While subtitled ‘Deleuze and the Lacanian School’, the primary aim of the present book is to provide a close reading of Deleuze's 1969 work The Logic of Sense faithful to the text. This presents an immediate difficulty in that the text is itself highly fragmentary, being comprised of thirty-four miniature chapters or ‘series’ whose interrelations are never fully spelled out – indeed, the form and content of the work aligned, the text's series are ‘nonsense’ yet collectively as a ‘structure’ generate sense as their superficial (yet not insignificant) by-product. The wager of the present book is that ‘sense’ can be made of The Logic of Sense by approaching this structure as a psychoanalysis of sense. Although I will be primarily focusing on the latter portion, the so-called ‘dynamic genesis’ which provides a psychoanalytical account of language acquisition, by reading it in parallel with a number of the book's earlier series I will show how psychoanalysis underpins the larger project.

I will argue that this psychoanalysis of sense comprises three key components, which Deleuze touches on in the preface when he writes that for him The Logic of Sense is ‘an attempt to develop a logical and psychoanalytical novel’. Firstly, insofar as ‘Psychoanalysis is the psychoanalysis of sense’ – at least within the construction or constructivism of The Logic of Sense itself – Deleuze intends to map psychoanalysis directly onto the logic and ontology of sense developed in the book as a whole. This makes his psychoanalysis of sense directly ontological and not merely psychological. Secondly, this logic and ontology of sense does not pre-exist (though outstrips) its construction by language. Thirdly, the psychoanalytical clinic of logical and ontological (or better onto-logical) sense completes itself in the literary work. In short, psychoanalysis is integral to Deleuze's onto-logic of sense even if the latter outstrips the former.