Deleuze 1990

Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Trans. by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. by Constantin V. Boundas. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990.

First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming

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introduces peculiarity to paradoxes

• any phrase of becoming is pointing in two directions at once:

to say that Alice becomes larger is to say that she is becoming smaller than she will be

• it IS just a verbal game, but a verbal game we can't think around
• we don't have any capability of thinking of the world OUTSIDE this game

"SENSE" --> wants to connect to a directionality; we talk about things as having "sense" when they point in one direction for comparison or change

-- "Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction (sens); but paradox is the affirmation of both sense or directions at the same time."

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connects this to Plato, who helps us see these events of becoming

• Plato and Socrates as founding a defense of the life of the mind, "philosophy" as a discipline
• quotes from Philebus and Parmenides, aporetic dialogues (dialogues in which paradoxes presented are not resolved) --> Plato acknowledges problems but doesn't deal with them

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suggests Plato was aware that strange events of becoming have connection to language

• paradoxes resist theory of Forms; is there a Form for hotter, colder? verbs? -- hotter is something that an individual JUDGES; how does that match the theory of Forms?

• see Sophist 235-6
• see pg 256 in Deleuze
• perhaps act as two languages; or two dimensions in language in general, only one of which Plato focused on
• true proportions of the object, but don't correspond to what we see
• Plato distinguishing betwee true objects and claimants, false reproductions (philosopher vs. sophist)

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Lewis Carroll helps us see these paradoxes

• paradox of pure becoming goes in two directions at once;
• Deleuze wants to call this paradox of infinite identity: identity as sameness, but infinite in that it continues/persists in sameness
• Sorites paradox: when does a pile of pebbles become a heap? --> a heap is a LINGUISTIC thing, at which language assigns limits;
• but language also transcends limits "and restores them to the infinite equivalence of an unlimited becoming" (3)
• "infinite equivalence" -- "hotter" & "colder" are equivalent in some sense, but at the same time cannot be

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undercuts common sense

• "infinite identity" vs. "personal identity"
• infinitives vs. substantives

Second Series of Paradoxes of Surface Effects

moves to a new dualism:

Stoic distinction between bodies and events

• Stoics are trying to reconfigure the field in which things can be thought

broken down into three parts, four paragraphs each

1-4: moves from Platonic dualism to Stoic dualism; 5-8: drawing out implications of Stoic dualism for philosophy (9-12: echo of that in Lewis Carroll)

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straight reading of Stoicism

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STOICS: distinction bw bodies (para 1) and events (para 2) implications for understanding of matter, causality, time

1) materialism: Stoics claim that all that exist are bodies; bodies that we see are mixtures of elements; Deleuze says we can refer to a particular arrangement of bodies (state of affairs) overall State of Affairs is arrangement of bodies as a whole

2) causality: when we say body A has causal relationship with body B; can only talk about causes, not effects;

3) time: from the point of view of bodies, there is only one present; from a divine perspective, there is only one present; time as unwinding of a rope (Cicero) -- Cicero's notion of fate == Deleuze's use of the term Destiny -- events have different relationship to time

---

Stoic map of reality;

distinction between existence [BODIES] and subsistence [EVENTS]; ex. Mickey Mouse / centaurs / etc. have different form of Being than real person; Mickey Mouse has no body; someone with a body can dress up as Mickey Mouse, but it isn't Mickey Mouse

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effects, events don't exist but SUBSIST or INHERE; they're verbs, INFINITIVES

not just INDICATED by verbs, but ARE verbs -- pure verbs, which we don't speak in, vs. conjugated verbs

series of presents; only the present exists in time only the past and future SUBSIST, dividing time simultaneously

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event is being cut; there are bodies involved (person, knife) -- but cutting is event this is INCORPOREAL

effects don't happen bw bodies -- you can say a body is cut, but the being cut is not a body

void is not a body, and a sayable is not a body; Deleuze is primary interested in incorporals that are "sayables"

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more summary of points he's made above

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what difference does this make for how philosophy operates?

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if causes are only happening in the realm of bodies, you can't have effects in that register; causes only concern events, and events are not bodies;

freedom -- Stoics preserve freedom in both registers (events and bodies), in the realm of bodies: thru co-fatedness, con-causality; in the realm of events: by not assigning causes

in Homeric epics, there is certain fated events, but many paths to that one fate; Stoics say no, there must be a chain of causes; this leads to understanding that all things are fatalistically determined

see Cicero, "On fate" -- Chryssipus argues that this kind of fatalism can be remedied by splitting events into simple vs. complex; complex events are "co-fated": two things must be fated together for it to happen -- nexus of causalities allows you to act like there's freedom, even though everythign is fated; con-fatality

[this is different from the Atomists, w/clinamen or "swerve"]

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Stoics have category "something", biggest genus , with "bodies" as subspecies

reversing Platonism (see appendix)

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important dualism in Plato is not form and image, but form and copy;

for the Stoics, this no longer matters -- Stoics "discovered surface effects" (7), recovering common sense from Platonism;

the things that Plato wanted to attribute to Ideas all migrate into events in Stoic philosophy; stripping apart Plato and porting them to a different register

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"becoming unlimited"

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paradoxes of Stoics, entirely new way of thinking about paradoxes

"Paradox appears as a dismissal of depth, a display of events at the surface, and a deployment of language along this limit." (9)

many critics say these paradoxes are NONSENSE by changing the REFERENT; Deleuze interested in peculiarity of language in paradox

there are dialectics of events, but not of bodies -- bodies just proliferate in materiality; there's no pressure on the world to solve this paradox (the way there is in Hegel); maintains separation between bodies and effects -- affirmation of the nonrepresentational

Third Series of the Proposition

use the previous dualisms outlined to get to the question of sense

four distinct parts:

1) summary of what Deleuze claims are three different relations within a proposition

DENOTATION: (a) relates to: "an external state of affairs" (b) functions through: "association of the wordss themselves with particular images which out to 'represent' the state of affairs" (c) expressed by: "formal particulars" (13) such as "it" and "that" (d) values: "true and false"; dealt with as true or false expressions

MANIFESTATION: (a) relates to: "the person who speaks and expresses himself"; "presented as a statement of desires and beliefs" desires --> wanting a pony; doesn't really mean pony is there beliefs --> wanting causes something to happen (b) functions through: "causal inferences, not associations." (c) expressed by: manifesters, "I","you","tomorrow" (d) values: "veracity and illusion"

if we didn't have something like manifestation, there would just be isolated individuals saying things (denotations); only understand articulartions through part of a whole, sense of a whole -- have to understand others as saying something in approaching the world as a whole

SIGNIFICATION: (a) relates to: "universal or general concepts, and of syntactic connections to the implications of the concept" (b) functions through: demonstrations (c) expressed by: premises and conclusions (d) values: condition of truth vs. absurdity

• • possibility for error

2) arguing/asserting that we need to add a fourth dimension/perspective, sense

-- from standpoint of speech: manifestation is primary (speech vs. language -- Saussurian distinction)

-- from the standpoint of language (considered as a system): signification is primary and provides basisf or manifestation no proposition has its meaning independently; don't just denote something, but can only denote in relation to other propositions if you understand language as a system, there are going to be some terms that are taken to ground the system (even tho they don't necessarily) --> e.g. God, world, "language"

-- then undercuts this solution: can't even see signification as primary; [possible third perspective: denotation as primary?] signification itself requires denotation; has to be a link back to the world at some point signification doesn't make any committment to states of affairs (purely formal); but if signification is primary, it's not clear how the link back to denotation operates how to tie signification back into the world?

-- have to add a FOURTH dimension/perspective movement from signification to manifestation to denotation carries us in a circle; not going to be able to point to or outline its structure the way we could with the other three; "sense" cannot make language impossible -- has to still allow for everything we see in language; can we have a language that resists all three other dimensions not a NECESSARY condition of possibility, but nothing in our experience that precludes or disprove it -- a false proposition still has SENSE --

"Sense is the fourth dimension of the proposition." (19)

transcending the three dimensions of denotation, manifestation, signification even as it is the "fourth dimension"

pg: 20 example of Mobius strip; --> connects it to empiricism

TRANSCENDENTAL --> interested in "conditions of possibility"

"transcendental empiricism"; transcendental, not Idealism, but still about discovering conditions of possibility

3) discussion of philosophers who have recognized this dimension (stoics, phenomenology)

trying to create a lineage people who recognized this, even though they might not have recognized it

4) concludes with claim that stoic "event" is equivalent to what he's calling sense

can't think of sense as something that has its own existence outside the proposition surface linking to state of affairs