in 1994, we were introduced to Deleuze's "difference and repetition", which gave us his basic system of thought and concluded with a hint of divulging his epistemology. Our positing of difference in the "Spatium" was to follow an epistemology of the triad of
"bodies - sense - event", which led to the manifestation of the incorporeal. This earlier volume from Columbia univ. press gives us the epistemology in detail. He concentrates on the 3rd moment of "event" and the "logic of sense", as the title announces. He presents an extremely detailed account of : manifestation of the singularity along the line of "past-future" on the surface of external bodies; next , signification as the"ideal-game", for which he lists "8" aspects. Then 3rd, he articulates abstraction along the "border-of-sense", as that creative frontier where our "rebel-element" emerges that stretches the present. Finally he addresses what many might miss: an actual doctrine of Hegel's "counter-blow". He calls it keeping concepts "liquid" and preventing them from the rigidity that is imposed by the "schizophrenic -self". This liquidity is presented as a triad of: word-passion / word-action / word-aesthetic (my rendition for this 3rd moment). The amount of information here is staggering. He is tough to completely assimilate. But take your time; conquer questions immediately before moving on. I did this with his 1994 book; and then this one was much more accessible. Deleuze offers real transcendence for post-moderns; but it is a "produced" transcendence. After completing this volume you should have a firm grasp on his thought. 5 stars of course.

The Logic of Sense (LOS) cries out to be interpreted from the end to the beginning, since the Thirty-Fourth Series is the culmination of all the previous Thirty-Three.

Therefore to summarize the meaning of the Event, best accompanied by humor rather than by irony or satire, is to express how the resonance of original Depth (Freudian Id) of the body and mouth, first by Eros (libidinized) and then by Thanatos (desexualized), become projected onto the shining metaphysical surface via sublimation, thinking and language, into the expressed, the Result. The created is the result of the creating and vice versa. Also "series" represents his concept of difference which is founded on multiplicity (series of more than one) as Univocity of Being, versus the Same or oneness which would yield the Equivocity of Being. It takes the first part of the book to catch up with this finale.

Logic of Sense came shortly after Difference and Repetition (DR), and the difference is remarkable. While DR is much more of an attempt to express concepts, LOS takes on the limits of the ability to express sense, using paradox and Lewis Carroll's fantasy use of language to express his philosophy of difference. It is very demanding of the reader and it helps to have supportive secondary sources such as James Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and Guide--(read this one first), and Sean Bowden's The Priority of Events: Deleuze's Logic of Sense (Plateaus -- New Directions in Deleuze Studies).

Let me state right of the bat that this book is head-deep in psychoanalytic terminology and to me represents the best confrontation (way better than anti-oedipus and a thousand plateaus) of Deleuze's philosophy with psychoanalysis. I think many readers of Deleuze get caught up in Deleuze's originality and forget that he didn't try to describe a completely new system of everything, but rather wanted to describe more precisely the logic of a creative ontology. For a serious critique of psychoanalysis, the logic of sense is the book to go to, not anti-oedipus. It is for this reason - his desire to confront lacanian psychoanalysis head-on that I consider this to be his boldest book.

Also let me mention that it is in the appendix of this book that Deleuze deals with an extremely important problem which is almost completely overlooked by most Deleuze scholars - the problem of the other. This problem is inextricably linked with lacanian psychoanalysis and hence any critique of psychoanalysis must rigorously understand the ontology of the other. Deleuze here says that the ontological status of the other is that of a "possible world" which complicates things a bit because of his earlier critique of the concept of the possible in difference and repetition.

In contrast to one of the previous reviewers, I consider the idea that Deleuze is or was ever a post-semiotic theorist is completely wrong. In many interviews when asked about what he tried to do, he answers that he tried to come up with a theory OF signs (this is even his answer after he worked with guattari, which is very curious)... This is evidenced quite clearly in that one of his earliest books is on proust and signs, and that in Difference and Repetition, signs repeatedly come up as being the "flashes" as Deleuze describes them, that connect intensive differences. A book coming out called "the primacy of semiosis" uses a synthesis of Deleuze's ideas about univocity and signs with other theorists and will probably provide useful reading for this problem.

You can certainly read this book for fun, but I think the more "fun" of Deleuze's books are the works with Guattari, which I am sorry to say, are also his worst books. All of the genius in them (mostly stylistic, not conceptual) relies on the genius of his early work (the concept creation). The concepts were created very early, and as Badiou claims, Deleuze just found different names for them in different contexts. Not to bash Guattari, I think his "Three Ecologies" is quite good (not his earlier stuff though), but the combined work is more interesting than it is philosophically serious. lets not forget something quite crucial: Deleuze states guattari saved him from psychoanalysis - which is why this book is so important since it is the only and last confrontation Deleuze ever has WITHIN psychoanalytic terminology.

Again, I can't stress it enough, to understand this book, you need to read Lacan since much of the book is most obvioiusly a response to and a re-internalization (through "buggery") of lacan (the chapter titles make this quite obvious).

I also recommend as a supplement to this:
1) The Lacanian Subject - by Bruce Fink... Incredibly clear book on lacan's theory of the subject.
2) Difference & Repetition (Deleuze's Masterwork)
3) The Anti-Oedipus papers: Deleuze and guattari's letters to each other in the production of anti-oedipus. Here the problems become more obvious and the genesis of the style explicit.

Nice!

Some of Deleuze's very best work but not up to Whitehead./