Hidenobu Suzuki

Hidenobu Suzuki was a Japanese student who attended Deleuze’s seminars at the University of Paris from 1979 until 1987, when Deleuze retired, first at the Vincennes campus and then at Saint-Denis. Suzuki regularly sat in the seat next to Deleuze and faithfully made cassette recordings of the seminars. (A description of Suzuki’s contributions can be found in this article by Pauline Petit at France Culture.)

Suzuki’s recordings formed the basis of the archive of Deleuze’s seminars established at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) (National Library of France), which 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 (here). The transcriptions available atThe Deleuze Seminars project are based on Suzuki’s recordings. 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).

Suzuki was one of two Japanese students who attended Deleuze’s seminars at Vincennes in the 1970s. The other was Kuniichi Uno, who returned to Japan in 1983 and translated several works by Deleuze into Japanese, including Mille Plateaux, L’Anti-Oedipe, L’Épuisé, Foucault, Le Pli. Uno eventually became a professor of literature at the University of Rykkio in Tokyo, and mainained a correspondence with Deleuze (see Deleuze “Letter to Uno: How Felix and I Worked Together,” inTwo Regimes of Madness).

The seminars listed below are those in which Suzuki participated in the seminar discussions.