Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze
	Gilles Deleuze, French philosopher of difference and immanence
Tradition	Continental philosophy, Post-structuralism, Postmodern philosophy
Influenced by	Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan
Lifespan	1925–1995
Notable ideas	Philosophy of difference; concept of multiplicity; Difference and Repetition; A Thousand Plateaus (with Félix Guattari); rhizomatic ontology; immanence
Occupation	Philosopher, Professor
Influenced	Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Manuel DeLanda, Speculative realism, Contemporary philosophy
Wikidata	Q184226

Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher whose work became highly influential across many fields of thought. He is best known as a philosopher of difference and becoming – interested in how things change rather than in fixed identities. His major works include Difference and Repetition (1968) and (with Félix Guattari) Anti-Oedipus (1972). These texts introduced radical ideas such as difference-in-itself, intensive multiplicity, and desiring-production. Deleuze’s writing often challenged traditional structures (such as stable meanings, identities or social hierarchies) in a way that led others to call him a post-structuralist. In practice, however, he preferred to see himself as a metaphysician creating new concepts. His thought draws on figures like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson and Leibniz, yet seeks a distinctive ontology of change. Deleuze’s influence has spread from philosophy into fields as diverse as film studies, literary theory, art, political theory and social sciences.

Early Life and Education

Gilles Deleuze was born in Paris in 1925 to a conservative, middle-class family. During World War II his family took refuge in Normandy for a year, where a teacher named Pierre Halwachs introduced the young Deleuze to literature (Gide, Baudelaire) and to philosophy. Deleuze later said that this exposure gave him a sense that philosophical ideas could have the vivid autonomy of literary characters. After the war, he returned to Paris, did a year of intensive preparatory study (khâgne) at Lycée Henri IV, and then studied the history of philosophy at the Sorbonne. His teachers included Jean Hippolyte and Ferdinand Alquié, whom he greatly admired, as well as Georges Canguilhem and Maurice de Gandillac. At this time he was also influenced by the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, which he read alongside his coursework.

In 1948 Deleuze passed the agrégation (state teaching exam) in philosophy and began teaching in various schools. In 1950 he married Fanny (Denise) Grandjouan, a translator of D. H. Lawrence, and the couple had two children. Deleuze remained married to Fanny for life. In 1953, at age 28, he published his first book Empiricism and Subjectivity on David Hume, marking the start of his career. This choice of topic was a provocation in his intellectual milieu; his contemporaries (such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who were students at the École Normale Supérieure) were focusing on Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, while Deleuze championed an empiricist. Between 1953 and 1962 he moved among secondary school and university teaching positions in France. He published little during this period – later calling it “a hole in my life” – partly because he was suffering from chronic respiratory illness.

His reputation in academic circles was established in 1962 with Nietzsche and Philosophy, a book that reinterpreted Nietzsche’s thought in a new, affirmative way. He immediately followed this with other monographs: Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1963), Proust and Signs (1964), and Bergsonism (1966). In 1968, Deleuze earned his doctorate with Difference and Repetition, a work he regarded as his masterpiece. His secondary dissertation was Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. In 1969 he obtained a permanent professorship at the progressive University of Paris VIII in Vincennes (which later moved to Saint-Denis). He taught there until retirement in 1987 and also gave weekly seminars at the institution. In 1969 he published The Logic of Sense and around the same time met the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, beginning the collaboration that produced Deleuze’s most famous joint works.

Major Works and Ideas

Early monographs. Deleuze’s first solo books set the stage for his later innovations by offering new readings of major thinkers. Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953) presented Hume as a radical subjectivist, overturning later readings that bracketed doubt. Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) portrayed Nietzsche as completing and inverting Kant’s project, while rejecting Derridean phenomenology’s focus on language. Deleuze saw Nietzsche as a philosopher of affirmation and difference. In Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1963) he highlighted Kant’s own internal critique of transcendentalism and emphasized the creative aspect of judgment. Proust and Signs (1964) used literature to reveal how interpretation itself creates meaning, presaging his later interest in “minor literature.” In Bergsonism (1966), Deleuze gave a clear popular account of Henri Bergson’s philosophy – especially Bergson’s ideas of time and duration – which deeply influenced him. Each of these books not only interpreted a traditional figure, but also used that figure to develop new concepts. Deleuze treated his subjects as portraits, drawing out themes of perception, memory, difference or expression with originality.

Difference and Repetition (1968). This book is Deleuze’s central philosophical statement. Rejecting the idea that difference can only be defined after identity (x is different from y because each has an identity), Deleuze set out to make difference primary. He argued that Western philosophy has suffered a “transcendental illusion” by subordinating difference to sameness. Instead, he proposed to recognize difference in itself. To do so he developed a new metaphysical vocabulary: concepts of the virtual versus the actual, nonlinear repetition, and multiplicity. In Deleuze’s scheme, reality consists of processes and flows (an “Intensive” rather than isolated substances); whenever events repeat, each repetition carries an internal difference that makes novelty. He drew examples from mathematics and science (like calculus and evolution) to show how a multiplicity of possibilities underlies what we see. Deleuze also used thought experiments (often involving infinity or infinitesimal changes) to argue that what seems like the same thing is never identical to itself. Difference and Repetition ranges widely – exploring topics like the Platonic theory of Ideas, Kantian faculties, Nietzsche’s eternal return, and the nature of time – all to demonstrate that the identity-attributed world is a “representation” hiding the generative role of difference. This book established Deleuze as a major original philosopher. Its style is demanding: Deleuze intentionally “forces” the reader to think anew, and every chapter seems to invent new terms to break traditional categories. For all its difficulty, it laid the groundwork for many later currents (such as poststructuralism, new materialism, and process philosophy) by insisting that difference and novelty are fundamental.

In the same year he completed Difference and Repetition, Deleuze published Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, applying similar ideas to Baruch Spinoza’s system. Here he stressed univocity of being (one concept of reality applying to all things) and “immanence” (no transcendent realm beyond nature). Deleuze often described his project as building on Spinoza with a rich manifold of variation. Correspondingly, his doctoral work declared that identity or substance must be replaced by difference and event, and possibility by virtual processes.

The Logic of Sense (1969). Deleuze’s next book explored how meaning emerges. Its central question was the relation between surface events and deeper structures of sense. He combined ideas from Lewis Carroll’s paradoxes, psychoanalytic slips of the tongue, and modern logic to show that every proposition or event produces an “effect” of sense by unifying surface and depth. While not as widely cited as Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense introduced important concepts (like “surface” vs “depth” of meaning, and psychoanalytic approaches interpreted in ways distinct from Freud). It broadened his philosophy beyond pure ontology to include analysis of language and signification, while still maintaining a focus on rhythm and repetition in thought.

Collaboration with Guattari – Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In 1969 Deleuze met Félix Guattari, a Marxist psychoanalyst and militant activist. Together they wrote Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I (1972) and then A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II (1980). These volumes became hugely influential and controversial, melding philosophy, psychiatry, Marxism and art. Anti-Oedipus was an immediate sensation in France, attracting wide public attention. It challenged both classical Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari rejected the Freudian idea that desire arises from lack and is focused on family structures. Instead, they portrayed desire as a productive, unconscious force that flows like energy through social and natural systems. They coined terms like “desiring-production” to mix Marx’s idea of economic production with Freud’s unconscious drives. In this view, desire is positive and dynamic (closer to Nietzsche’s will-to-power or Spinoza’s active nature) not a mere response to lack. Anti-Oedipus also satirized the Oedipus complex as a narrow way of coding desire; for Deleuze and Guattari the Oedipal family was just one small “desiring-machine” among many.

A Thousand Plateaus continued the project in a more experimental, nonlinear style. It contains famous terms like “rhizome” (a non-hierarchical, ever-branching model of knowledge or society) and “body without organs” (a metaphor taken from Antonin Artaud, referring to a body where all desires flow freely, unconstrained by fixed structure). They expanded the scope of desiring-production to nature and society, giving a Scala Natura of historical formations (tribal, imperial, and capitalist social “machines”). They celebrated “becoming” – processes of transformation (e.g. becoming-animal or becoming-woman) that break down stable identities. Guattari’s influence and the style of these books was wild and playful: they include jokes, striking metaphors, and a deliberately rhizomatic structure (no single line of argument but many interconnected essays).

Together, these collaborations argued for a politics of deterritorialization – freeing flows of desire and knowledge from rigid institutions. Their final joint book was What Is Philosophy? (1991), a more reflective work on the nature of thought, art and science.

Cinema, art and later work. In the 1980s Deleuze turned to aesthetics. He published Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), which applied his ideas to film theory. He analyzed how film creates meaning through movement, montage and time and introduced the idea that modern cinema breaks with classical narrative forms in a temporal, disjunctive way. These became classics in film studies. He also wrote on other art forms: Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981) explored painting in a Deleuzian way, and Essays Critical and Clinical (1993) gathered various non-mainstream essays on literature, psychiatry and philosophy. Post-1968 political events had influenced him and, along with his cinema books, he briefly became active in causes (prison reform with Foucault’s group, gay rights, etc.).

Late in life Deleuze continued working despite ill health. He published a study Foucault (1986) soon after Michel Foucault’s death, and What is Philosophy? with Guattari in 1991. His last book was Essays Critical and Clinical in 1993. By then his lungs were failing; in 1995 Deleuze took his own life while suffering great pain from pulmonary illness.

Method and Philosophy

Throughout his career, Deleuze emphasized creative construction of concepts over mere interpretation. He famously said that he conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts. In other words, philosophers do not just describe the world—they invent new conceptual tools to understand it. This methodological stance explains why his works often read like conceptual art: playful, inventive, and sometimes baffling. He deliberately mixed literary, scientific, and everyday examples to provoke the reader into thinking differently.

Several key themes run across his work:

Multiplicity and difference. Deleuze rejected any one true, underlying identity for things. Instead, he held that reality is composed of multiplicities – assemblages, processes, or events with many components. He owed this idea to philosophers like Leibniz (monads as unique centers of force) and Bergson (continuous variation), but he extended it into a broader notion of geometry of intensities. On this view, there are always multiple ways a thing could be, and fixed identities are just convenient slices of a fluid reality. This led him to say that “no two leaves are identical” – every object contains tiny differences that mark it as unique. Thus repetition is never exact; each repetition is “with a difference.”

Immanence and Spinozist monism. Deleuze embraced a Spinozist outlook: there is only one substance or reality, and everything that exists is a mode (a particular expression) of it. He called this a “plane of immanence,” meaning there is no transcendence above nature: mind, society, art, science – all exist on the same plane. Consequently there are no absolute categories like Good and Evil in any ultimate metaphysical sense. For Deleuze, ethics becomes a question of what enhances or hinders life (following Spinoza’s Ethics), not obedience to transcendent moral laws. The world is one vast reality, couched in terms of forces and affects, rather than split into mind/body or subject/object.

Vitalism and empiricism. Following Bergson, Deleuze had a kind of vitalism: he believed in a life-force or elan that propels change. Human thought and creativity are not separate from nature’s dynamism. He also remained a philosophical empiricist (not in the narrow sense of sense data, but in the sense that insofar as we know anything, we know it through experiential processes and differences). In fact he called his approach “transcendental empiricism.” This meant he wanted to account for how new things could emerge rather than assuming we only perceive pre-existing forms.

Critique of representational thought. Much of Deleuze’s philosophy challenges what he called the “regime of representation” – the everyday assumption that concepts simply mirror pre-given things. Instead, he conceived of concepts themselves as forces. Each concept has a conceptual persona (an animated figure or force-field behind it). For example, his concept of “rhizome” evokes a rootlike network that spreads horizontally. His concept of “body without organs” evokes a decentered body of flows. Such neologisms illustrate his view that thinking creates a virtual field of possibilities, which science then realizes in specific outcomes. In short, Deleuze saw philosophy as constructing maps of potential reality, rather than describing a fixed territory.

Opposition to static structure. In concrete terms, Deleuze opposed many structuralist ideas that dominated the French scene in the 1960s (Lévi-Strauss in anthropology, structural linguistics, structural Marxism). Where a structuralist saw a fixed underlying code (e.g. of language or of society), Deleuze insisted that structure is continuously produced and broken apart by difference and flow. He therefore focused on how change happens. His famous term “rhizome” (from A Thousand Plateaus) exemplifies this: unlike a traditional “tree” model of knowledge (roots and branches with clear hierarchy), a rhizome is an open, spreading network in which any point can connect to any other. This became a powerful metaphor for post-structuralist and interdisciplinary thinking, suggesting knowledge is non-linear and always moving.

Eternal return and event. Drawing on Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return, Deleuze took it not as something literally recurring but as a metaphor for creative repetition. Each event returns an aspect of the past but in a new configuration, and thus the “future” is always open with unforeseen permutations. In Difference and Repetition he connected this to the idea of the virtual (all possible variations) and the actual (the particular manifestation we see). The virtual is no less real; it’s the realm of potentials out of which actual events arise. Philosophy’s task, for Deleuze, is to give consistency to the virtual – mapping the fields of difference that can become real under certain conditions.

Creation of concepts. Deleuze insisted that understanding a philosophical problem requires inventing the right concept, not simply applying old categories. For example, instead of accepting subject or object as fundamental, he would ask “what new concept allows us to understand these experiences?” In film he replaced “narrative structure” with “movement-image” and “time-image” as ways to think of cinema. In psychology he replaced “libido” or “ego” with “desiring-machine” and “body-without-organs.” In society he opposed “class struggle” as the only dynamic and introduced “lines of flight” to describe revolutionary escapes. This method means readers often find Deleuze’s works conceptually dense: he will often answer a question by coining a term that reframes how we ask the question.

Overall, Deleuze’s philosophy rejects any single unified whole. Instead of focusing on being (what things are), he emphasized becoming: how things undergo continual transformation. He saw multiplicity, difference, and creative change as the core of reality. On this basis he argued against any teleology or final purpose for history; for him even politics is a “history of others” – a play of forces without a predetermined end.

Philosophy of Desire

A striking aspect of Deleuze’s thought emerges from his collaboration with Félix Guattari: a radically new philosophy of desire. In Anti-Oedipus (1972), they argued that desire is not the result of a lack to be fulfilled (as in classical psychoanalysis), but a productive force that shapes both psyche and society. They introduced the term “desiring-production” to emphasize this. Desire, they said, is a kind of universal engine present in nature, economy, and the unconscious. It creates real flows and connections: desires manifest as creativity in art, drive technological innovation, and form social movements. The unconscious is seen as not a negative well of deficiency, but as a machine that produces reality (in mental images, social drives, etc.).

By this view, traditional psychoanalytic models (Oedipal complexes, symbolic structures) are just one way society captures and channels desire, not its essence. Deleuze and Guattari drew on Marx, arguing that capitalism both unleashes and controls these flows. Capitalism liberates creative energy by abolishing some old norms, but it also tries to regiment desire through institutions like the nuclear family, the market, and private property. A major theme in Anti-Oedipus is that modern individuals are torn between flows of desire (Schizo- reality) and the attempts of social machinery to harness those flows. Schizoanalysis (their term for a new kind of analysis) examines these flows without reducing them to either a single root cause or an unconscious family fix.

Key metaphors emerged: the “body without organs” (a concept from Antonin Artaud) describes a state of maximum fluidity where capacities are freed from fixed structure; “desiring-machines” describe the way parts of a system continually connect, disconnect and produce each other (for example, machines of desire might include the pairing of things like mother-child or worker-production). In short, they model desire as a constantly shifting, networked process. For instance, “schizophrenia” in Anti-Oedipus is described not just as illness but as the prototype of creative production – though it also shows the danger when flows cannot find a smooth social outlet and spiral into breakdown.

The philosophy of desire had a provocatively political edge. It aligned with the spirit of 1968’s movements in France (which Deleuze and Guattari experienced firsthand). They saw potential for revolution not in calling for “the people” against “the state”, but in deterritorializing fixed identities – allowing social and sexual roles to be reimagined. Their proposal was essentially: understand how desire operates in a system, then find ways to free and redirect it. This idea has resonated through later cultural and political theory (for example, in queer theory’s focus on fluid identity).

In practical terms, A Thousand Plateaus extended these ideas: it applied the same model of flows to language, culture, and even geography. They suggested that any structure (nation, state, family) works like a machine that both channels and restricts desiring energy. Political change happens when new lines of flight emerge that reorganize these machines (world and capital). The style of writing mirrors their content: A Thousand Plateaus is arranged in loosely connected “plateaus” (essays) that a reader can enter at any point, much like a rhizome can be entered from any root.

In summary, for Deleuze (especially with Guattari) desire is artful energy. It does not lack something; rather it endlessly creates connections. This overturned Freudian and classical Marxist paradigms. It influenced later thinkers like philosopher Manuel DeLanda, who applied Deleuzian ideas to economics and social science, and cultural critics who use terms like assemblage or affect to describe social dynamics.

Influence and Reception

Deleuze is often grouped with the second-generation French philosophers of the post-May-1968 era, alongside figures such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Collectively, they are called post-structuralists or sometimes “postmodernists,” though these labels are broad. It is fair to say Deleuze shared with them a skepticism of fixed structures (whether language, society or subjectivity). However, his emphasis on materiality and process distinguishes him. Where Derrida focused on text and différance, Deleuze turned frequently to biology, physics, and mathematics. He famously spoke of drawing metaphors from thermodynamics, genetics, chemistry, geology and other sciences. Jean-François Lyotard dubbed Deleuze a “library of Babel” for the sheer range of references in his work.

As a result, Deleuze’s influence has been very wide. Literary theorists use his concept of “minor literature” (from Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 1975) to study how marginalized writers produce political change. Film scholars have built entire Deleuzian film theories on The Movement-Image and The Time-Image. In architecture and urban theory, the idea of a rhizome has inspired new models of cities as decentralized networks. Anthropologists and sociologists have employed his ideas of assemblages and deterritorialization. In gender and sexuality studies, the concept of “becoming” (for example “becoming-woman”) continues to spark debate. Even scholars in biology and artificial life have engaged with his ideas (see, for instance, studies calling his philosophy “transversal” or “vitalist ecology”).

Among philosophers, Deleuze is one of the most-cited French analysts of the past century. His concepts of difference and multiplicity form the backbone of fields like New Materialism and Speculative Realism (which attempt to address what exists outside human perception). Political theorists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri drew on Deleuze and Guattari (along with Antonio Negri) in books like Empire to rethink class and state power. In education and literary theory, scholars have used Deleuze’s ideas of creativity to advocate for more open-ended forms of learning and reading.

Despite the breadth, reception of Deleuze has been mixed. He has many devoted followers who appreciate the creativity and liberatory aspects of his thought. Others find his style obscure or excessively abstract. In France, some older philosophers saw him as provocateur rather than serious scholar. When Anti-Oedipus became a bestseller (albeit a scandalous one) in the 1970s, it surprised many who expected scholarly writing to be dry. Across the Atlantic, Anglo-American philosophers initially paid little attention, but since the 1980s universities have translated and taught Deleuze widely. By the 21st century there were entire series of books and journals dedicated to Deleuze studies.

An important aspect of his legacy is that many of his boldest terms – “rhizome,” “plane of immanence,” “becoming,” “body without organs,” “desiring-production” – have entered common philosophical vocabulary. Concepts like difference-in-itself and philosophy of immanence are often cited in contemporary metaphysics. He has been praised as a philosopher who opened up new ways of thinking about art, science, and politics. For example, some credit Deleuze with inspiring parts of the new materialism movement, which seeks to move beyond anthropocentric ideas by emphasizing forces, flows, and symbioses. Others note his impact on continental phenomenology and existentialism insofar as it draws attention to creativity in human life.

Finally, many note that Deleuze rarely wanted the spotlight. He gave few conferences or interviews and preferred writing. Yet his publishing, teaching and candidacy as a public intellectual (especially after 1968) made him a central figure. His final works, like What Is Philosophy?, reflect on philosophy’s place when art and science themselves become philosophical.

Critiques and Debates

Deleuze’s philosophy has generated vigorous debate. Critics often point to his style: his writing can be dense, poetic, and full of neologisms. This has attracted suggestions that he is obscure, or that his key terms (rhizome, multiplicity, etc.) can be used loosely. Some defenders argue that the difficulty is intentional: he wanted readers to rethink basic assumptions.

Philosophically, important disagreements arise. Some analytic and traditional philosophers have argued that Deleuze lacks clear definitions or that his metaphysics is unduly abstract. For example, Alain Badiou (another contemporary French philosopher) criticized Deleuze for sidelining the role of universal truths or events in favor of perpetual flux. Slavoj Žižek, a Lacanian philosopher, launched a prominent attack in Organs Without Bodies (2003). Žižek accused Deleuze (and Guattari) of effacing negativity and contradiction, and he defended a more Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Žižek also argued that Deleuze’s celebration of “pure becoming” risks denying any stable ground for interpretation or resistance. In response, Deleuzians note that he actually admits limits and acknowledges forms of conflict – his whole point was to redistribute how we think about conflict within flows.

Feminist critiques have been significant. In the 1980s, theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Alice Jardine criticized the concept of "becoming-woman" in A Thousand Plateaus. They argued this idea appropriated feminist struggles in a way that was abstract and insensitive (for example, saying “everybody becomes-woman” was seen by some as trivializing actual women’s issues). Some feminists felt that Deleuze and Guattari’s revolutionary rhetoric largely centered white male subjects. Deleuze admirers respond that he and Guattari did refer to multiple “becomings” (woman, animal, etc.) as metaphors for transformation rather than literal identities. The debate continues floweringly, with newer feminist and queer theorists reinterpreting or critiquing their notions of desire and deterritorialization.

Others question his political implications. Some scholars ask whether a focus on flows and decentralization adequately addresses issues like structural oppression or collective organization. Critics of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project sometimes say it sounds more like poetic anthropology than a clear political strategy. Le Bon Temps maybe. Yet supporters find its recipes for social change innovative: e.g. replacing mechanistic Marxism with analyses of micropolitics and subjectivity.

Another debate touches on history of philosophy. Deleuze’s practice of reading philosophers “against the grain” has provoked both admiration and skepticism. In each book on a thinker, Deleuze often claimed that fundamental concepts were buried in misunderstandings of that thinker. For example, he portrays Hume as radical, Leibniz as proto-differentiator, Kant as pragmatist. Some scholars see this as a legitimate release of hidden potentials; others see it as anachronistic or selective. This gave rise to a famous phrase by some that “Deleuze’s history of philosophy is a weapon rather than an account.” Discussions continue about whether his readings are faithful reconstructions or idiosyncratic reinventions.

Finally, because Deleuze drew from linguistics, science and psychoanalysis in unorthodox ways, experts sometimes complain that he misuses technical terms or research. For example, mathematicians may nitpick his cover-tone use of calculus. But Deleuze himself said he did not aim for historical accuracy in those fields—rather, he took intuitions from them to spark philosophical concepts.

Despite the criticisms, most observers agree that Deleuze sparked important conversations. Over time many debates have become more nuanced, with critics recognizing the powerful insights even if they challenge them. He remains an active subject of academic conferences and new interpretations.

Legacy

Gilles Deleuze left a vast legacy. He is widely regarded as one of the central philosophers of post-World War II continental thought. His combination of metaphysics, literary flair, and political edge makes his work stand out. Conceptually, terms he introduced – difference, multiplicity, immanence, rhizome, body without organs, becoming, desiring-production – are now standard fare in philosophy courses. Many authors and researchers explicitly cite Deleuze. For instance, new materialists (like Jane Bennett or Ian Bogost) often draw on his ideas of material agency. In film studies, writers like Laura Mulvey and Colin McCabe famously built on his cinema books. In cultural theory, concepts like “schizoanalysis” or “nomadism” (also from A Thousand Plateaus) are part of the dialogue on power and resistance.

His influence is not just intellectual but also institutional. Deleuze’s works are taught in universities worldwide, translated into dozens of languages, and collected in critical anthologies and readers. Societies and journals dedicated to Deleuzian studies exist. Many philosophers of both the analytic and continental traditions have responded to him – either integrating his insights or arguing against them.

In the broader culture, Deleuze has been called “the philosopher who teaches us how to think differently.” Figures in art, music (for example, experimental musician and theorist Brian Massumi has translated some of his work), and design have engaged with his ideas. Politically, the notion of decentralized movements and grassroots “lines of flight” has influenced activist discourses, though it’s hard to trace direct lines from his familiar texts to any one movement.

In summary, Deleuze’s place in intellectual history is secure as a philosopher of change and creativity. His work challenged anyone concerned with how ideas evolve over time and how subjects are constituted. Decades after his death, thinkers continue to find inspiration (or provocation) in his vision of a world made of multiplying differences.

Selected Works

Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953) – on David Hume.
Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962).
Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1963).
Proust and Signs (1964).
Bergsonism (1966).
Difference and Repetition (1968).
Logic of Sense (1969).
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I (1972, with Félix Guattari).
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975, with Félix Guattari).
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II (1980, with Félix Guattari).
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981).
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983); Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985).
Foucault (1986).
What Is Philosophy? (1991, with Félix Guattari).
Essays Critical and Clinical (1993).

Timeline

1925: Born in Paris.
1948: Passes the agrégation in philosophy.
1953: Publishes Empiricism and Subjectivity; marries Denise “Fanny” Grandjouan.
1962: Releases Nietzsche and Philosophy.
1968: Completes doctorate; publishes Difference and Repetition and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza.
1969: Becomes professor at University of Paris VIII; publishes Logic of Sense.
1972: Anti-Oedipus (with Guattari) is published.
1975: Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (with Guattari).
1980: A Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari).
1983–1985: Publishes Cinema 1 and Cinema 2.
1986: Publishes Foucault.
1991: Publishes What Is Philosophy? (with Guattari), his final book with Guattari.
1993: Publishes Essays Critical and Clinical.
1995: Dies (November 4) after a long illness.