ABSTRACT
Gilles Deleuze (1925-95) studied philosophy at the Sorbonne between 1944 and 1948. Among his professors, we find some of the most eminent names of the rich academic philosophical world in those days: Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alquié, and Maurice de Gandillac. He taught philosophy at a secondary level for some years, and in 1957 he found a post at the Sorbonne, where he lectured until he obtained a position at the University of Lyon which he held for five years (1964-69). From 1969 onwards he occupied a chair at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes, where he lectured until 1987.1
In 1943, just before starting his university studies, Deleuze and his friend Michel Tournier were invited by Maurice de Gandillac to attend the cultural gatherings held by Marie-Magdeleine Davy in her home on the outskirts of Paris.2 On these occasions and subsequently on several others at Marcel Moré’s salon, Deleuze became familiar with the influence of Jean Wahl (1888-1974) in those circles. Almost thirty years later, Deleuze underlined Jean Wahl’s significant stimulus for him and many others, before and after World War II:
The importance of Jean Wahl for my generation was 1. To make known a prodigious number of thinkers, to make them alive, introducing them in France, be it Kierkegaard or Whitehead. It is obviously clear that Jean Wahl’s books dominate everything that has been done afterwards. He has completely shaken French philosophy. 2. By means of his tone, his humor, his typical irony, and above all his style, he actually pulls down all kinds of partitioning between philosophy and poetry….Jean Wahl came up as a poet-philosopher irreducible to philosophy. 3. His own thought and the topicality of his thought: he was the one who reacted against dialectics when Hegel dominated the university. He was the one who vindicated the value of the construction of the “AND.”
