Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (image via philosophyforchange.wordpress.com)

On 4 November 1995, Gilles Deleuze committed suicide by jumping from his Parisian apartment window. He left behind a philosophical legacy that went on to influence numerous academic disciplines: continental philosophy, cinema studies, literary theory, cultural criticism, social and political theory, LGBTQ studies, art and architecture theory, as well as the growing field of animal studies and environmental theory. In part this is because Deleuze himself enjoyed such a broad and eclectic range of influences. He innovatively combined the thinking of Bergson, Foucault, Kant, Hume, Lacan, Leibniz, Marx, Nietzsche, and Spinoza with insights on artists such as Bacon and Artaud, novelists like Kafka and Carroll, along with filmmakers such as Herzog, Hitchcock, and Eisenstein. And this is just a brief nod to some of his deepest influences. There are many more. All the intellectual excitement and flurry over Deleuze may confirm the prediction made by his good friend and fellow philosopher, Michel Foucault: “This century [i.e., the 20th century] will be Deleuzian.”

What is becoming of Deleuze today, in the 21st century? To answer this question, it’s worth remembering some of Deleuze’s key ideas. There is, for example, his famous point that philosophy is the creation of concepts. Without the creation of new concepts, there can be no thinking with a difference, no line of flight in thought. Second, and closely related to this, Deleuze proposed that concepts are tools of analysis, not recognition........Deleuze infamously declared: “If you are trapped in the dream of the other, you are fucked.”........Continue Reading

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