Our Goals & Support

The aim of “The Deleuze Seminars” project is to translate into English the seminar lectures of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) that were given at the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis between 1971 and 1987, and to make them available online. The project is a continuation of work already undertaken by Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) (French National Library) and the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of three generous grants from the “Scholarly Editions and Translations” division of the National Endowment of the Humanities, as well as a Global Synergy grant from the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University.

The content of this site is supported by a data management plan at the Purdue University Data Repository (PURR), and we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Director of PURR, Michael Witt, as well as Matthew Kroll, Reid I. Boehm, and Stanislav Pejsa who designed the data plan (https://purr.purdue.edu/groups/deleuze/about_the_seminars).

 

History of “The Deleuze Seminars” Project

Shortly after Deleuze’s death on 4 November 1995, one of his students, the musician Richard Pinhas, with the cooperation of Deleuze’s family (his wife Fanny, and children Julien and Émilie), created a website entitled WebDeleuze (https://www.webdeleuze.com/) that was dedicated to Deleuze’s thought. The site not only initiated the project of transcribing Deleuze’s seminar lectures, but also included a wide range of resources and links for scholars interested in Deleuze’s work (including transcriptions of lectures by colleagues such as Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, André Scala; a complete bibliography of Deleuze’s writings by Timothy Murphy; scans of Deleuze’s manuscripts, etc.). The site was recently redesigned by Benoit Maurer and remains a valuable resource.

In 1999, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) (French National Library) in Paris, recognizing the importance of Deleuze’s work as a part of France’s national patrimony, established an audio archive of all the seminars Deleuze gave at the Université de Paris 8 between 1979 and 1987. The archive was based on cassette recordings that had been made by a Japanese student, Hidenobu Suzuki, who unfailingly sat in the seat next to Deleuze and recorded the seminars for almost ten years. The archive includes 273 cassettes of 180 separate lectures, comprising 413 hours of recordings. The BNF converted Suzuki’s cassette recordings into digital files and made them accessible online through the Gallica search engine (https://gallica.bnf.fr/). A detailed summary of the holdings at the Bibliothèque Nationale has been published as a separate book by Frederic Astier, Les cours enregistrés de Gilles Deleuze, 1979-1987 (Mons, Belgium: Éditions Sils Maria, 2006).

Two years later, in 2001, a group of preeminent French scholars, initially headed by the philosopher Alain Badiou, constituted a not-for-profit organization entitled L’Assocation Siècle Deleuzien (The ‘Deleuzian Century’ Association) whose aim was to build on the work of the BNF and to produce written transcriptions of the seminar recordings that had been collected in the archive. The project took fourteen years to complete. The French transcriptions are freely available at a website called La Voix de Gilles Deleuze (The Voice of Gilles Deleuze), which is hosted and maintained by the University of Paris 8 (http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/).

This is where “The Deleuze Seminars” project has its origin. Starting in 2011, the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University provided two grants to complete the French transcriptions of two significant seminar series: the 1985-1986 seminar series on Michel Foucault, and the 1979-1980 seminar series on The Apparatus of State and the War Machine. The transcriptions were completed by Annabelle Dufourcq (https://www.ru.nl/english/people/dufourcq-a/), and are available at the Paris 8 website.

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the “Scholarly Editions and Translations” division of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The project to translate the French transcriptions into English began in August 2016 with an initial two-year grant from the NEH, and The Deleuze Seminars project has subsequently received two additional three-year grants (2018-2021, 2021-2024) in support of its work. Furthermore, a supplemental grant from the NEH (2023) provided support necessary for migrating the entire site into a different software program, WordPress, that will allow continuing support from Purdue IT.

This website was created to host the online publication of the translations and corrected transcripts, and it is actively under ongoing development.