The Logic of Sense

The Logic of Sense
	Cover of the French edition
Author	Gilles Deleuze
Original title	Logique du sens
Translators	Mark Lester, Charles Stivale
Language	French
Series	European Perspectives
Subject	Meaning
Published	1969 (Les Éditions de Minuit, in French); 1990 (Columbia University Press, in English);
Publication place	France
Media type	Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages	392 (French edition); 393 (Columbia University Press edition)
ISBN	978-0231059831

The Logic of Sense (French: Logique du sens) is a 1969 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The English edition was translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, and edited by Constantin V. Boundas.^[1]

Summary

An exploration of meaning and meaninglessness or "commonsense" and "nonsense" through metaphysics, epistemology, grammar, and eventually psychoanalysis, The Logic of Sense consists of a series of thirty-four paradoxes followed by an appendix that contains five previously published essays, including a brief overview of Deleuze's ontology entitled "Plato and the Simulacrum". The Deleuzian understanding of nonsense considers that there is a "surface level" of nonsense which creates innocent, childlike preoccupations with contradictions (represented by Lewis Carroll), and the inner space of nonsense which deals with strong and violent contradictions (represented by Antonin Artaud). Leading on from Deleuze's ontology in his 1968 book Difference and Repetition, sense can only itself be understood as a constant set of correlations and associations. Nonsense, especially through the literature he analyzes, intrinsically avoids being defined, and can only be seen as "that which has no sense," but "is opposed to the absence of sense".

The book introduces Deleuze's philosophy of the event and of becoming as well as the emergence of the plane of immanence and the body without organs, mythic conceptions of time (Chronos and Aion), the structure of games, and textual analyses of works by Lewis Carroll, Seneca, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Tournier, Antonin Artaud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Melanie Klein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Malcolm Lowry, Émile Zola and Sigmund Freud.

Reception

The philosopher Michel Foucault wrote that The Logic of Sense "should be read as the boldest and most insolent of metaphysical treatises – on the simple condition that instead of denouncing metaphysics as the neglect of being, we force it to speak of extrabeing".^[2] The philosopher Christopher Norris believes that, like Difference and Repetition (1968), The Logic of Sense comes as near as possible to offering a full-scale programmatic statement of Deleuze's post-philosophical, anti-systematic, ultra-nominalist or resolutely "non-totalizing" mode of thought.^[3]

The physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont write in Fashionable Nonsense (1997) that The Logic of Sense prefigures the style of works that Deleuze later wrote in collaboration with Félix Guattari, and that, like them, it contains passages in which Deleuze misuses technical scientific terms.^[4] Josuha Ramey describes The Logic of Sense as Deleuze's "most sustained ethical reflection".^[5] Timothy Laurie argues that Deleuze presents "sense" as wrapped up in a problematic, and that a problematic cannot be evaluated according to truth and error, nor is it ever exhausted through one single solution.^[6]

References

^ Columbia University Press, The Logic of Sense. Gilles Deleuze. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, accessed on 15 December 2024
^ Foucault, Michel. "Theatrum Philosophicum". Originally published in Critique 282 (1970), pp. 885-908, slightly amended. Retrieved 15 December 2024.
^ Christopher Norris (1995). Ted Honderich (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 183. ISBN 0-19-866132-0.
^ Sokal, Alan; Bricmont, Jean (1999). Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. New York: Picador. p. 166. ISBN 0-312-20407-8.
^ Ramey, Joshua (2012). The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 172. ISBN 978-0-8223-5229-7.
^ Laurie, Timothy (2015). "Masculinity Studies and the Jargon of Strategy: Hegemony, Tautology, Sense". Angelaki. 20 (1): 13–30. doi:10.1080/0969725X.2015.1017373. hdl:10453/44220. S2CID 142704874.

v t e Gilles Deleuze – Félix Guattari
Concepts and theories	Affect Arborescent Assemblage Body without organs Desiring-production Deterritorialization Difference Erewhon Event Haecceity Immanent evaluation Individuation Line of flight Minority Molar configuration Multiplicity Plane of immanence Reterritorialization Rhizome Schizoanalysis Societies of control Socius Subjectification Transcendental empiricism Univocity of being Virtual
Works by Deleuze and Guattari	Capitalism and Schizophrenia Anti-Oedipus A Thousand Plateaus Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Rhizome Nomadology: The War Machine What Is Philosophy?
Works by Deleuze	Empiricism and Subjectivity Nietzsche and Philosophy Kant's Critical Philosophy Proust and Signs Nietzsche Bergsonism Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty Difference and Repetition Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza The Logic of Sense Spinoza: Practical Philosophy The Intellectuals and Power: A Discussion Between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault Dialogues² Superpositions Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation Cinema 1: The Movement Image Cinema 2: The Time-Image Foucault The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Périclès et Verdi: La philosophie de Francois Châtelet Negotiations Essays Critical and Clinical Bartleby, la formula della creazione Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 Two Regimes of Madness
Works by Guattari	Psychanalyse et transversalité Molecular Revolution Desire and Revolution L'inconscient machinique. Essais de Schizoanalyse L’intervention institutionnelle Les années d'hiver Pratique de l'institutionnel et politique Communists Like Us Molecular Revolution in Brazil The Three Ecologies Cartographies schizoanalytiques Chaosmose Chaosophy Soft Subversions The Guattari Reader The Anti-Œdipus Papers Chaos and Complexity
Related topics	L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze La Borde clinic Deleuze and Guattari A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity

Summary

Reception

References

Further reading