French journalist Claire Parnet's famous dialogues with Gilles Deleuze offer an intimate portrait of the philosopher's life and thought. Conversational in tone, their engaging discussions delve deeply into Deleuze's philosophical background and development, the major concepts that shaped his work, and the essence of some of his famous relationships, especially his long collaboration with the philosopher F?lix Guattari. Deleuze reconsiders Spinoza, empiricism, and the stoics alongside literature, psychoanalysis, and politics. He returns to the notions of minor literature, deterritorialization, the critical and clinical, and begins a nascent study of cinema. New to this edition is Deleuze's essay "Pericles and Verdi," which reflects on politics and historical materialism in the work of the influential French philosopher Fran?ois Ch?telet. An enduring record of Deleuze's unique personality and profound contributions to culture and philosophy, "Dialogues II" is a highly personable account of the evolution of one of the greatest critics and theorists of the twentieth century.

Praised for its rare combination of scholarly rigor and imaginative interpretation, "Nietzsche and Philosophy" has long been recognized as one of the most important analyses of Nietzsche. It is also one of the best introductions to Deleuze's thought, establishing many of his central philosophical positions.

In "Nietzsche and Philosophy," Deleuze identifies and explores three crucial concepts in Nietzschean thought-multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation-and clarifies Nietzsche's views regarding the will to power, eternal return, nihilism, and difference. For Deleuze, Nietzsche challenged conventional philosophical ideas and provided a means of escape from Hegel's dialectical thinking, which had come to dominate French philosophy. He also offered a path toward a politics of difference. In this new edition, Michael Hardt's foreword examines the profound influence of Deleuze's provocative interpretations on the study of Nietzsche, which opened a whole new avenue in postwar thought.

"The question 'what is philosophy?' can perhaps only be posed lat in life, with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking concretely. It is a question posed in a moment of quiet restlessness, at midnight, when there is no longer anything to ask." Posing that question, Deleuze and Guattari worked together for what turned out to be the last tiome, to produce a book which can be seen as a condensation of everything they had written before, together and separately. Twenty years on from their endlessly influential Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari have lost none of their inspirational radicalism, only deepened it. Their book is a profound and careful interrogation of what it might mean to be a 'friend of wisdom', but it is also a devastating attack on the sterility of what has become, when 'the only events are exhibitions and the only concepts are products which can be sold'. Philosophy, they insist, is not contemplation, reflection or communication, but the creation of concepts. The first part of the book explores the concept, the 'plane of immanence' in which it can be born and the conceptual personae' which can activate it. It concludes with a brilliant account of philosophy's relation to social and economic development, from ancient Greece to the modern capitalist state. Part two considers other forms of thought: science, art, literature and music. By the light of its 'rivals', Deleuze and Guattari illuminate philosophy in all its distinctiveness, displaying the same light-footed erudition whether they are discussing Godel's Theorem, Proust and Pessoa, Mondrian or Boulez. Written with the energy and inventiveness that marked their earlier collaborations, What is Philosophy? is an enormous achievement. It is a vital book, not only for philosophers but for everyone concerned with the uses of human intelligence in a time when, as the authors remark, sales promotion has replaced critique.

In this extraordinary work Gilles Deleuze, the most renowned living philosopher in France, reflects on one of the figures of the past who has most influenced his own sweeping reconfiguration of the tasks of philosophy. Deleuze's brilliant text shows how current definitions of philosophy do not apply to Spinoza: a solitary thinker (yet scandalous and hated), he conceived of philosophy as an enterprise of liberation and radical demystification much as did Leibniz or, later Nietzsche. Spinoza confronts the grand philosophical problems that are still current today: the comparative role of ontology (the theory of substance), of epistemology (the theory of ideas), and of political anthropology (the theory of modes, passions, and actions). The goal of this book is to determine the rapport among the univocity of Being in the theory of substance; the production of truth and the genesis of sense in the theory of ideas; and practical joy (or the elimination of the sad passions) and the selective organization of the passions in the theory of modes.

At last available in paperback, this book anticipates and explains the post-structuralist turn to empiricism. Presenting a challenging reading of David Hume's philosophy, the work is invaluable for understanding the progress of Deleuze's thought.

Essays by Gilles Deleuze on the search for a new empiricism. 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.

In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of the late 19th-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity." He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism; their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them - Masoch and Sade - lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles a part.Venus in Furs, the most famous of all of Masoch's novels was written in 1870 and belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain. The cycle was to treat a series of themes including love, war, and death. The present work is about love. Although the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome can be found here - fetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment, and always the volatile presence of a terrible coldness - these do not eclipse the singular power of Masoch's eroticism.

Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology, with a single infinite substance, and all beings as the modes of being his substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science. Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher; and this reading of Spinoza by Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction, "Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence." Gilles Deleuze, known for his inquiries into desire, language, politics, and power, finds a kinship between Spinoza and Nietzsche. He writes, "Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy and in vision ...he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time I read him, of a witch's broom that he makes one mount. " Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was a French philosopher whose writings influenced many philosophical disciplines such as literary theory, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. He also taught philosophy at the University of Paris at Vicennes. Robert Hurley was a translator for many French philosophers including Michael Foucault (History of Sexuality), Gilles Deleuze, and George Bataille (Theory of Religion).

An "introduction to the nonfascist life" (Michel Foucault, from the Preface)
When it first appeared in France, "Anti-Oedipus" was hailed as a masterpiece by some and "a work of heretical madness" by others. In it, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western society's innate herd instinct has allowed the government, the media, and even the principles of economics to take advantage of each person's unwillingness to be cut off from the group. What's more, those who suffer from mental disorders may not be insane, but could be individuals in the purest sense, because they are by nature isolated from society. More than twenty-five years after its original publication, "Anti-Oedipus" still stands as a controversial contribution to a much-needed dialogue on the nature of free thinking.

Called by many France's foremost philosopher, Gilles Deleuze is one of the leading thinkers in the Western World. His acclaimed works and celebrated collaborations with F?lix Guattari have established him as a seminal figure in the fields of literary criticism and philosophy. The long-awaited publication of "What is Philosophy?" in English marks the culmination of Deleuze's career.

Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between philosophy, science, and the arts, seeing as means of confronting chaos, and challenge the common view that philosophy is an extension of logic. The authors also discuss the similarities and distinctions between creative and philosophical writing. Fresh anecdotes from the history of philosophy illuminate the book, along with engaging discussions of composers, painters, writers, and architects.

A milestone in Deleuze's collaboration with Guattari, "What is Philosophy?" brings a new perspective to Deleuze's studies of cinema, painting, and music, while setting a brilliant capstone upon his work.

In this landmark text by one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze takes the paintings of Francis Bacon as his object of his study. The book presents a deep engagement with Bacon's work and the nature of art. Deleuze analyzes the distinctive innovations that came to mark Bacon's style: the isolation of the figure, the violation and deformations of the flesh, the complex use of color, the method of chance, and the use of the triptych form. Here Deleuze creates a number of his well-known concepts, such as the 'body without organs' and contrasts his own approach to painting with that of both the phenomenological and the art historical traditions. Deleuze links Bacon's work to Cezanne's notion of a 'logic' of sensation and, investigating this logic, explores Bacon's crucial relation to past painters such as Cezanne, Velasquez, and Soutine.

In this classic of critical thought, Deleuze and Guattari challenge conventional interpretations of Kafka’s work. Instead of exploring preexisting categories or literary genres, they propose a concept of “minor literature”—the use of a major language that subverts it from within. Writing as a Jew in Prague, they contend, Kafka made German “take flight on a line of escape” and joyfully became a stranger within it. His work therefore serves as a model for understanding all critical language that must operate within the confines of the dominant language and culture.

'A Thousand Plateaus' is the second part of Deleuze and Guattari's landmark philosophical project, 'Capitalism and Schizophrenia' - a project that still sets the terms of contemporary philosophical debate. Written over a seven year period, 'A Thousand Plateaus' provides a compelling analysis of social phenomena and offers fresh alternatives for thinking about philosophy and culture. Its radical perspective provides a toolbox for aenomadic thought' and has had a galvanizing influence on today's anti-capitalist movement.

"Authors, if they are great, are more like doctors than patients: they are themselves astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists." So wrote the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, setting himself the task of demonstrating the connections between literature and medicine. The essays collected here testify to Deleuze's fundamental conviction that philosophy cannot be undertaken independently of science and art. As so often in his writing, the names of philosophers such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger appear beside those of literary figures including Melville, Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Beckett and Artaud. With this book, Deleuze's life-long ambition to dismantle the barriers between art and its adjacent domains is brilliantly realized.

Alguna vez Michel Foucault pronostico que la filosofia del siglo XXI seria "deleuziana." En verdad, ya antes de la muerte de Gilles Deleuze sus obras se habian transformado en referencia ineludible del pensamiento contemporaneo. Tanto en sus trabajos sobre otros filosofos (Nietzche, Spinosa, Bergson) como en sus obras mayores algunas de ellas realizadas conjuntamente con Felix Guattari, Deleuze desplego un pensamiento creativo, libre y libertario.Justamente, esas son las senas de identidad que fueron apreciadas por sus numerosos lectores, quienes trascendieron el circulo de especialistas en que tantos pensadores quedan atrapados. Diferencia y repeticion es un libro mayor de Gilles Deleuze, un trabajo exhaustivo sobre la historia de los conceptos filosoficos, y a la vez la exposicion brillante de un modo de pensar problematizador y desapaciguante. Contra el espiritu conservador, Deleuze restaura en este libro la potencia creativa de la filosofia.

Part autobiography, part interview, and part essay, this text traces the intellectual journey of a man often acclaimed as one of the most important philosophers in France. A guide to Deleuze by Deleuze, it explains the life and work of this figure in contemporary philosophy, tying together the strands of his long and prolific career. This guide sets forth the purposes that have united Deleuze's philosophical undertakings over the years. The inquiries that have characterized his work - including his theory of antipsychiatry, his notion of philosophy as critical practice, his theories about the role of the intellectual in the contemporary world and about the function of the image in cinema - are all explored here in a down-to-earth style that will be appreciated by novices and initiates of French theory alike. A traveller's guide to a mind that has altered the course of contemporary critical theory, it also discusses aspects of Deleuze's life that shed light on his philosophical writings. Deleuze tells of how he met and initiated his collaboration with Felix Guattari, a fruitful venture that lasted many years and produced some of his most important work. Deleuze clarifies some of his

A posthumous collection of writings by Deleuze, including letters, youthful essays, and an interview, many previously unpublished. Letters and Other Texts is the third and final volume of the posthumous texts of Gilles Deleuze, collected for publication in French on the twentieth anniversary of his death. It contains several letters addressed to his contemporaries (Michel Foucault, Pierre Klossowski, Francois Chatelet, and Clement Rosset, among others). Of particular importance are the letters addressed to Felix Guattari, which offer an irreplaceable account of their work as a duo from Anti-Oedipus to What is Philosophy? Later letters provide a new perspective on Deleuze's work as he responds to students' questions. his volume also offers a set of unpublished or hard-to-find texts, including some essays from Deleuze's youth, a few unusual drawings, and a long interview from 1973 on Anti-Oedipus with Guattari.

Considered one of the most important works of one of France's foremost philosophers, and long-awaited in English, "The Logic of Sense" begins with an extended exegesis of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland." Considering stoicism, language, games, sexuality, schizophrenia, and literature, Deleuze determines the status of meaning and meaninglessness, and seeks the 'place' where sense and nonsense collide.

Written in an innovative form and witty style, "The Logic of Sense" is an essay in literary and psychoanalytic theory as well as philosophy, and helps to illuminate such works as "Anti-Oedipus."

A Thousand Plateaus continues the work Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari began in Anti-Oedipus and has now become established as one of the classic studies of the development of critical theory in the late twentieth century. It occupies an important place at the center of the debate reassessing the works of Freud and Marx, advancing an approach that is neither Freudian nor Marxist but which learns from both to find an entirely new and radical path. It presents an attempt to pioneer a variety of social and psychological analyses free of the philosophical encumbrances criticized by postmodern writers. A Thousand Plateaus is an essential text for feminists, literary theorists, social scientists, philosophers, and others interested in the problems of contemporary Western culture.

Translated and with an Introduction by Daniel W. Smith
Afterword by Tom Conley
Gilles Deleuze had several paintings by Francis Bacon hanging in his Paris apartment, and the painter's method and style as well as his motifs of seriality, difference, and repetition influenced Deleuze's work. This first English translation shows us one of the most original and important French philosophers of the twentieth century in intimate confrontation with one of that century's most original and important painters.
In considering Bacon, Deleuze offers implicit and explicit insights into the origins and development of his own philosophical and aesthetic ideas, ideas that represent a turning point in his intellectual trajectory. First published in French in 1981, "Francis Bacon" has come to be recognized as one of Deleuze's most significant texts in aesthetics. Anticipating his work on cinema, the baroque, and literary criticism, the book can be read not only as a study of Bacon's paintings but also as a crucial text within Deleuze's broader philosophy of art.
In it, Deleuze creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon's paintings but at the same time finds a place in the "general logic of sensation." Illuminating Bacon's paintings, the nonrational logic of sensation, and the act of painting itself, this work--presented in lucid and nuanced translation--also points beyond painting toward connections with other arts such as music, cinema, and literature. "Francis Bacon" is an indispensable entry point into the conceptual proliferation of Deleuze's philosophy as a whole.
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, Vincennes-St. Denis. He coauthored "Anti-Oedipus" and "A Thousand Plateaus" with Felix Guattari. These works, as well as "Cinema 1, Cinema 2, The Fold, Proust and Signs," and others, are published in English by Minnesota.
Daniel W. Smith teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers (the army) are nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of the state. In this daring essay inspired by Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers (the army) are nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of the state. In the same vein, nomadic science keeps infiltrating royal science, undermining its axioms and principles. Nomadology is a speedy, pocket-sized treatise that refuses to be pinned down. Theorizing a dynamic relationship between sedentary power and "schizophrenic lines of flight," this volume is meant to be read in transit, smuggled into urban nightclubs, offices, and subways. Deleuze and Guattari propose a creative and resistant ethics of becoming-imperceptible, strategizing a continuous invention of weapons on the run. An anarchic bricolage of ideas uprooted from anthropology, aesthetics, history, and military strategy, Nomadology carries out Deleuze's desire to "leave philosophy, but to leave it as a philosopher."

Logic of Sense is one of Deleuze's seminal works. First published in 1969, shortly after Difference and Repetition, it prefigures the hybrid style and methods he would use in his later writing with Felix Guattari. In an early review Michel Foucault wrote that Logic of Sense 'should be read as the boldest and most insolent of metaphysical treatises'. The book is divided into 34 'series' and five appendices covering a diverse range of topics including, sense, nonsense, event, sexuality, psychoanalysis, paradoxes, schizophrenia, literature and becoming and includes fascinating close textual readings of works by Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, Seneca, Pierre Klossowski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Emile Zola. Logic of Sense is essential reading for anyone interested in post-war continental thought.

Since its publication in 1968, Difference and Repetition, an exposition of the critique of identity, has come to be considered a contemporary classic in philosophy and one of Gilles Deleuze's most important works. The text follows the development of two central concepts, those of pure difference and complex repetition. It shows how the two concepts are related, difference implying divergence and decentring, repetition being associated with displacement and disguising. The work moves deftly between Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Althusser and Nietzsche to establish a fundamental critique of Western metaphysics, and has been a central text in initiating the shift in French thought - away from Hegel and Marx, towards Nietzsche and Freud.