Introduction

For the second time in this narrative something extraordinary happens. Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was a remarkable thinker, a polymath whose capacity for innovation was matched only by his capacity to assimilate ideas from others, each capacity reinforcing the other. He took philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular in all sorts of new directions. And he did so largely by releasing forces at work in his predecessors. The image of a figure ‘X’ which I used at the beginning of Chapter 5 has a certain aptness here too.

Foucault famously wrote, in a 1970 review of two of Deleuze’s most influential books, ‘Perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian’ (Foucault (1998), p. 343). Admittedly, Deleuze himself later suggested that this was ‘a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid’ (‘Letter to a Critic’, p. 4) – the joke being, as James Williams insightfully puts it, that Foucault, ‘a friend and inspiration to Deleuze’, was deliberately flouting ‘Deleuze’s opposition to the cult of the origin, to the dominance of the human self in the definition of values and to the limitation of thoughts to epochs’ (Williams (2003), p. 3). Yet, as Williams also goes on to observe, ‘Foucault’s mock prediction is turning out to be accurate’ (ibid.). There is a growing interest in Deleuze’s work which makes it increasingly difficult for anyone aspiring to make general sense of things not to reckon with his ideas.