Gilles Deleuze is multifaceted and his works seemingly heteroclite, which has made it difficult to assess what a “Deleuzian” philosophy may be, even if there are a host of philosophical concepts that bear his signature. Most secondary works on him tend to approach him through one of his works on the canonical philosophers, arguing, for example, that Deleuze is and always was a Nietzschean or a Bergsonian or a Spinozist. But these seem to miss what it means to be properly “Deleuzian.”What would it ...
Gilles Deleuze is multifaceted and his works seemingly heteroclite, which has made it difficult to assess what a “Deleuzian” philosophy may be, even if there are a host of philosophical concepts that bear his signature. Most secondary works on him tend to approach him through one of his works on the canonical philosophers, arguing, for example, that Deleuze is and always was a Nietzschean or a Bergsonian or a Spinozist. But these seem to miss what it means to be properly “Deleuzian.”
What would it mean to read Deleuze “conceptually” and systematically across all of his works? Is there some unifying thread that not only gathers together his philosophical concerns, but also shows us how to read all of his monographic works from start to finish and reveal what a Deleuzian philosophy is?
Our guest today, Nathan Widder of Royal Holloway University, proposes a possible way to navigate this dilemma. For Nathan, the concept that constitutes this guiding thread is the concept of sense. From his earliest published work–an essay reviewing Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence–to his two magni opei (Difference and Repetition, and the aptly named The Logic of Sense), the concept of sense is, according to Nathan, the organizing conceptual principle that drives all of Deleuze’’s analyses and animates his philosophical questioning.
So, what is the concept of sense in the work of Deleuze? What does he mean by it, and how does it organize his philosophical project? These are the questions we tackle in this week’s episode – and if you’’e worried that you do not know much about Deleuze, worry no more, because neither did we. But thanks to Nathan and his new book Deleuze and the Logic of Sense (SUNY Press, 2026) we all learned a lot – and so will you.
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/deleuze
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