The Logic of Sense

The Logic of Sense

The French edition
Author Gilles Deleuze
Original title Logique du sens
Translator Mark Lester
Country France
Language French
Genre Philosophy
Published
  • 1969 (Les Éditions de Minuit, in French)
  • 1990 (in English)
Media type Print
Pages 392 (French edition)

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 with Charles Stivale, and edited by Constantin V. Boundas.[1]

Summary

An exploration of meaning and meaninglessness, or "commonsense" and "nonsense", The Logic of Sense consists of a series of thirty-four paradoxes and an appendix that contains five previously published essays, including a brief overview of Deleuze's ontology entitled "Plato and the Simulacrum".

The book introduces Deleuze's philosophy of the event and of becoming and includes textual analyses of works by Lewis Carroll, Seneca, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Tournier, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Émile Zola and Sigmund Freud.

Reception

Michel Foucault said 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] Christopher Norris believes that, like Difference and Repetition (1968), it 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]

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont write 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 that misuse technical scientific terms.[4]

References

  1. ↑ Columbia University Press
  2. ↑ http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpfoucault5.htm
  3. ↑ Christopher Norris (1995). Ted Honderich, ed. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 183. ISBN 0-19-866132-0.
  4. ↑ Sokal, Alan; Bricmont, Jean (1999). Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. New York: Picador. p. 166. ISBN 0-312-20407-8.

Further reading