Gilles Deleuze: an introduction

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze 1 was one of the most infl uential and prolifi c French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century."I consider him to be the greatest contemporary French philosopher, " Michel Foucault once said, adding famously that "perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian." 2 Despite such accolades, Deleuze remains diffi cult to classify as a thinker.Th e labels most frequently used to interpret contemporary French philosophy are inapplicable to Deleuze, since he was neither a phenomenologist, a structuralist, a hermeneutician, a Heideggerian, nor even a "postmodernist." Whereas many French philosophers (Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Lyotard) began their careers with studies of Husserl, Deleuze wrote his fi rst book on Hume, and always considered himself an empiricist.Most dauntingly perhaps, his published oeuvre at fi rst sight seems to be marked by a rather bewildering eclecticism, including constructive works such as Diff erence and Repetition and Logic of Sense, numerous monographs in the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, Kant, Spinoza, and 1. Gilles Deleuze (

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 275 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.