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] [Filler ad by obit] Ideas Catch Fire. Ideas about improving your world, your career, your community, your home, your investments, your wardrobe, your meals, your free time and more, ignite in the pages of The New York Times. -- ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]