The work of Gilles Deleuze occupies an anomalous position in anglophone philosophy.
Internationally, he is among the most influential European thinkers of the latter twentieth century. The impact of his work is felt across European philosophy, critical theory, political theory, film studies, feminism, psychoanalysis, anthropology, geography, and other disciplines, and all his major books are translated into English.
Study of his work in anglophone philosophy is usually limited to “Continental philosophy” (in distinction from so-called analytic philosophy), where Deleuze is the object of devoted specialists whose discourse seems to outsiders as opaque and self-referential as anything in analytic philosophy, and the rest of the philosophers ignore it.1“Continental philosophy” is not just any philosophical work coming from the European continent. Nobody calls Rudolf Carnap a Continental philosopher. What more is required is that the author take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker who has to be responded to. That appropriately excludes Carnap, Wittgenstein, Popper, and Bergson from “Continental” philosophy, and gathers the stalwarts, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Agamben, and Deleuze. Yet Deleuze fits poorly with these others, because not only do they take Nietzsche seriously; they rate Heidegger nearly the same, whereas Deleuze almost never discusses or even mentions Heidegger, and his work is the outstanding alternative to everything Heideggerian and hermeneutic in European philosophy. It is metaphysical, constructive, experimental, even empirical in a way that none of the sons of Heidegger want to be. It made Deleuze somewhat solitary. Surveying Paris philosophy in 1968, he felt that “what philosophy lacks is empiricism.”2