ABSTRACT
At the time of his death on November 4, 1995, Gilles Deleuze was recognized widely as one of the most important figures in late-twentiethcentury French philosophy. Throughout his career, Deleuze showed an abiding interest in several of the arts, but perhaps in none more consistently than literature. Besides writing books on Proust (1964, revised and expanded in 1970 and 1976), the nineteenth-century novelist Leopold Sacher-Masoch, for whom masochism was named (1967), and Kafka (1975), as well as a final collection of essays on literature, titled Essays Critical and Clinical [CC] (1993), Deleuze made constant reference to novels, poems, plays and essays in virtually all of his works. Among the philosophers he most valued was Nietzsche, whom many would characterize as a decidedly literary figure, and other writer-philosophers and philosopher-writers made frequent appearance in his books-Kierkegaard, Blanchot, Michaux, Artaud, Klossowski, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Borges, among others. Deleuze’s 1969 examination of the paradoxes of meaning, The Logic of Sense (LS), was as much a reading of Lewis Carroll as a treatment of Stoic philosophy, and scattered throughout the pages of the massive A Thousand Plateaus (MP) (1980) were references to over seventy-five writers.
