Talk:Gilles Deleuze

Working-class family?

The Life section starts with “Deleuze was born into a working-class family in Paris and lived there for most his life.” In L'abécédaire entry “E comme Enfance”, Deleuze describes his own family as “right-wing bourgeois” and his father as a factory owner engineer. So, maybe there’s some left-wing wishful thinking involved in this mistake ;) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.180.184.119 (talk) 06:24, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

sources? —Zujine|talk 00:37, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

"Deleuze, a heavy smoker, suffered from a debilitating pulmonary..." The insinuation that tobacco caused the disease is based in what evidences? I erased the "heavy smoker" thought I'm sure tomorrow it will be back. Big Pharma everywhere...

His suicide was like Koestler's: euthanasia. But he didn't leave any note. --Justana (talk) 19:30, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

Metaphysical doctrines / Plane of Immanence

The concept of a plane of immanence is not put forward as a metaphysical model of reality as such but rather as a model of how the particular intellectual modality Deleuze defines as philosophy grounds itself, is able to reflect, to contemplate, and to communicate its ideas. Contrast with the plane of reference (associated with the intellectual modality of science) and the plane of sense (most closely associated with the third component of his trinity of intellectual modalities: art). To the best of my reckoning, in WIPh, D&G don't profer a metaphysical doctrine so much as postulate that all such intellectual systems are constructivisms which are deployed, with varying degrees of success, and with varying unintended consequences, against the inscrutable chaos of reality, the chaosmos. As constructivisms, these modes are all creative activities ("science is no less creative than the arts or philosophy") and the created systems carry the signiatures of their creators, much as our vocal utterances carry signiatures of the bearers physiological constitutions and individualities. As such, there is never any complete final metaphysics, nor in all likelihood will there ever be a complete final science, but rather creative and multifaceted evolutions contingent upon situational necessity as perceived by the desires and sensory cognitive configurations of future generations of artists, scientists, philosophers, and here we might add religious/occult constructions, the atmosphere of which envelops WIPh like completion and death. Which is well fitting and may have been an intentional implication (a joke of sorts), suggestion may be found in the way D&G differentiated philosophy from religion in WIPh. Trancendence vs immanence. And Deleuze's own fraught relationship with transcendence. Trancendent hieranchies freeze creation, effectively killing the free creative play on the plane of immanence. That's about the edge of what I'm remotely confident that I understand about it. ...some other stuff: Figures (found in Hegel, as constituent elements in the creation of Concepts: is this what Deleuze meant by Figures in relation to Religion?) vs Concepts. --joshua.cullick (talk) , 1 January 2012 —Preceding undated comment added 12:31, 1 January 2012 (UTC).

De Landa

My (non-logged in) edit to "Reception" qualifying the current "it's just not influential in english" language with references to the school associated with Manuel de Landa were quickly reverted with no justification, even though it was cross-reference to Manuel de Landa and Intensive science and virtual philosophy, both of whom substantiate the claims I had made. I actually got into De Landa because of those wikipedia pages.

It's absolutely inadmissible that an encyclopedia article about Deleuze fails to mention De Landa, but I don't want to get into a revert war. Can we agree on some language for this?--Dnavarro (talk) 17:04, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I was surprised to read de Landa described as an analytic philosopher and the edit history says so too. I assume the reversal was motivated by concerns about accuracy. The justification is that the additions were unsourced. If there are citations at the pages you mention, then you can add the material and provide them here. Others may be concerned with a neutral point of view, then, but the first concern is that any claims are verifiable. DionysosProteus (talk) 17:28, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

See the archive, under "Skewed Reception". The claim that Delanda is an analytic philosopher, or that there is a band of analytic philosophers producing noticeable scholarship on Deleuze, had no supporting citations, and I strongly doubt there are any to be had. Delanda is an example of the "North American humanities" reception already noted in the article. 271828182 (talk) 17:30, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Most-browsed Deleuze and Guattari articles

I wanted to find out which of the D&G articles garners the most traffic on this site. I thought this might be of interest to other editors interested in the D&G articles. All stats for June 2010:

• Gilles Deleuze 11,862
• Rhizome (philosophy) 2,887
• Félix Guattari 2,623
• A Thousand Plateaus 2,341
• Anti-Oedipus 2,191
• Deterritorialization 1,326
• Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1,208
• Haecceity 1,173
• Body without organs 1,130
• Plane of immanence 1,057
• Affect (philosophy) 647
• Arborescent 545
• Multiplicity (philosophy) 823
• Desiring-production 402
• Minority (philosophy) 388
• Schizoanalysis 369 (though article had been deleted to a redirect)
• Immanent evaluation 344
• Subjectivation 330
• Reterritorialization 319
• Line of flight 317
• Difference (philosophy) 300
• La Borde clinic 282
• L'Abécédaire_de_Gilles_Deleuze 224
• A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity 184

Also related are:

• Noosphere 5,896
• Individuation 3,658

But neither article has any substantial treatment of D&G

DionysosProteus (talk) 14:25, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

somthing abut networks and network age/internet ?

somthing abute verilo or that guy that wrote piosophy based on time and speed ? maybe sombody sohuold write somthing abut what some foks belive his network way of thinking belongs to internt sosiology and cyberspace ontologi ? was he not used as a big thinker abut this in the 1990 ? or just a link to those foks that build on his ideas what sombody called secondaery intelectuels(hard and negri ?) or is it too much postmodernsim too menntion? (like manuel castells and sassen maybe even bauman think his writeing are just postmodern nonsens ) murakaim 82.147.33.187 (talk) 12:42, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

too negative

This article is overwhelmingly negative - detailing numerous critiques without giving equal time to the positive influence on scholars such as Braidotti, DeLanda, Massumi, Patton, and many more. 198.72.191.223 (talk) 22:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

To quote what I wrote on this topic in 2007: "I agree that the article should not give an impression that Deleuze-reception has been generally negative. However, I do not think the Reception section gives such an impression. The first two paragraphs, in particular, describe the largely positive reception, as does the opening paragraph of the article.

As for making specific references to pro-D&G works: there used to be a paragraph along these lines, discussing Delanda, Alliez, and Lecercle. I canned it, since it was arbitrary to only discuss those three (why not Massumi, Dan Smith, Boundas, Patton, Ansell-Pearson, Williams, et al.?), and a full extension of that set would make a huge, unmanageable list, most of which would add no more information to the article than "yeah, this guy likes Deleuze, too". Instead I devised the opening two paragraphs as an encyclopedic summary.

Why, then, is there a more detailed list of negative criticism? That has to do with the state of the page in 2005, when there was nothing like a reception section. At that time, the Talk section attracted some complaints that by omitting any mention of Sokal & Bricmont's book, the article was terribly unbalanced and skewed in a pro-Deleuze POV. While I agreed that some mention of critical commentary was needed, rather than enshrining Sokal & Bricmont as some sort of definitive criticism of Deleuze, I tried to give a broader and richer overview. While the chronological list format is awkward, I don't think it imbalances the article as a whole, especially as everything else is a sympathetic exposition."

I will also add now (in 2013) that the "Influenced" infobox basically serves the purpose of listing Deleuze's "positive influence on scholars." 271828182 (talk) 18:27, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Health

Instead of mysteriously referring to a "disease," it's preferable to be specific: tuberculosis. I also removed a comment about tracheotomy, losing power of speech, and being "chained like a dog" to a respirator, because the citation (http://philosophy1.narod.ru/www/html/library/pdf/113444.pdf) doesn't support that. It says there was a rumor about a tracheotomy, and other sources have him making phone calls the day of his suicide.KD Tries Again (talk) 05:55, 8 June 2013 (UTC)KD Tries Again

Žižek...

Do we need the sentence: "What remains worthwhile in Deleuze's oeuvre, Žižek finds, are precisely those concepts closest to Žižek's own ideas"? Seems to be basically equivalent to saying "Zizek agrees with precisely those concepts with which Zizek agrees..."?109.149.106.136 (talk) 22:59, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Picture

Shouldn't we use a picture with slightly less motion-blurred hands here? --178.1.117.153 (talk) 16:52, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

• I've updated the photo with one that was shared via the Creative Commons database Joeyvandernaald (talk) 16:04, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Deleuze's atheism phrasing

I was the one who originally added to the article the sentence about the philosopher's atheism on the "Life" section. It read "Like many of his contemporaries, including Sartre and Foucault, Deleuze was an atheist." Not even a day afterwards, the user User:FreeKnowledgeCreator changed the sentence to the very dry "Deleuze was an atheist". I didn't quite understand why he did that. It seemed a silly change. Then I visited his page and learned he is a Christian conservative, which made me think the edit might have been done because of a conflict of interest. Seeing as Sartre and Foucault were both atheists like Deleuze and directly related to him (they are both mentioned in the article several times) and also considering that "Deleuze was an atheist" is a very loose, uncontextualized sentence, I suggest we go back to my original phrasing of the information. Please, write down your opinions/votes so we can settle this. (For more information on the discussion, see the user's talk page.) Clausgroi (talk) 03:20, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are meant to be dry. If your objection to "Deleuze was an atheist" is that it is dry, then that isn't much of an objection. There is nothing silly about making encyclopedias dry, but there is something silly about abusing other editors by attacking what you perceive to be their religious or political convictions, instead of arguing against them rationally. If you seriously think I have a conflict of interest, then raise the issue at this noticeboard. I will be fascinated to see what the result will be. "Deleuze was an atheist" is a perfectly acceptable statement; I have no idea what describing it as "loose" is supposed to mean. As I tried to explain several times, that Sartre and Foucault were atheists is not relevant at all to Deleuze being an atheist. The only way in which it might possibly be relevant would be if one of them encouraged Deleuze to become an atheist. If you have evidence of that, then by all means mention it. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 03:34, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

"Like many of his contemporaries, including Sartre and Foucault, Deleuze was an atheist." I second this phrasing, not only because it provides the context but also because it throws light on the intellectual milieu in which Deleuze was working. And Deleuze was deeply influenced by Sartre who was his teacher (he called him a breath of fresh air) and admired Foucault enough to write a wonderful monograph on him. And everybody knows about Foucault's praise of Deleuze and the preface he wrote for Anti-Oedipus. -Mohanbhan (talk) 11:45, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

I think what you mean by "Encyclopedias are meant to be dry" is that they are meant to be direct, straightforward, objective and impartial, but still comprehensive and relevant. First, these are totally different characteristics from being "dry". Second, nothing in my phrasing of Deleuze's atheism goes against that. We don't have to save space or economise words in the article. What I mean by "dry, loose, uncontextualized sentence" is that no encyclopaedia lists information about a person like this:

- John Doe was an atheist.

- John Doe was a vegetarian.

- John Doe was a democrat.

- John Doe was born in London.

- John Doe collected stamps.

The logical thing to do in an encylopaedical article is to integrate those pieces of information in the body text in a contextualized way, not simply throw them like you did. And that is my objection to your removal, FreeKnowledgeCreator. My point about a possible conflict of interest is just speculation, but it makes sense, even more now that you misteriously deleted your user page. It was either on purpose because of our discussion about your partiality or a very strange, well-timed coincidence.

For those who want to check the original discussion, see User talk:FreeKnowledgeCreator. I ask other editors that are reading this to make your voices heard. Share your opinions below. Thanks. Clausgroi (talk) 18:35, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Clausgroi, your comments about dryness suggest to me that you are confused about how an encyclopedia should be written. You complained that my wording was very dry, yet then you say there is nothing wrong with an encyclopedia being dry. Can't you see the contradiction? You say that no encyclopedia makes statements such as, "John Doe was born in London." You are simply wrong about that. Wikipedia and other encyclopedias contain numerous statements of exactly that kind. The article Gilles Deleuze begins by stating, "Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in Paris and lived there for most of his life." If your position were truly logical, you would surely rewrite that statement, so that it reads, "Like many of his contemporaries, Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in Paris and lived there for most of his life." Yet, you have not done anything of the kind. Similarly, if you really wanted to be consistent, you would rewrite the statement, "Deleuze found the work of academic thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre attractive", so that it reads, "Like many of his contemporaries, Deleuze found the work of academic thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre attractive."

All of that being said, I have no intention of reverting again if consensus favors your addition. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:40, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

I think you are the confused one here. I didn't say "there is nothing wrong with an encyclopedia being dry". I said it's perfectly normal (and expected) that an encyclopaedia is "direct, straightforward, objective and impartial, but still comprehensive and relevant". My phrasing of Deleuze's atheism does not contradict that, it corroborates that. Yours, on the other hand, exaggerates that. Like I said, there's no need to save words if they are going to help contextualize the information that we want to convey to the reader. In "Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in Paris and lived there for most of his life", all information is directly transmited in a comprehensive sentence that is impartial, objective and contextualized in a body text. I see nothing wrong with it. But "Deleuze was an atheist" as a single sentence with no context at the end of a section is too loose and uncontextualized. What I said about encyclopaedias (and you seem not to have understood) is that they don't insert information scattered in an article, like the examples I gave. These pieces of information are inserted in contextualized and well-constructed sentences with diverse types of figures of speech and writing techniques, like introductions and appositions. If other French philosophers that lived at the time of Deleuze were "born into a middle-class family in Paris and lived there for most of their lives", then the "Like some/many of his contemporaries" introduction would be suitable. I don't have that knowledge, so I wouldn't write anything like that. However, I do know that many of his contemporary philosophers were atheists, and that includes the very two that are mentioned in the article as being important to Deleuze's life: Sartre and Foucault. Notice that I didn't mention other atheist philosophers like Nietzsche, for he was not directly related to Deleuze (he was German and lived well before him). Nor did I mention atheist writers like Proust of Kafka, who are also mentioned in the article, because they were not philosophers. Had I mention all of them, I would agree with you about going off-topic. Clausgroi (talk) 17:03, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

Obviously it would be a good idea to provide more information than "Deleuze was an atheist". The additional information, however, should be about Deleuze. It should explain, for example, why he became an atheist, how he expressed his atheism, and matters of that nature. It should not consist of irrelevant details about other philosophers who also happened to be atheists. Your persistent refusal to acknowledge that those details are irrelevant does not make your position any more correct. I am not interested in discussing this matter any further, however. Go ahead and restore the material about Sartre and Foucault if you wish. I already made it clear that I wouldn't revert you again. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:10, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

I'm not interested in writing any more about this either. It seems I will start repeating myself, for I have said everything that I wanted to and still you didn't change your opinion. So far, 100% of the people who opined on this matter agree with me (yes, only one). If, in the future, more people write here against my phrasing and reach the majority, you'll be able to revert it again. Until then, I expect you to respect Wikipedia's policy of consensus, as you already said you would. Cheers. Clausgroi (talk) 14:40, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

I'm quite new to this but it seems to me that there is a problem with the part of the statement "Like many of his contemporaries". Asides from Sartre and Foucault, who are these others? Rather than contextualizing the fact of Deleuze's atheism this surely raises more questions than it answers. Also, do we think that perhaps more information could and should be provided regarding his atheism itself? What form did it take and how did it influence his life and work? Was it identical with the atheism of his "contemporaries"?

See this: "Postmodern theology stretches from militant atheism to village atheist. All the major Postmodern writers were atheists, including Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Bataille, Barthes, Baudrillard, Macherey, Deleuze, Guattari, and Lacan. Charlotte Allen noted that Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, “and their [followers]...were all militant atheists, with all the intolerance and totalitarian tendencies of that breed.”" Source: http://www.allaboutworldview.org/postmodern-theology.htm -Mohanbhan (talk) 11:52, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

There's also this passage "(...) the writings of such atheistic post-modernists as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jean-François Lyotard." from Michael D. Waggoner (2011). Sacred and Secular Tensions in Higher Education: Connecting Parallel Universities. Taylor & Francis, pg. 88.
If we were to explicit who were those contemporary atheists, then we would do exactly what user:FreeKnowledgeCreator accused me of doing: go off-topic. Then I would have to agree with him: we have to keep to the article and include only information that is relevant to Deleuze. If one wishes to know who were these other atheist philosophers, one can very well check the List of atheist philosophers. All of them are there. Clausgroi (talk) 15:52, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Confused

I am not a total neophyte, but to admit that I found this article was virtually unreadable. Could someone please make the semiotics a bit clearer? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bticho (talk • contribs) 23:27, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Orgiastic representation of the infinitely large and small

Hello,

I am a Deleuze-Guattari scholar with ten years of reading experience. I disagree wholly with the presentation of difference-in-itself on the Wikipedia page; cf. Difference and repetition on Leibniz's "orgiastic" representation of the infinite.

Deleuze's structuralism relates the two terms of a differentiation via a third difference which differenciates them (i.e., external logic of relations).

Furthermore, this does not reach the infinitely large, as Deleuze is not only an empiricist, but a transcendental idealist (remember that Kant defined the conditions of experience as empirically real, and transcendentally ideal). The concept of Erewhon (or Kantian subjectivity, which organizes the pure intuition of sensibility in an asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible into absolute and ideal space-time); larval subjects (Leibnizian singularities); and Poincaré's eternal recurrence theorem (limit or hole-border of the thermodynamical real) can be used to demonstrate all of this. Raoulsie (talk) 09:57, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

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• Gilles Deleuze.png

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 05:53, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion

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• Gilles Deleuze.jpg

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Pronunciation of name

"Gilles Louis René Deleuze (/dəˈluːz/ də-LOOZ"

Is this the American pronunciation? Why, given that he was French, is it given priority over the French pronunciation? Certainly here in the UK I would never have thought to pronounce it other than the French way. And how do Americans pronounce his first name? "Gills"? (as in the fish organs), "Jills"? And why is the pronunciation of the first name omitted? Hundovir (talk) 15:39, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

gd qn. The Jean Baudrillard pg has a reference for IPA pronunciation maybe someone ought search Deleuze's FatalSubjectivities (talk) 10:56, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

The article should simply mention the French pronunciation: [ʒil dəløz]. What's the point of encouraging an incorrect pronunciation (which is at the moment given first)? Another thing: are Louis and René really Deleuze's names? Where's the source for this? Telivuo (talk) 10:59, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Zizek citations

the "Zizek 2004" citations are for his writing for which book? There are 2 2004 Zizek proses cited on this pg. FatalSubjectivities (talk) 10:53, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Deleuze’s Interpretations

This article claims that: “In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, Deleuze claims that Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is an attempt to rewrite Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), even though Nietzsche nowhere mentions the First Critique in the Genealogy, and the Genealogy's moral topics are far removed from the epistemological focus of Kant's book.”

However, Nietzsche mentions and twice cites the First Critique in On the Genealogy of Morality. In book I, section 13, Nietzsche refers to the “Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’,” which is a concept that appears in the First Critique at the heart of its “epistemological focus”. The context of the reference, in which Nietzsche argues that the separation of a subject from its actions is a consequence of the “seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified within it)” is evident in “popular morality” in the notion of a free subject who can choose to refrain from their actions and thus be held responsible for the actions they do choose. Nietzsche connecting a fundamental error of reason (itself a concern of Kant’s First Critique) to Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’ and the notion of a free, morally responsible ‘subject’, thus seems to indicate that the moral topics of the Genealogy are not “far removed from the epistemological focus of Kant’s book”. Furthermore, in Book III section 12 of the Genealogy, Nietzsche discusses Kant’s concept of the “intelligible character of things” and cites CPR B 564ff. Note that this is also an epistemological concept of Kant’s that Nietzsche discusses. Nietzsche also quotes and cites the CPR in book III section 25 of the Genealogy, in which he derides the claim that Kant’s critique of dogmatic theology and the fundamental errors of reason in the First Critique actually posed any danger to the ascetic ideal. It’s arguable that Nietzsche’s treatment of the ‘ascetic ideal’ as the primary focus of book III of the Genealogy is in many ways a direct argument against there being a clear separation between the “moral topics” he discusses and the supposedly disinterested “epistemological focus” of modern philosophy. Nietzsche also engages in a critique of Kant’s conception of aesthetics as a ‘disinterested’ operation in section 6 of the third book of the Genealogy, which again seems to show that Nietzsche sees such exclusive categorizations like the properly moral being “far removed” from the properly epistemological or the disinterested aesthetic contemplation of beauty are, in fact, highly suspect.

The way that this article presents Deleuze’s claim that the Genealogy is “an attempt to rewrite Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” is arguably a misconstrued, or “heterodox,” interpretation itself, that conveniently leaves out all context and clarification, including what was present in the same sentence that the article questionably paraphrases. Dionysianwavves (talk) 00:16, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, moreover, these claims are uncited and smack of primary research, I've removed this text:

"In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, Deleuze claims that Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is an attempt to rewrite Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), even though Nietzsche nowhere mentions the First Critique in the Genealogy, and the Genealogy's moral topics are far removed from the epistemological focus of Kant's book. Likewise, Deleuze claims that univocity is the organizing principle of Spinoza's philosophy, despite the total absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works."

I also removed the following from the Reception section. The statement suggested that his influence was most strongly felt in North America as opposed to Europe (no), that it was mostly felt in the humanities (doh, it's philosophy, which is part of the humanities), and that it's most felt in literary theory (no basis for this claim, the citation doesn't support it).

"Like his contemporaries Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, Deleuze's influence has been most strongly felt in North American humanities departments, particularly in literary theory, where Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are oft regarded as major statements of post-structuralism and postmodernism, though neither Deleuze nor Guattari described their work in those terms."

References

Can somoene fix the number od Deleuze's influences?

More than 20 thinkers were added without any meaning whatsoever (examples: Hegel, Battaile, Aristotle, Bachelard, Fichte, Holderin and many more). 77.85.226.98 (talk) 10:51, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

values section classical liberalism

Is there more than one model of society in "classical" liberalism? well there's the social contract everywhere even in classical works like Plato's Republic. Is Spinoza or Nietzsche a classical liberalist!? and what has this sentence got to do with the key of Nietzsche? this sentence has no relevance to this section: "In a classical liberal model of society, morality begins from individuals, who bear abstract natural rights or duties set by themselves or a God". I'm deleting it. it's here if someone explains its relevance by constructing an argument for its inclusion. *a cis woman growing a philosopher's beard MichelleGDyason 07:18, 6 January 2024 (UTC)