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Thinkers

Gilles Deleuze

Poststructuralist · Europe · 1925 to 1995

French thinker who held that reality is made of change and difference, and who wrote with Guattari on desire and power.

What it is

Gilles Deleuze (1925 to 1995) was a French philosopher and one of the most influential and prolific of the second half of the twentieth century. He thought of philosophy as the making of new concepts, and called himself a "pure metaphysician". He wrote on ontology, on politics and society, and on film and painting.

He was born in Paris and lived there most of his life. He passed the philosophy exam called the agrégation in 1948, taught at schools until 1957 and then at the University of Paris. He had breathing problems from childhood and lost a lung to tuberculosis in 1968. After the events of May 1968 he began a long collaboration with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.

The main ideas

  • Philosophy makes concepts. For him, philosophy is not a commentary on the world but the creation of concepts that let us think what we could not before.
  • Difference first. In his main work, Difference and Repetition, he tried to build a philosophy in which difference is basic and not something added to sameness.
  • A new vocabulary. He proposed that multiplicity replace substance, that event replace essence and that the virtual replace the merely possible, as terms for a metaphysics fitted to modern science and mathematics.
  • Reading history differently. He wrote studies of Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Leibniz and Foucault, partly to unearth the assumptions he had absorbed from his education.
  • Sense and truth. In Logic of Sense he looked at how meaning is formed, as the ground that a statement needs before it can be true or false.
  • Thinking with others. With Guattari he wrote Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which sets out to shock readers and to "force us to think", drawing on sources as unlike as psychoanalysis and the writings of Antonin Artaud.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine a person who is described as a "teacher", a "parent" and a "citizen", as if each label fixed what they are. Deleuze would ask what the person becomes in each setting and what new combinations are possible, instead of asking what their essence is. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Difference and Repetition (1968) is his main philosophical work.
  • Logic of Sense is his book on sense and truth.
  • Anti-Oedipus (1972), with Félix Guattari, is the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
  • A Thousand Plateaus (1980), with Guattari, is the second volume.

Questions and criticism

  • A shocking read. Reading Anti-Oedipus can be a shocking experience. It draws on a bizarre collection of sources and sets out to force the reader to think.
  • What can be checked? It is fair to ask how claims such as the primacy of difference could be tested.

Close neighbours

Henri Bergson is one of the thinkers he wrote about and learned from, and Baruch Spinoza, David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche are others. The pages on Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who published in the same years, show how many different directions French thought took at once.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Baruch Spinoza · He wrote two books on Spinoza and took from him a picture of reality as a single field of forces.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche · His first major book on a thinker is on Nietzsche, whose view of force and difference he took up.
  • Henri Bergson · He wrote a book on Bergson and built on his view of time and creative change.

Other Poststructuralist thinkers

Sources we used

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