Gilles Deleuze (French Gilles Deleuze) (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and the fine arts from the early 1950s until his death in 1995. Plateau 1980, co-writing both with psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be one of his greatest creations. Philosopher Adrian William Moore ranks him among the "greatest philosophers", citing Bernard Williams' criteria for a great thinker. Although he has described himself in the past as "pure metaphysics," his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across philosophy and art, including literary theory, post-structuralism, and postmodernism.
Gilles Deleuze, along with many Marxist-inspired neo-Spinosists such as Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Antonio Negri, was one of the key figures in the great flowering of Spinoza studies in continental philosophy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (or the rise of French Spinoism post-structuralist-inspired), which was Spinoza's second revival in history, after Neo-Spinozism of great importance in German philosophy and literature in about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Deleuze's preoccupation with and reverence for Spinoza is well known in contemporary philosophy. As Pierre Macherry stated, “An important part of Deleuze's work is devoted to reading philosophers: Stokes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc. But an individual position on this list will be assigned to Spinoza, because of the philosophical interest with which he corresponds.
Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974) pdf by Gilles Deleuze
“One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian,” Michel Foucault once wrote. This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966 (on Rousseau, Kafka, Jarry, etc.), belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze’s last book, Critique and Clinic (1993). But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. “The new themes, a certain new style, a new aggressive and polemical way of raising questions,” he wrote, “come from Sartre.” But the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze’s thought as well as his attempt to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside—but, he cautions, as a philosopher.