SEAN BOWDEN

he Priority of Events: Deleuze's Logic of Sense

Sean Bowden, The Priority of Events: Deleuze's Logic of Sense, Edinburgh University Press, 2011,
296pp., $40.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780748643646.
Reviewed byDavid Scott, Coppin State University
Sean Bowden's The Priority of Events: Deleuze's Logic of Sense is a timely and
invaluable resource for resuscitating interest in a work that, despite the current
renaissance in Deleuze studies, continues to perplex and discomfort those who seek a
way into its unique and hybrid structure and conceptions. Bowden's strategy is not to
propose an original philosophical argument; rather, with dogged rigor, he masterfully
traces a single idea -- the ontological priority of the event -- through a series of figures
and movements in Deleuze's Logic of Sense, and uses them as a thread to systematize
the book's unique and sometimes paradoxical expression. Patiently, over the course of
five chapters, Bowden surveys this primary theme, which he takes to be the
fundamental problem directing The Logic of Sense. He interprets figures (Leibniz,
Lautman, Simondon) and movements (Stoicism, structuralism, psychoanalysis), which
sometimes float to the surface like confetti, only to suddenly disappear back into the
weft and warp of Deleuze's inscrutable text. In some cases, even in Deleuze's own text,
the relative significance of their ideas contradicts their actual, often oblique, presence
in his enigmatic book. In this impressively thorough work, incorporating key
untranslated sources, Bowden focuses on an aspect of Deleuze's thought that is more
often than not neglected because of the idiosyncratic presentation and novel
negotiation of metaphysics, ethics, literature, linguistics, and psychoanalysis in Logic
of Sense. By constructing a coherent argument, which frames a coherent route for us to
follow, Bowden provides a welcome gift to both the novice reader and the experienced
scholar.
Bowden writes near the conclusion: "this present study can be considered to be a work
in the history of philosophy" (278). Bowden's decision to write on Deleuze means that
he must wade into the deep waters of the apparent irreconcilable divide between
scholar and philosopher, protected on either side by those who have vested interests
in this opposition -- disciplinary, institutional and, most certainly, political interests.
Bowden handles this predicament with great poise. For Deleuze this problem -- that to
do philosophy is either to create or to commentate -- is ultimately a false problem. But
it is always present and accompanies his every interpretation of Spinoza or Nietzsche
or Bergson, as it structures what he sees as the dominant "image of thought," which
the history of philosophy contrives for self-justification: "an image of thought called
philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking"
(Deleuze, Dialogues13).
Thus, Deleuze's own work is constantly undercutting the division (that he himself
insists on) between those texts that exemplify the history of philosophy (Spinoza,
Nietzsche, or Bergson) and his more "properly philosophical" works like Difference and
Repetition and Logic of Sense. "I like writers who seemed to be part of the history of
philosophy, but who escaped from it in one respect or altogether"
(Deleuze, Dialogues 14-5). The extent to which the thinkers and writers discussed
in The Logic of Sense approach and exploit the underlying problem--either nourishing
the creation of concepts or upsetting the sanctioned characterization of a
philosopher's thought via a problematizing interpretation--determines the degree to
which Deleuze's work is a philosophical success. Therefore, Bowden's decision to place
the problem of the problem at the center of his interpretation of The Logic of Sense is
meant to operationally and structurally orient us in Deleuze's thought. If there is one
thing to critique in this vital work, it is that by omitting a discussion of phenomenology
Bowden misses a significant opportunity to relate what he takes as essential in The
Logic of Sense to the phenomenological conception of "transcendental ontology." It
would be an overstatement, however, to suggest that this exclusion in any way
compromises his overall purpose.
Bowden 's first chapter fills a gap in Deleuze studies. He identifies the Stoics as "the
first philosophers to consider events as ontologically irreducible to 'things,' whether
material or ideal" (17). He finds justification, therefore, for Deleuze's turn to Stoicism
on the basis of the its distinction between "incorporeal events, meanings, or effects"
and corporeal bodies, things, or abstract Ideas. More generally, Bowden helpfully
outlines the ontological and epistemological principles of Stoic logic, physics, and
ethics. He then narrows his focus to the Stoic ontological perspective that Deleuze
adopts to conceptualize event-sense as the 'fourth dimension' of language. Bowden
argues that Deleuze, consequently, justifies the Stoic perspective on the grounds that
Stoic lekta or the "sayable," the incorporeal predicate-event, brings "language to bear
upon itself." As a result, a dimension of temporality, Aion, is disclosed: "the infinite
equivalence of an unlimited becoming" (Logic of Sense 3). Bowden helps us to see the
grounds for Deleuze's finding in the Stoics the precursors to Nietzsche's 'eternal
return' and Bergson's real durée. The question, however, is, How can language exploit
the full expressive potential of sense? In other words, how can sense express more
primarily real genesis, which secondarily determines the overt dimensions of the
proposition: manifestation, signification, and denotation?
Bowden's analysis of Deleuze's Leibnizianism in Chapter Two is an important
contribution. What motivates Deleuze's refashioning of Leibniz is, according to
Bowden, the problem of understanding how events that are ontologically primitive in
relation to 'things' are prolonged in the problem of how we are to acquire knowledge
of things through grasping their events. Or rather, the problem of how Deleuze's
fashioning a kind of "neo-Leibnizianism without God," by a "process of triangulation" --
a notion Bowden borrows from Donald Davidson -- establishes the relay between the
distinct epistemological and ontological dimensions (logical genesis and ontological
genesis) engendering events, simultaneously. In this chapter we get the true focus of
Bowden's entire interpretation -- Deleuze's structural and operational foregrounding of
the problem as problem in the "immanent double genesis of being and thought" (118).
Bowden's refashioning of a Leibnizianism divorced from an original substantial
instance (God) offers a way for Deleuze to theorize, in terms of a problem,
a positive relation, no longer strictly exclusive or negative, between incompossible
worlds. What this also means is that knowledge is reciprocally conditioned by the same
ontological condition engendering being, insofar as knowledge or belief is determined
by the knowing subject's triangulation of its objective being "within an inter-worldly
'problem'" – an intersubjective and linguistic milieu -- "which is 'resolved' by the way in
which these operators take on particular, determinate values within the incompossible
worlds forming the cases of solution to the problem" (71-2).
Bowden's third chapter, focused on Albert Lautman and Gilbert Simondon, two
brilliant, if still largely neglected thinkers, is a major achievement. The relevance of
Lautman and Simondon, according to Bowden, lies in how each contributes to
Deleuze's development of the problem as the primary structural and operational
element in The Logic of Sense. As Bowden writes, "Deleuze first introduces his concept
of the 'problem' (and, as will be seen, his concept of 'singularity') in order to establish
the conditions for this internal genesis" (101). The problem is the internalizing
of genesis in sense, as genesis is the problematization ofsense. He continues, "every
designating proposition has a sense, but this sense will itself be located in a sub-
representative problem in relation to which these propositions in turn function as
elements of response or cases of solution" (101). Lautman and Simondon, though
adopting distinct manners reflecting their divergent goals, share the idea that
philosophical invention is nourished by a sub-representational problem. Lautman
grasps the problem in a generalized mathematical "dialectic," composed by the
dissymmetrical and 'differential' relation (dy/dx), whereas, for Simondon it is an ideal
pre-individual field, a problematic, metastable system of maximal potentiality,
engorged with incompatibilities. For both the individual 'thing' and Idea are but
tenuously stabilized or individualized structures resulting from the resolving of the
tensions internal to problematic fields. Thus, Bowden provides evidence that Deleuze's
theory of intensive individuation builds upon the work of Lautman and Simondon by
relating the problematic Idea to actual things via a necessity of an ideal problematic
field, so that the knowledge embodied in propositional statements and objectively
knowable things becomes mutually and reciprocally individuated through the same
process without identity and without assuming a determining instance external to the
system (102).
The final two chapters focus on the presence of structuralism and psychoanalysis
in The Logic of Sense. In the chapter on structuralism, Bowden clarifies Jacques Lacan's
tripartite distinction of the symbolic, imaginary, and real, while he carefully traces
Deleuze's borrowing from Roman Jakobson's linguistics. Both discussions are tailored
to Deleuze's ontological motive: to dramatize the internal genesis of the event via the
actualization in language of an ideal but no less real 'pre-individual' ontological
dimension of virtual singularities. Again, Bowden judiciously references
Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, as well as the important essay, "How does one
Recognize Structuralism?" If there is a quibble, it is that Bowden relies perhaps too
heavily in the fourth chapter on Difference and Repetition. The unintentional result is
that these ideas as developed in The Logic of Sense become marginalized.
Bowden's final chapter, concentrating on psychoanalysis, is in many ways his tour de
force. Typically, one reads Deleuze's thought from the perspective of his later
suspicion of psychoanalysis -- influenced by Felix Guattari. Certainly, one can suggest
that the relative neglect of The Logic of Sense might stem from the unwillingness for
many to see Deleuze's obvious attraction to psychoanalysis as anything other than a
naïve misadventure or an aborted failure. Deleuze is, of course, partially to blame for
this characterization. In either case, one does a disservice to the transformation
undergone by psychoanalytic ideas and concepts that result from Deleuze's
interpretation. Building upon his discussion of structuralism, Bowden argues that
Deleuze's turn to psychoanalysis is necessitated by his desire to show how the genesis
of the structure-problem "is thought by means of a structural account of the entry of
the real, biological child into what Lacan calls the 'symbolic order', comprising all of
the linguistic and cultural structures governing human existence" (185). His revealing
how Deleuze brings together Lacan and Melanie Klein (two overtly mutually opposed
positions), while demonstrating how Deleuze himself remained neither Lacanian nor
Kleinian (or Freudian for that matter), is a great feat. Without fidelity to any one
psychoanalytical doctrine, Deleuze, in Bowden's interpretation, invents an entirely new
metaphysical-psychoanalytic "science of events" (186). Thus, psychoanalysis is taken to
be the extension of the Stoic distinction between the incorporeal 'sayable' and
corporeal 'things.' Bowden leaves us with the impression that Deleuze's later negative
stance toward psychoanalysis is less a rejection of what it achieves than it is a rejection
of the means by which it achieves its goals. It is an intriguing new perspective on
Deleuze's relation to psychoanalysis.

Even so, a not always faint murmur of another conversation intrudes in this final
chapter, as elsewhere. It is a conversation that, ironically, Bowden strengthens by his
choosing to silence it.

On the first page of The Priority of Events Husserl specifically, but phenomenology
more generally, is dismissed on the grounds that Bowden does not want to reduplicate
other's efforts. Yet, how can one truly address the problem of sense, the ontology of
events, without confronting Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, when Deleuze writes:
"Could phenomenology be this rigorous science of surface effects" (Logic of Sense 21)?
Or, how can one ignore Deleuze's crediting Husserl with rediscovering "the living
sources of the Stoic inspiration" (20)? One notices how skillfully Bowden avoids the fact
that the primary reference for Lautman is Heidegger, that Simondon's thought is
clearly nourished by his teacher Merleau-Ponty, and that Heidegger's 'ontological
difference' structures Simondon's own ontological interrogations. How do we ignore
that in The Logic of Sense Deleuze endorses Sartre's critique of Husserl? One does not
have to be a phenomenologist or in agreement with its methods and goals to ask what
I believe is fair a fair question: How might Bowden's evasion of phenomenology distort
his intentions? In The Logic of Sense Deleuze certainly asks a related question of
himself.
Bowden's marginalization of phenomenology is evident in relation to Deleuze's
insistence that Husserl's formulation of "expression" (a central concept for Deleuze --
cf. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza) extends the Stoic discovery of the 'fourth
dimension of sense' -- "an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface
of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition" (Logic of
Sense 19). Specifically, Deleuze credits Husserl's formulation of the "perceptual noema"
to Stoic inspiration (Logic of Sense 20). Like sense, the noema is neither reducible to
the proposition nor 'lived' mental representation nor general concepts. Sense is the
"neutral," "impassive," "sterile splendor" that, nonetheless, is the "genetic power"
directing denotation, manifestation, and signification. So, if Bowden correctly notes
Deleuze's exploiting of the distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung (sense and
reference), he leaves out the fact that it is Husserl and not Frege who inspires
Deleuze's reformulation of this distinction.
From Deleuze's perspective, Husserl's failure results from the fact that he cannot
resolve the problem at the "heart of the logic of sense." Thus, it is a bit perplexing that
Bowden ignores what Deleuze calls the problem of the "immaculate conception": how
does genesis arise from the neutrality or sterility of sense itself? Phenomenology
cannot resolve the problem, let alone ask the question, because it reduces genesis to
intentional structures or ideal categories passively integrated a priori into a
transcendental activity. This is why Deleuze continues an on-going dialogue with Ideas
I, Husserl's text most exemplifying his 'transcendental turn,' which, for Deleuze
intersects with the Stoic impulse "because of the reductive methods of
phenomenology" (Logic of Sense 96). In Kantian terms, to be intelligible, whatever
product genesis makes 'possible', is precisely the case because it is already predicated
on the structures presumed by the transcendental activity of a subject. Thus, in the
last analysis, the phenomenological transcendental subject renders genesis, for
Husserl, impossible. For Deleuze Husserlian genesis merely traces the transcendental
on the outlines of the empirical.
Quite explicitly, Deleuze provides a critique of Husserl's "sleight-of-hand" change from
a static categorical phenomenology to one supposedly more dynamically constitutive
of reality. Deleuze insists on the absolute non-resemblance between what conditions
(metastable, pre-individual plane of singularities) and what is conditioned (actualized
or the individuated 'thing'). Only then do "the conditions of the true genesis become
apparent," Deleuze writes (Logic of Sense 105). Without addressing this issue,
Deleuze's borrowings from Simondon, Lautman and structuralism remain untethered.
Because of Bowden's decision to completely sidestep Deleuze's overt negotiations with
phenomenology, his otherwise sophisticated commentary suggests a pedagogical
narrowness. If, the omission of phenomenology strengthens Bowden's focus on the
ontological priority of the event over substantial ontologies via the genealogy of
figures and movements Deleuze outlines, it also incompletely articulates the problem
of the sense-event as Deleuze formulates it. We have lost any idea of whom Deleuze
takes to be his primary adversary, against whom he stakes out his position.

This worry is most clearly manifested in Bowden's description of Deleuze's ontological

prioritizing of events as offering a "transcendental ontology." For Bowden Deleuze's
transcendental ontology defines events that "are ontologically prior to substances, 'all
the way down'" (82). But Bowden provides a second definition: it is that the priority of
events over worldly individuals means that the world of events "is not something
external to the conditions of knowledge" (69).

Immediately we are reminded that more than any other philosopher, Heidegger's path-
breaking reinterpretation of Kant's transcendentalism sets the stage for Bowden's
reference to transcendental ontology. In Heideggerian terms, the "transcendental" does
not refer to a priori knowledge or the possibility of synthetic knowledge, but rather to
the possibility itself for comprehending the ontological constitution of beings.
Ontological knowledge "says something about the intrinsic dynamics of beings"
(Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason 65) and
thereby expands the possibility of knowledge beyond merely logical possibilities. Thus,
the ontological truth it grants thought is primordial, Heidegger argues, insofar as it
discloses in advance what is essential about the being of beings. "Transcendental
knowledge is knowledge which investigates the possibility of an understanding of
being, a pre-ontological understanding of being; and such an investigation is the task
of ontology. Transcendental knowledge is ontological knowledge, i.e., a priori
knowledge of the ontological constitution of beings. Because transcendental
knowledge is ontological knowledge, Kant can equate transcendental philosophy with
ontology" (Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant 127, my italics).
In fact, the richness and thoroughness of The Priority of Events, ironically, causes one
to feel more intensely the absence of phenomenology and to wonder if the rigorous
clarification and exposition carried out by Bowden might not have been fuller with
some level of engagement of it, however indirect. Instead, we are left with a vague
distortion, a kind of astigmatism on the surface of Bowden's presentation, where its
absence is discernible.

Bowden's reticence to identify the phenomenological origins of his characterization of

Deleuze's transcendental ontology, means that he omits what is at stake in Simondon's
formulation: the individuation of knowledge requires a new conception of the subject,
or a new transcendental perspective for subjectivity, on consciousness, that is
expressive of this immanent double genesis of being and thought. Consequently,
Deleuze does not conserve the form of consciousness within the transcendental, so
much as try to replace the a priori unity of synthesis and identity of an individuated
consciousness-Ego with an impersonal, pre-individual, problematic transcendental field
-- which in his last published work is "defined by pure immediate consciousness with
neither object nor self, as a movement which neither begins nor ends" and is
constituted by singularities or potentials in a process of auto-unification (Deleuze,
"Immanence: A Life").

Despite the refusal to acknowledge the phenomenological roots of his own

interpretation, Bowden's greatest appeal is that he courageously faces head-on the
unique challenge of commenting on Deleuze. As he writes, "if we are to remain faithful
[to] the Deleuzian event, there is no choice for the future but to go beyond Deleuze"
(278). Should the question be: has Bowden been too faithful to Deleuze's thought? In
truth, this is a question that is only answerable in the future (as all good questions
should be). What we can admit, however, is that we are grateful to Bowden for the
opportunity to ponder this useful question. And for the future, we are left inspired by
same truth he admits: that ultimately philosophical success is engendered in the
necessary failures that guide the history of philosophy.