Gilles Deleuze (; French: [ʒil dəløz]; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers". Although he once characterized himself as a "pure metaphysician", his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across philosophy and art, including literary theory, post-structuralism and postmodernism.

Along with several French and Italian Marxist-inspired neo-Spinozists like Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Antonio Negri, he was one of the central figures in a great flowering of Spinoza studies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries continental philosophy (or the rise of French-inspired post-structuralist Neo-Spinozism) that was the second remarkable Spinoza revival in history, after highly significant Neo-Spinozism in German philosophy and literature of approximately the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A fervent Spinozist in many respects, Deleuze's preoccupation with and reverence for Spinoza are well known in contemporary philosophy. As Pierre Macherey noted, "An important part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the reading of philosophers: the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc. But a rather singular position in this list would be assigned to Spinoza, owing to the philosophical interest that corresponds to him."