Abstract
Logique du sens1is central to my concern, as it is the only book by Deleuze which can be claimed to be ‘about language’. Do we not find in it a chapter (Series no. 26) entitled ‘Of language’? Does not its chute, its last ‘series of paradoxes’ offer us a fully fledged theory of the genesis of language? Can we not say that, although its ostensible theme is a theory of ‘sense’ (a notion to be carefully distinguished from linguistic meaning), the text is a reading of the works of Lewis Carroll, a literary author whose nonsense is steeped in language, and can even be said to consist mainly of intuitions about the workings of language?2
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Notes
G. Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969).
See J. J. Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense (London: Routledge, 1994).
On this, see G. Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme (Paris: PUF, 1966), pp. 99–101 (Engl. trans., pp. 96–8).
G. Deleuze, ‘A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?’, in F. Chatelet, Histoire de la philosophie, vol. 8: Le XXe siè;cle (Paris: Hachette, 1973; 2nd edn, 2000), pp. 299–335.
A. Badiou, L’Etre et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988). On Badiou, see J. J. Lecercle, ‘Cantor, Lacan, Mao, Beckett, Même Combat: the Philosophy of Alain Badiou’, Radical Philosophy, 93, January/February 1999, pp. 6–13.
A. Badiou, L’Ethique (Paris: Hatier, 1993), Engl. trans. A. Badiou, Ethics (London: Verso, 2001).
S. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), p. 92.
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), p. 144 (Engl. trans., p. 152).
M. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p. 299 (my translation).
G. Deleuze and C. Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion; 2nd edn 1996), pp. 77–80 (Engl. trans., p. 62–4).
L. Irigaray, ‘Du fantasme et du verbe’, in Parler n’est jamais neutre (Paris: Minuit, 1985), pp. 69–80.
See J. A. Miller, ‘Language: Much Ado about What?’, in E. Ragland-Sullivan and M. Bracher (eds), Lacan and the Subject of Language (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 21–35.
L. Carroll, The Annotated Alice, ed. M. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 47.
For a detailed analysis, see J. J. Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 14–18. On Lewis Carroll’s linguistic intuitions, see my Philosophy of Nonsense (London: Routledge, 1994).
Luis d’Antin Van Rooten, Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames (London: Angus & Robertson, 1968). This obscure but moving line, obviously the work of an avant-garde French poet, can be glossed thus: ‘you have a beautiful screw [a kind of crane] with which to hoist a fine cargo of lacquer on board’. The ghosts of Pierre Loti and Victor Segalen, unless it is Paul Gauguin, are clearly evoked.
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© 2002 Jean-Jacques Lecercle
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Lecercle, JJ. (2002). Events, Sense and the Genesis of Language. In: Deleuze and Language. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599956_5
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