The Heidegger–Deleuze relationship has attracted significant attention of late. This paper contributes to this line of research by examining Deleuze’s claim, recently reiterated and developed by Philip Tonner, that Heidegger offers a univocal conception of Being where there is one sense of Being that is said throughout all entities. Although these authors maintain that this claim holds across Heidegger’s oeuvre, I purposefully adopt a conservative hermeneutical strategy that focuses on two writings from the 1927–1928 period—Being and Time and the following (...) year’s lecture course translated as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic—and emphasize the lesson of the ontological difference that Being is always the Being of an entity, to argue that with regards to these texts, at least, an alternative equivocal interpretation is possible in which Being is always said differently. The conclusion draws out the implications of this for the relationship between Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and Deleuze’s differential ontology. (shrink)

Death is often characterised within naturalism as being ‘nothing to us’ and we are urged to think of ‘nothing less than of death’. In his lectures on Spinoza, Deleuze says ‘thinking of death is the most base thing’. Thinkers such as Lucretius, Nietzsche and Spinoza, have clear perspectives on the need to avoid thinking about death. They share in the belief that meditation on death only leads to fear and sadness. These affirmationists, that is, philosophers whose writings aim at affirming (...) life, therefore denounce death as unimportant to philosophy. Deleuze also presents a philosophy that seems affirmationist, in keeping with the tradition of those whose ideas he interprets and incorporates into his own philosophy. And yet, death - in the form of the death drive - is a key concept in Deleuze’s work Difference and Repetition. This thesis asks the question: Does Deleuze present a concept of death that affirms life? The concept of death is rarely explored in Deleuze studies, and yet it plays an important role in his philosophy. This thesis seeks to contribute to this research, by delineating and examining Deleuze’s concept of death in Difference and Repetition. The description of death provided by Deleuze is compared with the concepts of death in the works of two affirmationists, Lucretius and Spinoza. Hegel’s concept of death is then explored to determine whether Deleuze succeeds in avoiding the use of negation in death’s relation to the subject. The thesis then considers Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return. The result of his use of the eternal return leads to discussions around kenosis, transpantheism and immanence. It is decided that the naturalist process of demystification is taken by Deleuze to require the demystification of identity, giving primacy to immanence as a singular life. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to understand the nature of and relation between science and philosophy articulated in the early work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It seeks to challenge the view that Deleuze’s metaphysical and metaphilosophical position is in important part an attempt to respond to twentieth century developments in the natural sciences, claiming that this is not a plausible interpretation of Deleuze’s early thought. The central problem identified with such readings is that they provide an insufficient explanation of the (...) nature of philosophy’s contribution to the encounter between philosophy and science that they discern in Deleuze’s work. The philosophical, as opposed to scientific, dimension of the position attributed to Deleuze remains obscure. In chapter 1, it is demonstrated that this question of philosophy’s contribution to intellectual life and of how to differentiate philosophy from the sciences is a live one in Deleuze’s early thought. An alternative, less anachronistic interpretation of the parameters of Deleuze’s early project is offered. The remaining chapters of the thesis examine the early Deleuze’s understanding of the divergence between philosophy and science. Chapter 2 gives an account of Deleuze’s metaphilosophy, alongside a reconstruction of his largely implicit early understanding of science. The divergent intellectual processes and motivating concerns that account for Deleuze’s understanding of the differentiation of science and philosophy are thus clarified. In chapter 3, Deleuze’s use of mathematical and physical concepts is examined. It is argued that these concepts are used metaphorically. In chapter 4, the association between modern science and the Deleuzian concept of immanence that has been proposed by some Deleuze scholars is examined and ultimately challenged. The thesis concludes with some reflections on the significance of Deleuze’s early work for contemporary debates concerning the future of continental philosophy and the nature of philosophy more generally. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to extract what I call an empiricist mode of existence through a combined reading of two under-researched vectors of Gilles Deleuze's thought: his ‘transcendental empiricism’ and his ‘affirmative naturalism’. This empiricist mode of existence co-positions Deleuze's empiricism and naturalism as pertaining to a stylistics of life which is ontologically experimentalist, epistemologically open, and immanently engaged in the world. That is, a processual praxis of demystification and organising encounters towards joy.

Desplegando diversos conceptos filosóficos propios del pensamiento de Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze y Gilles Deleuze-Félix Guattari, el artículo tiene la intención de, por un lado, exponer el pensamiento de estos filósofos como un pensar eminentemente político que, asentado en un renovado interés por la ontología, sienta las bases para el desarrollo de una filosofía a-subjetiva, mientras que, por otro, precisa aquellos distanciamientos conceptuales que obligaron a Deleuze a afirmar, ante un cierto dejo de historicismo que vislumbra en Heidegger, que el (...) filósofo alemán no afirmó el núcleo del pensamiento de la Diferencia. Esto al determinar el pensamiento nietzscheano como el acabamiento de la historia de la metafísica, así como al no vislumbrar en las razas bastardas y oprimidas ese modo del poder que clama repetitivamente por su expresión. (shrink)