Gilles Deleuze

Deleuze made his early reputation writing unusual, sympathetic studies of philosophers the mainstream French curriculum treated as marginal — Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson — reading each of them against the grain of the rationalist tradition to build a philosophy that privileged difference, multiplicity, and becoming over sameness, unity, and fixed being. Difference and Repetition, his most demanding solo work, argued that Western philosophy had a long habit of treating difference as a secondary, derivative fact about things that are fundamentally identical to themselves, and tried to reverse the order: identity itself, he argued, is a temporary, produced effect of more fundamental differences constantly repeating and varying. His collaboration with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari produced Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, two volumes united under the title Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which attacked Freudian psychoanalysis for squeezing the whole restless productivity of human desire into one small, domestic drama about mommy, daddy, and the analyst's couch, and proposed instead a model of thought as a rhizome — a networked, non-hierarchical structure like crabgrass or fungus, with no single root and no fixed center, that could be entered from any point and connect to anything else. He famously said that a concept is a brick, and you can build a courthouse of reason with it or throw it through a window, and his own concepts were built to travel well outside philosophy departments, into film theory, art criticism, and radical politics. He suffered from severe, worsening respiratory illness for the last decades of his life, requiring surgery that removed part of a lung, and when the illness finally became unbearable, he ended his own life by jumping from the window of his Paris apartment.