is always characterized by the singularity of the meeting or the event; no one thinks in the same way. Clearly, then, Deleuze does not think that thought has a natural inclination to the truth. In fact, it has no natural inclination whatsoever. Still, thought is about something. Deleuze calls the “object” of thought “sense” (NP, 104; LS, 120). We will see now how “sense” differs from “truth.” Throughout the discussion, I follow Mark Lester and Hugh Tomlinson, who render the French sens with “sense,” and not Richard Howard, who prefers “meaning” instead in his translation of Proust and Signs.
The Sense of a Sign Is Not Situated in the Object or the Subject, but in the Essence as Absolute Difference (Fourth and Third Postulates)
The signs that confront thought are like enigmas or hieroglyphs: They cannot simply be deciphered. They simultaneously reveal and hide themselves, for their content or sense can never be univocally grasped. Still, thought cannot but try to explicate or unfold the sense(s) implied in the sign: “Sense is like the other side [l’envers] of the sign: the explication of what it implicates” (Zourabichvili 2012, 68). Thought has no choice but to try to analyze (and simplify) the secret of the sign in explicit and determinate significations. Explication, however, does not mean that the sense is given. The explication of sense fundamentally influences the development of the sign and the sense it implies. The sign also develops itself in a parallel movement, and the self-unfolding of the sign affects the sense and its unfolding. As a consequence, the sense of a sign is always temporal, it is always affected by the singular and accidental nature of the sign.
But what is the sense of a sign? In line with Proust, Deleuze argues that the sense (or “truth”) of a sign has nothing to do with the object that emits it. The object is just the carrier, and hence it does not contain the secret, or content, of the sign. This idea contradicts what is presupposed in perception, love, and thought. Perception spontaneously attributes the qualities of the sign to the object from which they issue forth; for example, we transpose the timidity suggested by lowered eyes to the person who lowers his eyes. Love, and more specifically the tendency to want to possess the loved one, is based on a confusion of the attractiveness of the signs emitted by the loved one with the attractiveness of the loved one himself. And, finally, the fact that thought tends toward objectivity (PS, 20) is inscribed in the premise that the truth needs to be articulated and communicated. Thought searches for objective contents and for explicit and univocal significations (PS, 20) because it confuses the sign’s significance with its referent. In Deleuze (PS, 19), conversely, the sign designates an object but signifies something different. Hence, the sense of a sign cannot be grasped in words and assignable phenomena. In order to detect the sense of a sign, we need to concentrate on the multitude of signs that accompany the concerned sign. The sense of a sign becomes clear only from within the field wherein the sign is situated.
A second misconception of sense is the subjectivist one. Unlike the objectivist view described above, subjectivists confuse the sense of a sign with the associations a sign evokes in the thinker. According to Deleuze, sense cannot result from subjective association because the latter does not allow one to distinguish the sense of one sign from that of another, since everything “is permitted in the exercise of associations” (PS, 24). Two different signs can evoke the same arbitrary and ephemeral associations. Moreover, subjectivism of this sort makes the content of a sign inaccessible to others: the sense remains strictly personal and idiosyncratic.
Hence, the sense of a sign is “beyond designated objects, beyond intelligible and formulated truths, but also beyond subjective chains of association” (PS, 25). It is situated in alogical or supralogical essences or Ideas (PS, 25). Just like Platonic Ideas, Deleuze’s supralogical essence refers to the origin or ground of things and concepts: it is what unites the things and concepts that fall under the same heading; it is that from which they are generated. However, Deleuze’s essences are not general and identical, like Plato’s Ideas, but singular and differential. And they are not transcendent, but immanent. Moreover, Deleuzean essences need to be produced, whereas Platonic Ideas are to be remembered. As we will see in chapter 3, Deleuze develops his account of “Ideas” more in dialogue with Kant than with Plato. As the origin of things and concepts, as that in which specific things and concepts are not yet distinguished, the essence is that which “constitutes the true unity of sign and sense” (PS, 25),11 that which unites sign and sense in a perfect adequation (PS, 33). Deleuze uses the Neoplatonic term “complication” to “designate the original state that precedes any development, any deployment, any ‘explication’” (PS, 29) of the sign. Whereas sense is implicated or implied in the sign (which, in its turn, needs to be explicated or unfolded), the complicated essence relates implication and explication to one another:
Implication and explication, envelopment and development: such are the categories of the Search. First of all, sense is implicated in the sign; it is like one thing wrapped within another. [. . .] But the metaphors of implication correspond further to the images of explication. For the sign develops, uncoils at the same time that it is interpreted. [. . .] Sense itself is identified with this development of the sign as the sign was identified with the involution of sense. So that Essence is finally the third term that dominates the other two, that presides over their movement: essence complicates the sign and the sense; it holds them in complication; it puts the one in the other. (PS, 57–58; translation slightly modified)
The complicated, ideal essence includes or implies all explications of itself, which means that implication and explication are two aspects of the same complicated, ideal being. The complication is a unity that already encompasses the multitude of the concrete expressions.
I should remark that although Deleuze distinguishes between sense and essence—the essence is what unites sense and sign—there are also numerous passages in which he does not distinguish them. He speaks, for example, of the incarnation of essences (PS, 43, 49); of works of art revealing essences (PS, 27); and of the perfect identity of sign and essence (PS, 42). In what follows, then, I will treat “essence” and “sense” as equivalent, just as Deleuze does.
Let me now explain how we are to understand Deleuze’s statement that Ideas or essences are not unique but differential. It is helpful in this context to look at art, and more specifically at a poem by an author extensively discussed in The Logic of Sense, Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. What is the sense of this poem? As the title indicates, the poem is about hunting the snark. That allows us to reduce the previous question to: What is the sense of the snark? A snark is one of those typical Carrollian portmanteau words. It is a combination of two words: snake and shark. Thus, the sense of the word snark is constituted not by something that is identical to itself but by the difference and field of tension between the two existing words. Since Carroll applies this portmanteau strategy to the entire poem, the sense of the poem is constituted by the difference between two “series,” as Deleuze calls it. The snark is the point around which two divergent series turn. Let me illustrate this with some lines from the poem:
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care,
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap. (Carroll 1961, 179)
On the one hand, there is the series of demonstrable bodies (thimbles, forks, railway-shares, and soap); and, on the other, the series of intangible concepts (care, hope, life, smiles). The snark assembles both series, not because it is what both series have in common—strictly speaking, the two series share nothing—but because it traverses them. It contaminates one series with the other. It reflects elements of one series in elements of the other.12 If that is possible, it is because each series is itself not a collection of elements with something
