Deleuze, Gilles (1925–1995)

In contrast to thinkers such as René Descartes and Immanuel Kant and the static world that they envisioned, Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher who taught at the University of Paris, emphasizes becoming, contingency, irony, play, difference, repetition, and chance. Deleuze advocates becoming a nomadic thinker with neither past nor future. A wandering, nomadic, erring type of journey leads to the embrace of difference and repetition. Therefore, Deleuze constructs an anti-Kantian model of thought that is aconceptual, nonrepre-sentational, disjunctive, and inchoate. With this type of impetus, Deleuze's philosophy can be grasped within the context of the turn to difference that occurs in the 20th century with thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida.

If Deleuze is anti-Kantian, he is also anti-Hegelian in the sense that he is opposed to all closed or total philosophical systems. In a later work coauthored with Félix Guattari, titled What Is Philosophy? the job of philosophers is envisioned to be the creation of new concepts. Borrowing from Friedrich Nietzsche, Deleuze agrees that thought is a matter of creation, and truth is a creation of thought. This does not mean that philosophical concepts represent the truth independent of the plane of immanence upon which they are constructed. According to Deleuze, concepts are complex singularities and intensive multiplicities that do not represent anything. The creation of concepts occurs when a thinker determines a problem on a plane or set of pre-philosophical presuppositions, which he calls the plane of immanence. He also refers to it as the image of thought, by which he means an image that thought gives itself of what it means to think. The sources of truths are problems, which represent the differential elements of thought. More than merely questions to which thought [Page 284]provides answers, problems form the underlying and unanswerable questions that govern the creation of knowledge in a particular sphere.

Deleuze views his philosophy as a form of empiricism, which creates concepts in response to problems. Deleuze's empiricism is also experimental, by which he means introducing thoughts and acts that change an individual perspective. At the same time, Deleuze wants to find hidden differences and the destruction of illusions of permanence. The solving of a problem merely transforms it and offers new challenges rather than breaking the cycle of ever newer problems. Therefore, we must find a way to live with a problem rather than thinking that we can solve it for the foreseeable future. The problem of time is an example of a difficulty that begs for a new conceptualization.