The Logic of Sense

The Logic of Sense (French: Logique du sens) is a 1969 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. An exploration of meaning and meaninglessness, or "commonsense" and "nonsense", it 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, Emile Zola and Sigmund Freud.

Michel Foucault said 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". Christopher Norris believes that, like Difference and Repetition, 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.


The English edition was translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, and edited by Constantin V. Boundas.

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