The Logic of Sense
.jpg) Cover of the French edition | |
| Author | Gilles Deleuze |
|---|---|
| Original title | Logique du sens |
| Translator | Mark Lester, Charles Stivale |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Series | European Perspectives |
| Subject | Philosophy |
| Published |
|
| 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 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 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] 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 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] 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.[5]
References
- ↑ Columbia University Press
- ↑ http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpfoucault5.htm
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Laurie, Timothy 2015: 'Masculinity Studies and the Jargon of Strategy: Hegemony, Tautology, Sense' Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 20(1) p. 24 URL: https://www.academia.edu/10912537
Further reading
- Foucault, Michel. "Theatrum Philosophicum". Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: New Press, 1998. 343-368.
- Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy through the Looking Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985.
- Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.