Ebook: Deleuze's course on Rousseau

In 1959-1960, Deleuze dedicated a year of coursework to Jean Jacques Rousseau, a thinker
we are not used to rank among Deleuze’s famous ‘minor’ philosophical heroes. Indeed, it
would be easy to dismiss Rousseau as too romantic, too aristocratic, and too much of a State
thinker in order to have any profound connection with Deleuze. However, the course’s typed
summary of twenty-seven pages, never published but available at several places online 1,
suggests otherwise. The document is a surprising encounter between Deleuze and Rousseau,
one in which Deleuze explicitly transforms Rousseau into a thinker of genesis, virtuality, and
actuality, each a key concept in Deleuze’s own thought. This connection or transformation
disappears (or is rendered implicit) in the single essay Deleuze published on Rousseau in
1962 2, as does much of the internal structure Deleuze discerns in Rousseau, which makes the
course summary a unique source to turn to.