- Lived:
- 1925–1995 · Paris, almost without interruption
- Tradition:
- French post-war philosophy; metaphysics rebuilt on difference and immanence
- The Big Idea:
- Reality is not made of stable identities that then happen to differ; it is made of difference itself — and philosophy's job is not to recognize eternal truths but to create new concepts for a world that never stops producing the new.
- In their words:
- "Philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts."
- If you remember one thing:
- The man who never left Paris, taught with one ruined lung, and wrote the century's most difficult books had one simple conviction: thinking is not recognizing what is already there — it is making something that wasn't.