Abstract

Deleuze does not mention Schopenhauer very frequently. Certainly Schopenhauer does not appear to be in the counter-canon of life-affirming philosophers that Deleuze so values – indeed, far from it. Nor does he appear to be even a favoured ‘enemy’ as he describes Kant, or as he sometimes appears to view Hegel. In Jones and Roffe’s collection on Deleuze’s historical antecedents, Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, Schopenhauer is mentioned exactly once (in the chapter on Hume) and certainly not in the dignified role of one of the twenty leading influences on Deleuze. Nevertheless, I think Schopenhauer’s break from Kant is crucial for understanding not only Deleuze’s account of Nietzsche, but also for a proper grasp of the core Deleuzian distinction between the actual and the virtual, at least in its guise as the distinction between desiring-production and social production in Anti-Oedipus.