Introduction: Humour, or the Univocity of Sense

There are a number of ways to view the genesis of sense in The Logic of Sense. One way that has been emphasised in the secondary literature is as the emergence of consciousness from the body's affects. There is, however, a more interesting and important genesis at stake beneath this one. If the first genesis takes us from the verb to the logical proposition and empirical consciousness, the second off-piste route goes from the verb to the univocity of being. As Deleuze writes, playing on the literal meaning of the scholastic term univocity – one voice (voce) – ‘The univocity of Being signifies that Being is Voice, that it is said.’

This second genesis thus remains at the level of – and indeed is the very culmination of – language's secondary organisation (the surface), and is explicitly discussed throughout the final series of the dynamic genesis, the ‘Thirty-Fourth Series of Primary Order and Secondary Organisation’. It is for this reason that the book concludes at the level of the secondary organisation, and at the level of the relation between speech and language, rather than with the tertiary ordinance of language or of the logical proposition. Hence the genesis at stake in Deleuze's logic of sense as a whole moves from noise to the voice, the voice to speech, speech to the verb and from the verb to univocity, without ever moving all the way up to language (as cut off from speech). As such, the current chapter will complete the account of Deleuze's theory of the phantasm given in the previous chapter, which it will do through the addition of the ontological and literary components needed to move from its beginning in sexuality and language to its never fully realised ending beyond sexuality in the univocity of being.