Deleuze and learning

This chapter will examine the philosophical and intellectual oeuvre of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. The work that this chapter attempts to do is to give access to the learning theory of Deleuze without overly simplifying or unnecessarily reducing the complexity of his ideas. Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was a philosopher who worked for the majority of his life as an intellectual and university academic. He was propelled into the public eye in 1972, after the success of his first collaborative work with Felix Guattmi, called Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze did not write a book on learning, or specifically on education as such, so we must piece together his ideas on learning from comments interspersed from within his oeuvre. Despite this apparent lack of direct information and analysis of learning, Deleuze's ideas have recently begun to gain traction in many educational and creative circles (see Cole, 20 II a). Perhaps this is because Deleuze provides what he described as 'a conceptual toolbox' (Deleuze, 1980: 17), which can be readily applied to other areas such as education in terms of a philosophical framing and theoretical base that resists dogmatism and encourages the novel and imaginative (re) creation of theory and practice. In this chapter, I will argue that this conceptual toolbox does not represent a free-for-all in terms of an anything-goes learning and educational theory, but, on the contrary, the Deleuzian toolbox is in many ways deliberately hard to accept and necessarily challenging to put into action.