Gilles Deleuze

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Gilles Deleuze [ ʒil dəˈløːz ] (born January 18, 1925 in Paris , † November 4, 1995 ibid) was a French philosopher . Deleuze wrote numerous writings on philosophy, literature, film and art. His main works include: Difference and Repetition (1968), Logic of Meaning (1969), Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Thousand Plateaus (1980). He wrote the last two works together with Félix Guattari .

Life

Gilles Deleuze was born in Paris and lived there for most of his life. During the Second World War he attended the Lycée Carnot and for a year the elite school Henri IV. Deleuze studied philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1944 to 1948 , with Ferdinand Alquié (1906–1985), Georges Canguilhem , Maurice de Gandillac and Jean Hyppolite , among others .

During the 1950s, Deleuze taught at various high schools, as it was the usual academic career. In 1957 he took up a position at the Sorbonne. He had already published his first book on Hume . As with many contemporary philosophers, especially his teacher Georges Canguilhem, his work was critical of rationalism and essentialism . However, Deleuze did not engage in the philosophical trends of the post-war period, such as phenomenology or structuralism .

From 1960 to 1964 Deleuze had a job at the Center national de la recherche scientifique . During this time he dealt with Nietzsche and Henri Bergson and published Nietzsche and philosophy . He made a close friendship with Michel Foucault and together with him published the critical complete edition of Friedrich Nietzsche. From 1964 to 1969 he was a professor at the University of Lyon . In the year of May 1968 in Paris he submitted his dissertation Difference and Repetition and his second thesis Spinoza and the problem of expression in philosophy . In retrospect, these works were recognized as the first and most fruitful attempts to philosophically understand the student revolt.

In 1969 he received a position at the University of Paris VIII , a reform university that attracted many eminent scholars, including Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari . He made a deep friendship with the psychiatrist Guattari, which resulted in fruitful collaboration over many years. During the 1970s they jointly published the groundbreaking works Capitalism and Schizophrenia I and II . During this time he also got to know Gilbert Simondon , who particularly influenced his philosophy of technology .

In 1970 he took part in Foucault's working group on the situation of prisoners in France and demonstrated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet against racist violence and for the rights of immigrants.

In 1977, like around sixty other intellectuals, he signed an appeal for the decriminalization of pedophilia , which appeared in the Liberation and Le Monde newspapers. The appeal was initiated by the pedophile writer Gabriel Matzneff .

In 1987, at the age of 62, Deleuze retired from his university position. In 1992 Félix Guattari died. Gilles Deleuze committed suicide on November 4, 1995 because of a serious respiratory illness from which he had suffered for decades.

plant

Deleuze stands in the long tradition of European thinkers who dealt with the critique of essentialism ( Baruch de Spinoza , Friedrich Nietzsche ). But what should take its place? For Deleuze this was the all-one , the totality of all, which comprises the entire physical universe and its conditions of possibility. Deleuze was also directed against Platonism . Plato's view was that the things of the world are only imperfect manifestations of ideas that are themselves perfect, eternal, and immutable. Deleuze countered this with his idea of ​​the world of the virtual . Every realization of objects in the world is a nexus (place of interconnectedness) of virtualities , which necessarily interact with one another imperfectly. Since they are imperfect, they also disrupt the future realization of virtualities.

Politically and morally, this view is an obligation for Deleuze to reject fascism and capitalism . Both appear as attempts to deny the instability of the physical world and to limit the possibilities of realization. Instead, one should accept the instability and imperfection of the real world and move freely through the realizations of virtuality.

Deleuze's work therefore has anti- Hegelian features . For him, it is not the dialectic of the will (of master and servant ) that brings about change, but internal, immanent difference . Deleuze adopts the idea of duration , body time, in which the body itself produces difference from Henri Bergson , without needing external stimulus.

For him, concepts are not ideas (in the Hegelian sense) that transcend the real world and thereby negate it, but rather they stand at a break point between objects, which enables change and penetration. The term enables new connections between things by linking their virtual indeterminacies. He is therefore in a positive sense productive . Deleuze's philosophy knows no negation in the Hegelian sense; it bears the traits of pure affirmation of the connection of the hitherto unconnected.

Two key works by Deleuze, the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia , are equally works by Félix Guattari . Anti-Oedipus (Volume I) sees itself as a critique of the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud . Psychoanalysis appears here as an instrument for maintaining (among other things capitalist) dominance and repression , above all by submitting the subject to the phallic structure of culture. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, develop the concept of the wish machine , a machine-thought unconscious that, unlike in psychoanalysis, is not linguistically structured. The subject is therefore not characterized by a negative lack (as in Lacan's), but by a positive desire .

In A Thousand Plateaus (Volume II), the philosophical tradition of rationalism , especially Hegelianism , is subjected to a radical criticism. Deleuze and Guattari propagate heterogeneity , diversity , nomadic science and the body without organs . One of their most popular concepts, the rhizome , is supposed to be an alternative to conceptual models which, as “books”, claim to represent the world. This includes the tree of knowledge , which has been the central model for the hierarchical organization of the sciences since Plato , but also its modernist counter-conception of the “tufts of roots”, which aims to fragmentise the world as a counter-movement ( James Joyce and Friedrich Nietzsche are named ) , but through this process references to higher-level, all-encompassing units are constantly preserved. The rhizome is above all in the media theory as a metaphor to describe hypertext - networks used. For Deleuze and Guattari, nomadic science is the positive opposite of monarchical science . They use this to designate two models of power. Monarchical science separates power and action, leading to the division of labor between intellectual and physical labor. In nomadic science, however, they remain united.

Deleuze interprets Spinoza as follows: There would be a “gloomy passion” where pleasure is not experienced as such, but as displeasure. Robert Pfaller sees the following examples of such gloomy passions: indignation, fulfillment of duty, heroism , righteousness, anger , zeal, feelings of guilt , stubbornness , etc. However, happiness and love would be lost. One no longer acts in a self-creative and free manner in relation to the current context, but subordinates one's actions to a concept, an ideology .

Deleuze's writings defy easy readability, which is due to an artificial, highly complex and associative writing process. Many do not want to be read linearly, but present themselves as a network of interconnected “plateaus”. His writings deal eclectically with cultural fields as diverse as psychoanalysis , anthropology , linguistics , political economy , sociology , history , biology , music , art , literature , architecture and cinema . They were enthusiastically accepted into the humanities, especially in media theory , aesthetic theory , literary studies , cultural studies and gender studies , but also politically in neo-anarchism and postoperaism . Contemporary thinkers in whom his work plays an important role are Eric Alliez , Seyla Benhabib , Homi K. Bhabha , Rosi Braidotti , Manuel de Landa , Fredric Jameson , Antonio Negri , Edward Said , Peter Sloterdijk , Slavoj Žižek , Klaus Theweleit and Joseph Vogl .

Gilles Deleuze and the cinema

Gilles Deleuze sees the motion of film as both inherent and transcendent in film. His two volumes of film theory, Movement Image and Zeitbild ( Cinema I and II ), represented a break with a semiotic understanding of film (and the associated film criticism) and propagated a cinema that should also be understood as a philosophical practice. According to him, the director is a philosopher because he does not think in terms, but with images and sounds.

Deleuze distinguishes between two phases in the history of cinema, both of which result from the relationship between images and movement: the image of movement and the image of time. Motion is inherent in the former and older types of images. It shows them through continuous cuts and thus presents a uniform world view. The image of time, on the other hand, transcends the moment of time and works with discontinuous assembly practices . This reveals the construction of cinematic time and space. A world marked by discontinuity and a lack of order reveals itself to the viewer.

First, some avant-garde assembly techniques succeed in creating an indirect image of time. They master the transition to this new type of representation by emphasizing certain moments in the structure of the movement image. You are thus pursuing a content-driven conflict structure. In American film this is expressed through a duel structure and parallel montage, in Soviet film through the dialectical relationship (see Sergei Michailowitsch Eisenstein ), in French impressionism through alternating montage and in German expressionism through the conflict of light and shadow. This transition phase of cinema "no longer makes time the measure of movement, but a perspective of time from time" (Deleuze).

The time image is, as it were, a “visually composed ontology” (Fahle). Time plays a decisive role for Deleuze because the film is superior to all other media, including language, in the representation and reflection of time. The image of movement in its most typical form as an action image only understood time and space as linked and inseparable from one another. With the crisis of the action image at the time of Italian neorealism , optical and acoustic images increasingly take up the space that the sensorimotor image had previously occupied. The sensorimotor image is based on a successive narrative mode that knows the beginning, middle and end.

With neorealism, situations prevail that the characters can no longer (or can) induce meaningful actions; Deleuze describes these new situations as “optical” and “acoustic”. In these opto-acoustic situations, time, detached from space, action and action (movement), can be represented as “pure time”.

Fonts (selection)

  • Empirisme et subjectivité 1953, German: David Hume Übers. Peter Geble & Martin Weinmann. Frankfurt 1997
  • Nietzsche and Philosophy , Rogner & Bernhard, Munich, 1976 (orig. 1962)
  • Nietzsche. A reading book by Gilles Deleuze. Translated by Ronald Voullié, Merve Verlag, Berlin 1979
  • Kant's critical philosophy. Merve Verlag , Berlin 1990 (orig. 1963)
  • Proust and the signs , translated by Henriette Beese , Merve Verlag, Berlin 1993 (orig. 1964)
  • Bergson for an introduction. Junius, Hamburg 1989 (orig. 1966)
  • Sacher-Masoch and masochism. In: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch: Venus in fur. Insel, Frankfurt 1968; Pp. 163–281 (Orig .: Presentation de Sacher-Masoch. Le froid et le cruel. Avec le texte intégral de “La Vénus à la fourrure”. Editions de Minuit, Paris 1967)
  • Spinoza and the Problem of Expression. Fink, Munich 1993 (orig. 1968)
  • Logic of meaning. Translated from the French by Bernhard Dieckmann, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1989 (orig. 1969)
  • Difference and repetition. From the French by Joseph Vogl , Fink, Munich 1992 (orig. 1968)
  • How do you recognize structuralism? Merve Verlag, Berlin 1992 (orig. 1973)
  • (with C. Parnet) dialogues. Frankfurt a. M. 1980 (orig. 1977)
  • (with F. Guattari) Anti-Oedipus . Capitalism and Schizophrenia I. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1974 (orig. 1972)
    • (with F. Guattari): A thousand plateaus . Capitalism and Schizophrenia II. Merve Verlag, Berlin 1992 (orig. 1980)
  • Small fonts. Merve Verlag, Berlin 1980
  • (with F. Guattari): Kafka . For a little literature. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1976 (orig. 1975)
  • (with F. Guattari): Rhizome. Merve Verlag, Berlin 1977 (preface to a thousand plateaus )
  • Francis Bacon. Logic of sensation. From the French by Joseph Vogl. Fink, Munich 1995 (orig. 1981)
  • Bartleby or the formula. Translated from the French by Bernhard Dieckmann, Merve Verlag, Berlin 1994
  • Pericles and Verdi . The philosophy of François Châtelet . Passagen Verlag , Vienna 1989, ISBN 3-900767-40-8 .
  • The motion picture. Kino I. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1989 (orig. 1983)
    • The time picture. Kino II. Ibid. 1990 (orig. 1985)
  • The lonely island. Texts and discussions from 1935 to 1974. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2003 (orig. 2002)
  • Schizophrenia and Society. Texts and discussions from 1975 to 1995. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2005 (orig. 2003)
  • Spinoza. Practical philosophy. Translated by Hedwig Linden, Merve Verlag, Berlin 1988 (orig. 1981)
  • Foucault . From the French by Hermann Kocyba, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1987 (orig. 1986)
  • (with M. Foucault) The thread is broken. Translated by Ulrich Raulff and Walter Seiter, Merve Verlag, Berlin 1977
  • The wrinkle. Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated from the French by Ulrich Johannes Schneider , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2000 (orig. 1988)
  • Negotiations 1972–1990. Translated from the French by Gustav Roßler, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1993 (orig. 1990)
  • (with F. Guattari) What is philosophy? Translated from the French by Bernd Schwibs and Joseph Vogl, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1996 (orig. 1991)
  • Criticism and clinic. Translated from the French by Joseph Vogl, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2000 (orig. 1993)
  • Lust and desire. Translated by Henning Schmidgen . Merve Verlag, Berlin 1996
  • Plato and the illusion, in: Alloa, Emmanuel: Image theories from France. An anthology , 'eikones' series, Fink, Munich 2011, pp. 119–135.

Introduction literature

Web links

Commons : Gilles Deleuze  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Primary texts
Bibliographies
Introductions and other secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pascale Hugues : It was forbidden to forbid. In: Die Zeit from January 25, 2020, p. 53.
  2. ↑ John Marks: Gilles Deleuze. Vitalism and Multiplicity. Pluto Press, 1995, p. 2.
  3. ↑ Borges and the classical Hollywood cinema - Style in Cinema - fiction writer | Style | Find Articles at BNET.com
personal data
SURNAME Deleuze, Gilles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French postmodern philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH November 4th 1995
Place of death Paris