This volume brings together twenty essays on the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) that I have written over the past fifteen years. The first (Essay 6) was published in 1996, while the most recent (Essay 8) is appearing for the first time in this book. The original pieces were written as journal articles, book prefaces, and lectures, and although I have introduced minor revisions throughout—and in one case (Essay 2) restored an omitted section—the essays have been reproduced here largely in their original form. As a result, there remains a certain overlap among the essays, which occasionally return to the same themes from different points of view, while pursuing different trajectories. The essays have been organized into four sections, each of which examines a particular aspect of Deleuze’s thought.

1. Deleuze and the History of Philosophy. Deleuze began his career with a series of books on various figures in the history of philosophy—Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, and Spinoza—and the first set of essays explores three broad trajectories in Deleuze’s approach to the history of philosophy. The first essay presents Deleuze’s reading of Plato in light of Nietzsche’s call for the “overturning” of Platonism, while the second essay uses Duns Scotus’s concept of univocity to explore Spinoza’s overturning of the medieval Aristotelian tradition. The final three essays constitute a trilogy that examines Deleuze’s relationship to the preand post-Kantian traditions. Essay 3 provides a Deleuzian reading of Leibniz’s philosophy, and Essay 4 discusses the frequently laid charge that Deleuze is anti-Hegelian. The fifth essay recapitulates these readings of Leibniz and Hegel by placing them in the context of the problem of the relation between logic and existence, and explores the reasons why Deleuze turned to the development of a philosophy of difference. Taken together, these essays show Deleuze’s deep indebtedness to these traditions, as well as the manner in which he transformed them in the pursuit of his own philosophical project.