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The Priority of Events: Deleuze's Logic of Sense
Sean Bowden shows you how the Deleuzian event should be understood in terms of the broader metaphysical thesis that fixed things or substances are always secondary with respect to events. He achieves this through a reconstruction of Deleuze’s relation to the history of thought from the Stoics through to Simondon, taking account of Leibniz, Lautman, structuralism and psychoanalysis along the way. Key • Focuses on Deleuze's concept of events and highlights the philosophical richness of The Logic of Sense• Engages with material by Lautman and Simondon that has not yet been translated into English• Examines and clarifies a number of Deleuze’s most difficult philosophical concepts, including sense, problematic Ideas and intensive individuation
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
304 pages, Hardcover
First published August 16, 2011
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May 5, 2018
As of this writing, it’s been almost fifty years since Gilles Deleuze published his enigmatic masterpiece, The Logic of Sense. Yet for all that, it’s not altogether clear that the full depth of its philosophical innovations and implications have been justly reckoned with, even - and perhaps especially - by the many Deleuzians who populate the landscape of contemporary 'theory' today. With Sean Bowden’s magisterial study of what may well be Deleuze's most complex work however, this may all be about to change. Ranging over the span of Deleuze's conceptual reference points - the Stoics, Leibniz, Albert Lautmann, Gilbert Simondon, structuralism, and psychoanalysis - Bowden takes up each of these in turn in order to show how Deleuze went about pressing them all into his project of establishing - take a guess! - the ontological priority of events.
As stated baldly by Bowden, for Deleuze, "[e]vents are what characterize things in general. Ontologically, relations between events of all types, orders, magnitudes and durations make the 'thing' what it is, whatever it is.” A simple enough claim on the surface, but one with ramifications strewn far and wide when explored in depth. After all, we tend to think of events as happing to ‘things’, characterising changes in ‘substances’ which, contrary to Deleuze’s approach, would seem to be ontologically primary with respect to events. Yet it is precisely this thesis that Deleuze aims to resist, proposing instead a delicately fashioned ontology in which events themselves would characterise the furniture of the world, one extending ‘all the way down’. A strange thought to classical ears perhaps, but one right in line with Deleuze’s lifelong endeavour to reevaluate and rethink our most cherished intuitions.
Thus although itself offered as a 'contribution to the history of philosophy’ (one partly aimed at opening channels of communication with other theories of the event), so rich are the insights mined from Deleuze’s work that Bowden’s own book sparkles with the shine of novelty. Especially intriguing in this regard are Bowden’s comments on Deleuze’s epistemological practice, in which Bowden in fact finds the trace of a certain (if still distinctive) idealism operative in Deleuze philosophy - in stark contrast to the dominant reading of Deleuze as a strict materialist or empiricist. This to the degree that events, for Deleuze, maintain a necessary relation to language - which is itself an event. Indeed, it's nothing less than the unfolding of this strange topology of the event that underwrites the trajectory of Bowden's study, oriented as it is according to a central question that drives its narrative: "what are the conditions of the event if everything, including the very language in which events are determined, must ultimately be reducible to events?”.
Needless to say, the journey embarked upon in answering this question is anything but straightforward, and the achievement of Bowden’s book is to have charted with painstaking rigour the twists and turns of Deleuze’s efforts to provide a resolution in his philosophy of the event. That said, had Bowden written nothing else than the two chapters dealing with Stoicism and psychoanalysis (in which the neglected influence of Melanie Klein on Deleuze is finally given its due in the English literature!), the Priority of Events would still be a must-read in the world of Deleuze scholarship. While the intense focus on the minutiae of Deleuze’s book can and does translate into an exhausting experience of reading at times, and while it also feels like the wider stakes of Deleuze’s philosophy (beyond the problems raised and tackled in the Logic) are sometimes lost in the detail, in the end, these are small prices to pay for so rewarding an accomplishment.
As stated baldly by Bowden, for Deleuze, "[e]vents are what characterize things in general. Ontologically, relations between events of all types, orders, magnitudes and durations make the 'thing' what it is, whatever it is.” A simple enough claim on the surface, but one with ramifications strewn far and wide when explored in depth. After all, we tend to think of events as happing to ‘things’, characterising changes in ‘substances’ which, contrary to Deleuze’s approach, would seem to be ontologically primary with respect to events. Yet it is precisely this thesis that Deleuze aims to resist, proposing instead a delicately fashioned ontology in which events themselves would characterise the furniture of the world, one extending ‘all the way down’. A strange thought to classical ears perhaps, but one right in line with Deleuze’s lifelong endeavour to reevaluate and rethink our most cherished intuitions.
Thus although itself offered as a 'contribution to the history of philosophy’ (one partly aimed at opening channels of communication with other theories of the event), so rich are the insights mined from Deleuze’s work that Bowden’s own book sparkles with the shine of novelty. Especially intriguing in this regard are Bowden’s comments on Deleuze’s epistemological practice, in which Bowden in fact finds the trace of a certain (if still distinctive) idealism operative in Deleuze philosophy - in stark contrast to the dominant reading of Deleuze as a strict materialist or empiricist. This to the degree that events, for Deleuze, maintain a necessary relation to language - which is itself an event. Indeed, it's nothing less than the unfolding of this strange topology of the event that underwrites the trajectory of Bowden's study, oriented as it is according to a central question that drives its narrative: "what are the conditions of the event if everything, including the very language in which events are determined, must ultimately be reducible to events?”.
Needless to say, the journey embarked upon in answering this question is anything but straightforward, and the achievement of Bowden’s book is to have charted with painstaking rigour the twists and turns of Deleuze’s efforts to provide a resolution in his philosophy of the event. That said, had Bowden written nothing else than the two chapters dealing with Stoicism and psychoanalysis (in which the neglected influence of Melanie Klein on Deleuze is finally given its due in the English literature!), the Priority of Events would still be a must-read in the world of Deleuze scholarship. While the intense focus on the minutiae of Deleuze’s book can and does translate into an exhausting experience of reading at times, and while it also feels like the wider stakes of Deleuze’s philosophy (beyond the problems raised and tackled in the Logic) are sometimes lost in the detail, in the end, these are small prices to pay for so rewarding an accomplishment.
January 27, 2025
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