Gilles Deleuze: biography of this French philosopher

Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher, considered one of the most influential in the Gallic country during the second half of the 20th century.

From the fifties until his death, he wrote numerous works on the history of philosophy, politics, and also dealt with literature, cinema, and painting. Let's see his life through this biography of Gilles Deleuze, in which we will see his intellectual journey in a summarized way.

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Biography of Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze's life is that of a great thinker, knowledgeable about the work of great philosophers and artists of both his time and past, and whose end, traumatic and surprising, meant the end of one of the most important minds in France during the century past.

Early years and training

Gilles Deleuze was born in Paris, France, on January 18, 1925, into a bourgeois family.. His parents, Louis Deleuze, an engineer, and his mother, Oddet Camaüer, a housewife, were attached to the Croix de Feu organization, a right-wing paramilitary political league, predecessor of the Social Party French. Already from an early age, Gilles had respiratory problems, which made him vulnerable to every flu, cold and allergy you could get.

In 1940, After World War II began and while his family was on vacation in Deauville, Gilles Deleuze discovered French literature thanks to his teacher Pierre Halbwachs. There he would read Baudelaire, Gide and France.

Still at war, he attended the Carnot Lyceum and, during the Nazi occupation, witnessed the arrest of his brother George, who participated in the French resistance and died in a concentration camp.

Despite this, Gilles attended the Sorbonne between 1944 and 1948, studying philosophy. There he met great thinkers of his time, such as Georges Canguilhem, Ferdinand Alquié, Maurice de Gandillac and Jean Hyppolite.

teacher and writer

After completing his studies, Deleuze taught at various schools until 1957, before returning to his alma mater and teaching at the Sorbonne. In 1956 he married Denise Paul Grandjouan.

Several years earlier, in 1953, he had published his "Empirisme et subjectivité" ("Empirism and Subjectivity"), which is an essay on Hume's famous "Treatise on Human Nature."

Between 1960 and 1964 he worked at the Center national de la recherche scientifique (“National Center for Scientific Research”, CNRS), this being the period in which he would publish Nietzsche et la philosophie (“Nietzsche and Philosophy”) in 1962. It was also at this time that he would meet the great Michel Foucault, a person with whom he shared an important friendship..

After finishing his period at the CNRS, he would go on to teach for five years at the University of Lyon and, during that period, in 1968 he would publish Difference and repetition (“Difference and repetition”) and “Spinoza et le probleme de l'expression” (“Spinoza and the problem of expression”).

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Paris VIII University

In 1969 he would go on to work at his last university, Paris VIII, being a professor there until his university retirement in 1987.

There he worked with Foucault and, also, it would be the place where he would meet Félix Guattari, a heterodox psychoanalyst with whom he would start a great collaboration.

This collaboration turned out to be very fruitful and gave birth, in 1972, to Capitalisme et Schizophrenie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe (“Capitalism and Schizophrenia: The Anti-Oedipus”) and the second volume, Capitalisme et Schizophrenie 2. Mille Plateaux (1980).

It is in these works that Gilles Deleuze affirms that "what defines a political system is the path that its society has traveled."

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Last years

Deleuze's ideology is circumscribed within anarchist philosophy, or as a Marxist within the more libertarian sector. Although Gilles Deleuze was quite critical of the Marxist movement, he considered himself one.

He saw that it was impossible to do political philosophy without focusing on an analysis of capitalism. A demonstration of his Marxist interests was his unfinished work “La grandeur de Marx” (“The greatness of Marx”).

What ended his life was not the multiple respiratory problems he suffered, although they were the ones that motivated him to commit suicide. Already towards the end of his life, he was diagnosed with severe respiratory failure and, on November 4, 1995, he decided to end it all by throwing himself out of the window of his apartment on Avenue Niel.

Deleuze's philosophy

Gilles Deleuze's philosophy can be divided into two parts. The first corresponds to the one that he came after finishing his studies in 1948, that he devoted himself to writing monographs on several important philosophers for Western thought, such as david humeGottfried Leibniz. Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, as well as various artists such as Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch…

In these works of great thinkers he is consolidating his own intellectual thought, something that has just been configured when he publishes Difference and repetition (“Difference and Repetition”) in 1968 and logic du senses (“Logic of meaning”) a year later.

On the other hand, and here we enter the second part of it, he wrote books on more eclectic philosophical concepts. The theme was quite varied, although not leaving aside the way of explaining the concept in question from a perspective philosophical, like schizophrenia, cinema, sense... These ideas gave them their own character, their own variation intellectual.

Metaphysics

In the most traditional philosophy, there is the idea that difference derives from identity. For example, to say that something is different from something else, some minimal identity between the two elements is assumed.

However, Deleuze defended rather the opposite, that all identity is the result of the difference. The categories we use to differentiate people (French and German, communist and liberal, women and men, university and non-university...) are derived from differences, and not from a common identity that has found aspects individuals.

about society

The old societies handled simple machines, while the disciplinary ones are equipped with energetic machines.. This phrase, so abstract at first, was Gilles Deleuze's vision of how societies functioned, whether applying control principles or disciplinary principles.

Control societies operate on third-type machines, such as computers. The information is controlled, the data that people receive from the comfort of their homes. Although Deleuze passed away long before the advent of modern smartphones, this idea of ​​the control society that, through breaking news, "hashtags" and message chains, shapes the emotions and thinking of the population is really a description of our reality.

In a society where the technological revolution has taken place, especially with the improvement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), capitalism is no longer based on production, production which has been brought to Third World countries. It is a capitalism of overproduction and overconsumption. Developed countries no longer buy raw materials and sell finished products, but buy finished products or assemble their parts. What you want to sell are services, and what you want to buy are shares.

In the old societies of sovereignty, simple machines were operated: levers, pulleys, clocks... Instead, the later disciplinary societies were equipped with energy machines, and today's control societies, work with third-class machines, mainly computers and other means of communication. The technological revolution is a profound mutation of capitalism.