Notes on Deleuze's 'Logic of Sense' - Preface
The preface is subtitled 'From Lewis Carroll to the Stoics', giving a clear sense of the two main resources Deleuze is drawing on for this work. Whether this bears out during the course of the text is another thing - his 'pick-me-up' method, as its designated in Dialogues II, tends to make enumerating the sources of his ideas very difficult. Apparently this text is his closest encounter with Lacanian psychoanalysis before Guattari 'saves' him from that particular discourse.
Deleuze distinguishes between the pleasures Lewis Carroll offers 'the modern reader' and something else 'over and above the immediate pleasure' which he identifies as the 'play of sense and nonsense, a chaos-cosmos'. The idea of the chaosmos cropped up intermittently in Difference et Repetition; in my understanding this was Deleuze's way of describing a universe populated by differences, where the apparently fixed and extensive 'cosmos' was produced as an optical effect of differential processes within intensive multiplicities.
The relationship being made here betwee the chaos-cosmos relationship and a 'play of sense and nonsense' was touched upon briefly in D&R also - in some quite obscure and difficult passages about Russell's notion of the proposition without sense that can neither be true or false. Hence 'sense' is a requirement for any proposition to enter into the distributive true/false economy. The implication here, so it seems to me, is that if we conflate sense/nonsense and chaos/cosmos then these two must be imbricated in one another in a productive and dynamic relationship. Which is obviously a very important contention for any 'logic of sense'.
Deleuze states his intention to present a 'series of paradoxes' which would form a 'theory of sense'. The theory is inseparable from paradoxes, because sense is a 'nonexisting entity' which 'maintains very special relations with nonsense.' This bears out the predication I made above.
The book is described using ideas elaborated in Difference et Repetition - problems, series, dicethrows. The phrase 'a galaxy of problems' provides a pleasant image when we take into account his discussion of the nature of Ideas-Problems in D&R, bringing into resonance with the aforementioned chaos-cosmos relation. This makes perfect sense in terms of Deleuze's conflation of the virtual/actual components of both relations - the Idea-Problem is the posing of a set of differential and intensive relations, distributing singular and ordinary points to produce solutions that do not dissolve the problem. We can imagine this in the same way as we formerly imagined the cosmos being produced out of the intensive dynamic processes of the cosmos.
Deleuze distinguishes between the pleasures Lewis Carroll offers 'the modern reader' and something else 'over and above the immediate pleasure' which he identifies as the 'play of sense and nonsense, a chaos-cosmos'. The idea of the chaosmos cropped up intermittently in Difference et Repetition; in my understanding this was Deleuze's way of describing a universe populated by differences, where the apparently fixed and extensive 'cosmos' was produced as an optical effect of differential processes within intensive multiplicities.
The relationship being made here betwee the chaos-cosmos relationship and a 'play of sense and nonsense' was touched upon briefly in D&R also - in some quite obscure and difficult passages about Russell's notion of the proposition without sense that can neither be true or false. Hence 'sense' is a requirement for any proposition to enter into the distributive true/false economy. The implication here, so it seems to me, is that if we conflate sense/nonsense and chaos/cosmos then these two must be imbricated in one another in a productive and dynamic relationship. Which is obviously a very important contention for any 'logic of sense'.
Deleuze states his intention to present a 'series of paradoxes' which would form a 'theory of sense'. The theory is inseparable from paradoxes, because sense is a 'nonexisting entity' which 'maintains very special relations with nonsense.' This bears out the predication I made above.
The book is described using ideas elaborated in Difference et Repetition - problems, series, dicethrows. The phrase 'a galaxy of problems' provides a pleasant image when we take into account his discussion of the nature of Ideas-Problems in D&R, bringing into resonance with the aforementioned chaos-cosmos relation. This makes perfect sense in terms of Deleuze's conflation of the virtual/actual components of both relations - the Idea-Problem is the posing of a set of differential and intensive relations, distributing singular and ordinary points to produce solutions that do not dissolve the problem. We can imagine this in the same way as we formerly imagined the cosmos being produced out of the intensive dynamic processes of the cosmos.