Anarchy of Sense. Husserl in Deleuze, Deleuze in Husserl

Abstract

By putting Deleuze’s method of indirect discourse in practice, this essay aims to put up a reciprocal confrontation between Deleuze and Husserl. The first part of the essay investigates Deleuze’s theory of sense in the Fourteenth Series of Logic of Sense. At issue is the husserlian understanding of the noema, which announces the paradox of sense as a non-existing entity, whose anarchic and ambiguous nature challenges every traditional opposition (for example, the subject – object opposition) and motivates the “overcoming” of ontology by transcendental thinking. The author explains how the deleuzian critique of Husserl’s conception of the noema aims to think sense as an event prior to the noetic-noematic structure of intentionality. This requires, in turn, liberating the event of sense from consciousness and thinking of it as an impersonal transcendental field that does not have the form of a synthetic personal consciousness or a subjective identity. The second part is devoted to an analysis of Husserl’s Bernau Manuscripts which tries to show how Deleuze’s hypothesis about the transcendental field is already at work in Husserl’s reflection on time- consciousness.