Gilles Deleuze

Deleuze was born in Paris to a conservative engineer's family; his brother was arrested in the Resistance and died on a train to a concentration camp, of which he never spoke. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne with Lyotard and Tournier, passed the agrégation in 1948, taught in lycées for some years, published Empiricism and Subjectivity on Hume in 1953, and then fell silent for eight years, 'a hole', he said. Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) made his name, and a book followed each year: on Kant, Proust, Bergson, Masoch, Spinoza.

He called these books 'buggery in the history of philosophy': approaching a philosopher from behind and giving him a child that was his and yet monstrous. In 1968 his doctoral theses, Difference and Repetition and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, appeared; the former is his major philosophical work: Western thought has always subordinated difference to identity and repetition to representation, and he sought to think difference in itself, a repetition unlike mechanical recurrence that creates the new, a reality made of intensities and the virtual. The Logic of Sense (1969) thought event and surface through Lewis Carroll and the Stoics.

In 1969 he met the psychoanalyst and militant Félix Guattari, and they collaborated for twenty years. Anti-Oedipus (1972) attacked psychoanalysis for locking desire into the family triangle: desire is not lack but production, the unconscious a factory not a theatre, capitalism frees the flows of desire while recoding them, and schizoanalysis should follow the flows rather than interpret them. It was the most sensational philosophical book in France after 1968. A Thousand Plateaus (1980) replaced arboreal thinking with the rhizome and introduced the body without organs, nomadism, lines of flight, deterritorialisation and becoming-animal, each chapter readable from anywhere.

He taught at Vincennes, later Paris VIII, until retiring in 1987, and recordings of his lectures circulate online. In the 1980s he wrote two volumes on cinema, analysing the movement-image and the time-image through Bergson; The Fold treated the baroque through Leibniz; and his last book with Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1991), defined philosophy as the creation of concepts, science as the creation of functions, and art as the creation of affects and percepts. He almost never travelled, attended conferences or gave interviews, suffered from severe lung disease, and in 1995 threw himself from the window of his apartment.