This book presents a study of health and illness derived in large measure from the writings of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It provides the first systematic assessment of the significance of Deleuze’s thought for contemporary research in the health sciences, including work in public health, quality of life studies and human development. The book will introduce many of Deleuze’s key ideas, exploring the application of his method, what he called “transcendental empiricism”, to the analysis of select problems in the study of health and society. Of principal interest are the inventive accounts of subjectivity, embodiment and experience that Deleuze proposes, and the varied concepts that these accounts engender. In pursuing these interests, the book will confirm the need for a Deleuzian approach to research in the health and social sciences, along with the innovations in research practice that such an approach should inspire. Each task will entail a critical reading of several of Deleuze’s most important concepts, including ‘event’,‘affect’,‘relation’,‘life’,‘difference’,‘immanence’,‘becoming’and ‘assemblage’, in an effort to establish grounds for the more widespread adoption of Deleuze’s ideas across the health and social sciences. The book will focus on the treatment of subjectivity and the body such that the notion of ‘human life’may be reframed in the health and social sciences. I argue that such a shift is critical given recent affirmations of the convergence of the human and the nonhuman in social, political and biological life (see Latour 2005). While for some, this convergence signals the need for a posthuman account of health and illness more alert to the imbrications of science, technology, politics and biology (Rose 2007: 1–8), I am just as interested in the implications of this ‘decentring of the human’for research innovation in the health and social sciences. I aim to extend Deleuze’s account of subjectivity and the body in order to sketch the most important implications of ‘posthumanism’for thinking about health itself (see Wolfe 2010). The major problem the book seeks to confront, therefore, is the task of rethinking the ontological and epistemological status of health at a time when the ‘human subject’, to which the attribution of health necessarily refers, seems everywhere in retreat (Fox 2011). The book ventures to explain how health ix