M. Curtis Allen

This article presents formal correspondences between the ontological and logical structures of Deleuze’s theory of sense-events in the Logic of Sense as a “post-Cantorian orientation of thought” (Livingston 2012), grappling with an essential incompleteness or inconsistency at the heart of both Being and thought, one which Deleuze champions positively under the equation Ungrounding = Becoming. Through it, Deleuze’s sometimes slippery use of the concept of singularity (and its relation to the virtual) is elaborated, elucidating a post-Cantorian metaphysics of events, distinct from and preceding Badiou’s, that concretely defines the role of the singular in Deleuze’s early major works.

This essay presents a heterodox reading of the issue of solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP), out of which the whole of the TLP can be re-read. Inspired by, though not dependent on, the themes of virtuality and singularity found in Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’ (presented as a Wittgensteinian ‘immaculate conception’), Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘logical space’ is here complexly related to the paradoxes of the ‘metaphysical subject’ and ‘solipsism,’ within which the strictures of sense are defined, and through which the logico-pictorial scaffolding of the TLP precipitates its own systematic dissolution. It shows how nonsense envelopes not only not idle chatter, and metaphysical confusion, but sense itself.