Gloria Monti wrote:
> Lastly, I just learned of Gilles Deleuze's suicide. Anybody
>knows details?
>
Forwarded from [log in to unmask]
The New York Times, November 7, 1995, p. D21.
Gilles Deleuze, 70, French Professor and Author
By Craig R. Whitney
Paris, Nov. 6 -- Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher and
university lecturer whose prolific writings on art
literature and human thought influenced French
intellectuals, died in Paris on Saturday. He was 70.
Family members said he had jumped from his apartment window
to end a worsening chronic respiratory illness for which he
had recently undergone a tracheotomy.
Mr. Deleuze taught at the university established in the
Paris working-class suburb of Vincennes after the student
uprising in 1968 and wrote the best-known of his 30 works,
"The Anti-Oedipus," in 1972 with Felix Guattari.
The book, an attack on conventional psychoanalysis, sold
53,000 copies in France. He and Mr. Guattari, who died of
a heart attack in 1992, wrote four other books together,
including "What Is Philosophy," a 1991 work that was
published in English two years later.
Other works explored the connections between art and
action, and included studies of Spinoza, Leibniz Proust,
Kafka and Francis Bacon the British painter.
Born into a conservative family in Paris on Jan. 18, 1925,
Mr. Deleuze was influenced by the radical atmosphere of the
Left Bank after World War II. He studied at the Sorbonne
after 1944 and became an assistant professor there in the
history of philosophy in 1957, later moving to the
University of Lyons.
After the student uprising in 1968, Mr. Deleuze became a
popular and influential lecturer at Vincennes, where
students flocked to hear him speak.
Revolution, he believed, is an inherently creative act
against the repressiveness of the state, and he coined a
word, "nomadism," to describe it. "Deterritorialization"
was another word he coined to describe the phenomenon by
which individual identity frees itself from external
attempts at categorization.
His speaking style was described as flowing and complex as
the thought it expressed was intoxicating to his French
listeners.
"An exhausted man is much more than a weary man," he wrote
in a postface to Beckett's "Quad" three years ago. "Does he
exhaust the possible because he is himself exhausted, or is
he exhausted because he has exhausted the possible? He
exhausts himself by exhausting the possible, and
inversely."
Roger-Pol Droit wrote in an appreciation in Le Monde today:
"No one knows what distant posterity will remember of a
body of work that contemporaries probably understand only
a little. Thought, with Deleuze, is the experience of life
rather than reason."
He retired from teaching in 1987, when his health began to
deteriorate.
He is survived by his wife, Fanny, a son, Julien, and a
daughter, Emilie.
[End]
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