Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one ofthe most influential and prolific French philosophers of the secondhalf of the twentieth century. Deleuze conceived of philosophy as theproduction of concepts, and he characterized himself as a “puremetaphysician.” In his magnum opusDifference andRepetition, he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate tocontemporary mathematics and science—a metaphysics in which theconcept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replacesessence and virtuality replaces possibility. Deleuze also producedstudies in the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant,Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and Leibniz), and on the arts (atwo-volume study of the cinema, books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, awork on the painter Francis Bacon, and a collection of essays onliterature.) Deleuze considered these latter works as pure philosophy,and not criticism, since he sought to create the concepts thatcorrespond to the artistic practices of painters, filmmakers, andwriters. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activistand radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, amongthem the two-volumeCapitalism and Schizophrenia, comprisedofAnti-Oedipus (1972) andA Thousand Plateaus(1980). Their final collaboration wasWhat is Philosophy?(1991).

Deleuze is noteworthy for his rejection of the Heideggerian notion ofthe “end of metaphysics.” In an interview, he once offeredthis self-assessment: “I feel myself to be a puremetaphysician.... Bergson says that modern science hasn’t foundits metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysicsthat interests me.” (Villani 1999: 130) We should also point tothe extent of his non-philosophical references (inter alia,differential calculus, thermodynamics, geology, molecular biology,population genetics, ethology, embryology, anthropology,psychoanalysis, economics, linguistics, and even esoteric thought);his colleague Jean-François Lyotard spoke of him as a“library of Babel.” Deleuze’s influence reachesbeyond philosophy; his work is approvingly cited by, and his conceptsput to use by, researchers in architecture, urban studies, geography,film studies, musicology, anthropology, gender studies, literarystudies and other fields.

Deleuze meant for his style to keep readers on their toes, or even to“force” them to rethink their philosophical assumptions.(We will discuss this notion of being “forced” to thinkbelow in 3.1.) We will concentrate on the conceptual architecture ofhis thought, though readers should be aware that, perhaps more thanwith most philosophers, such a treatment of Deleuze’s workremoves much of the performative effect of reading the original.

• 1. Life and Works
• 2. Deleuze’s Readings of Other Philosophers
• 3. The Philosophy of Difference
  • 3.1Difference and Repetition
  • 3.2Logic of Sense
• 4. Collaboration with Guattari
  • 4.1Anti-Oedipus
  • 4.2A Thousand Plateaus
  • 4.3What is Philosophy?
• 5. Deleuze and the Arts
• 6. The Reception of Deleuze
  • 6.1 The feminist critique
  • 6.2 The Badiouan critique
  • 6.3 Deleuze and science
  • 6.4 Deleuze Effects
• Bibliography
  • Primary Literature
  • Secondary Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Life and Works

Deleuze was born in Paris to conservative, middle-class parents, whosent him to public schools for his elementary education; except forone year of school in Normandy during the Occupation, he lived in thesame section of Paris his entire life. His personal life wasunremarkable; he remained married to the same woman he wed at age 31,Fanny (Denise Paul) Grandjouan, a French translator of D. H. Lawrence,and raised two children with her. He rarely traveled abroad, althoughhe did take a trip to the United States in 1975; for the most part heminimized his attendance at academic conferences and colloquia,insisting that the activity of thought took place primarily inwriting, and not in dialogue and discussion. The most dramatic eventin his life occurred early, when, during the Occupation,Deleuze’s older brother was arrested by the Nazis for resistanceactivities and deported; he died on the train to Auschwitz.

When the Germans began their occupation of France in June 1940,Deleuze’s family was on vacation in Normandy, and he spent ayear being schooled there. Deleuze traced his initiation intoliterature and philosophy to his encounter with a teacher at Deauvillenamed Pierre Halbwachs (son of the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs), whointroduced him to writers such as Gide and Baudelaire. Early on, herecalled, philosophical concepts struck him with the same force asliterary characters, having their own autonomy and style. After theLiberation, Deleuze returned to Paris and undertook hiskhâgne (an intensive year of preparatory studies) atthe well-known Lycée Henri IV, and then studied the history ofphilosophy at the Sorbonne. He was taught by Jean Hippolyte andFerdinand Alquié, whom he “loved and admiredenormously,” as well as by Georges Canguilhem and Maurice deGandillac. Like many of his peers he was as influenced by the writingsof Jean-Paul Sartre as he was by the work of his academic mentors.

Deleuze’s historically oriented study at the Sorbonne led him todevote his first book,Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953), toHume. In an era in which peers like Foucault and Derrida, students atthe École Normale Supérieure, concentrated on “thethree ‘H’s” (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger),Deleuze’s decision to write on empiricism and Hume was already aprovocation, early evidence of the heterodox tendencies of histhought. From 1953 to 1962—which he later referred to as“a hole in my life”—Deleuze published little, movingamong various teaching positions in Paris and the provinces. It wasalso during this time that he contracted the recurring respiratoryailment that would plague him for the rest of his life. In 1962,Nietzsche and Philosophy was published to considerableacclaim, cementing Deleuze’s reputation in academic circles. Hefollowed this initial success withKant’s CriticalPhilosophy (1963);Proust and Signs (1964); andBergsonism (1966). In 1968 he publishedDifference andRepetition as his primary thesis for thedoctoratd’État, withSpinoza and the Problem ofExpression as the secondary thesis.

The next year, 1969, proved to be an important one for Deleuze. First,he found a permanent teaching position in Paris, at the experimentalcampus of the University of Paris VIII in Vincennes (which later movedto its current location in St. Denis); he gave weekly seminars at thisinstitution until his retirement in 1987. Second, he published anothermajor text in his own name,Logic of Sense. But mostimportantly, it was then that he met Félix Guattari, a radicalpsychoanalyst and political militant, with whom he began a longcollaboration. Their first joint volume,Anti-Oedipus (1972),was a best seller in France, a veritablesuccès descandale, and thrust Deleuze into the limelight as a publicintellectual. They followed this withKafka: Toward a MinorLiterature (1975), and then a book which, at least in the eyes ofsome, rivalsDifference and Repetition for the title ofDeleuze’s masterwork,A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

The 1980s were a decade of independent works for Deleuze:FrancisBacon: Logic of Sensation (1981);Cinema I: TheMovement-Image (1983);Cinema II: The Time-Image (1985);Foucault (1986); andThe Fold: Leibniz and theBaroque (1988). He then resumed his collaboration with Guattarifor their final joint work,What is Philosophy? (1991). Hisfinal years were spent in very ill health, although he did manage topublish a remarkable short essay, “Immanence: A Life” in1995, before taking his own life on November 4, 1995.

2. Deleuze’s Readings of Other Philosophers

Before he ever wrote “in his own name” inDifferenceand Repetition andLogic of Sense, Deleuze wrote aseries of works on figures in the history of philosophy (Hume,Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant, and Spinoza). In writing these works,Deleuze sought to unearth the presuppositions he absorbed in hiseducation; chief among them, he felt, was a deep-seated privilege ofidentity over difference. Deleuze thus set about trying to acceleratehowever he could a departure from Hegel, whom he saw as emblematic ofthat privilege. Deleuze attacks Hegel and others in what we cancall—though Deleuze did not—the “identitarian”tradition first of all by means of a radicalized reading of Kant,whose genius, as Deleuze explains inKant’s CriticalPhilosophy (1963), was to have conceived of a purelyimmanent critique of reason—a critique that did notseek “errors” of reason produced by external causes, butrather “illusions” that arise from within reason itself bythe illegitimate (transcendent) uses of the syntheses ofconsciousness. Deleuze characterized his own work as a philosophy ofimmanence, arguing that Kant himself had failed to realize fully theambitions of his critique, for at least two reasons: first, thefailure to pursue a fully immanent critique, and second, the failureto propose a genetic account of real experience, resting content withthe account of the conditions of possible experience.

First, Kant made the field of consciousness immanentto atranscendental subject, thereby reintroducing an element of identitythat is transcendent (that is, external) to the field itself, andreserving all power of synthesis (that is, identity-formation) in thefield to the activity of the always already unified and transcendentsubject. (Deleuze was influenced in this regard by his reading ofSartre’s 1937 essay “The Transcendence of the Ego.”)Already in his Hume book,Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953),Deleuze had pointed to an empiricist reversal of Kant. WhereKant’s question had been “How can the given be given to asubject?” Hume’s question had been “How is thesubject (human nature) constituted within the given?” In hismature work, Deleuze argues for an “impersonal andpre-individual” transcendental field in which the subject asidentity pole which produces empirical identities by active synthesisis itself the result or product of differentialpassivesyntheses (for instance, in what Deleuze calls the syntheses ofhabit, we find bodily, desiring, and unconscious“contractions” which unify a series of experiences,extracting that which is to be retained in the habit and allowing therest to be “forgotten”). Together the passive syntheses atall these levels form a differential field within which subjectformation takes place as an integration or resolution of that field;in other words, subjects are roughly speaking the patterns of thesemultiple and serial syntheses which fold in on themselves producing asite of self-awareness. Of course, Deleuze never simply proclaims thisas a bald thesis, but develops a genetic account of subjectivity inmany of his books. Taking all this into account, Deleuze summarizedhis differential, immanent and genetic position by the at first glanceodd phrase of “transcendental empiricism.” This is cashedout in terms of two characteristics: (1) the abstract (e.g.,“subject,” “object,” “State,” the“whole,” and so on) does not explain, but must itself beexplained; and (2) the aim of philosophy is not to rediscover theeternal or the universal, but to find the singular conditions underwhich something new is produced. In other words—and this is apragmatic perspective from which Deleuze neverdeviated—philosophy aims not at stating the conditions ofknowledge qua representation, but at finding and fostering theconditions of creative production.

Deleuze’s second criticism of Kant claims that he had simplypresumed the existence of knowledge and morality as“facts” and then sought their conditions of possibility inthe transcendental. But already in 1789, Salomon Maimon, whose earlycritiques of Kant helped generate the post-Kantian tradition, hadargued that Kant’s critical project required a method ofgenesis—and not merely a method of conditioning—that wouldaccount for the production of knowledge, morality, and indeed reasonitself. In other words, Maimon called for a genetic method that wouldbe able to reach the conditions of real and not merely possibleexperience. Maimon found a solution to this problem in a principle ofdifference: whereas identity is the condition of possibility ofthought in general, it is difference that constitutes the genetic andproductive principle of real thought.

These two Maimonian exigencies—the search forthe geneticconditions of real experience and the positing of aprincipleof difference—appear in almost every one of Deleuze’searly monographs.Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), forinstance, suggests that Nietzsche completed and inverted Kantianism bybringing critique to bear, not simply on false claims to knowledge ormorality, but on true knowledge and true morality, and indeed on truthitself: “genealogy” constituted Nietzsche’s geneticmethod, and the will-to-power was his principle of difference.Deleuze’s anti-Hegelianism is shown in his focus on theproductivity of the non-dialectical (“affirmative”)differential forces termed by Nietzsche “noble.” Theseforces affirm themselves, and thereby differentiate themselves first,and only secondarily consider that from which they have differentiatedthemselves.

InBergsonism (1966), Deleuze develops the ideas ofvirtuality and multiplicity that will serve as the backbone of hislater work. From Maimon’s reading of Kant, we know that Deleuzeneeds to substitute the notion of the condition of the genesis of thereal for the notion of conditions of possibility of representationalknowledge. The positive name for that genetic condition is thevirtual, which Deleuze adopts from the following Bergsonian argument.The notion of the possible, Bergson holds inCreativeEvolution, is derived from a false problem that confuses the“more” with the “less” and ignores differencesin kind; there is not less but more in the idea of the possible thanin the real, just as there is more in the idea of nonbeing than inthat of being, or more in the idea of disorder than in that of order.When we think of the possible as somehow “pre-existing”the real, we think of the real, then we add to it the negation of itsexistence, and then we project the “image” of the possibleinto the past. We then reverse the procedure and think of the real assomething more than possible, that is, as the possible with existenceadded to it. We then say that the possible has been“realized” in the real. By contrast, Deleuze will rejectthe notion of the possible in favor of that of the virtual. Ratherthan awaiting realization, the virtual is fully real; what happens ingenesis is that the virtual is actualized.

The fundamental characteristic of the virtual, that which means itmust be actualized rather than realized, is its differential makeup.Deleuze always held the critical axiom that the ground cannot resemblethat which it grounds; he constantly critiques the“tracing” operation by which identities in real experienceare said to be conditioned by identities in the transcendental. Forinstance, Deleuze criticizes Kant for copying the transcendental fieldin the image of the empirical field. That is, empirical experience ispersonal, identitarian and centripetal; there is a central focus, thesubject, in which all our experiences are tagged as belonging to us.Kant says this empirical identity is only possible if we can posit theTranscendental Unity of Apperception, that is, the possibility ofadding “I think” to all our judgments. Instead of thissmuggled-in or “traced” identity, Deleuze will want tohave the transcendental field be differential. Deleuze still wants towork back from experience, but since the condition cannot resemble theconditioned, and since the empirical is personal and individuated, thetranscendental must be impersonal and pre-individual. The virtual isthe condition for real experience, but it has no identity; identitiesof the subject and the object are products of processes that resolve,integrate, or actualize (the three terms are synonymous for Deleuze) adifferential field. The Deleuzean virtual is thus not the condition ofpossibility of any rational experience, but the condition of genesisof real experience.

As we have seen, the virtual, as genetic ground of the actual, cannotresemble that which it grounds; thus, if we are confronted with actualidentities in experience, then the virtual ground of those identitiesmust be purely differential. Deleuze adopts “multiplicity”from Bergson as the name for such a purely differential field. In thisusage, Deleuze later clarifies, “multiplicity” designatesthe multiple as a substantive, rather than as a predicate. Themultiple as predicate generates a set of philosophical problems underthe rubric of “the one and the many” (a thing is one ormultiple, one and multiple, and so on). With multiplicity, or themultiple as substantive, the question of the relation between thepredicates one/multiple is replaced by the question of distinguishingtypes of multiplicities (as with Bergson’s distinction ofqualitative and quantitative multiplicities inTime and FreeWill). A typological difference between substantivemultiplicities, in short, is substituted for the dialecticalopposition of the one and the multiple.

In sum, then, against the “major” post-Kantian traditionof Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Deleuze in effect posited his own“minor” post-Kantian trio of Maimon, Nietzsche, andBergson. To these he added a trio of pre-Kantians, Spinoza, Leibnizand Hume, but read through a post-Kantian lens.

We have already touched on Deleuze’s reading of Hume. Let us nowturn to Spinoza, for whom Deleuze’s admiration was seeminglylimitless; for Deleuze, Spinoza was the “prince” or eventhe “Christ” of philosophers. There are many Spinozistinheritances in Deleuze, but one of the most important is certainlythe notion of univocity in ontology. Univocity—as opposed to itsgreat rivals, equivocity and analogy—is the key to developing a“philosophy of difference” (Deleuze’s term for hisproject inDifference and Repetition), in which differencewould no longer be subordinated to identity. The result is a Spinozismminus substance, a purely modal or differential universe. Inunivocity, as Deleuze reads Spinoza, being is said in a single senseof all of which it is said, but it is said of difference itself. Whatis that difference? Difference is difference in degrees of“power”; in interpreting this term we must distinguish thetwo French wordspuissance andpouvoir. In socialterms,puissance is immanent power, power to act rather thanpower to dominate another; we could say thatpuissance ispraxis (in which equals clash or act together) rather thanpoiesis (in which others are matter to be formed by thecommand of a superior, a sense of transcendent power that matches whatpouvoir indicates for Deleuze). In the most general termsDeleuze develops throughout his career,puissance is theability to affect and to be affected, to form assemblages orconsistencies, that is, to form emergent unities that nonethelessrespect the heterogeneity of their components.

The final important figure in Deleuze’s readings of otherphilosophers is Leibniz, to whom, it must be recalled, Maimon appealedin his criticism of Kant. In 1988, Deleuze published a book on LeibnizentitledThe Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, which added newelements to the reading of Leibniz that appeared in Deleuze’searlier books: an interpretation centered on the concept of the fold,a development of a concept of the Baroque, and an attempt to define aneo-Leibnizianism in terms of contemporary artistic and scientificpractices. WhileThe Fold is a fascinating work, we willconcentrate here on Deleuze’s early reading of Leibniz, whichplays an important role inDifference and Repetition.

Deleuze pushes Leibniz’s thought to a point where Leibniz couldnever have taken it, given his theological presuppositions. This isthe point where one begins to consider the virtual domain on its ownaccount, freed from its actualization in a world and its individuals.On this score, Deleuze often likes to cite Jorge Luis Borges’sfamous story, “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” in whichsuch a virtual world is described in the labyrinthine book of aChinese philosopher named Ts’ui Pên: “In allfiction, when a man is faced with alternatives, he chooses one at theexpense of others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pên,he chooses—simultaneously—all of them… InTs’ui Pên’s work, all the possible solutions occur,each one being the point of departure for other bifurcations.”Leibniz had in fact given a similar presentation of the world at theconclusion of theTheodicy.

In Deleuze’s transformation of the Leibnizian / Borgesian image,the three Kantian transcendent Ideas of God, World, and Self all takeon a completely different demeanor. First, God is no longer a Beingwho compares and chooses the richest compossible world; he has nowbecome a pure Process that affirms incompossibilities and passesthrough them.

Second, the world is no longer a continuous world defined by itspre-established harmony; instead, divergences, bifurcations, andincompossibles must now be seen to belong to one and the sameuniverse, a chaotic universe in which divergent series trace endlesslybifurcating paths, and give rise to violent discords and dissonancesthat are never resolved into a harmonic tonality: a“chaosmos,” as Deleuze puts it (borrowing a word fromJoyce) and no longer a world. In contrast, Leibniz could only save the“harmony” of this world by relegating discordances anddisharmonies to other possible worlds—this was his theologicalsleight of hand.

Third, selves or individuals, rather than being closed upon thecompossible and convergent world they express from within, are nowtorn open, and kept open through the divergent series andincompossible ensembles that continually pull them outside themselves.The “monadic” subject, as Deleuze puts it, becomes the“nomadic” subject. In other words, if Deleuze isLeibnizian, it is only by eliminating the idea of a God who choosesthe best of all possible worlds, with its pre-established harmony andwell-established selves; in Deleuze, incompossibilities anddissonances belong to one and the same world, the only world, ourworld. But they belong to our world as its virtual register;developing the thought of the virtual is one of the great challengesof Deleuze’s masterpiece,Difference and Repetition, towhich we now turn.

3. The Philosophy of Difference

3.1Difference and Repetition

Deleuze’s historical monographs were, in a sense, preliminarysketches for the great canvas ofDifference and Repetition(1968), which marshaled these resources from the history of philosophyin an ambitious project to construct a “philosophy ofdifference.” Following Maimon’s critique,Differenceand Repetition produces a two-fold shift from the Kantian projectof providing the universal and necessary conditions for possibleexperience. First, rather than seeking the conditions forpossible experience, Deleuze wants to provide an account ofthe genesis ofreal experience, that is, the experience ofthis concretely existing individual here and now. Second, to respectthe demands of the philosophy of difference, the genetic principlemust itself be a differential principle.

However, despite these departures, Deleuze maintains a crucialalignment with Kant;Difference and Repetition is still atranscendental approach. Here we should remind ourselves that theterms “transcendent” and “transcendental” haveopposing significations. Transcendental philosophy in fact critiquesthe pretensions of other philosophies to transcend experience byproviding strict criteria for the use of syntheses immanent toexperience. On this score, at least, Deleuze aligns himself withKant’s critical philosophy.

Three further preliminary notes are in order here. First, as we willdiscuss in section 4 below, theCapitalism and Schizophreniaproject of Deleuze and Guattari will bring to the fore naturalisttendencies that are only implicitly present in the still-Kantianframework ofDifference and Repetition. So, although there issome risk of reading backwards in this formulation, we can say thatthe “of” in the phrase “the experience of thisconcretely existing individual here and now” is both subjectiveand objective. It is the experience by human subjects of thisindividual object in front of it, and it is the experience enjoyed bythe concretely existing individual itself, even when that individualis non-human or even non-living. (Deleuze’s panpsychism istreated briefly in Protevi 2011.) Second, then, in the demand forgenetic principles to account for the real experience of concreteindividuals, Deleuze is working in the tradition of the Principle ofSufficient Reason. Third, the notion of “genesis” isitself double; in Chapter 3, Deleuze lays out a dynamic genesis thatmoves from an encounter with intensity in sensation to the thinking ofvirtual Ideas, while Chapters 4 and 5 lay out a static genesis thatmoves from the virtual Idea through an intensive individuation processto an actual entity.

We are now ready to discuss the book itself. Murphy 1992 suggests thatthe first part of the book (the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2)constitutes Deleuze’s treatment of the history of philosophy,while in the second part of the book (Chapters 4 and 5) Deleuze isdoing philosophy in his own name. From this point of view, Chapter 3,on the “image of thought,” plays a pivotal role, leadingus into Deleuze’s own philosophy. This transitional role ofChapter 3 is confirmed elsewhere when Deleuze says that the study ofthe image of thought is the “prolegomena to philosophy”(Negotiations, 149).

In Chapters 1 and 2, to find a differential genetic principle, Deleuzeworks through the history of philosophy to isolate the concepts of“difference in itself” and “repetition foritself” that the assumptions of previous philosophies hadprevented from being formulated. “Difference in itself” isdifference that is freed from identities seen as metaphysicallyprimary. Normally, difference is conceived of as an empirical relationbetween two terms which each has a prior identity of its own (“xis different from y”). Deleuze inverts this priority: identitypersists, but is now a something produced by a prior relation betweendifferentials (dx rather than not-x). Difference is no longeran empirical relation but becomes a transcendental principle thatconstitutes the sufficient reason of empirical diversity (for example,it is the difference of electrical potential between cloud and groundthat constitutes the sufficient reason of the phenomenon oflightning).

In Chapter 2, the concept of “repetition for itself” isproduced as repetition that is freed from being repetition of anoriginal self-identical thing so that it can be the repetition ofdifference. Following the formula of Deleuze’s reading ofNietzsche’s eternal return, repetition is the return of thedifferential genetic condition of real experience each time there isan individuation of a concrete entity. Ultimately, then,Difference and Repetition will show that the individuation ofentities is produced by the actualization, integration, or resolution(the terms are synonymous for Deleuze) of a differentiated virtualfield of Ideas or “multiplicities” that are themselveschanged, via “counter-effectuation,” in each individuatingevent.

Chapter 3 lays out 8 postulates of the “dogmatic image ofthought.” Between the first four and last four postulates wefind a theory of the faculties, which is thus at the crossroads ofboth the chapter and the book.

Let us take up the first four postulates. The first postulate concernsour supposed natural disposition to think; the denial of this is whatnecessitates our being forced to think. The second and thirdpostulates concern subjective and objective unity. Subjective unity iscaptured by the notion of “common sense” such that ourfaculties of sensation, memory, imagination, and thought work inharmony, while objective unity is captured by the notion of“recognition” such that it is the same object that issensed, remembered, imagined, and thought. The fourth postulateconcerns “representation”, a key target of Deleuze’scritique. Here difference is submitted to a fourfold structure thatrenders difference subordinate to identity: 1) identity in theconcept; 2) opposition of predicates; 3) analogy in judgment; and 4)resemblance in perception. A good way to approach Deleuze’snotion of representation is via Aristotle and Porphyry. Specificdifferences are the opposed predicates that function on a horizon ofidentity in the concept under division; thus animal is the genus thatis divided into rational and irrational as specific differences thatenable the isolation of the species “human.” Then, we findthat the difference between individuals of the same species isinfra-conceptual and can only be made via the perception ofresemblances; Theaetetus looks like Socrates but not so much that theycannot be distinguished. Finally, the relation of substance to theother categories is analogical, such that being is said in many ways,but with substance as the primary way in which it is said.

After the first four postulates, we find the theory of the faculties,which will be Deleuze’s account of what it means to be“forced” to think in differential rather than identitarianterms. To free a notion of “difference in itself” suchthat difference need not be thought on the basis of a prior horizon ofidentity, Deleuze looks for an “encounter,” a sensationthat cannot be thought, that cannot find the empirical category underwhich an object can be recognized, and thus forces the“transcendent exercise” of the faculty of sensibility,when something can only be sensed.

Here we see the dynamic genesis from intensity in sensation to thethinking of virtual Ideas. Each step here has a distinct Kantian echo.The faculties are linked in order; here Deleuze as well as Kant lookto the privilege of sensibility as the origin of knowledge—the“truth of empiricism.” With sensibility, pure differencein intensity is grasped immediately in the encounter as thesentiendum, that which can only be sensed. In thedifferential theory of the faculties, sensibility, imagination,memory, and thought all “communicate a violence” from oneto the other—here Deleuze works with the Kantian notion of thesublime as discordant accord of the faculties. The “free form ofdifference” in intensity moves each faculty and communicates itsviolence to the next, though in this case there is no supernaturalvocation that will redeem the conflict of imagination and reason, asthere is in the resolution to the discussion of the sublime in theCritique of Judgment. Rather than a reconciliation of thefaculties, with thought, a “fractured self”—hereDeleuze takes up Kant’s notion of the split between theempirical ego and the Transcendental subject—is constrained tothink “difference in itself” in Ideas.

We won’t discuss the last four postulates in detail, as theyconcern the theory of Ideas, the topic of Chapter 4, which we willshortly discuss. For now, let us note that two of Deleuze’stechnical terms, intensity and virtuality, occupy two different placeson this line of dynamic genesis. Intensity is the characteristic ofthe encounter, and sets off the process of thinking, while virtualityis the characteristic of the Idea.

With the notions of intensive and extensive we come upon a crucialdistinction for Deleuze that is explored in Chapters 4 and 5 ofDifference and Repetition. Extensive quantities, such aslength, area or volume, are divisible. A volume of matter divided intotwo equal halves produces two volumes, each having half the extent ofthe original one. Intensive magnitudes, by contrast, refer toproperties such as temperature or pressure that cannot be so divided.If a volume of water whose temperature is 90º is divided in half,the result is two volumes at the original temperature, not two volumesat 45º. However, the important property of intensity is not thatit is indivisible, but that it is a property that cannot be dividedwithout involving a change in kind. The temperature of a volume ofwater, for instance, can be “divided” by heating thecontainer from below, causing a temperature difference between the topand the bottom. In so doing, however, we change the systemqualitatively; moreover, if the temperature differences reach acertain threshold (if they attain a certain “intensity” inDeleuze’s terms), the system will undergo a “phasetransition,” losing symmetry and changing its dynamics, enteringinto a periodic pattern of motion—convection—whichdisplays extensive properties of size: X centimeters of length andbreadth. Drawing on these kinds of analyses, Deleuze will assign atranscendental status to the intensive: intensity, he argues,constitutes the genetic condition of extensive space. Intensiveprocesses are themselves in turn structured by Ideas ormultiplicities.

An Idea or multiplicity is really a process of progressivedetermination of differential elements, differential relations, andsingularities. Let us take these step-by-step. “Elements”must have no independent existence from the system in which theyinhere; phonemes as the elements of the virtual linguistic Idea are anexample Deleuze uses inDifference and Repetition. Whenphonemes are actualized, they enter into differential relations thatdetermine the patterns of individual languages; thus the Englishphoneme /p/ is reciprocally determined by its differences from /t/,/b/, /d/, and so on. Finally, these differential relations of anindividual language determine singularities or remarkable points atwhich the pattern of that language can shift: the Great Vowel Shift ofMiddle English being an example, or more prosaically, dialectpronunciation shifts.

For another example—and here, in the applicability of his schemato widely divergent registers, is one of the aspects of Deleuze asmetaphysician—let us try to construct the Idea of hurricanes.The differential elements would be material “flows” drivenby intensive differences in temperature and pressure but undeterminedin form (neither smooth nor turbulent, neither big nor small) andfunction (neither forming nor destroying of weather events). Theseflows qua differential elements enter into relations of reciprocaldetermination linking changes in any one element to changes in theothers; thus temperature and pressure differences will link changes inair and water currents to each other: updrafts are related todowndrafts even if the exact relations (the tightness of the links,the velocity of the flows) are not yet determined. Finally, atsingular points in these relations singularities are determined thatmark qualitative shifts in the system, such as the formation ofthunderstorm cells, the eye wall, and so on. But this is still thevirtual Idea of hurricanes; real existent hurricanes will havemeasurable values of these variables so that we can move from thephilosophical realm of sufficient reason to that of scientificcausation. A hurricane is explained by its Idea, but it is caused byreal wind currents driven by real temperature supplied by the sun totropical waters.

To see how Ideas are transcendental and immanent, we have toappreciate that an Idea is a concrete universal. In an early articleon Bergson (“The Conception of Difference in Bergson”[1956]), Deleuze gave a particularly helpful example of this notion.InLa Pensée et le Mouvant, Bergson had shown thatthere are two ways of determining what the spectrum of“colors” have in common. (1) You can extract fromparticular colors an abstract and general idea of color (“byremoving from the red that which makes it red, from the blue whatmakes it blue, from the green what makes it green”). Or, (2) youcan make all these colors “pass through a convergent lens,bringing them to a single point,” in which case a “purewhite light” is obtained that “makes the differencesbetween the shades stand out.” The former case defines a singlegeneric “concept” with a plurality of objects; therelation between concept and object is one of subsumption; and thestate of difference remains exterior to the thing. The second case, onthe contrary, defines a differential Idea in the Deleuzean sense: thedifferent colors are no longer objects under a concept, but constitutean order of mixture in coexistence and succession within the Idea; therelation between the Idea and a given color is not one of subsumption,but one of actualization and differenciation; and the state ofdifference between the concept and the object is internalized in theIdea itself, so that the concept itself has become the object. Whitelight is still a universal, but it is a concrete universal, and not agenus or generality.

The Idea of color is thus like white light, which“perplexes” within itself the genetic elements andrelations of all the colors, but which is actualized in the diversecolors and their respective spaces. (Like the word“problem,” Deleuze uses the word “perplexion”to signify, not a coefficient of doubt, hesitation, or astonishment,but the multiple and virtual state of Ideas. Indeed, Deleuze adopts anumber of Neoplatonic notions to indicate the structure of Ideas, allof which are derived from the root wordpli [fold]:perplication, complication, implication, explication, andreplication.) Similarly, the Idea of sound could be conceived of as awhite noise, just as there is also a white society or a whitelanguage, which contains in its virtuality all the phonemes andrelations destined to be actualized in the diverse languages and inthe remarkable parts of a same language.

We can now move to discuss Chapter 5, on the individuation ofconcretely existing real entities as the actualization of a virtualIdea. In isolating the conditions of genesis, Deleuze sets up atripartite ontological scheme, positing three interdependentregisters: the virtual, intensive, and actual. Deleuze’s basicnotion is that in all realms of being intensive morphogeneticprocesses follow differential virtual multiplicities to producelocalized and individuated actual substances with extensiveproperties. Simply put, the actualization of the virtual proceeds byway of intensive processes. Beneath the actual (any one state of asystem), we find “impersonal individuations” or intensivemorphogenetic processes that produce system states and beneath thesewe find “pre-individual singularities” (that is, the keyelements in virtual fields, marking system thresholds that structurethe intensive morphogenetic processes). We thus have to distinguishthe intense “impersonal” field of individuation and itsprocesses from the virtual “pre-individual” field ofdifferential relations and singularities that make up an Idea ormultiplicity.

Tying together the themes of difference, multiplicity, virtuality andintensity, at the heart ofDifference and Repetition we finda theory of Ideas (dialectics) based neither on an essential model ofidentity (Plato), nor a regulative model of unity (Kant), nor adialectical model of contradiction (Hegel), but rather on aproblematic and genetic model of difference. Ideas define the being ofa thing, but one cannot attain an Idea through the Socratic question“What is … ?” (which posits Ideas as transcendentand eternal), but rather through “minor” questions such as“Which one?” “Where?” “When?”“How?” “How many?” “In whichcase?” “From which viewpoint?”—all of whichallow one to define the differential Ideas immanent in the intensiveprocesses they structure.

From these examples we can see that Ideas structure the intensiveprocesses that give rise to the behavior patterns of systems, andtheir singularities mark the thresholds at which systems changebehavior patterns. In a word, the virtual Idea is the transformationmatrix for material systems or bodies. Bodies are determined“solutions” to the “problem” that lays out themanifold options for incarnating bodies of that nature. Ideas thenrespond to the question “who?” (who is it that incarnatesthe Idea in this case?) rather than the essentialist “whatis?” (what are the properties of the substance that provide thenecessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the class ofwhich the object is a member?)

For orientation purposes, it’s useful to consider GilbertSimondon’s theory of individuation as a very simple model forwhat Deleuze calls “actualization.” For Simondon,crystallization is a paradigm of individuation: a supersaturatedsolution is metastable; from that pre-individual field, replete withgradients of density that are only implicit “forms” or“potential functions,” individual crystals precipitateout. The Deleuzean virtual is composed of “Ideas” or“multiplicities” involving differential relations amongheterogeneous components, whose rates of change are connected witheach other. For an example of such heterogeneity, let us return tohurricane formation, the Idea of which we sketched above. Here itshould be intuitively clear that there is no central command, but aself-organization of multiple processes of air and water movementpropelled by temperature and pressure differences. All hurricanes formwhen intensive processes of wind and ocean currents reach singularpoints. These singular points, however, are not unique to any onehurricane, but are virtual for each actual hurricane, just as theboiling point of water is virtual for each actual pot of tea on thestove. In other words, all hurricanes share the same virtual structureeven as they are singular individuations or actualizations of thatstructure.

In this treatment, we have concentrated on only some of themetaphysics inDifference and Repetition; much more could besaid about the role that Nietzsche’s thought of the eternalreturn plays therein, in addition to Deleuze’s remarks on adizzying array of figures from Plato and Scotus to Freud and Artaud.In the interests of space, however, let us move to a brief treatmentof Deleuze’s second major work of the late 1960s,Logic ofSense.

3.2Logic of Sense

WhileDifference and Repetition ranges over a wide field ofphilosophical topics,Logic of Sense focuses on two aspectsof a single issue, the structure and genesis of sense. The genius ofFrege and Russell was to have discovered that the condition of truth(denotation) lies in the domain of sense. In order for a propositionto be true (or false) it must have a sense; a nonsensical propositioncan be neither true nor false. Yet they betrayed this insight, Deleuzeargues, because they—like Kant before them—remainedcontent with establishing the condition of truth rather than itsgenesis. InLogic of Sense, Deleuze attacks this problem,first developing the paradoxes that result from the structure of senseand then sketching a theory of its genesis. He does this usingresources from analytic philosophy and the Stoics in the course of areading of Lewis Carroll—a typically innovative, if not quirky,set of Deleuzean references.

In the first part of the book, Deleuze analyzes the structure ofsense. He begins by identifying three types of relation withinpropositions:

1. Designation or denotation, which is the relation of a propositionto an external state of affairs (theory of reference, with itscriterion of truth or falsity).
2. Manifestation, which marks the relation of the proposition to thebeliefs and desires of the person who is speaking (with its values ofveracity or illusion).
3. Signification or demonstration, which is the relation of theproposition to other propositions (the domain of logic, with itsrelations of implication and assertion).

Propositions, in other words, can be related either to the objects towhich they refer, or to the subjects who utter them, or to otherpropositions. But each of these relations, in turn, can be taken to beprimary. (1) In the domain of speech, it is the “I” thatbegins: manifestation not only makes denotation possible (Hume), butis also prior to signification (Descartes’cogito). (2)In the domain of language, however, it is signification that isprimary, since one is always born into a preexisting language, andsignified concepts are always primary in relation to the self as amanifested person or to things as designated objects. (3) Yet in thedomain of logic we see the primacy of designation: as shown by thehypothetical mode of implications, the logical value of demonstrationis not the truth, but rather the conditions of truth (the conditionsof possibility under which the proposition would be true); thepremises must thus be posited as effectively true, which forces one toleave the pure order of implication in order to relate the premises toa denoted state of affairs. Logical designation, in other words,cannot fulfill its putative role as foundation, since it presupposesan irreducible denotation.

The theory of the proposition is thus caught in a circle, with eachcondition in turn being conditioned by what it supposedly conditions.“For the condition of truth to avoid this defect,” Deleuzeargues, “it would have to have something unconditioned capableof assuring a real genesis of designation and the other dimensions ofthe proposition: the condition of truth would then be defined, nolonger as the form of conceptual possibility, but as an ideal matteror ‘medium’ [matière ou ‘couche’idéelle], that is, no longer as signification, but assense” (LS 19). Sense, then, would be a fourth dimension ofpropositions, for which Deleuze reserves the term expression. ForDeleuze as for Frege, sense is what is expressed in a proposition; thetwo senses of “morning star” and “eveningstar” are two ways in which the samedenotatum may beexpressed in propositions.

Deleuze’s contribution to the philosophy of sense really beginsto take off when he shows that the attempt to make this fourthdimension evident is akin to Lewis Carroll’s Hunt for the Snark,or to unraveling a Möbius strip, since sense has neither aphysical nor a mental existence. Deleuze suggests that it was theStoics who first discovered the dimension of sense when theydistinguished between corporeal mixtures and incorporeal events. I canattribute the proper name “Battle of Waterloo” to aparticular state of affairs, but the battle itself is an incorporealevent (or sense) with no other reality than that of the expression ofmy proposition; what we find in the state of affairs are bodies mixingwith one another—spears stabbing flesh, bullets flying throughthe air, cannons firing, bodies being ripped apart—and thebattle itself is theeffect or theresult of thisintermingling of bodies. Sense thus has a complex status. On the onehand, it does not exist outside the proposition that expresses it, butit cannot be confused with the proposition, since it has a distinct“objectity” of its own (it does not exist, but rather“subsists” or “insists”). On the other hand,it is attributed to states of affairs or things, but it cannot beconfused or identified with states of affairs, nor with a quality orrelation of these states. “Sense is both the expressible or theexpressed of the proposition, and the attribute of the state ofaffairs. It turns one side toward things, and another side towardpropositions. But it cannot be confused with the proposition whichexpressed it any more than with the state of affairs or the qualitywhich the proposition denotes. It is exactly the boundary betweenpropositions and things” (LS 22).

The structure of sense generates a number of paradoxes, which Deleuzedistinguishes from the paradoxes of signification discovered byRussell in set theory (the set of all sets, and the “barber ofthe regiment”). The first is the paradox of regress, orindefinite proliferation: I can never state the sense of what I amsaying, but I can take the sense of what I am saying as the object ofanother proposition, whose sense in turn I cannot state, ad infinitum.This first paradox points both to the impotence of the speaker (myinability to state the sense of what I am saying) and to the highestpower of language (its infinite capability to speak about words). Thesecond paradox is that of sterile reiteration or doubling: one canavoid the infinite regress by extracting sense as the mere double of aproposition, but at the price of catapulting us into a third paradoxof neutrality or sterility—sense is necessarily neutral withregard to the various modes of the proposition: quality (affirmation,negation), quantity (all, some, none), relation, and modality(possibility, reality, necessity).

Thus extracted from the proposition, Deleuze argues that sense has thestatus of a pure ideationalevent, irreducible topropositions and their three dimensions: (1) the states of affairs thepropositions denote; (2) the experiences or mental activities(beliefs, desires, images, representations) of persons who expressthemselves in the proposition; and (3) universals or general concepts.But how can sense be said to engender the other dimensions of theproposition? This is the second task of a logic of sense: “tocombine the sterility of sense in relation to the proposition fromwhich it was extracted with its power of genesis in relation to thedimensions of the proposition” (LS 32).

In the second half ofLogic of Sense, Deleuze analyzes whathe calls the dynamic genesis of language, drawing in part from textsin developmental psychology and psychoanalysis. “What renderslanguage possible,” he writes, “is that which separatessounds from bodies and organizes them into propositions, freeing themfor the expressive function” (LS 181). Deleuze distinguishesthree stages in the dynamic genesis, which at the same time constitutethree dimensions of language: (1) the primary order is the noiseproduced in the depths of the body; (2) the secondary organizationconstitutes the surface of sense (and non-sense); and (3) the tertiaryarrangement [ordonnance] is found in fully-formedpropositions, with their functions of denotation, manifestation, andsignification.

The first stage of the dynamic genesis of sense, the primary order oflanguage, is found in the newborn infant. Deleuze draws from atradition of developmental psychology whose insights are expressed inthe vivid image of Daniel N. Stern: the infant’s experience is akind of human “weatherscape,” made up entirely ofsequences of risings and fallings of intensity—the jolting of abright light or a sharp noise, the calming of a voice, or theexplosive breakout of a storm of hunger (The Interpersonal Worldof the Infant, 1985). Deleuze will draw upon the writings of theFrench writer Antonin Artaud and call this life ofintensities-in-motion the “body without organs.” Thisprimary order of language (pure Noise as a dimension of the body)constitutes a first type of nonsense. But in the midst of this worldof intensities, there also appears a particular noise: the sound ofthe child’s parents, or other adults. Long before the infant canunderstand words and sentences, it grasps language as something thatpre-exists itself, as something always-already there, like a Voice onhigh. But for the child the Voice has the dimensions of languagewithout having its condition. (Adults have the same experience whenthey hear a foreign language being spoken.) For the infant to accedeto the tertiary arrangement of language (denotation, manifestation,signification), it must pass through its secondary organization, whichis the production of the surface dimension of sense. How does thisconstruction take place? From the flow of the Voice, the child willextract differential elements of various orders (phonemes, morphemes,semantemes) and begin to synthesize them into diverse series.

At this point, Deleuze isolates three series or syntheses: connective,conjunctive, and disjunctive. In the first, the child connectsphonemes in a concatenation of successive entities(“mama,” “dada”); in the second, there is theconstruction of esoteric words out of these phonemes through theirintegration and conjunction (“your royal highness” iscontracted into “y’reince”); in the third, the childstarts making these esoteric words ramify and enter into relation withother divergent and independent series. We can clearly see that theconstructions of this secondary organization of sense are not yet thefully formed units of the tertiary arrangement of language on high,but they are no longer merely the bodily noises of the primary order.Before the child has any understanding of linguistic units, itundertakes a vast apprenticeship in their formative elements. This iswhy the domain of sense is the condition or ground of propositions,not as their form of possibility, but as their “ideal matter or‘medium’”: we are positioned immediately withinsense whenever we denote, manifest, or signify. Moreover, since senselies at the frontier of words and things—it is expressed inpropositions and attributed to states of affairs, but it cannot beconfused with either propositions or states of affairs—itengenders both the determinate dimensions of the proposition(denotation, manifestation, signification) as well as its objectivecorrelates (the denoted, the manifested, and the signified).

The domain of sense is necessarily subject to a fundamental fragility,capable of toppling over into nonsense: the ground gives way to agroundlessness, asans-fond. The reason for this is clear.Sense is never a principle or an origin; rather, it is an effect, itis produced, and it is produced out of elements that do not, inthemselves, have a sense. Sense, in other words, has a determinaterelation with nonsense. Deleuze, however, distinguishes between twovery different types of nonsense. The first is that of Lewis Carroll,who remains at the surface of sense and, like children, makes use ofthe non-signifying elements of language in order to construct theportmanteau words (snark = shark + snake; frumious = furious + fuming)and nonsensical phrases (“’Twas brillig, and the slithytoves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”) that populate hiswriting. IfLogic of Sense is in part a reading ofCarroll’s work, it is because no one knew better than Carrollabout the conditions for the production of sense, which Deleuzeelucidates in detail: the extraction of differential elements or pureevent, their organization in multiple series, and most importantly,the aleatory point or paradoxical element that links the series (theideal “quasi-cause” that produces the effect of sense outof nonsense).

But there is a second type of nonsense, which is more profound thanthe surface nonsense found in Lewis Carroll. This is the terrifyingnonsense of the primary order, which found expression in the writingsof Antonin Artaud. Sense is what prevents the sonorous language frombeing confused with the physical body (noise). But in the primaryorder of schizophrenia experienced by Artaud, there is no longeranything to prevent propositions from falling back onto bodies, whichmingle their sonorous elements with the olfactory, gustatory, anddigestive effects of the body (Artaud’scris-souffles:“ratara ratara ratara Atara tatara rana Otara otarakatara”).

Deleuze will develop his theory of the body-without-organs in hiscollaboration with Félix Guattari, to which we now turn. As weshall see, the concept of the body-without-organs is put to work in acomplex naturalistic philosophy of “desiring-production”that moves far beyond the question of sense into the realms of nature,history, and politics. In other words, ifLogic of Senserepresents Deleuze’s confrontation with the “linguisticturn” that was so important for twentieth-century philosophy, itis a confrontation that he quickly put behind him as he came toembrace fully his materialist and naturalistic leanings.

4. Collaboration with Guattari

Following his work in the philosophy of difference, Deleuze meetsGuattari in the aftermath of May 1968. These famous“events,” which have marked French culture and politicsever since, brought together students and workers, to the befuddlementof the established guardians of the revolution, the French CommunistParty. Days of general strikes and standoffs with the police led theFrench President Charles de Gaulle to call a general election. DeGaulle’s call for a parliamentary solution to the crisis wasbacked by the Communists, who were evidently as scared of anyrevolution from below—which by definition would lack the partydiscipline they so craved—as were the official holders of Statepower, to whose position they aspired. The worker-student movementeventually collapsed, leaving memories of non-scripted socialinteractions and revealing the investments of the Party, lampoonedthereafter as “bureaucrats of the revolution,” inFoucault’s words in his Preface to the English translation ofAnti-Oedipus. The French Communist Party’s agreementwith De Gaulle to allow a parliamentary solution to the social crisiswas a glaring example of the horizon of identity (the desire thatsomeone be in control of a central State bureaucracy) that allowed anopposition (of the Gaullists and the Communists as rivals for controlof the State) to shackle difference.

The government response to May 1968 changed French academic life intwo ways. First, institutionally, by the creation of Paris VIII(Vincennes) where Deleuze taught; and second, in the direction of thephilosophy of difference, which became explicitly political post-1968.It became, in fact, a politics of philosophy dedicated to exposing thehistorical force relations producing identity in all its ontologicaland epistemological forms. In other words, the philosophy ofdifference now set out to show how the unified objects of the world,the unified subjects who know and hence control them, the unifiedbodies of knowledge that codify this knowledge, and the unifiedinstitution of philosophy that polices the whole affair, are productsof historical, political forces in combat with other forces.

In purely philosophical terms, the works with Guattari naturalize thestill-Kantian framework ofDifference and Repetition. By thetime ofAnti-Oedipus andA Thousand Plateaus Deleuzeand Guattari explicitly thematize that the syntheses they investigateare fully material syntheses, syntheses of nature in geological aswell as biological, social, and psychological registers (Welchman2009). Not just organic syntheses, but inorganic ones as well, are“spatio-temporal dynamisms.” With this full naturalizationof syntheses, the question of panpsychism is brought into full relief(Protevi 2011), since material syntheses are as much syntheses ofexperience as they are syntheses of things, as we see in the title ofChapter 3 ofA Thousand Plateaus: “The Geology ofMorals: Who does the earth think it is?”

4.1Anti-Oedipus

In consideringAnti-Oedipus we should first discuss itsperformative effect, which attempts to “force us tothink,” that is, to fight against a tendency to cliché.ReadingAnti-Oedipus can indeed be a shocking experience.First, we find a bizarre collection of sources; for example, theschizophrenic ranting of Antonin Artaud provides one of the basicconcepts of the work, the “body without organs.” Second isthe book’s vulgarity, as in the infamous opening lines about theunconscious (the Id): “It is at work everywhere, functioningsmoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, itheats, it eats. It shits and fucks [Ça chie, çabaise]. What a mistake to have ever saidthe id”(7 / 1). A third performative effect is humor, as in the mocking ofMelanie Klein’s analysis of children: “Say it’sOedipus, or I’ll slap you upside the head [sinont’auras un gifle]” (54 / 45; trans. modified). Thereare many more passages like this; it’s safe to say very fewphilosophy books contain as many jokes, puns, anddoubleentendres asAnti-Oedipus. A fourth element is thegleeful coarseness of the polemics. Among many other examples,thinkers of the signifier are associated with the lap dogs of tyrants,members of the French Communist Party are said to have fascistlibidinal investments, and Freud is described as a “masked AlCapone.” All in all, the performative effect of readingAnti-Oedipus is unforgettable.

Passing to the conceptual structure of the book, the key term ofAnti-Oedipus is “desiring-production,” whichcrisscrosses Marx and Freud, putting desire in the eco-social realm ofproduction and production in the unconscious realm of desire. Ratherthan attempting to synthesize Marx and Freud in the usual way, thatis, by a reductionist strategy that either (1) operates in favor ofFreud, by positing that the libidinal investment of social figures andpatterns requires sublimating an original investment in family figuresand patterns, or (2) operates in favor of Marx by positing neurosesand psychoses as mere super-structural by-products of unjust socialstructures, Deleuze and Guattari will call desiring-production a“universal primary process” underlying the seeminglyseparate natural, social and psychological realms. Desiring-productionis thus not anthropocentric; it is the very heart of the world.Besides its universal scope, we need to realize two things aboutdesiring-production right away: (1) there is no subject that liesbehind the production, that performs the production; and (2) the“desire” in desiring-production is not oriented to makingup a lack, but is purely positive. Desiring-production is autonomous,self-constituting, and creative: it is thenatura naturans ofSpinoza or the will-to-power of Nietzsche.

Anti-Oedipus is, along with its conceptual and terminologicalinnovation, a work of grand ambitions: among them, (1) an eco-socialtheory of production, encompassing both sides of the nature/culturesplit, which functions as an ontology of change, transformation, or“becoming”; (2) a “universal history” ofsocial formations—the “savage” or tribal, the“barbarian” or imperial, and the capitalist—whichfunctions as a synthetic social science; (3) and to clear the groundfor these functions, a critique of the received versions of Marx andFreud—and the attempts to synthesize them by analogizing theirrealms of application. In pursuing its ambitions,Anti-Oedipus has the virtues and the faults of thetourde force: unimagined connections between disparate elements aremade possible, but at the cost of a somewhat strained conceptualscheme.

Anti-Oedipus identifies two primary registers ofdesiring-production, the natural or “metaphysical” and thesocial or “historical.” They are related in the followingway: natural desiring-production is that which social machinesrepress, but also that which is revealed in capitalism, at the end ofhistory (a contingent history, that is, one that avoids dialecticallaws of history). Capitalism sets free desiring-production even as itattempts to rein it in with the institution of private property andthe familial or “Oedipal” patterning of desire;schizophrenics are propelled by the charge of desiring-production thusset free but fail at the limits capitalist society proposes, thusproviding a clue to the workings of desiring-production.

It’s important at the start to realize that Deleuze and Guattarido not advocate schizophrenia as a “lifestyle” or as themodel for a political program. The schizophrenic, as a clinicalentity, is the result of the interruption or the blocking of theprocess of desiring-production, its having been taken out of natureand society and restricted to the body of an individual where it spinsin the void rather than make the connections that constitute reality.Desiring-production does not connect “with” reality, as inescaping a subjective prison to touch the objective, but it makesreality, it is the Real, in a twisting of the Lacanian sense of theterm. In Lacan, the real is produced as an illusory and retrojectedremainder to a signifying system; for Deleuze and Guattari, the Realis reality itself in its process of self-making. The schizophrenic isa sick person in need of help, but schizophrenia is an avenue into theunconscious, the unconscious not of an individual, but the“transcendental unconscious,” an unconscious that issocial, historical, and natural all at once.

In studying the schizophrenic process, Deleuze and Guattari posit thatin both the natural and social registers desiring-production iscomposed of three syntheses, the connective, disjunctive, andconjunctive; the syntheses perform three functions: production,recording, and enjoyment. We can associate production with thephysiological, recording with the semiotic, and enjoyment with thepsychological registers. While it is important to catch the Kantianresonance of “synthesis,” it is equally important to note,in keeping with the post-structuralist angle we discussed above, thatthere is no subject performing the syntheses; instead, subjects arethemselves one of the products of the syntheses. The syntheses have nounderlying subject; they just are the immanent process ofdesiring-production. Positing a subject behind the syntheses would bea transcendent use of the syntheses. Here we see another reference tothe Kantian principle of immanence. Deleuze and Guattari propose tostudy the immanent use of the syntheses in a “materialistpsychoanalysis,” or “schizoanalysis”; by contrast,psychoanalysis is transcendent use of the syntheses, producing five“paralogisms” or “transcendental illusions,”all of which involve assigning the characteristics of the extensiveproperties of actual products to the intensive production process, or,to put it in the terms of the philosophy of difference, all theparalogisms subordinate differential processes to identities derivedfrom products.

According to the “universal history” undertaken inAnti-Oedipus, social life has three forms of“socius,” the social body that takes credit forproduction: the earth for the tribe, the body of the despot for theempire, and capital for capitalism. According to Deleuze andGuattari’s reading of the anthropological literature, tribalsocieties mark bodies in initiation ceremonies, so that the productsof an organ are traced to a clan, which is mythically traced to theearth or, more precisely, one of its enchanted regions, which functionas the organs on the full body of the earth. Material flows are thus“territorialized,” that is, traced onto the earth, whichis credited as the source of all production. The signs in tribalinscription are not signifiers: they do not map onto a voice, butenact a “savage triangle forming … a theater of crueltythat implies the triple independence of the articulated voice, thegraphic hand and the appreciative eye” (189). Empires overcodethese tribal meaning codes, tracing production back to the despot, thedivine father of his people. Material flows in despotic empires arethus “deterritorialized” (they are no longer credited tothe earth), and then immediately “reterritorialized” onthe body of the despot, who assumes credit for all production. Whentribal signs are overcoded, the signifier is formed as a“deterritorialized sign” allowing for communicationbetween the conquered and the conquerors. Signifiers are a“flattening” or “bi-univocalization”: twochains are lined up, one to one, the written and the spoken(205–6; cf. Derrida’s notion of“phonocentrism”). The body of the despot as imperialsocius means that workers are the “hands” of the emperor,spies are his “eyes,” and so on.

Capitalism is the radical decoding and deterritorialization of thematerial flows that previous social machines had zealously coded onthe earth or the body of the despot. Production is credited to the“body” of capital, but this form of recording works by thesubstitution of an “axiomatic” for a code: in this contextan “axiomatic” means a set of simple principles for thequantitative calculation of the difference between flows (ofdeterritorialized labor and capital) rather than elaborate rules forthe qualitative judgments that map flows onto the socius.Capitalism’s command is utterly simple: connectdeterritorialized flows of labor and capital and extract a surplusfrom that connection. Thus capitalism sets loose an enormousproductive charge—connect those flows! Faster, faster!—thesurpluses of which the institutions of private property try toregister as belonging to individuals. Now those individuals areprimarily social (as figures of capitalist or laborer) and onlysecondarily private (family members). Whereas organs of bodies weresocially marked in previous regimes (as belonging to the clan andearth, or as belonging to the emperor, as in thejus primaenoctis), body organs are privatized under capitalism and attachedto persons as members of the family. In Deleuze and Guattari’sterms, capitalism’s decoded flows are reterritorialized on“persons,” that is, on family members as figures in theOedipal triangle.

4.2A Thousand Plateaus

Three differences between this work and its predecessor areimmediately apparent. First,A Thousand Plateaus has a muchwider range of registers thanAnti-Oedipus: cosmic, geologic,evolutionary, developmental, ethological, anthropological,mythological, historical, economic, political, literary, musical, andeven more. Second, the results of the paralogisms ofAnti-Oedipus become “strata” inA ThousandPlateaus: the organism (the unification and totalization of theconnective synthesis of production, or the physiological register),the signifying totality orsignifiance, which we can perhapsrender as “signifier-ness” (the flattening or“bi-univocalizing” of the disjunctive synthesis ofrecording, the semiotic register), and the subject (the reification ofthe conjunctive synthesis of consummation, the psychologicalregister). Finally, whileAnti-Oedipus has a classicalconceptual architecture, that is, chapters that develop a singleargument,A Thousand Plateaus is written as a“rhizome,” that is, as allowing immediate connectionsbetween any of its points. Because of this rhizomatic structure, atraditional summary of the “theses” and arguments ofAThousand Plateaus is either downright impossible, or at best,would be much too complex to attempt in an encyclopedia article. Wewill therefore have to limit ourselves to the following remarks.

In fourteen plateaus, or planes of intensity—productiveconnections between immanently arrayed material systems withoutreference to an external governing source—Deleuze and Guattaridevelop a new materialism in which a politicized philosophy ofdifference joins forces with the sciences explored inDifferenceand Repetition.A Thousand Plateaus is a book of strangenew questions: “Who Does the Earth Think It Is?,”“How Do You make Yourself a Body Without Organs?,”“How does the war-machine ward off the apparatus of capture ofthe State?” and so on. To over-simplify, Deleuze and Guattaritake up the insights of dynamical systems theory, which explores thevarious thresholds at which material systems self-organize (that is,reduce their degrees of freedom, as in our previous example ofconvection currents). Deleuze and Guattari then extend the notion ofself-organizing material systems—those with no need oftranscendent organizing agents such as gods, leaders, capital, orsubjects—to the social, linguistic, political-economic, andpsychological realms. The resultant “rhizome” orde-centered network that isA Thousand Plateaus provideshints for experimentation with the more and more de-regulated flows ofenergy and matter, ideas and actions—and the attendant attemptsat binding them—that make up the contemporary world.

A Thousand Plateaus maintains the tripartite ontologicalscheme of all of Deleuze’s work, but, as the title indicates,with geological terms of reference. Deleuze and Guattari call thevirtual “the Earth,” the intensive is called“consistency,” and the actual is called “the systemof the strata.” As the latter term indicates, one of the foci oftheir investigations is the tendency of some systems to head towardcongealment or stratification. More precisely put, any concrete systemis composed of intensive processes tending toward the (virtual) planeof consistency and/or toward (actual) stratification. We can say thatall that exists is the intensive, tending towards the limits ofvirtuality and actuality; these last two ontological registers do not“exist,” but they do “insist,” to use one ofDeleuze’s terms.

Nothing ever instantiates the sheer frozen stasis of the actual northe sheer differential dispersion of the virtual; rather, natural orworldly processes are always and only actualizations, that is, theyare processes of actualization structured by virtual multiplicitiesand heading toward an actual state they never quite attain. Moreprecisely, systems also contain tendencies moving in the otherdirection, toward virtuality; systems are more or less stable sets ofprocesses moving in different directions, toward actuality and towardvirtuality. In still other words, Deleuze and Guattari are processphilosophers; neither the structures of such processes nor theircompleted products merit the same ontological status as processesthemselves. With this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari offer adetailed and complex “open system” which isextraordinarily rich and complex. A useful way into it is to followthe concepts of coding, stratification and territorialization. Theyare related in the following manner. Coding is the process of orderingmatter as it is drawn into a body; by contrast, stratification is theprocess of creating hierarchal bodies, while territorialization is theordering of those bodies in “assemblages,” that is to say,an emergent unity joining together heterogeneous bodies in a“consistency.”

These concepts, and several other networks of concepts considerationsof space preclude us from considering, are put to work in addressingthe following topics. After a discussion of the notion of“rhizome” in the first chapter (or “plateau”as they call it), Deleuze and Guattari quickly dismiss psychoanalysisin the second. In the third chapter they discuss the process ofstratification in physical, organic, and social strata, with specialattention to questions in population genetics, where speciation can bethought to stratify or channel the flow of genes. In chapters 4 and 5they intervene in debates in linguistics in favor of pragmatics, thatis to say, highlighting the “incorporeal transformations”(labels that prompt a different form of action to be applied to abody: “I now pronounce you man and wife”) that sociallysanctioned “order words” bring about (Deleuze and Guattarialso refer to speech act theory in this regard).

They also lay out the theory of “territories” or sets ofenvironmentally embedded triggers of self-organizing processes, andthe concomitant processes of deterritorialization (breaking of habits)and reterritorialization (formation of habits). Chapters 6 and 7discuss methods of experimenting with the strata in which we foundourselves. Chapter 6 deals with the organic stratum or the“organism”; the notorious term of art “Body withoutOrgans” can be at least partially glossed as the reservoir ofpotentials for different patterns of bodily affect. Chapter 7 dealswith the intersection ofsignifiance(“signifier-ness”) and subjectification in“faciality”; the face arrests the drift of significationby tying meaning to the expressive gestures of a subject. Chapters 8and 9 deal with the social organizing practices they name“lines” and “segments”; of particular interesthere is their treatment of fascism.

Chapter 10 returns to the question of intensive experimentation, nowdiscussed in terms of “becoming,” in which (at least) twosystems come together to form an emergent system or“assemblage.” Chapter 11 discusses the“refrain” or rhythm as a means of escaping from andforming new territories, or even existing in a process of continualdeterritorialization, what they call “consistency.”Chapters 12 and 13 discuss the relation of the “warmachine” and the State; the former is a form of socialorganization that fosters creativity (it “reterritorializes ondeterritorialization itself”), while the latter is an“apparatus of capture” living vampirically off of labor(here Deleuze and Guattari’s basically Marxist perspective isapparent). Finally, Chapter 14 discusses types of social constitutionof space, primarily the “smooth” space of war machines andthe “striated” space of States.

4.3What is Philosophy?

After a long period in which each pursued his own interests, Deleuzeand Guattari published a last collaboration in 1991,What IsPhilosophy? In answering their title question, Deleuze andGuattari seek to place philosophy in relation to science and art, allthree being modes of thought, with no subordination among them.Thought, in all its modes, struggles with chaos against opinion.Philosophy is the creation or construction of concepts; a concept isan intensive multiplicity, inscribed on a plane of immanence, andpeopled by “conceptual personae” which operate theconceptual machinery. A conceptual persona is not a subject, forthinking is not subjective, but takes place in the relationship ofterritory and earth. Science creates functions on a plane ofreference. Art creates “a bloc of sensation, that is to say, acompound of percepts and affects” (WP 164).

We will deal with Deleuze and the arts in some detail below. IndiscussingWhat is Philosophy?, let us concentrate on thetreatment of the relation of philosophy and science. We shouldremember at the outset that the nomad or minor science evoked inAThousand Plateaus is not the Royal or major science that makes upthe entirety of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘science’inWhat is Philosophy?. The motives for this conflation areunclear; in the eyes of some, this change considerably weakens thevalue of the latter work.

Be that as it may, inWhat is Philosophy? Deleuze andGuattari vigorously deny that philosophy is needed to help sciencethink about its own presuppositions (“no one needs philosophy toreflect on anything” [WP 6]). Instead, they emphasize thecomplementary nature of the two. First, they point out a number ofsimilarities between philosophy and science: both are approaches to“chaos” that attempt to bring order to it, both arecreative modes of thought, and both are complementary to each other,as well as to a third mode of creative thought, art.

Beyond these similarities, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish betweenphilosophy as the creation of concepts on a plane of immanence andscience as the creation of functions on a plane of reference. Bothrelate to the virtual, the differential field of potentialtransformations of material systems, but in different ways. Philosophygives consistency to the virtual, mapping the forces composing asystem as pure potentials, what the system is capable of. Meanwhile,science gives it reference, determining the conditions by whichsystems behave the way they actually do. Philosophy is the“counter-effectuation of the event,” abstracting an eventor change of pattern from bodies and states of affairs and therebylaying out the transformative potentials inherent in things, the roadsnot taken that coexist as compossibles or as inclusive disjunctions(differentiation, in the terms ofDifference and Repetition),while science tracks the actualization of the virtual, explaining whythis one road was chosen in a divergent series or exclusivedisjunction (differenciation, according toDifference andRepetition). Functions predict the behavior of constitutedsystems, laying out their patterns and predicting change based oncausal chains, while concepts “speak the event” (WP 21),mapping out the multiplicity structuring the possible patterns ofbehavior of a system—and the points at which the system canchange its habits and develop new ones.

For Deleuze and Guattari inWhat is Philosophy?, then,science deals with properties of constituted things, while philosophydeals with the constitution of events. Roughly speaking, philosophyexplores the plane of immanence composed of constellations ofconstitutive forces that can be abstracted from bodies and states ofaffairs. It thus maps the range of connections a thing is capable of,its “becomings” or “affects.” Science, on theother hand, explores the concretization of these forces into bodiesand states of affairs, tracking the behavior of things in relation toalready constituted things in a certain delimited region of space andtime (the “plane of reference”). How do concepts relate tofunctions? Just as there is a “concept of concept” thereare also “concepts of functions,” but these are purelyphilosophical creations “without the least scientificvalue” (WP 117). Thus concrete concepts like that of“deterritorialization” are philosophical concepts, notscientific functions, even though they might resonate with, or echo,scientific functions. Nor are they metaphors, as Deleuze and Guattarirepeatedly insist:

“Of course, we realize the dangers of citing scientificpropositions outside their own sphere. It is the danger of arbitrarymetaphor or of forced application. But perhaps these dangers areaverted if we restrict ourselves to taking from scientific operators aparticular conceptualizable character which itself refers tonon-scientific areas, and converges with science without applying itor making it a metaphor” (Deleuze 1989: 129).

Deleuze and Guattari’s refusal to recognize that their workcontains metaphors is due to their struggle against the“imperialism” of the signifying regime, a major theme inbothAnti-Oedipus andA Thousand Plateaus: not everyrelation between different intellectual fields can be grasped by themost common notions of “metaphor,” reliant as they are onthe notion of a transfer of sense from primary to secondarysignification.

5. Deleuze and the Arts

Kant had dissociated aesthetics into two halves: the theory ofsensibility as the form of possible experience (the“Transcendental Aesthetic” of theCritique of PureReason), and the theory of art as a reflection on real experience(the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in theCritiqueof Judgment). In Deleuze’s work, these two halves ofaesthetics are reunited: if the most general aim of art is to“produce a sensation,” then the genetic principles ofsensation are at the same time the principles of composition for worksof art; conversely, it is works of art that are best capable ofrevealing these conditions of sensibility. Deleuze therefore writes onthe arts not as a critic but as a philosopher, and his books andessays on the various arts—including the cinema (CinemaI and II), literature (Essays Critical and Clinical), andpainting (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation)—mustbe read as philosophical explorations of this transcendental domain ofsensibility.

The cinema, for instance, produces images that move, and that move intime, and it is these two aspects of film that Deleuze set out toanalyze inThe Movement-Image andThe Time-Image:“What exactly does the cinema show us about space and time thatthe other arts don’t show?” Deleuze thus describes histwo-volumeCinema as “a book of logic, a logic of thecinema” that sets out “to isolate certain cinematographicconcepts,” concepts which are specific to the cinema, but whichcan only be formed philosophically.Francis Bacon: The Logic ofSensation likewise creates a series of philosophical concepts,each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon’spaintings, but which also find a place in “a general logic ofsensation.”

In general, Deleuze will locate the conditions of sensibility in anintensive conception of space and a virtual conception of time, whichare necessarily actualized in a plurality of spaces and a complexrhythm of times (for instance, in the non-extended spaces andnon-linear times of modern mathematics and physics).

For Deleuze, the task of art is to produce “signs” thatwill push us out of our habits of perception into the conditions ofcreation. When we perceive via the re-cognition of the properties ofsubstances, we see with a stale eye pre-loaded with clichés; weorder the world in what Deleuze calls “representation.” Inthis regard, Deleuze cites Francis Bacon: we’re after an artworkthat produces an effect on the nervous system, not on the brain. Whathe means by this figure of speech is that in an art encounter we areforced to experience the “being of the sensible.” We getsomething that we cannot re-cognize, something that is“imperceptible”—it doesn’t fit the hylomorphicproduction model of perception in which sense data, the“matter” orhyle of sensation, is ordered bysubmission to conceptual form. Art however cannot be re-cognized, butcan only be sensed; in other words, art splits perceptual processing,forbidding the move to conceptual ordering. This is exactly what Kantin the Third Critique called reflective judgment: when the concept isnot immediately given in the presentation of art. With art we reach“sensation,” or the “being of the sensible,”thesentiendum.

Deleuze talks about this effect of sensation as the“transcendent exercise” of the faculty of sensibility;here we could refer to the third chapter ofDifference andRepetition, where Deleuze lays out a non-Kantian“differential theory of the faculties.” In this remarkabletheory, intensity is “difference in itself,” that whichcarries the faculties to their limits. The faculties are linked inorder; here we see what Deleuze calls the privilege of sensibility asorigin of knowledge—the “truth of empiricism.” Inthe differential theory of the faculties, sensibility, imagination,memory, and thought all “communicate a violence” from oneto the other. With sensibility, pure difference in intensity isgrasped immediately in the encounter as thesentiendum; withimagination, the disparity in the phantasm is that which can only beimagined. With memory, in turn, thememorandum is thedissimilar in the pure form of time, or the immemorial of transcendentmemory. With thought, a fractured self is constrained to think“difference in itself” in Ideas. Thus the “free formof difference” moves each faculty and communicates its violenceto the next. You have to be forced to think, starting with an artencounter in which intensity is transmitted in signs or sensation.Rather than a “common sense” in which all the facultiesagree in recognizing the “same” object, we find in thiscommunicated violence a “discordant harmony” (compare theKantian sublime) that tears apart the subject (here we find the notionof “cruelty” Deleuze picks up from Artaud).

6. The Reception of Deleuze

The writings of Deleuze have provoked a large literature ofexplication and introduction in both French and English; morerecently, works in German, Italian, and other European languages haveappeared. There have also been noteworthy critiques. Rather thanattempt a complete survey of the voluminous secondary literature, wewill concentrate on a few of the major critiques.

6.1 The feminist critique

An early wave of criticism was directed in the 1980s atDeleuze’s collaborations with Guattari by feminists such asAlice Jardine and Luce Irigaray. Jardine 1985 criticized the conceptof “becoming-woman” inA Thousand Plateaus, whichDeleuze and Guattari position as the first step towards ade-subjectivizing “becoming-indiscernible.” Jardine arguedthat Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that even women must undergo a“becoming-woman” amounts to a threat to the hard-foughtvictories of concrete feminist struggle that allowed women to claim asubjectivity in the first place. According to Grosz 1994’ssurvey of the early feminist critiques, Irigaray argued that the useof “becoming-woman” as a figure of change incumbent uponall, including men, amounts to a masculinist and desexualizingappropriation of feminist struggle. In the 1990s and now into the2000s, a number of feminists associated with the “corporealfeminism” movement have attempted positive connections withDeleuze in the name of an open and experimental attitude toward bodilypotentials, in both the singular and political registers, as in thephrase “body politic.” See among others Braidotti 1994 and2002; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994 and 1995; Olkowski 1999; Lorraine 1999;and the essays in Buchanan and Colebrook 2002.

6.2 The Badiouan critique

One of the most important criticisms of Deleuze was put forth inBadiou 1997. Badiou claimed, contrary to the dominant perception, thatDeleuze is not so much a philosopher of the multiple as of the One.Conducted in the highly technical idiom for which he is known, Badioucriticizes Deleuze for a certain vitalism, which in Badiou’seyes falls short of the axiomatic austerity demanded of philosophy.Whereas Badiou merely ignored the collaborative works with Guattari,Žižek 2003 conducts a polemic against the Guattaricollaborations in favor of a Deleuzean logic of Being characterized asan “immaterial affect generated by interacting bodies as asterile surface of pure Becoming” (as inLogic ofSense). A third critical work in this vein is Hallward 2005. ForHallward, the singular logic of Deleuze’s thought is analogousto the tradition of theophantic thinkers, whereby the divine spark ofcreation is entombed in creatures; the task of the creature is toredeem that divine spark from its creatural prison. But thisredemption is not annihilation; Deleuze’s philosophy is not thatof Lacanian-Žižekian“renunciation-extinction.”

In response to the Badiouan critique, we can note that one of the mostpromising leads for future research in discussing the relation ofBadiou and Deleuze is to concentrate on the type of mathematics eachthinker prefers. Rather than accepting Badiou’s characterizationof Deleuze as a thinker of reality in biological terms (as opposed toBadiou’s mathematical orientation), we should see Deleuze asproposing a “problematic” version of mathematics, versusBadiou’s axiomatic conception. This tack has been taken by Smith2003.

6.3 Deleuze and science

Deleuze was aware of the finitist revolution in the history of thedifferential calculus, despite Sokal and Bricmont’s 1999intimations otherwise. He writes inDifference andRepetition, “it is a mistake to tie the value of the symboldx to the existence of infinitesimals; but it is also amistake to refuse it any ontological or gnoseological value in thename of a refusal of the latter. In fact, there is a treasure buriedwithin the old so-called barbaric or pre-scientific interpretations ofthe differential calculus, which must be separated from itsinfinitesimal matrix. A great deal of heart and a great deal of trulyphilosophical naivety is needed in order to take the symboldx seriously …” (170). It seems obvious herethat Deleuze’s treatment of early forms of the differentialcalculus is not meant as an intervention into the history ofmathematics, or an attempt at a philosophy of mathematics, but as aninvestigation seeking to form a properly philosophical concept ofdifference by means of extracting certain forms of thought from whathe clearly labels as antiquated mathematical methods. (For positiveviews of Deleuze’s use of mathematics as provocations for theformation of his philosophical concepts, see the essays in Duffy2006.)

Massumi 1992 and DeLanda 2003 attempt to show that Deleuze’sepistemology and ontology can be brought together with the results ofcontemporary dynamical systems theory (popularly known as“chaos” and “complexity” theory). Bell 2006follows up on this work. Protevi 2001 looks at the accompanyingnotions of hylomorphism and self-organization in the history ofphilosophy; Bonta and Protevi 2004 treat Deleuze and dynamic systemstheory with regard to its potentials for geographical work. For otherissues on Deleuze and science, see the essays in Marks 2006. Finally,Ansell Pearson 1999 brought attention to Deleuze and biology; see alsoToscano 2006 in this regard.

6.4 Deleuze Effects

As the interest in Deleuze continues to grow, three of its effects areof interest to us, one of which is sociological and the other two ofwhich are philosophical.

The sociological effect is the globalization of institutions devotedto the study of Deleuze’s thought and its application in variousfields. A noteworthy institutional initiative is the series ofconferences sponsored by the journalDeleuze and GuattariStudies (see Other Internet Resources) under the leadership ofIan Buchanan. In addition to numerous conferences in Europe and NorthAmerica, an index of Deleuze’s widespread impact is the successof a number of conferences in Asia (to date, Taiwan, India, Singapore,South Korea, China and Japan).

The two philosophical effects are that of reviving interest in thosewhom Deleuze discusses explicitly or those whose influence on Deleuzecan be discerned, and that of providing a foil or counterpoint orreference point in readings of other philosophers.

The most prominent example of the revivifying effect is Bergson,relatively forgotten at the time of Deleuze’sBergsonism (1966), but now the subject of a growingphilosophical literature. Of course, we cannot attribute all thisinterest to Deleuze’s book and to the subsequent secondaryliterature on Deleuze that stresses the contribution of Bergson toDeleuze’s system (as we ourselves do above on the concept of thevirtual and the critique of the possible), but it is not implausibleto consider the counterfactual whereby without Deleuze’s workthe interest in Bergson would not be as strong as it currently is.Among the Bergson commentaries Mullarkey 1999, Guerlac 2006,Moulard-Leonard 2009, Grosz 2017, and Lundy 2018 all link the twothinkers in their works.

The post-Kantian Salomon Maimon has been for some time now a subjectof specialist interest by historians of philosophy; see the entry onMaimon; see also the recent English translation of his major work [Maimon1790 [2010]). Maimon’s relation to Deleuze is explored in Jones& Roffe (eds.) 2009, Smith 2010, and Voss 2011.

Another example of thinker whose current level of interest wasarguably catalyzed by being noticed as an influence on Deleuze is themid-20th century French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, whose notions ofthe “pre-individual” and of “crystallization”were influential in the development of Deleuze’s notions of thevirtual and actualization, respectively. An English translation of hisworks is Simondon 2020. Among others, see Toscano 2006 and 2009, Scott2014, Sauvagnargues 2016, Swan 2016, Alloa and Michalet 2017, and Voss2018 and 2020 for treatments of the Deleuze-Simondon relation.

Yet another would be the early 20th century French sociologist GabrielTarde, whose notion of microsociology is referred to approvingly inDeleuze and Guattari’s development of their notion of“micropolitics” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980 [1987,216–219]). For Deleuze-inspired treatments, see Alliez 2001,Brighenti 2010, Read 2015, Tonkonoff 2017.

More recently and to a still muted extent is the revival of interestin mid-20th century French thinker Raymond Ruyer, whose notion ofsurvol or “self-survey” is mentioned by Deleuzeand Guattari in their brief remarks on the consistency of the conceptin its neural instantiation inWhat is Philosophy? (Deleuzeand Guattari 1991 [1994, 210]). English translations of Ruyer’sworks are Ruyer 2016 and 2018. Ruyer’s relation to Deleuze isexplored in Bains 2002, Bogue 2009 and 2017, and Roffe 2017. Othertreatments of Ruyer that are relevant would be Massumi 2014 and Grosz2017.

Finally, while it’s certainly the case that Whitehead hasgarnered continuous interest on his own, a good bit of currentWhitehead scholarship includes reference to Deleuze as a leitmotif, asin Stengers 2011. A noteworthy new work influenced by both Deleuze andWhitehead is Williams 2016. See also Shaviro 2009, Robinson 2010, andBell 2011 and 2012, on the Deleuze and Whitehead connection.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

Works by Deleuze

• (1953)Empirisme et subjectivité (Paris: PUF); tr.asEmpiricism and Subjectivity, by Constantin Boundas, NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1991.
• (1956) “La Conception de la différence chezBergson,”Etudes bergsoniennes 4 (1956): 77–112;tr. as “Bergson’s Conception of Difference,” byMelissa McMahon, in John Mullarkey (ed.),The New Bergson,Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
• (1962)Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: PUF); tr. asNietzsche and Philosophy, by Hugh Tomlinson, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
• (1963)La philosophie critique de Kant (Paris: PUF); tr.asThe Critical Philosophy of Kant, by Hugh Tomlinson andBarbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1984.
• (1966)Le Bergsonisme (Paris: PUF); tr. asBergsonism, by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, NewYork: Zone Books, 1988.
• (1967)Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (Paris:Minuit); tr. asMasochism: An Interpretation of Coldness andCruelty, by Jean McNeil, New York: G. Braziller, 1971.
• (1968)Différence et répétition(Paris: PUF); tr. asDifference and Repetition, by PaulPatton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• (1968)Spinoza et le problème del’expression (Paris: Minuit); tr. asExpressionism inPhilosophy: Spinoza, by Martin Joughin, New York: Zone Books,1990.
• (1969)Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit); tr. asTheLogic of Sense, by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, New York:Columbia University Press, 1990.
• (1972) “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?”in Francois Châtelet, ed.,Histoire de la philosophie,tome 8: Le XXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1972): 299–335;tr. as “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” inDesertIslands, New York: Semiotext(e), 2003.
• (1964 [1970, 1976])Proust et les signes (Paris: PUF);tr. (of 1976 ed) asProust and Signs: The Complete Text, byRichard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
• (1977)Dialogues (avec Claire Parnet) (Paris:Flammarion); tr. asDialogues, by Hugh Tomlinson and BarbaraHabberjam, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
• (1981 [1970])Spinoza: Philosophie pratique; (Paris:PUF); tr. asSpinoza: Practical Philosophy, by Robert Hurley,San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.
• (1981)Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris:Editions de la différence); tr. asFrancis Bacon: Logic ofSensation, by Daniel W. Smith, Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2005.
• (1983)Cinéma I: l’Image-mouvement (Paris:Minuit); tr. asCinema I: The Movement-Image, tr. HughTomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1986.
• (1985)Cinéma II: l’Image-temps (Paris:Minuit); tr. asCinema II: The Time-Image, by Hugh Tomlinsonand Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989.
• (1986)Foucault (Paris: Minuit); tr. asFoucault, by Sean Hand, Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1988.
• (1988)Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit); tr.asThe Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, by Tom Conley,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
• (1990)Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit); tr. asNegotiations, by Martin Joughin, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1995.
• (1993)Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit); tr. asEssays Critical and Clinical, by Daniel Smith and MichaelGreco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
• (1995) “L’immanence: une vie,”Philosophie 47 (septembre 1), 3–7; tr. as“Immanence: A Life” inTwo Regimes of Madness,New York: Semiotext(e), 2006.
• (2002)L’Île déserte et autres textes:textes et entretiens 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris:Minuit, 2002); tr. asDesert Islands and Other Texts(1953–1974), by Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e),2003.
• (2003)Deux régimes de fous: textes et entretiens1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit); tr. asTwo Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995,by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), 2006.
• (2015)Lettres et autres textes, ed. David Lapoujade(Paris: Minuit); tr. asLetters and Other Texts, by AmesHodges, New York: Semiotext(e), 2020.

Works by Deleuze with Félix Guattari

• (1972)L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit); tr. asAnti-Oedipus, by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane,New York: Viking, 1977; reprint University of Minnesota Press,1983.
• (1975)Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris:Minuit); tr. asKafka: For a Minor Literature, by Dana Polan,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
• (1980)Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit); tr. asAThousand Plateaus, by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1987.
• (1991)Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris:Minuit); tr. asWhat is Philosophy?, by Hugh Tomlinson andGraham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Secondary Literature

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Other Internet Resources

• Deleuze and Guattari Studies
• Deleuze Web (includes Deleuze’s lectures at Vincennes in French, English,and other languages)
• The Deleuze Seminars (includes transcripts and English translations of the seminarsDeleuze gave at the University of Paris, Saint-Denis between 1971 and1987)
• Course page on Deleuze and Guattari, including lectures and outlines of texts by Deleuze and Deleuze andGuattari (John Protevi)
• Entry on Deleuze, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• La voix de Gilles Deleuze, Transcripts and sound files (MP3) of Deleuze lectures

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