ABSTRACT

To theoretically approach preschools, such as the ones described above, and join in their efforts to regain movement and experimentation in practice, some theoretical resources found in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Félix Guattari (1930-1992) have proved to be of great value. These two French thinkers were at their most active during the 1970s and 1980s in France. Deleuze was a trained philosopher and he published his thesis Différence et Répétition in 1968 (Deleuze, 1968a). The thesis was published after he had already written and published a number of important texts on different philosophers, such as David Hume (1711-1776) (1953), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) (1962), Henri Bergson (1859-1941) (1966), and Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) (1968b). Guattari was a psychoanalyst at the La Borde clinic outside Paris and engaged in the militant political struggle during the 1960s and 1970s in France (Sauvagnargues, 2005). Deleuze talks about the encounter with Guattari as having changed a lot. Through Guattari’s experience and political engagement in the field of psychiatry, the philosophy they created together not only became directed to and engaged even more in political practices, but also created a working relationship that functioned in between the two of them, without the need to define an original author (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987).