26 Facts About Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Louis Rene Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art.

Gilles Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in Paris and lived there for most of his life.

Gilles Deleuze's mother was Odette Camauer and his father, Louis, was an engineer.

Gilles Deleuze spent a year in khagne at the Lycee Henri IV.

Gilles Deleuze passed the agregation in philosophy in 1948, and taught at various lycees until 1957, when he took up a position at the University of Paris.

In 1968, Gilles Deleuze defended his two DrE dissertations amid the ongoing May 68 demonstrations; he later published his two dissertations under the titles Difference and Repetition and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza.

Gilles Deleuze taught at Paris VIII until his retirement in 1987.

Gilles Deleuze married Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan in 1956 and they had two children.

Gilles Deleuze kept his fingernails untrimmed because, as he once explained, he lacked "normal protective fingerprints", and therefore could not "touch an object, particularly a piece of cloth, with the pads of my fingers without sharp pain".

Gilles Deleuze, who had suffered from respiratory ailments from a young age, developed tuberculosis in 1968 and underwent lung removal.

Gilles Deleuze suffered increasingly severe respiratory symptoms for the rest of his life.

Gilles Deleuze is buried in the cemetery of the village of Saint-Leonard-de-Noblat.

He, therefore, concludes that pure difference is non-spatiotemporal; it is an idea, what Gilles Deleuze calls "the virtual".

Gilles Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking.

Gilles Deleuze borrows the doctrine of ontological univocity from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus.

Gilles Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference.

For Gilles Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding.

Gilles Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "pluralism = monism".

Difference and Repetition is Gilles Deleuze's most sustained and systematic attempt to work out the details of such a metaphysics, but his other works develop similar ideas.

Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Gilles Deleuze defines philosophy as the creation of concepts.

For Gilles Deleuze, concepts are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that define a range of thinking, such as Plato's ideas, Descartes's cogito, or Kant's doctrine of the faculties.

Gilles Deleuze, following Karl Marx, welcomes capitalism's destruction of traditional social hierarchies as liberating but inveighs against its homogenization of all values to the aims of the market.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, Gilles Deleuze claims that Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality is an attempt to rewrite Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, even though Nietzsche nowhere mentions the First Critique in the Genealogy, and the Genealogy's moral topics are far removed from the epistemological focus of Kant's book.

Likewise in the English-speaking academy, Gilles Deleuze's work is typically classified as continental philosophy.

Badiou further argues that, in practical matters, Gilles Deleuze's monism entails an ascetic, aristocratic fatalism akin to ancient Stoicism.

In Fashionable Nonsense, physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Gilles Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientific terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in his works.