The Philosophers' Cocoon

On Gilles Deleuze's birthday: on the philosophical significance of co-authoring

Today, January 18, is Gilles Deleuze's (1925-1995) birthday. The French philosopher would've become 99 had he lived to see the day. He died at the age of 70, in 1995 following a long pulmonary illness that plagued him for much of his life, which either drove him to suicide, or perhaps led him to accidentally fall out of a window. 

I only very recently got into his work, as I read his monographs on Spinoza and Nietzsche (both excellent). I am intrigued by the inherent paradoxical nature of Deleuze as a philosopher. He focuses on liberty, resisting societies of control, and standing out from the crowd, refusing to vote for your own oppressors, refusing to be tied down by conventional morality, for which he took inspiration in both Nietzsche and Spinoza. At the same time, he was for all appearances a regular guy, married to Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan) from 1956 until his death, he raised two children with her, living a quiet life where he did not travel much.  

Deleuze is known for co-authoring with his good philosophical friend Félix Guattari, a psychoanalyst. 

I've written about philosophical friendships and their importance on the Cocoon earlier, here.

Platform for finding co-authors? (perma-thread)

A reader writes in:

I have had a raw idea for a few years that I don't know how to evaluate and am sure that I cannot put it into practice by myself, even if it has any positive points. Recently I saw a relevant post on your blog exactly about this. I thought I can ask you as you are in a good position to advise.

It starts with an (I guess common) personal experience. I argued a subfield of political philosophy, where I had no experience with the literature. For a while, I was thinking about how I could find a co-author - it would be much faster to develop such an idea with a co-author, plus it would be good to have real cooperation between subfields, fields, etc. But then it came to my mind that it may be a problem for many others too. So, why not have a platform just for that purpose?