Deleuze: towards freedom

This short, beginners’ course is about ideas that are central to Deleuze’s philosophy ; in particular ideas relating to questions of values, and to questions concerning the nature of thought. For Deleuze our encounters with the world are recurrently blocked both by a distorted image of what it is to think, and by subtle failures to ‘affirm’ that which is different from ourselves (a consequence of this line of thought is an explicit social critique). He said of Spinoza ‘He wanted only to inspire, to waken, to reveal.’ The same can be said of Deleuze’s aims, and the issues involved are inseparably those of forms of life (with their embodied or ‘lived’ values) and of philosophical thought. But what might it be to ‘wake’?