Deleuze and Guattari: Difference, Rhizome, and Desire

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), a historian of philosophy who had already published influential monographs on Hume (Empiricism and Subjectivity, 1953), Nietzsche (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962), Bergson (Bergsonism, 1966), and Spinoza (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 1968), as well as his own major systematic works Difference and Repetition (Différence et répétition, 1968) and The Logic of Sense (Logique du sens, 1969), began collaborating in the aftermath of the May 1968 protests with Félix Guattari (1930–1992), a practicing psychoanalyst and militant political activist at the experimental La Borde psychiatric clinic. Their collaboration produced the two-volume project Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (L'Anti-Œdipe, 1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux, 1980), works that fused philosophy, psychoanalysis, political economy, and a deliberately unconventional, non-linear style of writing.