What Comes before the Study of Deleuze

Imagine we are students in a school of philosophy in late antiquity. We are learning about ancient Stoic philosophy and it is the beginning of the course. The first thing that the master would teach us is a now-forgotten genre of philosophical writing called ‘What Comes before the Study of …’ (Πρὸ τῆς ἀναγνώσϵως …). Before studying their materialist metaphysics, before analysing their propositional logic, before dissecting their ethical doctrines, students first learned about the way of life of a classic Stoic philosopher – her βίος – which detailed when and where she lived, with whom she studied, tales of important travels, with whom she spent time, the historical context in which she worked, her catalogue raisonné, among other biographical details. While most examples of this ancient genre are lost, Diogenes Laërtius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers collected anecdotes from them. Details of the philosophers’ in Diogenes’ Lives are amusing, contradictory, sometimes preposterous, although they still convey something essential about philosophers that cannot be found in their theoretical treatises and manuscripts. Nietzsche too appreciates this: ‘I for one prefer reading Diogenes Laërtius to Zeller, because the former at least breathes the spirit of the philosophers of antiquity.’ Before all else, students learned the kind of life a philosopher lived, and only afterwards, if this way of life was still desired, did students learn about their corresponding logical system or criterion of truth. Since scholars in the ancient schools organised courses according to a fixed sequence, this bio-philosophical genre acted as the first part of a schema isagogicum, or introductory scheme.

In our book, we develop a systematic account of ancient Greek and Roman Stoicism through its encounter with Gilles Deleuze and related twentieth-century French philosophers, beginning with a schema isagogicum of Deleuze himself.

A few months after he died, one of Deleuze's students – André Bernold – published a biography of his old teacher, which we might consider a new contribution to that forgotten genre of writing: ‘What Comes before the Study of Deleuze’.