Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Sense: The Role and Development of the Concept of Sense in Deleuze's Early Thought

This study presents a thinker-by-thinker and book-by-book account of Gilles Deleuze’s early thought by framing it around what it takes to be Deleuze’s most fundamental project: to develop a philosophy of sense. It shows how Deleuze, from his 1954 review of his teacher, Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, takes up this project and advances it both explicitly and implicitly through a series of writings up to and including the 1969 publication of The Logic of Sense. It establishes how the pursuit of this philosophy of sense shapes and gives unity to Deleuze’s diverse theses concerning ontology, ethics, aesthetics, knowledge, subjectivity, time, language, and becoming. And it demonstrates how the full maturation of Deleuze’s early thought is found in The Logic of Sense, which in turn influences the shape of his subsequent works, including his famous collaborations with Félix Guattari.

Part I of the work begins with an analysis of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, which presents Hegel’s philosophy as a philosophy and ontology of sense, and Deleuze’s review of Hyppolite’s book. Deleuze’s well-known anti-Hegelianism is founded on the response he outlines to Hyppolite’s text, as is the selection of thinkers he subsequently marshals to develop an alternative to Hegel’s and Hyppolite’s dialectical notion of sense. Subsequent chapters of Part I detail the readings Deleuze develops in a series of monographs and shorter writings on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Spinoza to support this cause. Parts II and III of the text examine how the achievements of these earlier studies are cashed out and further developed in the two works of original philosophy that are the culmination of Deleuze’s early period, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense. Here the work argues that The Logic of Sense’s reorientation of sense to being a surface phenomenon, and the key developments that follow therefrom, respond to deficiencies Deleuze finds in his approach in Difference and Repetition, making the later text the proper final expression of Deleuze’s early thought. An Interlude between Parts I and II examines how the two books Deleuze wrote in this period on literary figures, Proust and Sacher-Masoch, also develop key components of his project. An Epilogue shows how the maturation of Deleuze’s philosophy of sense will come to inform his collaborative works with Guattari as well as his later solo works, which together define the second half of Deleuze’s career.

Throughout these explorations, the study shows how Deleuze’s readings of the history of philosophy, along with his approach to questions of philosophical method and to the structuralism and psychoanalysis of his day, are also advanced by engagements with a broad range of additional figures, including Plato, Aristotle, and the ancient Stoics; medieval theologian Duns Scotus; early modern thinkers Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel; mathematician Bernhard Riemann and analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell; Freud and post-Freudian psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan; authors Lewis Carroll and Michel Tournier, and more.