.jpg) 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 |
|
| 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 philosopherGilles Deleuze. The English edition was translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, and edited by Constantin V. Boundas.[1]
An exploration of meaning and meaninglessness or "commonsense" and "nonsense" throughmetaphysics,epistemology,grammar, and eventuallypsychoanalysis,The Logic of Sense consists of a series of thirty-fourparadoxes followed by an appendix that contains five previously published essays, including a brief overview of Deleuze'sontology 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 byLewis Carroll), and the inner space of nonsense which deals with strong and violent contradictions (represented byAntonin Artaud). Leading on from Deleuze's ontology in his 1968 bookDifference 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 theevent and ofbecoming as well as the emergence of theplane of immanence and thebody without organs, mythic conceptions of time (Chronos andAion), the structure of games, and textual analyses of works byLewis Carroll,Seneca,Pierre Klossowski,Michel Tournier,Antonin Artaud,F. Scott Fitzgerald,Melanie Klein,Friedrich Nietzsche,Stéphane Mallarmé,Malcolm Lowry,Émile Zola andSigmund Freud.
The philosopherMichel Foucault wrote thatThe 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 philosopherChristopher Norris believes that, likeDifference 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 physicistsAlan Sokal andJean Bricmont write inFashionable Nonsense (1997) thatThe Logic of Sense prefigures the style of works that Deleuze later wrote in collaboration withFélix Guattari, and that, like them, it contains passages in which Deleuze misuses technical scientific terms.[4] Josuha Ramey describesThe 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]
