In my academic life I have had perhaps two proper encounters with Gilles Deleuze. First, in an survey class on critical theory, we spent a week reading something or other of his. I think perhaps from his and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Second, when writing my master’s thesis on Kant’s politics and anthropology, I read Deleuze’s Kant’s Critical Philosophy. I’m sure there have been other encounters, though always tangential, such as sitting through someone’s talk on Deleuze at a conference or watching bits and pieces from the documentary L’abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze (which is on youtube in full!).
I can’t say any of those encounters have particularly stuck with me. But nonetheless, I’ve always felt I just needed the right excuse to read more of Deleuze’s books and essays, so when an opportunity came up to do a survey course through the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy with noted Deleuzian Jon Roffe, I felt it’s time.
The course is split into two semester-long classes. The first covering nine of Deleuze’s first ten books (looks like we’re skipping his 1965 book on Nietzsche, translated into English as Pure Immancence, and the second half (presumably) the rest. So it looks like I’m going hard at Deleuze this year.
Gathering some materials to refer back to here for the first class.
Primary Texts
- Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953)
- Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962)
- Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1963)
- Proust and Signs (1964, 1976 rev.)
- Bergsonism
- Masochism
- Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
- Difference and Repetition
- Logic of Sense
Secondary Texts
- Deleuze a Guide for the Perplexed by Claire Colbrook
- Deleuze: An Introduction by Todd May
- Protevi, Smith, and Voss’s Stanford Encyclopedia article about Deleuze
- Deleuze on Music, Painting and Art by Ronald Bogue (Mostly for the bit on music, to be honest)
- The Works of Gilles Deleuze I: 1953-1969 by Jon Roffe – this book, I’m guessing, is the basis of the lecture course I’m taking. Available open access from the publisher
- Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event by Francois Zourabichvili
- Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time by James Williams
- Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition by Joe Hughes
- The Priority of Events by Sean Bowden
Other resources
- ABC of Gilles Deleuze
- John Protevi’s Lecture Notes on Deleuze
I’m going to steer clear of other introductory texts for now. I know there is a huge amount of discourse online about Deleuze at all points – but I don’t know enough to take it in critically quite yet. For now, I’m treating this post as a draft of a later index to the whole reading project that might serve as a guide to those starting later.
Edit 27/2: Added a few more books to the secondary text list that my pal Greg Marks recommended.
Philosophy After Dark 