Note: This is my first reading of The Logic of Sense by Gilles Deleuze. The most recent work I’ve done with Deleuze’s thought was a paper for a graduate course on the reemergence of Epicureanism in Early Modernity. In the paper, I explored the late 20th century’s encounter with Spinoza via Althusser and Deleuze. I’m hoping to eventually revise that paper for presentation/publication. For the present reading of The Logic of Sense, I’d like to undertake a close reading of the text while checking as many of Deleuze’s references as possible.
What makes the idea of reading The Logic of Sense especially fascinating is that the work is presented as a quite serious theoretical enterprise that takes as its starting point Alice in Wonderland and many of Lewis Carroll’s other weird but captivating books. Wait a minute. Isn’t Alice in Wonderland just a children’s story? According to Deleuze, it’s not that simple. “The priviliged place assigned to Lewis Carroll [in The Logic of Sense] is due to his having provided the first great account, the first great mise en scène of the paradoxes of sense — sometimes collecting, sometimes renewing, sometimes inventing, and sometimes preparing them” (LS, xiii). Already in the preface, Deleuze begins to give us a feel for the kind of ”sense” with which he is dealing. This is the sense of “making sense” and the kind of sense that is usually cast in opposition to what would be thought of as nonsense. Sense, understood in this way, suggests a state of general determination, a relation of an enduring self-same subject with a world in which ordinary things normally have subsisting identities. Common sense is usually assumed to be a general knowing about how the world is. But, what about a knowing of, not just how the world is, but how the world comes to be? Does common sense know much about the world’s becoming what it is and other than what it is? What about that remainder, that which persists after matter assumes form, which seems to allow for the possibility of new configurations to be thought? To say, “I am here now in this universe” makes perfect sense (and is true), because, in fact, I am here now in this universe. This statement makes sense because the terms which are taken to be so precise and which may or may not represent the determination of a particular state of affairs, really are fairly general.
In the “Sense-Certainty” portion of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel dramatizes the attempt of sense-certainty to give an account of its alleged immediate relation to what is. However, owing to the the fundamental nature of language itself (and, perhaps, also to the dimension of reality’s continual coming to be), this process of trying to account for an immediate knowing inevitably introduces generality and a move towards abstraction with terms like now, here, I, and this. Sense-certainty literally means that it enjoys an unmediated relationship to ”this,” whatever “this” might be. But what about when this becomes something else? Is it still this? This might shed some light on the issue, if I ever get around to reading it. Can hypertext refute the dialectic of sense-certainty? <–said with tongue in cheek. I digress into Hegel only because I believe I sense him lurking somewhere beneath these opening pages and in the First Series. I’m sure he will emerge (or at least someone wearing his mask will appear) sooner or later… Back to Deleuze.
In the first paragraph of the Preface, Deleuze says that “the marriage of language and the unconscious has already been consummated and celebrated in so many ways” which is, I assume, thanks to the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan (LS, xiii). I am not very well read in the history of psychoanalysis, but I am sure I can become somewhat proficient as we move along.
So far, we have paradoxes, a general notion of sense, and the paradoxical world of nonsense known as Wonderland. Next Deleuze talks about a “new image of the philosopher” established by Stoicism in opposition to Platonism/the preceeding images of the philosopher. The first appendix seems to be the best place to look into what might have been unsatisfactory about Platonism, whereas the First Series deals with Alice, pure events, and the rebellious becomings of matter.
