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Two thinkers, side by side

Life

1926 CE – 1984 CE

PoststructuralistContemporaryFrench

He showed that the asylum, the prison, and the clinic are not neutral institutions but machines for defining who counts as normal.

Gilles Deleuze

1925 CE – 1995 CE

PoststructuralistContemporaryFrench

Born Paris

He treated concepts as tools to be built and used rather than truths to be discovered, and spent a career arguing that difference, not sameness, is what reality is actually made of.

Connection

Michel Foucault friendship and mutual admiration Gilles Deleuze — Deleuze and Foucault were close friends and mutual admirers for years before a quiet estrangement over politics; Foucault once said he suspected the whole twentieth century would eventually be called Deleuzian.

Shared Places

Paris Paris Paris

Ideas

Justice Legalism

Being Change

Words

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
— Michel Foucault

“Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared. Power is exercised from innumerable points.”
— Michel Foucault

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
— Gilles Deleuze

“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”
— Gilles Deleuze

Key Moments

1970-84

Chair of the History of Systems of Thought, Collège de France

25 June 1984

Death in Paris

1972

Publishes Anti-Oedipus with Guattari

1995

Dies by suicide after decades of illness

Works

Discipline and Punish

Difference and Repetition

Explore

Compare

Two thinkers, side by side

Life

Michel Foucault

1926 CE – 1984 CE

PoststructuralistContemporaryFrench

He showed that the asylum, the prison, and the clinic are not neutral institutions but machines for defining who counts as normal.

Gilles Deleuze

1925 CE – 1995 CE

PoststructuralistContemporaryFrench

Born Paris

He treated concepts as tools to be built and used rather than truths to be discovered, and spent a career arguing that difference, not sameness, is what reality is actually made of.

Connection

Shared Places

Paris Paris Paris

Ideas

Justice Legalism

Being Change

Words

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
— Michel Foucault

“Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared. Power is exercised from innumerable points.”
— Michel Foucault

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
— Gilles Deleuze

“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”
— Gilles Deleuze

Key Moments

1970-84

Chair of the History of Systems of Thought, Collège de France

25 June 1984

Death in Paris

1972

Publishes Anti-Oedipus with Guattari

1995

Dies by suicide after decades of illness

Works

Discipline and Punish

Difference and Repetition