In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze wrote:One is established ‘from the outset’ within sense. Sense is like the
sphere in which I am already established in order to enact possible
denotations, and even to think their conditions. Sense is always pre-
supposed as soon as Ispeak; I would not be able to begin without
this presupposition. In other words, I never state the sense of what
I am saying. (28)The problem of sense is thus situated in the perspective of intensity,
and not of structure, of situations and not constants, of singularity and
not rules.
As we look at Deleuze’s philosophical itinerary with a single glance,
we see that it goes from identification to singularity, from repetition to
the event.******Deleuze drew his imaginary panorama through the presentation of
philosophical personae (Hume and Kant, Spinoza and Leibniz, Nietz-
sche and Bergson, and finally Foucault ...). We can speak precisely
about an imaginary landscape because Deleuze maintained that the
task of thinking is to shape one’s inner landscape, to manage in a cer-
tain sense the temperature of being. And thus thought constructs ways
of imagining possible worlds, and constructs them through the image
of thought, the image of a single thought.
The books in the first part of Deleuze’s work are devoted to philo-
sophical personae that allow the delineation of the displacements and
reconstructions, the openings and the cuts that Deleuze made in the
living body of the modern philosophical imaginary.
Empiricism and Subjectivity, published in 1953, was a book on David
Hume. Nine years later, with Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze offered a
splendidly clear reading of Nietzsche’s works. In 1963, he published
Kant’s Critical Philosophy, then in 1964 Proust and Signs. In 1966, he
published Bergsonism, in 1967 The Presentation of Sacher-Masoch
(Masochism. Coldness and Cruelty), and in 1968, Expressionism in
Philosophy: Spinoza.
1968 is an important year for Deleuze’s philosophical itinerary, a
rupture that bore its fruit through the meeting with Guattari. In the
first period of his work, Deleuze confronted the fundamental nodal
points of modern philosophy and thus traced in this way his originalDeleuze and the Rhizomatic Machine 479780230_221192_08_cha07.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 47