Gilles Louis René Deleuze was a French philosopher who wrote extensively on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art from the early 1950s until his death in 1995. His most popular works include the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars as his magnum opus.

An important part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the reading of other philosophers such as the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Bergson. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers". Although he once characterized himself as a "pure metaphysician", his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across the humanities, including philosophy, art, and literary theory, as well as movements such as post-structuralism and postmodernism.

Deleuze considered himself an empiricist and a vitalist, and his body of work rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference, and desire. He favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence, positing that everything is a mode of one substance and thus on the same level of existence, arguing that there is no good and evil, but rather only relationships which are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals.