On the Sense and Nonsense in Deleuze

Abstract

For Deleuze sense is not something ordinary, on the contrary sense for him runs counter to to common sense and to good sense; sense in its paradoxical nature affirms past and future, before and after, both senses or directions at the same time. Sense is neither denotation, manifestation or meaning, but a fourth person singular, a non-existent entity, an event, an “incorporeal” entity, it is an extra-being. Sense is event, and as such points to the paradoxical element without which a structure cannot be thought. This paradoxical element or perpetum mobile is for Deleuze nonsense, which should be distinguished from the absurd and from the sub-sense, Untersinn. In our opinion, however, the major limitations of Deleuze's “play of sense and nonsense” consist in a vitalistic conception of singularity as the true subject which pulls the strings “behind the curtain”. If in subsequent works Deleuze abandons the very concept of sense, and yet maintains his basic set up in almost the same form until the very end, until What is Philosophy?, the question remains who or what now plays the strategic role played in The Logic of Sense by nonsense?