Gilles Deleuze: Biography Of This French Philosopher
Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher, considered one of the most influential in the French country during the second half of the 20th century.
From the 1950s until his death, he wrote numerous works on the history of philosophy and politics, and also addressed literature, cinema and painting. Let’s see his life through this biography of Gilles Deleuze in which we will see his intellectual journey in summary.
The life of Gilles Deleuze is that of a great thinker, knowledgeable of the work of great philosophers and artists both of his time and past, and whose end, traumatic and surprising, marked the end of one of the most relevant minds in France during the Last century.
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 members of the Croix de Feu organization, a right-wing paramilitary political league, predecessor of the French Social Party. From an early age, Gilles had respiratory problems, which made him vulnerable to all flu, colds and allergies that he could have.
In 1940, When the Second World War 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, he 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.
After completing his studies, Deleuze taught in several schools until 1957, later 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” (“Empiricism and Subjectivity”), which is an essay on Hume’s famous “Treatise on Human Nature.”
Between 1960 and 1964 he worked at Center national de la recherche scientifique (“National Center for Scientific Research”, CNRS), this being the period in which he would publish Nietzsche and philosophy (“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 problème de l’expression” (“Spinoza and the problem of expression”).
Paris VIII University
In 1969 he went 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 begin a great collaboration
This collaboration turned out to be very fruitful and gave birth, in 1972, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L’Anti-Œdipe (“Capitalism and schizophrenia: The anti-Oedipus”) and the second volume, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille Plateaux (1980).
It is in these works that Gilles Deleuze states that “what defines a political system is the path along which its society has traveled.”
Last years
Deleuze’s ideology is confined within anarchist philosophy, or as a Marxist within the most 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 were not the multiple respiratory problems he suffered, although they were what motivated him to commit suicide. 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 came after finishing his studies in 1948, which was devoted to writing monographs on several important philosophers for Western thought, such as David Hume, Gottfried Leibniz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, as well as several artists such as Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch…
In these works by great thinkers he consolidates his own intellectual thinking, something that has just been configured when he publishes Difference and repetition (“Difference and Repetition”) in 1968 and Logique du sens (“Logic of meaning”) a year later.
On the other hand, and here we enter the second part, wrote books on more eclectic philosophical concepts The themes were quite varied, although not leaving aside the way of explaining the concept in question from a philosophical perspective, such as schizophrenia, cinema, meaning… These ideas gave them their own character, their own intellectual variation.
Metaphysics
In the most traditional philosophy there is the idea that difference is derived from identity. For example, to say that something is different from something else, some minimal identity between both elements is assumed.
However, Deleuze defended rather the opposite, that all identity is the result of difference The categories we use to differentiate people (French and German, communists and liberals, women and men, university students and non-university people…) are derived from differences, and not from a common identity that has found particular aspects.
Old societies handled simple machines, while disciplinary societies equipped themselves 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.
In control societies, third-type machines are operated, such as computer machines. The information, the data that people receive from the comfort of their homes is controlled. Although Deleuze died long before the appearance of modern smart phones, this idea of the society of control that, through breaking news, “hashtags” and message chains, shapes the emotions and thoughts of the population is really a description of our reality.
In a society where the technological revolution has occurred, especially with the improvement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), capitalism is no longer based on production, production which has been taken to Third World countries It is a capitalism of overproduction and superconsumption. Developed countries no longer buy raw materials and sell finished products, but rather buy finished products or assemble their parts. What you want to sell are services, and what you want to buy are shares.
In the ancient societies of sovereignty, they operated with simple machines: levers, pulleys, clocks… On the other hand, later disciplinary societies were equipped with energy machines and, the current societies of control, They operate with third type machines, mainly computers and other means of communication The technological revolution is a profound mutation of capitalism.
