Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was a French philosopher whose single-authored work (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962; Difference and Repetition, 1968, his generally acknowledged magnum opus; Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 1968; The Logic of Sense, 1969) and his long collaboration with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus, 1972, and A Thousand Plateaus, 1980) make him one of the most-cited continental philosophers of the later 20th century. Source: Wikipedia (T2, tertiary).

Deleuze and Stoicism

post-modern-stoics-thecollector (TheCollector, T4) reports that a large part of Deleuze's own ontology rests on Stoic metaphysics, and that some readers of his work treat the Stoic position as the only ethics he regarded as fully adequate. What he draws from Stoic materialism is an "ethics without a morality" — a pragmatism that stays immanent to events as they happen, rather than one derived from dogma or a transcendent rule. He adds something the Stoics didn't have: an experimental, almost therapeutic layer of exercises meant to intensify positive affect and de-center the subject. The article notes that critics consider his Stoicism heavily "updated," which fits a stated method of his — he read old texts to pull something new out of them, not to recover their original sense. Quoted in the piece: "A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window."

In the conversation

Deleuze is the spoke's clearest case of a modern philosopher using an ancient school as live metaphysics rather than as a historical object — closer to how Spinoza used Stoic ideas than to Foucault's or Sartre's more distanced, critical engagements with the same school. His book on Spinoza's expressionism gives the spoke a direct line: Deleuze reading the same early-modern rationalist the spoke already holds, through a Stoic lens.

Related

stoicism · baruch-spinoza · michel-foucault · post-modern-stoics-thecollector