Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death, wrote on a variety of subjects including ontology, social critique, film theory, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with long-term collaborator Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered to be his magnum opus.

A significant part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the radical reinterpretation of important figures in the history of philosophers including the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Bergson. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers". Although he once characterized himself as a "pure metaphysician", his concepts have influenced many fields and been applied across art, literary theory, musicology and sociology amongst others and is frequently associated with post-structuralism and postmodernism.