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.
Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life pdf by Gilles Deleuze
The essays in this book present a complex theme at the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, what in his last writing he called simply ''a life.'' They capture a problem that runs throughout his work--his long search for a new and superior empiricism. Announced in his first book, on David Hume, then taking off with his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson, the problem of an ''empiricist conversion'' became central to Deleuze's work, in particular to his aesthetics and his conception of the art of cinema. In the new regime of communication and information-machines with which he thought we are confronted today, he came to believe that such a conversion, such an empiricism, such a new art and will-to-art, was what we need most. The last, seemingly minor question of ''a life'' is thus inseparable from Deleuze's striking image of philosophy not as a wisdom we already possess, but as a pure immanence of what is yet to come. Perhaps the full exploitation of that image, from one of the most original trajectories in contemporary philosophy, is also yet to come.