The Logic of Sense

[1] An exploration of meaning and meaninglessness or "commonsense" and "nonsense" through metaphysics, epistemology, grammar, and eventually psychoanalysis, The Logic of Sense consists of a series of thirty-four paradoxes followed by an appendix that contains five previously published essays, including a brief overview of Deleuze's ontology entitled "Plato and the Simulacrum".

Leading on from Deleuze's ontology in his 1968 book Difference and Repetition, sense can only itself be understood as a constant set of correlations and associations.

The book introduces Deleuze's philosophy of the event and of becoming as well as the emergence of the plane of immanence and the body without organs, mythic conceptions of time (Chronos and Aion), the structure of games, and textual analyses of works by Lewis Carroll, Seneca, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Tournier, Antonin Artaud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Melanie Klein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Malcolm Lowry, Émile Zola and Sigmund Freud.

[2] The philosopher Christopher Norris believes that, like Difference and Repetition (1968), The Logic of Sense 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] The physicists 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.