Gilles Louis René Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, 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 psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.
Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Although post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media within pre-established, socially constructed structures.
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy.
The private sphere is the complement or opposite to the public sphere. The private sphere is a certain sector of societal life in which an individual enjoys a degree of authority, unhampered by interventions from governmental or other institutions. Examples of the private sphere are family and home.
Postmodern feminism is a mix of post-structuralism, postmodernism, and French feminism. The goal of postmodern feminism is to destabilize the patriarchal norms entrenched in society that have led to gender inequality. Postmodern feminists seek to accomplish this goal through rejecting essentialism, philosophy, and universal truths in favor of embracing the differences that exist amongst women to demonstrate that not all women are the same. These ideologies are rejected by postmodern feminists because they believe if a universal truth is applied to all woman of society, it minimizes individual experience, hence they warn women to be aware of ideas displayed as the norm in society since it may stem from masculine notions of how women should be portrayed.
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1980 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While the first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), was a critique of contemporary uses of psychoanalysis and Marxism, A Thousand Plateaus was developed as an experimental work of philosophy covering a far wider range of topics, serving as a "positive exercise" in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhizomatic thought.
Affect is a concept, used in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and elaborated by Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, that places emphasis on bodily or embodied experience. The word affect takes on a different meaning in psychology and other fields.
Minority is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their books Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975), A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and elsewhere. In these texts, they criticize the concept of "majority". For Deleuze and Guattari, "becoming-minor(itarian)" is primarily an ethical action, one of the becomings one is affected by when avoiding "becoming-fascist". They argued further that the concept of a "people", when invoked by subordinate groups or those aligned with them, always refers to a minority, whatever its numerical power might be.
The body without organs is a philosophical concept used in the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The term was first used by French writer Antonin Artaud in his 1947 play To Have Done With the Judgment of God, later adapted by Deleuze in his book The Logic of Sense as part of a response to psychoanalysis, and ambiguously expanded upon by himself and Guattari in both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
A rhizome is a concept in post-structuralism describing a nonlinear network that "connects any point to any other point". It appears in the work of French theorists Deleuze and Guattari, who used the term in their book A Thousand Plateaus to refer to networks that establish "connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles" with no apparent order or coherency. A rhizome is purely a network of multiplicities that are not arborescent with properties similar to lattices. Deleuze referred to it as extending from his concept of an "image of thought" that he had previously discussed in Difference and Repetition.
The Logic of Sense is a 1969 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The English edition was translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, and edited by Constantin V. Boundas.
Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, and Félix Guattari, a French psychoanalyst and political activist, wrote a number of works together.
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal that was established in 1993. It covers "work in the disciplinary fields of literary criticism and theory, philosophy, and cultural studies." Since 1998, it has been published by Routledge. The editor-in-chief is Pelagia Goulimari, who was also the founding executive editor. In 1996, the journal was named "Best New Journal" in the annual awards of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
What is Philosophy? is a 1991 book by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. The two had met shortly after May 1968 when they were in their forties and collaborated most notably on Capitalism & Schizophrenia and Kafka: Towards a Minority Literature (1975). In this, the last book they co-signed, philosophy, science, and art are treated as three modes of thought.
Post-Marxism is a political philosophy and critical social theory which deconstructs Marxism. The term "post-Marxism" first appeared in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theoretical work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, although Félix Guattari is often considered a post-Marxist. Philosophically, post-Marxism counters derivationism and essentialism. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and Marxist, or neo-Marxist, analysis, in response to the decline of the Left post-68. Most notably, post-Marxists reject the primacy of class struggle and economism, and shift focus to 'radical democracy'. Recent overviews of post-Marxism are provided by Ernesto Screpanti, Göran Therborn, and Gregory Meyerson.
A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. It argues that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychoanalysis, sociology, history, communication theory, philosophy and feminist theory.
Proust and Signs is a book by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in which the author explores the system of signs within the work of the celebrated French novelist Marcel Proust. It was first published in 1964; its second edition (1972) added an eighth concluding chapter, and its third edition (1976) appended an entire second part. The book was translated into English by Richard Howard.
Thomas Nail is a Professor of Philosophy at The University of Denver.
Ranjan Ghosh is an Indian academic and thinker who teaches at the Department of English, University of North Bengal, India. His wide-ranging scholarly work spans across the fields of comparative literature, comparative philosophy, philosophy of education, environmental humanities, critical and cultural theory, and Intellectual history. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.
