Gilles Deleuze, one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers, was born in the 17th arrondissement of the French capital in 1925. Little Gilles was your average Parisian child, with a fondness for collecting stamps in his spare time, as Deleuze was to recall later in life. The Second World War began when he was fifteen; evacuated to Normandy, it was there that lessons on French literature given by a young professor awakened his intellectual curiosity. The encounter with philosophy was to take place not long after, in his final year of lycée. Recognising in his very first philosophy class his calling for the discipline, he took up a life of research as a matter of course. His thesis at the Sorbonne on the British Empiricist David Hume became his first publication. Following a decade of intermittent ‘silence’, in the 1960s he produced study after study in close succession, radically reconstituting every field he deigned to intervene in. But it was his 1972 Anti-Oedipus, co-authored with psychoanalyst-turned-political-activist Félix Guattari, that secured him lasting fame. Embraced as one of the prime representatives of what came to be known in Anglo-American circles as the postmodernist/poststructuralist movement, his reputation spread far and wide. And yet through all this bustle he himself was largely to stay put in his 17th arrondissement flat. Disliking travel, he spent little time on the likes of lecture tours, concentrating instead on his university teaching and his publications. Indeed, his life remained remarkably constant throughout. Plagued for decades by a respiratory condition, in the last years of his life he was forced to use an oxygen inhalator. This physiological burden may well have proven too much, and on 4 November 1995 he threw himself out of a window at his home. It is a curious irony of history that his death coincided with the assassination of the then Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, who had ratified the Oslo Accords and reconciled with Yasser Arafat; Deleuze had previously (in 1982) published a text entitled ‘The Importance of Being of Yasser Arafat’.

Deleuze's readership continues to grow all over the world, and research on his work is prolific.