Gilles Deleuze Biography Quotes 1 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Gilles Deleuze was born in Paris on 18 January 1925 and became one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century French philosophy. He studied at the Sorbonne after the Second World War, where he encountered a lineage of teachers who shaped his method and interests. Jean Hyppolite introduced him to rigorous, creative readings of Hegel and the history of philosophy; Georges Canguilhem offered a model for concept-driven inquiry attentive to science and life; and Maurice de Gandillac supervised Deleuze's higher studies and later directed his major doctoral work. From early on, Deleuze conceived philosophy as the invention of concepts rather than the commentary upon them, a stance he would maintain while reading thinkers as diverse as Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, and Leibniz.

Early Teaching and First Books
After passing the agregration in 1948, Deleuze taught in secondary schools and then in higher education. His first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953), offered a striking interpretation of David Hume, recasting empiricism as a theory of the formation of subjectivity and social rules rather than a mere psychology of impressions. He held a research position at the CNRS in the late 1950s and moved through university posts while producing a series of compact, highly original monographs: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), which revived Nietzsche's thought as a philosophy of affirmation and critique of ressentiment; Kant's Critical Philosophy (1963), a lucid constellation of the faculties; Proust and Signs (1964), a literary-philosophical study of apprenticeship through signs; Bergsonism (1966), reframing duration and intuition; and Coldness and Cruelty (1967), a study of Sacher-Masoch and the logic of masochism.

Difference, Repetition, and Spinoza
In 1968 Deleuze defended his doctorat d'Etat, submitting two complementary works: Difference and Repetition as the principal thesis and Spinoza and the Problem of Expression as the secondary thesis, under the direction of Maurice de Gandillac. Difference and Repetition proposed a powerful ontology of difference-in-itself, the virtual and the actual, and a critique of representation; it is a cornerstone of his philosophical project. The Spinoza study reintroduced immanence, univocity, and expression as resources for a nontranscendent ethics and metaphysics, launching a lasting Deleuzian engagement with Spinoza alongside earlier engagements with Nietzsche and Bergson.

Vincennes and a New Style of Philosophy
In the wake of the events of 1968, Deleuze joined the newly created University of Paris VIII at Vincennes (later Saint-Denis), an experimental institution where teaching and research were reorganized. There he worked amid a lively milieu that included Michel Foucault, Francois Chatelet, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jacques Ranciere. Deleuze's seminars became legendary for their openness, conceptual inventiveness, and sustained attention to texts. He cultivated collaborative formats and long conversations with students and interlocutors such as Claire Parnet, who helped convey his voice and pedagogy beyond the classroom.

Encounter with Felix Guattari
Deleuze's partnership with the psychoanalyst and activist Felix Guattari, associated with Jean Oury's La Borde clinic and shaped by encounters with Lacanian psychoanalysis and political movements, transformed his work. Together they authored Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. These books proposed schizoanalysis as a critique of the Oedipal reduction, introduced concepts such as the body without organs (drawn from Antonin Artaud), assemblage, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and the rhizome, and rethought desire as productive and immanent. Their collaboration also yielded Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), a study of linguistic invention and minority expression, and later What Is Philosophy? (1991), a meditation on the creation of concepts, percepts, and affects.

Writing Across the Arts and Sciences
Deleuze's solitary works in the 1970s and 1980s ranged across literature, painting, cinema, and the history of philosophy. With Claire Parnet he published Dialogues (1977), an experimental conversation about becoming, politics, and writing. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981) he analyzed painting as a production of sensation rather than representation. He wrote two major volumes on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), offering a conceptual taxonomy of images and signs that reshaped film theory. His monograph Foucault (1986) was both homage and interpretation, engaging a close contemporary whose remark that "perhaps one day this century will be called Deleuzian" had already marked their intellectual kinship. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988) returned to metaphysics through the figure of the fold, while Negotiations (1990) collected interviews, and Essays Critical and Clinical (1993) explored the border of literature and philosophy.

Relations and Intellectual Milieu
Deleuze's work unfolded amid a generation of French thinkers who reoriented philosophy and the human sciences. Alongside Michel Foucault, he shared a commitment to concept creation and the analysis of power and desire. With Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida he shared a critical stance toward metaphysical presence and a sensitivity to language and difference, even as their paths diverged. Pierre Klossowski's writings on Nietzsche influenced Deleuze's account of eternal return and forces. Earlier teachers such as Jean Hyppolite and Georges Canguilhem remained touchstones for method. Though he never belonged to a psychoanalytic school, his encounter with Felix Guattari brought him into dialogue and dispute with Lacanian currents. Within political and academic life he kept a distance from party structures, yet his concepts were frequently mobilized in debates about May 1968, psychiatry, and anti-capitalist practice.

Illness, Withdrawal, and Death
From the late 1980s Deleuze struggled with severe respiratory illness that progressively limited his public activity. He continued to write and to converse, most memorably in the long filmed interview with Claire Parnet known as L'Abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze, recorded with the condition that it be broadcast only after his death. On 4 November 1995, in Paris, he ended his life. Friends and readers understood the act in the context of his prolonged illness and refusal of immobilization, rather than as a philosophical gesture.

Legacy
Deleuze's legacy crosses disciplinary borders. Philosophers drew on his reconceptualization of difference, immanence, and individuation; political theorists and geographers adapted notions of assemblage, territory, and becoming; film and art critics used his image-taxonomies and analyses of sensation; literature scholars explored his accounts of style, minor literature, and the clinical. The collaborative inventions with Felix Guattari provided a vocabulary for thinking desire and capitalism beyond psychoanalytic and orthodox Marxist frameworks, while his readings of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Leibniz revitalized the canon as a toolbox for new problems. Those who worked around him, from Michel Foucault to Claire Parnet and Felix Guattari, formed an intellectual constellation in which Deleuze's insistence that philosophy creates concepts remains a living practice rather than a closed doctrine.

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