What Is Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari?

Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between philosophy, science, and the arts, seeing as means of confronting chaos, and challenge the common view that philosophy is an extension of logic. The authors also discuss the similarities and distinctions between creative and philosophical writing.

What Is Philosophy according to Deleuze?

Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy, famously, as an activity that consists in ‘forming, inventing and fabricating concepts’.

What is Deleuze known for?

Deleuze became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art.

What did Deleuze believe?

Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or immanent: to live well is to fully express one’s power, to go to the limits of one’s potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society still suppresses difference and alienates people from what they can do.

What does Deleuze say about desire?

In Deleuze’s view, desire is not a psychic existence, not lack, but an active and positive reality, an affirmative vital force. Desire has neither object, nor fixed subject. It is like labour in essence, productive and actualisable only through practice.

What are Deleuze ethics?

An ethical way of living, in the Deleuzian sense of the term, will not turn to higher values in order to ‘shape’ its ways of existing according to the command of such values. It is rather, as Deleuze states, a matter of forming ‘a style of life’ according to ‘optional rules.

What is Arborescent thinking?

Arborescent (French: arborescent) is a term used by the French thinkers Deleuze and Guattari to characterize thinking marked by insistence on totalizing principles, binarism, and dualism.