Gilles Deleuze: biography of this French philosopher.

A brief biography of Gilles Deleuze, philosopher linked to post-structuralism.

Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher, considered one of the most influential in France 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 take a look at his life through this biography of Gilles Deleuzein which we will see his intellectual journey in a summarized way.

Gilles Deleuze Biography

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

Early years and formation

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 every flu, cold and Allergy one could have.

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

Still at war he attended the Lycée Carnot 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 from 1944 to 1948, studying philosophy.. There he met great thinkers of his time, such as Georges Canguilhem, Ferdinand Alquié, Maurice de Gandillac and Jean Hyppolite.

Professor and writer

After finishing his studies, Deleuze taught in several colleges until 1957, then returned to his alma mater and taught 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 the Centre national de la recherche scientifique ("National Center for Scientific Research", CNRS), being this the period in which he would publish Nietzsche et la philosophie ("Nietzsche and philosophy") in 1962. It was also at this time that he met the great Michel Foucault, 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 Différence et répétition ("Difference and repetition") and "Spinoza et le problème de l'expression" ("Spinoza and the problem of expression").

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University Paris VIII

In 1969 he would go on to work at his last university, the University of 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. Félix Guattari, a heterodox psychoanalyst with whom he would begin a great collaboration..

This collaboration proved 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 circumscribed within the 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 from, 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 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 of great thinkers, he consolidates his own intellectual thinking, something that is just configured when he publishes Différence et répétition ("Difference and Repetition") in 1968 and Logique du sens ("Logic of meaning") a year later.

On the other hand, and here we are entering his second part, he wrote books about more eclectic philosophical concepts. The subject matter was quite varied, although not leaving aside the way of explaining the concept in question from a philosophical point of view, such as schizophrenia, cinema, meaning... These ideas gave them their own character, their own intellectual variation.

Metaphysics

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

However, Deleuze argued rather the opposite, that all identity is the result of difference.. The categories we use to differentiate people (French and Germans, communists and liberals, women and men, university and non-university students...) derive from differences, and not from a common identity that has been found to have particular aspects.

About society

The old societies operated 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 by applying principles of control or disciplinary principles.

In societies of control we operate on machines of the third type, such as computers. They control the information, the data that people receive from the comfort of their homes. Although Deleuze died 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 the Third World countries, capitalism is no longer based on production, production which has been taken to the 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 they want to sell are services, and what they want to buy are shares.

In the old societies of sovereignty, they operated with simple machines: levers, pulleys, clocks... Later disciplinary societies, on the other hand, were equipped with energetic machines, and today's societies of control, operate with machines of the third type, mainly computers and other means of communication.. The technological revolution is a profound mutation of capitalism.