Thinker · TH-0183
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who taught at Lyon and at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes, later Saint-Denis). Through studies of Hume,…
Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who taught at Lyon and at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes, later Saint-Denis). Through studies of Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson he developed a metaphysics of difference, and in Difference and Repetition he challenged the traditional priority of identity, treating difference as metaphysically prior. With the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari he wrote Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, and he also wrote influential books on cinema.
Key ideas
- Difference is primary and not merely a relation between already identical things.
- Repetition is not the recurrence of the same but the production of difference.
- Reality is a field of becoming, with virtual structures actualised in different ways.
- Philosophy is the creation of concepts.
Major works
- Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962)
- Difference and Repetition (Différence et répétition, 1968)
- Anti-Oedipus (1972, with Félix Guattari)
- A Thousand Plateaus (1980, with Félix Guattari)
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In the Coordinates
The questions of philosophy where Gilles Deleuze takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.
- 1.1.1 Substance Theory Is a river a thing, or an event?