Gilles Deleuze

1) Biography:

On January 18, 1925, Gilles Deleuze, a well-known French author and anti-rationalist philosopher, was born at his lifelong home on the 17th arrondisment of Paris. His father was an engineer who had fought in World War I as well. During the German occupation of France, his brother had participated in the German resistance; he was slain after being caught. Gilles attended the public school prior to the war. He was on holiday in Normandy when the war started, and it was determined that Giles would stay in Normandy and continue his studies there after the German invasion of France. He spent a year in Normandy, where he had his first successful academic experience. His teacher encouraged him to read Gide and Baudelaire’s writings. Following his return, he enrolled in the Lycee Carnot in Paris. Later, he studied at the Henri IV, where he completed his Kagne, an academic year reserved for gifted students. He enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1944 and studied philosophy there. He obtained his philosophy aggregation in 1948.

He started his career in 1948 by accepting a post as a philosophy teacher in various Parisian schools. ‘Empiricism and Subjectivity, on David Hume’, his first book, was written and released in 1953. He began working at the Sorbonne as a lecturer on the history of philosophy in 1957. He left the Sorbonne in 1960 and worked as a researcher at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique for the following four years after his appointment. Deleuze worked as a teaching assistant at numerous universities in the meantime.

He released his well-known work, “Nietzsche and Philosophy,” in 1962. He made a lifelong friend in Michel Foucault during this period when Foucault requested that Giles be considered for a professorship at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Giles took a job as an instructor at the University of Lyon in 1964, and with the help of Foucault, he was able to get a job as a philosophy professor at the Vincennes in 1969. Deleuze published his doctoral dissertation in 1968. It was divided into two parts: Diffrence et repetition (Difference and Repetition), a major thesis exploring the nature of mind, identity, and time, and Spinoza et le problmes de l’expression (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza), a minor thesis. The same year, Giles contracted a lung disease that impaired his ability to breathe.

Giles accepted a job as a professor at the Experimental University of Paris VII in 1969, and he held that position until he retired in 1987. At the Paris VII, he had his first encounter with Felix Guattari, who would become his literary companion. Together, they created and published a number of important literary works, including Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. These texts offered an analysis of the political turbulence that surrounded France in May 1968.

Throughout his life, Deleuze actively participated in political discourse. He was particularly interested in problems relating to gay rights and the Palestinian liberation movement. Additionally, Giles belonged to the Foucaultfounded Groupe d’information sur les prisons. Giles created and dedicated the book “Foucault” to the study of Foucault’s work after his death in 1984 as a tribute to his achievements. The book was released in 1986.

Giles Deleuze has produced a large body of literary work. Some of his works honor the work of other practitioners, while others are based on the writings of philosophers including Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Foucault. His most well-known works are, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, The Movement-Image, The Time-Image, Painting (Francis Bacon), Coldness and Cruelty, and Proust and Signs. He has also produced books that describe philosophical experiences with artistic works by well-known authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Heinrich von Kleist, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A few months prior to his passing, Giles’ final book, “Immanence: A life,” which contained a collection of essays known as the “Essays Critical and Clinical” was published. Deleuze’s lung condition had gotten so bad that rigorous confinement was prescribed for him, which prevented him from writing. On November 4th, 1995, Giles Deleuze committed suicide.

2) Main Works:

Anti-Oedipus:

Schizoanalysis is a loosely defined critical practice that was founded from the perspective of schizophrenia and psychosis as well as from the social progress that capitalism has sparked. Deleuze and Guattari created its notions and theories in the book. When discussing these ideas, they make references to anthropology, economics, the creative arts, literature, and history. They developed a “materialist psychiatry” based on the unconscious as a collection of productive processes of desire, incorporating their concept of desiring-production that connects desiring machines and bodies without organs, and repurposing Karl Marx’s historical materialism to detail their various social production organisations, “recording surfaces,” coding, territorialisation, and other related concepts. This was in contrast to contemporary French use of Sigmund Freud’s ideas. Deleuze and Guattari’s description of schizophrenia draws on Friedrich Nietzsche’s theories of the will to power and eternal recurrence; this book builds on much of Deleuze’s earlier thinking in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, which used Nietzsche’s ideas to explore a radical conception of becoming.

The Logic of Sense:

The Logic of Sense is an investigation of meaning and meaninglessness, or “common-sense” and “nonsense” through metaphysics, epistemology, grammar, and ultimately psychoanalysis. It is made up of thirty-four paradoxes, and then there is an appendix with five previously published essays, including a brief summary of Deleuze’s ontology titled “Plato and the Simulacrum.” According to Deleuzian theory, there are two levels of nonsense: the “surface level” (represented by Lewis Carroll) causes innocent, childlike preoccupations with contradictions, and the “inner space” defined by strong, violent contradictions (represented by Antonin Artaud).

The book provides an overview of Deleuze’s theories of the event and of becoming, as well as textual analyses of works by Lewis Carroll, Seneca, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Tournier, Antonin Artaud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Melanie Klein, Friedrich Nietzsche, St.phane Mallarm, Malcolm Lowry, .mile Zola, and Sigmund Freud. It also discusses the emergence of the plane of immanence and the body without organs and mythic conceptions of time.

Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty:

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian novelist from the late 19th century, is philosophically examined in this by Gilles. Deleuze claims that Masoch has a unique manner of “desexualizing love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity” in the Foreword. Deleuze makes an effort to “cut through” the many means of expression and substance that Leopold von Sacher-Masoch used to create his works of art. He also makes an attempt to define masochism as opposed to sadism, stating that the two types of “pornology” are mutually exclusive and cannot coexist as a Sadomasochistic entity. Masochism, according to Deleuze, is something much more profound and sophisticated than the love of suffering, and it is unrelated to sadism.

Difference and Repetition:

The piece makes an effort to critique representation. Deleuze explores the concepts of difference in itself and repetition for itself throughout the book, which are logically and metaphysically superior to any concept of identity. According to some observers, Deleuze attempted to recast Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) from the perspective of creation itself in this work.

Nietzsche and Philosophy:

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote this book about Friedrich Nietzsche in 1962. In it, Nietzsche is treated as a logically consistent philosopher, and ideas like the desire to power and the everlasting return are discussed. The book Nietzsche and Philosophy is well-known and significant. Since Nietzsche had previously received little attention as a serious philosopher in France, its publication has been viewed as a pivotal moment in French philosophy.

3) Main Themes:

Metaphysics:

Deleuze sees time and space as unifying structures imposed by the subject, just like Kant did. Therefore, he draws the conclusion that the concept of pure difference, or what Deleuze refers to as “the virtual,” is not spatial or chronological. The phrase is an allusion to Proust’s description of what endures in both the past and the present: “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” Despite the superficial similarities between Deleuze’s virtual notions and Plato’s forms and Kant’s ideas of pure reason, they are not originals or models and do not transcend conceivable experience; rather, they represent the conditions of real experience, the inherent difference in itself.

As a result, Deleuze occasionally alludes to Kant by calling his philosophy a transcendental empiricism. Experience only makes sense, according to Kant’s transcendental idealism, when it is arranged according to intuitions (namely, space and time). According to Kant, supposing that the qualities of the universe as it exists without regard to our perceptual access are contained in these intuitions and ideas leads to attractive but absurd metaphysical views (for example, extending the concept of causality beyond possible experience results in unverifiable speculation about a first cause). Deleuze flips the Kantian model: experience surpasses our notions by bringing novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, free of our previous categories, compelling us to develop new modes of thought.

Ontological univocity is a concept that Deleuze appropriates from the mediaeval philosopher John Duns Scotus. Many famous theologians and philosophers argued that when one argues that “God is good,” God’s goodness is only comparable to human goodness in discussions over the nature of God during the Middle Ages. Scotus countered that when one says, “God is good,” they are referring to the exact same goodness as is intended when they say, “Jane is good.” That is, God simply differs from us in degree, and attributes like kindness, strength, reason, and so forth apply equally to God, people, and inanimate objects like fleas.

Deleuze modifies the univocity thesis to assert that being is unambiguously difference. However, with univocity, it is being that is Different in the sense that it is said to be Different and not the Differences that are and must be. Furthermore, we and our uniqueness remain ambiguous in and for a univocal Being; it is not we who are univocal in a Being that is not, says Deleuze. Here, Spinoza, who believed that everything in the universe is a mutation of one substance—God or Nature—is simultaneously echoed and inverted by Deleuze. According to Deleuze, there is only a constantly distinguishing process, an origami cosmos that is constantly folding, unfolding, and refolding. Deleuze uses the paradoxical expression “pluralism = monism” to encapsulate this ontology.

Epistemology:

In order to achieve his odd metaphysics, Deleuze adopted an unusual epistemology, or what he refers to as a modification of “the image of thought.” Deleuze contends that the conventional view of thought, which can be found in thinkers like Aristotle, Rene Descartes, and Edmund Hussrel, misperceives thinking as a mostly unproblematic activity. Truth may be difficult to ascertain; it may call for a lifetime of rigorous computation, systematic doubt, or pure theorising, yet thinking is capable, at least in theory, of accurately recognising facts, forms, and other concepts. God’s-eye neutrality may be practically hard to achieve, but that is the ideal to strive for: an ordered extension of common sense that is pursued without bias and leads to a definite, determinate truth.

In contrast, Deleuze contends that true thinking involves a violent encounter with reality and an involuntary rupture of pre-existing categories. He dismisses this viewpoint as attempting to cover up the metaphysical flux. Truth modifies our perceptions of reality and what is conceivable. We can achieve a “thought without image”—a thought that is always determined by issues rather than fixing them—by letting go of the presumption that thinking has an inherent ability to perceive the truth, according to Deleuze. But all of this assumes codes or axioms that are not the outcome of chance, but also do not have an inherent reason. Similar to theology, everything in it makes sense if you accept sin, the virgin birth, and the incarnation. The area of reason is always carved out of the irrational; it is not protected from the irrational in any way, but rather it is traversed by it and is only defined by a specific relationship between irrational components.

Delirium and drift lie underneath all reason. This strange epistemological viewpoint underpins Deleuze’s odd readings of the history of philosophy. Reading a philosopher now involves presenting the philosopher’s attempt to deal with the difficult character of reality rather than trying to come up with a single, accurate interpretation. “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. […]Instead of repeating what a philosopher says, the history of philosophy must explain what he must have taken for granted, what he didn’t say but is still present in what he did say, says Deleuze.

Similarly, Deleuze characterises philosophy as the formation of notions rather than the eternal quest of truth, reason, or universals. Deleuze views concepts as philosophical constructions that define various types of thinking, such as Plato’s ideas, Descartes’ cogito, or Kant’s doctrine of the faculties, rather as identity conditions or propositions. A philosophical idea posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created.” So, according to Deleuze, philosophy is more akin to creative or practical production than it is a supplement to a complete scientific account of an already existent universe.

Values:

Deleuze once more replicates Spinoza’s views on ethics and politics, albeit in a distinctly Nietzschean key. According to the classical liberal theory of society, morality starts with the individual, who has impersonal inherent rights or obligations that they or a deity have established. Deleuze critiques the idea of an individual as an arresting or halting of distinction after rejecting any metaphysics based on identity (as the etymology of the word “individual” suggests). Instead of following Spinoza and Nietzsche’s naturalistic ethics, Deleuze aims to comprehend people and their morals as outcomes of the organization of pre-individual desires and forces.

For each mode of production—the earth for the tribe, the body of the tyrant for the empire, and capital for capitalism—a separate socius (the social body that claims credit for production) exists, according to the opening section of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Building on Foucault’s idea of the society of discipline, Deleuze argues that society is undergoing a change in structure and control in his 1990 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (“Post-scriptum sur les societes de controle”). The boundaries of societies of discipline, which were once defined by distinct physical enclosures (such as schools, workplaces, jails, office buildings, etc.), have been blurred by institutions and technologies developed during World War II. Social control and discipline have therefore entered the lives of people who are viewed as “masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’.” By using transaction records, mobile location tracking, and other personally identifiable information, modern societies’ control systems are said to monitor and follow people throughout their lives.

But how can Deleuze reconcile his ethical naturalism with his pessimistic diagnoses? To live well, according to Deleuze, is to completely express one’s force and reach the limits of one’s potential rather than judging what is present by transcendent, non-empirical norms. In today’s society, differences are still suppressed, and people are cut off from their potential. We must abandon our preconceived notions of who we are in order to become what we are capable of in order to confirm reality, which is constantly in a state of flux of change and difference. Creativity is the apex of Deleuzean activity. Perhaps the solution is to create without passing judgment. If passing judgment is so repulsive, It’s not because everything is equally valuable; rather, what is valuable can only be created or identified by defying judgment. What artistic expertise may ever have an impact on the work to come.

4) His Relevance:

Gilles Deleuze jumped from the window of his Parisian apartment to his death on November 4, 1995. Continental philosophy, cinema studies, literary theory, cultural criticism, social and political theory, LGBTQ studies, art and architecture theory, as well as the expanding fields of animal studies and environmental theory, are just a few of the academic disciplines whose philosophical legacies he left behind. This is partially attributable to Deleuze’s own wide-ranging and diverse influences.

He creatively merged the ideas of Bergson, Foucault, Kant, Hume, Lacan, Leibniz, Marx, Nietzsche, and Spinoza with observations on writers and filmmakers like Herzog, Hitchcock, and Eisenstein, as well as painters like Bacon and Artaud. This is merely a passing mention of some of his most significant influences. They are numerous. All the intellectual fervour and commotion around Deleuze may prove Michel Foucault’s prophecy that “this century [i.e., the 20th century] will be Deleuzian” true.

Deleuze was a devoted immanence philosopher, in reality. Reviving the idea of difference from the grip of identity politics was one of his most significant efforts on this front. The hierarchical nature of dualisms such as being/nonbeing, man/woman, human/animal, black/white, and so on was destroyed by the idea of difference he created. Deleuze complicates the way difference is considered by focusing on positive difference-in-itself rather of the negative difference, for example, between a man and a woman. This raises questions about the place that nonbeing holds in the Western philosophical tradition.

Deleuze merely affirms nonbeing. He seeks a positive nonbeing that is not interpreted in terms of absence or lack, which are negative concepts (a man is not what a woman lacks, and vice versa). Instead, he believes that nonbeing is a part of being. Life, including the lives of men and women, has the creative capacity to go beyond what is already possible. Deleuze was able to create a politically charged understanding of experience thanks to this slight but nonetheless important shift in perspective. He was more intrigued by the conditions of existing experience than he was in comprehending the conditions of potential experience. This was what he described as transcendental empiricism.

This concept has significant political ramifications. The diversity and productivity of experience are understood to arise out of concrete and contingent (actual) particulars rather than universals that (in the traditional transcendentalist view) are believed to govern experience once the singularity of experience is freed from the abstract conditions of possible experience—when possible experience has become exhausted.

As we attempt to comprehend and react to the violence that is playing out in front of us at the start of the twenty-first century, Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is of the utmost value. Mass extinction of species, climate change, rising inequality, poverty, depletion of natural resources, pollution, epidemics, civil and interstate warfare that no longer distinguishes between combatants and non-combatants, escalating nationalism and a pernicious intolerance toward the increasing number of refugees around the world, and of course religious as well as other fundamentalisms: thought and the world appear to be exhausted in the face of this dire situation.

We must resist throwing up our hands in defeat and giving up. We urgently require original solutions that will turn what appears to be hopeless into something positive. In this view, reality’s capacity for transformation is a transcendental action. Empirical reality is altered by transcendental empiricism from its current state. It is the differential process that underlies all experience, not anything outside the range of experience. We must develop alternatives if the rest of the 21st century is going to be different. Transcendental empiricism involves problematizing what already exists in order to break with habit. This is more than just a practical activity that involves, to name a few things, changing policies, creating new technology, adding more social and environmental services, adopting new laws, and creating more open forms of governance.

In order to investigate the transcendental, imaginative, and diverse circumstances of reality, we also face a theoretical, philosophical — conceptual — obstacle. If we are to truly break from ingrained ways of thinking and acting in response to the issues societies face, we need to describe and analyse how violence operates, how it is justified, and how it is ingrained into daily life. This will operate as a buffer, preventing the very issue that practical solutions are meant to address from resurfacing.

Deleuze was fascinated by the issue of autonomy and wondered how a practise may increase or decrease a being’s capacity or power to act. How are the socially organised and unstructured flows of life — bodies, commodities, money, finance, matter, ideas, language — described? What kind of behaviours and modes of agency are produced by such structuring and un-structuring? What is it serving, exactly? The work of a philosopher cannot, however, stop at the level of criticism if philosophy is the discipline of producing concepts.

New ideas must be developed in the current environment. But make no mistake, as new concepts are applied, they do not explain current practises and experiences; rather, it is necessary to explain the concepts themselves. In other words, it’s necessary to explain (transcendentally) the circumstances under which new ideas emerge. Philosophers wrestle with the potential for actual experience (empiricism) to make a difference as a result of this procedure.

Since problematising challenges ingrained ways of thinking and behaving, it is a type of transcendental empiricism. The fierce and courageous resistance many Greeks had to the austerity measures imposed by the European Union comes to mind. This promotes much-needed public discussion and attention on the use of “legitimate” violence in the service of democracy. In fact, this demonstrates how the use of “legitimate violence” is a violent attack on democracy.

A static understanding of Deleuzean philosophy is not what makes him relevant now. Anyone who is inspired by Deleuze should steadfastly avoid viewing him as a dogmatic representation of ideas. Deleuze is neither a respected authority on Western philosophy nor a hero to be adored. Deleuze’s solitary nonbeing challenges us to think differently in an effort to build a future that is distinct from the present. To embrace the future in our midst by reaffirming the potentiality shaping the present, in simple words. In the immortal words of Deleuze, “If you are trapped in the dream of the other, you are fucked”. It’s time to pursue our own aspirations as well as escape the trap they place us in if they are only dreams not set to become a reality.

5) Some Quotes:

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”

― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.”

― Gilles Deleuze

“Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.”

― Gilles Deleuze

“The shame of being a man – is there any better reason to write?”

― Gilles Deleuze

“It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity”

― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.”

― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“A leftist government doesn’t exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.”

― Gilles Deleuze

“Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: ‘OK, OK, let’s go on to something else.’ Objections have never contributed anything.”

― Gilles Deleuze