Intellectual historian Michel Foucault remarked in an introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L'anti-Oedipe (1975; translated as Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1977) that the twentieth century may at some point be known as "Deleuzian." Foucault believed that Deleuze's challenge to traditional epistemologies of thought and his consequent creation of a new, subject-free epistemology would influence the thought patterns of an entire generation. Battling the Enlightenment legacy of the all-knowing subject--the cogito--and the privileging of singularity over multiplicity, Deleuze inaugurated a philosophy that celebrated an antihumanist, anti-Enlightenment understanding of the subject, history, psychology, and the natural and social world. To read Deleuze is to undergo a different thought process--to experience an alternative epistemology that subjects the old certainties of identity, logic, and meaning to profound interrogation.

Any consideration of Deleuze's life is hampered by the subject's resistance to talking about his own "life-story...