The Logic of Sense
by Gilles Deleuze
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gilles DeleuzeEditor: Constantin V. Boundas
Translator: Mark Lester
Translator: Charles Stivale
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1990-04-15
ISBN: 0231059833
Number of pages: 393
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Book Reviews of The Logic of Sense
Book Review: phantastic book, lamentable translation
Summary: 3 Stars
This book rates five stars for what it ought to have been had it been translated competently. (It gets one star for the translative mutilation.)
What makes Logic of Sense such an amazing discourse? It is certainly not the "confrontation with Lacanian analysis" mentioned by one reviewer -- there is no such confrontation here, only with Kleinian analysis and with some of Lacan's early disciples. Anti-Oedipus would have been the real confrontation, except that with A-O the misunderstandings begin to multiply uncontrollably. And it is a more powerful work by far than LS, on a hole Other level, it just can't handle its own forces or hold its horses . . .
What is so great about LS is rather exactly what it says in the title, its Logic of Sense. Deleuze got very frustrated with logic such as it developed in the schools of Wittgenstein and Frege-Russell-Quine; but here he is in full initiatory postdoctoral fervor, and is able to find what is powerful in Frege's distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung and run with it, in fact using the linguistics of Saussure and Benveniste to invent his own Idea of sense: a sense whose Other side is the event with which it is connected and in which it continues otherwise.
This is the only real connection to Lacan in the book, and it is a fine borrowing and reinvention on Deleuze's part: the Moebius band. Does the Thing have two sides or one side? Neither, or both. Deleuze realized that the event itself does not exist until it begins to make sense of itself (as "subject", Badiou would say); making sense is itself an event, THE event. (Deleuze never lost hold of this insight: it is still there in What Is Philosophy?)
The reason I call it the Thing is that the Moebius topology of the phantasm (another name of sense) did "originate" (so to speak) out of Lacan's seminar on the Thing (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where the M-b is not yet introduced). What the topology of the projective plane (of which the M-b is a cutting) enables is an aesthetic intuition of that Thing, that Surface that has neither interior nor exterior ("extime"): call it the human essence (as Spinoza did): desire.
The topology of desire can be approached intuitively, aesthetically, conceptually by construction of the projective plane -- which can also become part of a practice of cure (of the sick gaze of manic-melancholy passion, delusional anticipation and mourning . . .) by way of object-making. On that (the partial cure by making things) Deleuze and Lacan will always remain in agreement. Beyond that, Deleuze never followed Lacan into knot theory and practice, the conceptual-aesthetic-ethical construction of triadic relation . . . (But at the end of Cinema I we see Deleuze constructing his own version of symbolic-triadic out of Peirce, where Lacan too found it).
How to read LS in the context of Deleuze's own evolution? That theory of surface, phantasm, sense . . . was never abandoned by Deleuze; and yet you can see how the abyss, the Hole (Artaud, Nietzsche) he never practiced topologically WITH Lacan, already threatens to break up the surface and swallow the psyche. Deleuze does not seem to have grasped at this point (1969) that the 3 or 4 dimensional topology of the Body (locus of the Other as Lacan clarified in 1967) could be not just surveyed superficially (where holes appear as disappearances), but explored "in depth" -- not at all by multiplying Cartesian-Riemannian dimensions, but in changing relations, inventing a new DIT-MENTION of relation (triadic, Borromean) nearly adequate to handle Language that touches and penetrates the listening body. (It takes 4, adding the symptom, to achieve the topology of enunciation.)
Should we then blame Guattari for misleading Deleuze away from and against Lacan? That would be a facile procedure but gratuitous, since obviously the encounter with Guattari was as close as Deleuze was able to come to Lacan -- and for good reason! Look at the groups of hysterics and perverts surrounding Lacan! Look at the magisterial son-in-law! Alas, regard Lacan himself, in his public persona (personality, as he said , is "paranoid psychosis"): the Master who cannot tolerate dissent . . . But is that really true of Lacan, the analyst, who invented the Cartel as topological research group? Whose seminar was actually not structurally that of the Master discourse but that of the Teacher (which is entirely different, it is the discourse of a "cured hysteric")? Whose private analytic practice never ceased to produce new ideas and techniques, which Lacan always credited (as Freud did) to the analysants?
One could only be thankful, then, for Deleuze's creative separation, if only that connection with Lacanian topology had not been prematurely broken. As to a "confrontation with Lacan", it never took place -- except precisely in that it became a confrontation . . . between shadows.
Summary of The Logic of Sense
Considered one of the most important works of one of France's foremost philosophers, and long-awaited in English, The Logic of Sense begins with an extended exegesis of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Considering stoicism, language, games, sexuality, schizophrenia, and literature, Deleuze determines the status of meaning and meaninglessness, and seeks the 'place' where sense and nonsense collide.
Written in an innovative form and witty style, The Logic of Sense is an essay in literary and psychoanalytic theory as well as philosophy, and helps to illuminate such works as Anti-Oedipus.
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