Deleuze, Gilles

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) began his career as a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, prior to a post at the University of Lyon where he taught the history of philosophy. The first phase of Deleuze's work begins with books on Nietzsche (1983) and Kant (1984), Bergson (1988), Foucault (1988), Spinoza (1990), Hume (1991), and Leibniz (1993). In 1969, at the request of the French philosopher, historian, and social theorist Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Deleuze began teaching philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, a post he held until his retirement in 1987. Following an extended period of respiratory illness, Deleuze took his own life on November 4, 1995. In his early publications, The Logic of Sense (1990) and Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze specified his conception of the “image of thought.” For Deleuze, philosophers such as Plato and Hegel involve themselves with the “dominant image” of thought, which centers on recognition and representation. By contrast, Deleuze's two volumes are a groundbreaking attempt to identify the subject matter of a nonrepresentational image of thought.

The second stage of Deleuze's philosophical production is dominated by his collaboration with the French psychoanalyst, philosopher, and radical political activist Félix Guattari (1930–1992), in writing Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1984) and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987). In these books, Deleuze and Guattari began to develop their Nietzschean-inspired, post-Marxian critique and reassessment of the genealogy of desire in contemporary capitalist societies. Indeed, they argued that in the aftermath of the French political and philosophical turbulence produced by the events of May 1968, radical political thinkers should aim to conceive of more creative and variable relations as regards personal and political life.

Consequently, in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari make an effort to break free from Freud's idea of the unconscious as a “theater” and, in the process, expand upon their immanent model of the unconscious as a “factory” producing desire. Fundamentally developing the field of psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari reject “Freudo-Marxism,” or the standpoint that the unconscious is bound up exclusively with “mummy and daddy,” that is, with individuals and societies that have basically innocuous desires that are repressed, but might be liberated by more open-minded social relationships. Alternatively, they seek to demonstrate that the unconscious is crucially related to sociogeographical, historical, collective, and multiple “becomings” (developments without subject or object), desires, and utterances.

Deleuze and Guattari's stance concerning the unconscious stems from their interest in the “machinic production of desire” and especially Guattari's ideas regarding “desiring machines.” For Deleuze and Guattari, the machinic production of desire and desiring machines are models for a pioneering approach to psychoanalysis wherein they would be equipped to take apart the French therapist Jacques Lacan's (1901–1981) linguistic and structural conceptual system to facilitate new theories of politics and psychoanalysis.

As the landmark companion volume to Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus introduces their reconsideration of the notion of “system” using the idea of the “rhizome,” a meandering, horizontal underground structure, similar to the stems of plants such as the iris, whose sprouts grow into new flora. Deleuze and Guattari present and organize A Thousand Plateaus as a rhizomatic sequence of “plateaus,” a concept formulated by the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904–1980), that indicate what Bateson labeled a “block of intensity,” such as a family quarrel, which is not arranged around a moment of termination. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Bateson's plateau contests the propensity of Western philosophy to associate language and events with external or transcendental purposes, rather than assessing them as a complex of interactions that constitute the spaces where they exist and in terms of their inherent worth. In the end, therefore, the plateaus, which emerge from the rhizome, [Page 191]come to stand in A Thousand Plateaus as the definitive representation of innumerable multiple becomings.

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