Continental · 1925–1995
Gilles Deleuze
French philosopher of difference, desire and becoming
Deleuze sought a philosophy of difference in itself, not difference as a gap between fixed identities; with Félix Guattari he described desire as productive and thought as a rhizome, branching without a centre.
Life and thought
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) studied at the Sorbonne and spent years writing studies of other philosophers, among them Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson and Spinoza, which he described as portraits through which he did his own thinking. He taught at Lyon and then at the experimental University of Paris VIII from 1969 until 1987. Severely ill with lung disease in his last years, he took his own life in 1995.
Western philosophy, Deleuze argued, has always treated difference as secondary: a gap between things that are first identical with themselves. In Difference and Repetition he reversed this, making difference and becoming primary and identity a passing effect. With the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari he wrote Anti-Oedipus, attacking psychoanalysis for reducing desire to family dramas; desire, they argued, is productive, always connecting and building. A Thousand Plateaus offered the “rhizome”, a network like grass roots with no centre or hierarchy, as a model for thought, against the tree with its trunk and branches.