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Abstract
This thesis examines the way in which Gilles Deleuze asserts the ontological priority of events over substances in his 1969 publication, The Logic of Sense, with reference to several philosophers and intellectual movements, namely, the Stoics, Leibniz, Albert Lautman, Gilbert Simondon, structuralism and psychoanalysis.
Chapter 1 analyzes the problem which The Logic of Sense sets out to resolve, that is, to determine the ‘evental’ conditions of the event if everything is to be understood as ontologically dependent on events. It then examines how Deleuze compares events to Stoic lekta, which are both causal effects and the material of Stoic dialectic. The event is seen to be the juncture of an ongoing ‘sense-event,’ simultaneously involving: causal analyses of bodies; the construction of concepts characterizing these bodies; and the development of one’s knowledge of these bodies.
Chapter 2 examines how Deleuze extends a number of Leibnizian notions in order to re-describe this sense-event in terms of ‘static ontological and logical geneses,’ or ‘disjunctive syntheses,’ bearing on divergent ‘points of view’ with regard to the events characterizing worldly things. These syntheses bring about a three-fold determination of: a world of individuals common to divergent points of view; the beliefs of persons holding these points of view; and families of concepts which these individuals and persons ‘exemplify’ insofar as they belong to a common world.
Chapters 3 and 4 explore the way in which, with reference to Lautman, Simondon and structuralism, Deleuze argues that static geneses should be thought of in terms of an underlying structure, wherein the events characterizing things are themselves determined only by other events. Within this structure, events of all orders and types determine each other reciprocally, completely and progressively, and without reference to any substance transcending this system.
Chapter 5 shows how, in relation to psychoanalysis, Deleuze understands the structure of events to be produced as an event by speaking persons, even as this structure also produces these persons, and their speech, as events. We are thus able to conclude that the structure of events is both the evental-determination of events characterizing things in general, and itself an event.