Deleuze, Gilles

(born Jan. 18, 1925, Paris, France—died Nov. 4, 1995, Paris) French antirationalist philosopher and literary critic. He began his study of philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1944 and was appointed to the faculty there in 1957; he later taught at the University of Lyons and the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes). His first major publications, David Hume (1952) and Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), were historical studies of thinkers who emphasized the limited powers of human reason. In Difference and Repetition (1968), he argued against the devaluation of “difference” in Western metaphysics and tried to show that difference inheres in repetition itself. A central theme of his work during this period was the “Eleatic-Platonic bias” of Western metaphysics—i.e., its preference for unity over multiplicity (“the one” over “the many”) and for sameness over difference. According to Deleuze, this bias falsifies the nature of experience, which consists of multiplicities rather than unities. In Anti-Oedipus (1972), the first volume of a two-volume work (Capitalism and Schizophrenia), Deleuze and the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (1930–92) attacked traditional psychoanalysis for suppressing human desire in the service of normalization and control. The second volume, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), condemned all rationalist metaphysics as “state philosophy.” Depressed by chronic illness, Deleuze committed suicide.