As in this example the word ‘solidity’ was used wrongly and it seemed that we had shown that nothing

really was solid, just in this way, in stating our puzzles about the general vagueness of sense-experience, and about
the flux of all phenomena, we are using the words ‘flux’ and ‘vagueness’ wrongly, in a typically metaphysical way,
namely without an antithesis; whereas in their correct and everyday use vagueness is opposed to clearness, flux to
stability, inaccuracy to accuracy, and problem to solution. The very word ‘problem’, one might say, is misapplied
when used for our philosophical troubles. These difficulties, as long as they are seen as problems, are tantalizing,
and appear insoluble. (Wittgenstein, 1972: 45–6)

So what of Deleuze’s baroque and ever-shifting metaphysical structures, built not on

firm foundations, but on problems without solutions, on untamed paradox? The above
passage, taken from Wittgenstein’s preliminary studies for his Philosophical Investigations,
captures one of the most powerful external objections to Deleuze’s work in Logic of Sense. Is it
not embarked on an impossible and misleading enterprise? Aren’t its metaphysical
constructions selfdefeating, or at least poor aesthetic creations rather than philosophy, not
only through their desire to place reality ‘against the background of the eternal’, but also in
language without a stable grammar and set of rules (Wittgenstein, 1980: 75)? Aren’t the
concepts of pure difference and pure events words broaching no antithesis and hence
uselessly detached from ‘everyday use’? In selecting insoluble problems and paradoxes as the
genetic core for his philosophy, does not Deleuze choose in experience? Given this ground,
what then would be the purpose and value of the extraordinary and complex constructions
described throughout this book? In short, in Logic of Sense does Deleuze not show his true
colours as the constructor of the latest and perhaps most obscure metaphysics: ‘the
foundations of an abstruse philosophy, which seems to have hitherto served only as a shelter
to superstition, and a cover to absurdity and error!’ (Hume, 1975: 16)?

Deleuze was well aware of these objections, not only in the format laid out by Hume in
his critique of abstruse philosophy, but also as part of an inheritance from Wittgenstein and
ordinary language philosophy. In his first book, on Hume, he inverts the priority given to
epistemology and to scepticism in many interpretations of Hume’s work in favour of the moral
relation of passions to principles, where the human subject is constituted by these principles
and grounded on imagination (Empirisme et subjectivité, pp. 143–4). This is a constant quality
of Deleuze’s readings of other philosophers: he is not solely concerned to counter or disprove,
but rather to divine how a philosophy crosses the ages and offers new potential despite its
timebound aspects. Divination is accompanied by re-enactment and the hidden resources of
an earlier work are dramatised in a different way in order to release them. Together,
divination and theatrical representation – for this is what is meant by replaying and
counteractualisation – form Deleuze’s moral position. He teaches us to sense, represent,
express and thereby donate, by experimenting with events as they occur in series, in order to
be worthy of them. He could have chosen a foe in Hume, in his commitment to common utility
and in the conservatism of his historical experimental method, but instead a different but
consistent Hume was uncovered, one that was already there, not in historically identified
forms, but rather in the conditions for novelty and change in his thought.

Logic of Sense can be read as a continuation of this transfer from knowledge and
understanding of nature constituted by given facts to nature as constituted by changing
relations. This does not imply a concession to abstract and non-empirical thought. Deleuze’s
method is wholly experimental, but where the boundaries of the experiment are loosened in
the extreme in order to exploit its creative side: experimentation as novel and open creativity
rather than as repetitive confirmation or particular disproof. This method implies a change in
the approach to the given, reflecting its alteration from a source of solid and identifiable
evidence, to an inherent fluidity and change. Deleuze’s higher empiricism is therefore a form
of experimentation with the conditions for changing relations, Conclusion: on method and
metaphysics 203 when series (such as habits) encounter events (such as shocks to a system).
The nature of these events and relations calls for kinds of philosophical structures that do not
prejudge becoming out of existence at the outset. This is why Deleuze is so profoundly
antipathetic to common sense and to appeals to physical and psychological concreteness,
because such apparently innocent and reasonable gestures carry the doom of any primary
differences within them. If there is a promise to strike fear in Deleuzian creators it is ‘Seek, and
you will find’ (Matthew 7: 7), for his empiricism must not carry the objective of a search for a
desired identity over to its result. Instead, if anything is to be confirmed at all, it is that no fixed
objective can reflect the necessarily changing nature of reality. (Always seek difference and,
with luck, ye shall not find it). The deep meanings of search, creation and experiment must
therefore change from verification or falsification to innovation; neither the establishment of
truths nor their rejection, but rather an affirmation of new transitory ones. This is not to be
foolhardy or to reject structure and continuity: both are necessary conditions for Deleuze’s
empiricism. It is to be radically critical with respect to intellectual and emotional obstacles to
creativity in order to be worthy of the novelty of events.

Deleuze’s philosophy of language, constructed by deploying literary insights on

philosophical and linguistic theories, is an example of this empiricism. It could be argued that
language should be discovered in its everyday use, or through experiments mimicking those of
the natural sciences or through a dialectical search for repeated patterns and counterfactuals,
where theories stand and fall alongside research in the fields of anthropology, psychology and
now neuroscience. None of these methods could alone answer the problem Deleuze is
tackling, as defined by knots of different kinds of questions. What explains the capacity of
language to mutate beyond fixed grammar? How can language carry emotional significance to
the point of expressing and generating novel significance and sense? What would this
language have to be like in order to stand as a condition for all events, not as a necessary
condition for their occurrence, but rather as a condition after the event where all events are
said to be expressible in language? How can paradoxes be generated in language? And how is
it that these paradoxes produce value or sense and play powerful roles in the generation of
new words and ideal structures? The right experimental fields for such questions are also
literary, rather than strictly the sanitised everyday of a selfselecting sect, or the narrow
strangled and aspic-preserved relics of language laboratories, or the desperate search for
sameness across Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense 204 cultures and individuals. The right
experimental method is to take as comprehensive a view as possible of established structures
and theories and to test them experimentally and dialectically against problems also produced
in literature and played out in lives, not defined with an eye on generality, but with all senses
tuned to the singular. The right justification for such experimental constructions is pragmatic.
(How to donate better next time? How can the experiment remain an event for others?) Thus
Deleuze expresses a new experience of the sign in language from Proust. (Do you feel it?) He
develops a different definition of sense to fit these signs. (But what does it imply for definitions
of denotation, signification and manifestation?) He then experiments with the many paradoxes
and problems the new structure releases through other systems and ossifying common sense.
(How can these be made different and better?) This may not look like experiments according
to popular image multiplication of perspectives on a reality itself multiple and always changing,
is far from negative if accompanied by a constant and generous experimentation – as in the
uncertainty of a child in the presence of an unfamiliar object and perceptions. What ought we
to prefer: accurate, complicated and manifold enquiries or the banishment of the best tools
for such enquiries because they do not favour the passing and already faded certainties of
restricted groups?

One of the rare references to Wittgenstein – in truth, to his disciples – makes these
points explicit in the context of events. It occurs in one of Deleuze’s later books, The Fold:
Leibniz and the Baroque, where he discusses Whitehead’s philosophy of events:

[Whitehead’s philosophy] is provisionally the last great AngloAmerican philosophy, just

before the disciples of Wittgenstein spread their mists, their sufficiency and their terror. An
event is not only ‘a man is crushed’: the great pyramid is an event, and its duration for an hour,
30 minutes, 5 minutes . . ., a passage of Nature, a view of God. What are the conditions for an
event so that all is event? The event produces itself in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, under
the condition that a sort of sieve intervenes. (Le pli, p. 103)

Everything from Logic of Sense on the event is recapped and taken up anew here. There
is the critique of the illusion of semblance and sameness: mists carried by the complacent
sufficiency of common sense rolling out over an essentially changeable reality. There is the
ever-present belief in the priority of passions: in this case, the powerful terror carried through
appeals to an apparently easily accessed everyday, against careful but arduous and only
fleetingly and obliquely accessible constructions. All is event, rather than the restriction of
events to ‘happenings-to’. Ubiquitous infinitives must be deployed against occasional gerunds.
It is how you express an infinitive such as ‘to love’ and thereby how you change its multiple
relations for all rather than the occurrence of the same loving to everyone. Yet if all is multiple,
this is only on condition that this primary multiplicity works through and with a secondary but
necessary series of transient identities. You can have your everyday, but others must have
their different ones. The everyday is part of the event, but we must not make false claims
either for its sufficiency, or for its metaphysical innocence, or for its commonality. Deleuze
returns to these questions on metaphysics and method in Appendix II of Logic of Sense, on
Lucretius. He draws a series of Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense 206 proposals for a philosophical
naturalism resistant to presuppositions of identity: ‘The products of nature cannot be
separated from a diversity that is essential to them’ (LoS, 267, 307). Is this to set up a
straightforward opposition between two metaphysical positions: one settled on sameness, the
other on difference? No. The lesson of Logic of Sense is that diversity is experienced and
encountered in language, thought, bodies and ideas. It appears in creative experiments when
we consider events as they occur in series. So it is not that the next event is guaranteed to be
different, it is rather that the current one is multiple and calls for explanation as differential
movement through many-faceted series. Deleuze’s metaphysics is then not drawn from
outside nature but rather deduced from within it. It is no metaphysics at all, if this is to be a
philosophical insult or a reason to flee complexity for the reassurance of illusory identity. Life is
diverse and calls for philosophical structures adequate to its potential for change, novelty and
renewal:

There is no world which is not manifest in the variety of its parts, places, rivers and the
species that inhabit it. There is no individual absolutely identical to another individual; no calf
which is not recognisable to its mother; no two shellfish or grains of wheat which are
indiscernible. There is no body composed of homogeneous parts – neither plant nor stream
which does not imply a diversity of matter or heterogeneity of elements, where each animal
species, in turn, may find the nourishment appropriate to it. From these three points of view
we deduce the diversity of worlds themselves: worlds are innumerable, often of different
species, sometimes similar, and always composed of heterogeneous elements. (LoS, 266, 308)