Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

Gilles Deleuze (French Gilles Deleuze) (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and the fine arts from the early 1950s until his death in 1995. Plateau 1980, co-writing both with psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be one of his greatest creations. Philosopher Adrian William Moore ranks him among the "greatest philosophers", citing Bernard Williams' criteria for a great thinker. Although he has described himself in the past as "pure metaphysics," his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across philosophy and art, including literary theory, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Gilles Deleuze, along with many Marxist-inspired neo-Spinosists such as Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Antonio Negri, was one of the key figures in the great flowering of Spinoza studies in continental philosophy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (or the rise of French Spinoism post-structuralist-inspired), which was Spinoza's second revival in history, after Neo-Spinozism of great importance in German philosophy and literature in about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Deleuze's preoccupation with and reverence for Spinoza is well known in contemporary philosophy. As Pierre Macherry stated, “An important part of Deleuze's work is devoted to reading philosophers: Stokes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc. But an individual position on this list will be assigned to Spinoza, because of the philosophical interest with which he corresponds.