“Fanny” Grandjouan, a French translator of D.H. Lawrence. His first book,
Empiricism and Subjectivity
, on David Hume, was published in 1953, when he was 28.Over the next ten years, Deleuze held a number of assistant teaching positions in Frenchuniversities, publishing his important text on Nietzsche (
Nietzsche and Philosophy
) in 1962. Itwas also around this time that he met Michel Foucault, with whom he had a long and importantfriendship. When Foucault died, Deleuze dedicated a book-length study to his work (
Foucault
1986). In 1968, Deleuze’s doctoral thesis, comprising of
Difference and Repetition
and
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
were published. This was also the period of the first major incidence of pulmonary illness that would plague Deleuze for the rest of his life.In 1969, Deleuze took up a teaching post at the ‘experimental’ University of Paris VII, where hetaught until his retirement in 1987. In the same year, he met Félix Guattari, with whom he wrotea number of influential texts, notably the two volumes of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
,
Anti-Oedipus
(1972) and
A Thousand Plateaus
(1980). These texts were considered by many(including Deleuze) to be an expression in part of the political ferment in France during May1968. During the seventies, Deleuze was politically active in a number of causes, includingmembership in the
Groupe d’information sur les prisons
(formed, with others, by MichelFoucault), and had an engaged concern with homosexual rights and the Palestinian liberationmovement.In the eighties, Deleuze wrote a number of books on cinema (the influential studies
TheMovement-Image
(1983) and
The Time-Image
(1985)) and on painting (
Francis Bacon
(1981)).Deleuze’s final collaboration with Guattari,
What is Philosophy?
, was published in 1991(Guattari died in 1992).Deleuze’s last book, a collection of essays on literature and related philosophical questions,
Essays Critical and Clinical
, was published in 1993. Deleuze’s pulmonary illness, by 1993, hadconfined him quite severely, even making it difficult for him to write. He took his own life on November 4th, 1995.
2. The History Of Philosophy
Deleuze’s whole intellectual trajectory can be traced by his shifting relationship to the history of philosophy. While in later years, he became quite critical of both the style of thought implied innarrow reproductions of past thinkers and the institutional pressures to think on this basis,Deleuze never lost any enthusiasm for writing books about other philosophers, if in a new way.Most of his publications contain the name of another philosopher as part of the title: Hume, Kant,Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Leibniz, Foucault.Deleuze expresses two main problems with the traditional style and institutional location of thehistory of philosophy. The first concerns a politics of the tradition:
The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even inthought. It has played the repressors role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-so’s book about them? A formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in thought – but which also makes those who stayoutside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.
(D 13)This hegemony of thought recurrently comes under attack later in Deleuze’s career, notably in
What is Philosophy?
This criticism also sits well with a general theme throughout his writings,which is the immediate politicisation of all thought. Philosophy and its history is not separated
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