in 1997, the physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accused Deleuze of sliding between accepted technical meanings and private ones. They had no quarrel with metaphor, but held that scientific terms are useful only if precise. Deleuze had already answered that scientific creators of functions and cinematic creators of images show "remarkable similarities". Smith, Protevi and Voss later argued that Sokal and Bricmont underestimated his grasp of mathematics, and linked his ideas to dynamical systems and chaos theory.

  Even admirers have been uneasy about one booklet. Coldness and Cruelty, on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, appeared in French in 1967 and was translated by Zone Books in 1989. Alison M. Moore notes that it fails to separate Masoch's own view of his desire from the psychiatric label "masochism", a term Masoch emphatically rejected.

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• 8. The Last Years

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  In 1994 and 1995 France's Arte channel aired L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, eight hours of interviews with Claire Parnet. Deleuze had always been wary of talking about himself. Asked once about his life, he said: "Academics' lives are seldom interesting." He went on: "What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy?" He added that arguments from one's own privileged experience "are bad and reactionary arguments".

  The historian James Miller notes a contrast between Deleuze's ideas about escaping oppressive systems and his fairly conventional daily life. The adventures happened through writing and teaching. Deleuze also struggled with alcoholism for much of his life and eventually quit entirely for the sake of his health. That experience left marks on his philosophy, in his reflections on the promise and danger of alternative ways of thinking and in his use of "sobriety" as an interpretive frame.

  Breathing had been hard for him since youth. In 1968 he developed tuberculosis, and a lung was removed. He was an avid smoker. His symptoms worsened for the rest of his life, until even writing took laborious effort. Overwhelmed by his respiratory problems, he died by suicide on the 4th of November 1995, throwing himself from a window of his apartment.

  He left plans behind. He had announced a book titled La Grandeur de Marx, The Greatness of Marx. He also left two chapters of an unfinished project called Ensembles and Multiplicities. They have since been published as the essays "Immanence: A Life" and "The Actual and the Virtual". Deleuze is buried in the cemetery of the village of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.

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