Gilles Deleuze

French philosopher (1925–1995)

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Lived 1925–1995, aged 70France

France AcademicsAcademic

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71 languages
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Era
1925–1995
Aged 70
Known for
Gilles Deleuze from A …
1989

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

A philosopher who turned metaphysics into a machine for thinking difference itself — not as negation or lack, but as the engine of reality. His books with Félix Guattari rewired how a generation read desire, power, and capitalism.

Biography

About

Gilles Louis René Deleuze was born 18 January 1925 in France and spent four decades writing on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. Much of his work consisted of close readings of the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Bergson — building a metaphysics that found its fullest expression in Difference and Repetition (1968), widely considered his magnum opus. In 1972 he began his collaboration with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, producing the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), which became his most widely read works. Th…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze

said1988

A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.

— from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche (“Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics”), 1988–1989.

Gilles Deleuze

said1962

One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche’s work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values.

— p. 1

Gilles Deleuze

said1962

Evaluations, in essence, are… ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate.

— p. 1

Gilles Deleuze

said1962

Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.

— p. 7

Gilles Deleuze

said1962

When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness (Z III “Of the three evil things”).

— p. 7

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