Gilles Deleuze

1925-1995 · French · Metaphysics, Ontology, Philosophy of Mind, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Cinema, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Difference, Continental Philosophy

A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through.

When Gilles Deleuze arrived at the Sorbonne in the late 1940s, French philosophy was dominated by Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. His response was to write a book on Hume. That provocation announced a lifelong program: replacing the tradition of identity, negation, and transcendence with a philosophy built from difference, immanence, and what he called transcendental empiricism. His solo masterpieces "Difference and Repetition" and "The Logic of Sense" argue that identity and resemblance are not fundamental — they are effects produced by a deeper play of differences. Ideas are not Platonic…

Topics Gilles Deleuze addresses

• difference and repetition
• univocity of being
• the simulacrum
• the overturning of Platonism
• transcendental empiricism
• the virtual and the actual
• the plane of immanence
• the body without organs
• desire as production
• assemblages
• rhizome
• deterritorialization and reterritorialization
• lines of flight
• becoming
• becoming-animal
• becoming-woman
• becoming-imperceptible
• smooth and striated space
• the war machine
• the fold
• schizoanalysis
• the time-image
• the movement-image
• the theory of multiplicities

Converse with Gilles Deleuze on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Gilles Deleuze's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.