Gilles Deluze
Biography
Gilles Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher, one of the most influential of the postwar period. He taught at Lyon and, from 1969 until his retirement in 1987, at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes), where his seminars were open to anyone. He wrote monographs on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Proust, Kafka, Francis Bacon and cinema, and — with the psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari — the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Suffering from severe respiratory illness, he died by suicide in 1995.
Key Ideas
- Difference before identity. The argument of Difference and Repetition (1968), his principal work. Western philosophy has treated difference as a relation between things that are first identical to themselves. Deleuze inverts this: difference is primary, and identities are temporary stabilisations of differential processes.
- The rhizome. From A Thousand Plateaus (1980, with Guattari). Against the tree — hierarchical, rooted, with a single trunk and traceable descent — the rhizome is a structure with no centre and no privileged entry point, where any point may connect to any other, which may be broken anywhere and will re-form elsewhere. It has become the standard figure for describing networks, and is also the most borrowed and least carefully read of their concepts.
- Assemblage (agencement). A provisional arrangement of heterogeneous elements — bodies, tools, statements, institutions — that functions as a unit while it holds together. Assemblage thinking is the direct ancestor of Bruno Latour's networks and of much subsequent material semiotics.
- Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. The paired movements by which a practice is detached from its context and re-anchored in another. Capitalism, on their account, deterritorialises constantly and reterritorialises on money.
- Body without organs. Borrowed from Antonin Artaud: a body considered as pure potential, prior to the organisation that assigns each part a function.
- Societies of control. Deleuze's short 1990 "Postscript on the Societies of Control" is his most directly applicable text for this field. He argues that Foucault's disciplinary societies — organised through enclosures with clear thresholds, the school, the factory, the prison — are being replaced by continuous modulation with no thresholds at all: perpetual training, perpetual assessment, access that can be granted or revoked at any moment. The individual becomes a "dividual," decomposed into data points; masses become samples, markets and banks. See panopticon for the model this supersedes.
Selected Works
- Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962)
- Difference and Repetition (1968)
- Anti-Oedipus (1972), with Félix Guattari
- A Thousand Plateaus (1980), with Félix Guattari
- Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985)
- "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1990)
Criticism
Deleuze's prose is deliberately difficult, and the concepts travel badly: "rhizome" in particular is frequently used as a synonym for "network" in ways that discard the argument it belongs to. The Sokal–Bricmont critique accused Deleuze and Guattari of misusing mathematical and scientific vocabulary; defenders reply that the borrowings are avowedly conceptual rather than technical.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Two of Deleuze's concepts have become basic equipment here. The rhizome supplies a vocabulary for non-hierarchical, decentralised systems that predates the popular internet by a decade. And "Postscript on the Societies of Control" is the single most useful short text for describing surveillance that has no tower, no walls and no clear moment of entry or exit — which is to say, the ordinary contemporary kind.
