Michel Foucault

After Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault was Deleuze’s most significant contemporary intellectual and political relationship. He regarded Foucault as the greatest thinker of his time, and the author of one of ‘the greatest of modern philosophies’ (N 94). His Foucault (1986) was the only book he wrote on a contemporary philosopher. They were also close friends, at least for a period from the 1960s to the 1970s. In Dialogues, Foucault is mentioned among the small group of Deleuze’s closest associates, which included his lifelong friend Jean-Pierre Bamberger, his wife Fanny, his friend and publisher Jerome Lindon, and Guattari (D 17-18). After 1976, for a variety of reasons, they drifted apart and rarely spoke in the years before Foucault’s untimely death in 1984. Some years later Deleuze reflected on this period in their relationship...