Gilles Deleuze
Reality is difference and constant becoming, not fixed identities – think like a spreading root network rather than a tree with one trunk.
Placement
Philosophy of difference and becoming: rhizome instead of tree, desiring-machines instead of lack.
Key ideas
- Rhizome
- Difference and repetition
- Immanence
- Body without organs
Influence
Influenced by 11
Baruch de Spinoza
influenced by ✓
Deleuze read Spinoza as a philosopher of expression and immanence and asked with him what a body can do (Spinoza et le problème de l’expression, 1968). G. Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (1968); Spinoza. Philosophie pratique (1970; 1981); SEP “Gilles Deleuze”; SEP “Baruch Spinoza”
Baruch de Spinoza › 1632–1677
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
influenced by ✓
In The Fold (1988) Deleuze read Leibniz as the Baroque philosopher whose monads express the whole world from a point of view and whose matter is infinitely folded. G. Deleuze, Le pli. Leibniz et le baroque (1988); SEP “Gilles Deleuze”; SEP “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz › 1646–1716
David Hume
influenced by ✓
In Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953) Deleuze read Hume as showing how a subject is constituted within the given through habit and association, and stressed his externality of relations. G. Deleuze, Empirisme et subjectivité (1953); SEP “Gilles Deleuze”; SEP “David Hume”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
David Hume › 1711–1776
Immanuel Kant
influenced by ✓
Deleuze read Kant’s doctrine of the faculties and their discordant accord in the sublime (La philosophie critique de Kant, 1963) and recast transcendental philosophy as ‘transcendental empiricism’ (1968). G. Deleuze, La philosophie critique de Kant (1963); “L’idée de genèse dans l’esthétique de Kant” (1963); Différence et répétition (1968); SEP “Gilles Deleuze”
Immanuel Kant › 1724–1804
Friedrich Nietzsche
influenced by ✓
In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) Deleuze read Nietzsche against Hegel as a thinker of affirmation, of active and reactive forces and of eternal return as selection of difference. G. Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962); SEP “Gilles Deleuze”; SEP “Friedrich Nietzsche”
Friedrich Nietzsche › 1844–1900
Henri Bergson
influenced by ✓
Deleuze read Bergson’s duration as a qualitative multiplicity and the virtual as real without being actual (Le bergsonisme, 1966), and built Cinema 1–2 (1983–85) on Matter and Memory. G. Deleuze, Le bergsonisme (1966); Cinéma 1. L’image-mouvement (1983); Cinéma 2. L’image-temps (1985); SEP “Gilles Deleuze”; SEP “Henri Bergson”
Henri Bergson › 1859–1941
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John Duns Scotus
influenced by ✓
Deleuze took Duns Scotus’s univocity of being as the first moment of a philosophy of difference, followed by Spinoza and Nietzsche (Difference and Repetition, 1968). G. Deleuze, Différence et répétition (1968); Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (1968); SEP “Gilles Deleuze”; SEP “John Duns Scotus”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
John Duns Scotus › c. 1266–1308
Gabriel Tarde
influenced by
Deleuze read Tarde as a thinker of repetition and difference (Difference and Repetition, 1968) and, with Guattari, set his microsociology of imitation against Durkheim (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980). G. Deleuze, Différence et répétition (1968); G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Mille plateaux (1980)
Evidence: AI draft
Gabriel Tarde › 1843–1904
Alfred North Whitehead
influenced by ✓
In The Fold (1988) Deleuze read Whitehead’s events and prehensions as a successor to Leibniz’s monadology, with chaos, extension and intensity as conditions of the event. G. Deleuze, Le pli. Leibniz et le baroque (1988); A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929); SEP “Alfred North Whitehead”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Alfred North Whitehead › 1861–1947
Jakob von Uexküll
influenced by ✓
Deleuze took Uexküll’s tick, defined by three affects, as a model of a body known by what it can do (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980; Spinoza. Philosophie pratique, 1981). G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Mille plateaux (1980); G. Deleuze, Spinoza. Philosophie pratique (1981)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Jakob von Uexküll › 1864–1944
Frantz Fanon
influenced by
In Anti-Oedipus (1972, with Félix Guattari) Deleuze cited a case from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth – a persecution psychosis that seemed to concern the death of the patient’s mother, who had in fact been killed by a French soldier – to show that delusion invests the social and historical field, not only the family. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, L’Anti-Œdipe (1972), ch. 2; F. Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (1961), ch. “Guerre coloniale et troubles mentaux”
Evidence: AI draft
Frantz Fanon › 1925–1961
Influenced 3
Antonio Negri
influenced ✓
Negri took up Deleuze’s ‘societies of control’ (1990) and, with Michael Hardt, made it part of the account of biopolitical power in Empire (2000). M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire (2000); G. Deleuze, “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle” (1990); preface to A. Negri, L’anomalie sauvage (1982)
Antonio Negri › 1933–2023
Isabelle Stengers
influenced
Stengers borrowed from Deleuze the conceptual figure of the ‘idiot’, who slows down a consensus, to frame her cosmopolitical proposal (‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal’, 2005). I. Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public (2005); G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (1991)
Evidence: AI draft
Isabelle Stengers › b. 1949
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
influenced
Viveiros de Castro used Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming and multiplicity to describe Amerindian perspectivism (‘Les pronoms cosmologiques’, 1998; Métaphysiques cannibales, 2009). E. Viveiros de Castro, “Les pronoms cosmologiques et le perspectivisme amérindien”, in É. Alliez (ed.), Gilles Deleuze. Une vie philosophique (1998); Métaphysiques cannibales (2009)
Evidence: AI draft
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro › b. 1951
Criticism
Criticized by 2
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
criticised by
Spivak objected that Deleuze, with Foucault in ‘Intellectuals and Power’ (1972), conflates two senses of representation, speaking-for (vertreten) and portraying (darstellen) (‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 1988). G. C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988); M. Foucault & G. Deleuze, “Les intellectuels et le pouvoir”, L’Arc 49 (1972)
Evidence: AI draft
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak › b. 1942
Slavoj Žižek
criticised by
Žižek preferred the Deleuze of The Logic of Sense to the Anti-Oedipus Deleuze, whose praise of desiring flows he saw as fitting late capitalism (Organs without Bodies, 2004). S. Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (2004)
Evidence: AI draft
Slavoj Žižek › b. 1949
Criticizes 3
Plato
criticised
Deleuze called for ‘reversing Platonism’: instead of ranking copies by their likeness to the Ideas, he affirmed the simulacrum and difference (The Logic of Sense, 1969, appendix). G. Deleuze, Logique du sens (1969), appendix I.1 “Platon et le simulacre”; Différence et répétition (1968)
Evidence: AI draft
Plato › 428–348 BCE
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
criticised
Deleuze rejected Hegel’s dialectic for subordinating difference to identity and negation, opposing to it a Nietzschean affirmation of difference (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962; Difference and Repetition, 1968). G. Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962); Différence et répétition (1968), Introduction and ch. I; SEP “Gilles Deleuze”
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831
Sigmund Freud
criticised
With Guattari, Deleuze attacked Freudian psychoanalysis for confining desire to the Oedipal family triangle and conceiving it as lack rather than production (Anti-Oedipus, 1972). G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, L’Anti-Œdipe. Capitalisme et schizophrénie (1972), ch. 2; SEP “Gilles Deleuze”
Evidence: AI draft
Sigmund Freud › 1856–1939
Works
Nietzsche as anti-Hegel: affirmation instead of negation.
Difference in itself, without subordination to identity.
- 1972Anti-Oedipus
Written with Félix Guattari: desiring-machines against the Oedipal triangle of psychoanalysis.
Written with Félix Guattari: rhizome, nomadology, smooth and striated space.
Position
Deleuze sought to think difference as primary rather than as a mere deviation from an identity. In Difference and Repetition he criticised the whole tradition of “representation,” which subordinates the different to the same, and developed a philosophy of becoming and immanence inspired by Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson. With Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus, he attacked psychoanalysis: desire is not lack but productive, a network of “desiring-machines” that capitalism both unleashes and recaptures. A Thousand Plateaus contrasted hierarchical, tree-like thinking with the “rhizome,” a network without centre in which every point can connect with every other. Philosophy, the two wrote, is the creation of concepts. Deleuze shaped art theory, political philosophy and media studies.
Life & context
Deleuze was born in Paris in 1925 and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He first wrote monographs on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson and Spinoza. From 1969 he taught at the experimental University of Paris VIII (Vincennes), where his lectures attracted large audiences. With the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari he wrote a series of influential books. Severely ill, he took his own life in 1995.
Further main works
- The Logic of Sense (1969)
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