Genesis of a creator of concepts: Gilles Deleuze, 1945-1969

Abstract

This project aims at reconstructing the genesis of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy since 1945 - year in which the author, young student, writes five unacknowledged essays - and the end of the Sixties - when he defends his two PhD dissertations (Difference and repetition and Expressionism in philosophy. Spinoza) and he publishes the book Logics of sense. Those works constitute a coherent sequence in the development of Deleuze's philosophy before the encounter avec Felix Guattari, a sequence which is the result of a confrontation with phenomenology, epistemology, anthropology and psychoanalysis.Starting from the analysis of unacknowledged writings (articles, transcription of conferences) and from hundreds of pages of completely unpublished materials (courses, reviews, letters, notes), this project aims at going against the tide, opposing to two usual interpretations of Deleuze: the "pragmatic" ones - which simply use his concepts - and the "systematically" ones - which aim at seizing the supposed internal coherence of his philosophy. The project applies to Deleuze's texts a "contextualizing" approach, which consists in using methods taken from social and historical sciences but which aims, at the same time, at preserving the "philosophical" content of those texts. Going against the idea of an irreducibility of philosophical creations to social and psychological determinations, this study try to explain Deleuzian concepts starting from their context of emergence, a context that is, at once, social an epistemological. The general objective is to write a monograph able to give an altogether innovative interpretation of the first part of Deleuze's theoretical trajectory (AU)