PERSON
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze was among the twentieth century's most inventive philosophers and among the few Continental thinkers to engage seriously with Whitehead's process metaphysics. His books Difference and Repetition (1968), The Logic of Sense (1969), and above all The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988) engage Whitehead explicitly; the opening chapter of The Fold calls Whitehead 'the successor of Leibniz' and uses Whitehead's framework to develop a theory of events and folding that has shaped contemporary process thought.
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Deleuze's philosophical project — often pursued in collaboration with Félix Guattari — rejected the dominant Continental traditions of his time (phenomenology, structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis) in favor of a thought centered on difference, multiplicity, and becoming. These commitments made Whitehead a natural interlocutor. Both philosophers prioritized process over substance, becoming over being, events over things.
The engagement was not uncritical. Deleuze read Whitehead through the lens of his own project, which emphasized difference and deterritorialization in ways Whitehead had not. But