Gilles Deleuze

French philosopher (1925–1995), author of Difference and Repetition (1968), Logic of Sense (1969), and (with Félix Guattari) Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Although a generation younger than Merleau-Ponty and not typically classified as a phenomenologist, Deleuze shares with MP a sustained engagement with Bergson, a commitment to thinking the genesis of consciousness from sub-personal multiplicities, and a rejection of both objectivism and anthropomorphic subjectivism. The wiki encounters Deleuze primarily through the convergence of his three passive syntheses of time with MP's account of organic passivity and institution.

Key Points

  • Deleuze's three syntheses of time in DR ch. 2 — habit (founding), memory (grounding), eternal return (ungrounding) — provide a systematic architecture for what MP's passivity and institution courses approach without formalizing at the organic level
  • The concept of "contemplation-contraction" extends temporal constitution to sub-organismal levels: "every organism... is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations" (DR 73); "We speak of our 'self' only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us" (DR 74)
  • The "larval subject" names the passive contemplation-contraction in the organic realm — organized multiplicities of varying level that carry out life as a project; analogous to MP's "animal stratum"
  • The je fêlé (cracked I) — Deleuze's reading of Kant's cogito — discovers that the self was constituted by asubjective passive syntheses; this fracture is the problematic field that generates the third synthesis
  • Deleuze's concept of becoming-animal (with Guattari) finds its "ontological grounding" in DR's third synthesis: the passive multiplicities can resurface and unmake the subject
  • Philosophy-cinema and its loss: Deleuze's 1974 "Note to the Italian Edition of The Logic of Sense" coins the phrase "a philosophy-cinema." The 1968 Difference and Repetition Preface had already demanded "the search for a new means of philosophical expression... in relation to the renewal of certain other arts, such as the theatre or the cinema." But Carbone (carbone-2019-philosophy-screens) argues that the 1983–85 Cinema diptych loses the hyphen: Deleuze returns to "philosophy as practice of concepts" with cinema as object. The late programmatic claim "Cinema itself is a new practice of images and of signs, of which philosophy must make the theory" (Time-Image, final paragraph) is what Carbone marks as "Ah! the old style..." — the retreat from the philosophy-cinema Deleuze had announced. See philosophy-cinema.

Connections

  • converges with maurice-merleau-ponty on organic passivity and the institution of signs as mechanisms for sub-subjective time-constitution — per decarie-daigneault-2025-anonymous-temporality
  • shares with MP the Bergsonian inheritance: "Bergson shows that consciousness is, in principle, coextensive with life; but how, and under what conditions, does life in fact become self-consciousness?" (Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 52)
  • develops the concept of multilateral-emergence — emergence that goes both ways (organization/disorganization)
  • differs from MP methodologically — transcendental empiricism vs. phenomenological description; the commensurability is assumed rather than demonstrated in the secondary literature
  • is the third term of a Bergson-MP-Deleuze convergence on continuous birth — see claims#bergson-mp-deleuze-naissance-continue (live claim) for the structural-parallel articulation
  • supplies the operator of encounter — Difference and Repetition (1968) ch. 3 articulates encounter as event-at-the-surface that opens depth in the virtual past; Décarie-Daigneault 2024 adopts this as the load-bearing operator for opening the deep human past via traces.
  • supplies the figure of depth of time — DR p. 230/296 distinguishes explication (laying-out flat) from implication (depth folded into the present); DR p. 80, p. 82 treat memory as the grounding synthesis that constitutes the being of the past. Décarie-Daigneault 2024 inverts the Bergsonian cone with these tools.

Sources

  • decarie-daigneault-2025-anonymous-temporality — the primary source for Deleuze's appearance on the wiki; develops the MP-Deleuze convergence on organic temporality
  • carbone-2019-philosophy-screens — the primary source for Deleuze's Cinema diptych on the wiki. Reads the 1983–85 books as a retreat from the 1974 "philosophy-cinema" program, and as grounds for Carbone's philosophy-screens project which picks up the hyphen Deleuze dropped.
  • decarie-daigneault-2024-crooked-finger — develops Deleuze's Difference and Repetition on memory (p. 80, p. 82), explication-vs-implication (p. 230/296), encounter as "forces us to think" (p. 138), the "gigantic memory" / cone of all the living (p. 212/274), metempsychosis (p. 83), and "past that has never been present" (p. 83, 85, 103, 273) as the operator-set for opening the depth of the deep human past via traces of pre-history (cave paintings).