Implication and explication, envelopment and development: such are the categories of the Search. First of all, sense is implicated in the sign; it is like one thing wrapped within another. [. . .] But the metaphors of implication correspond further to the images of explication. For the sign develops, uncoils at the same time that it is interpreted. [. . .] Sense itself is identified with this development of the sign as the sign was identified with the involution of sense. So that Essence is finally the third term that dominates the other two, that presides over their movement: essence complicates the sign and the sense; it holds them in complication; it puts the one in the other. (PS, 57–58; translation slightly modified)
The complicated, ideal essence includes or implies all explications of itself, which means that implication and explication are two aspects of the same complicated, ideal being. The complication is a unity that already encompasses the multitude of the concrete expressions.
I should remark that although Deleuze distinguishes between sense and essence—the essence is what unites sense and sign—there are also numerous passages in which he does not distinguish them. He speaks, for example, of the incarnation of essences (PS, 43, 49); of works of art revealing essences (PS, 27); and of the perfect identity of sign and essence (PS, 42). In what follows, then, I will treat “essence” and “sense” as equivalent, just as Deleuze does.
Let me now explain how we are to understand Deleuze’s statement that Ideas or essences are not unique but differential. It is helpful in this context to look at art, and more specifically at a poem by an author extensively discussed in The Logic of Sense, Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. What is the sense of this poem? As the title indicates, the poem is about hunting the snark. That allows us to reduce the previous question to: What is the sense of the snark? A snark is one of those typical Carrollian portmanteau words. It is a combination of two words: snake and shark. Thus, the sense of the word snark is constituted not by something that is identical to itself but by the difference and field of tension between the two existing words. Since Carroll applies this portmanteau strategy to the entire poem, the sense of the poem is constituted by the difference between two “series,” as Deleuze calls it. The snark is the point around which two divergent series turn. Let me illustrate this with some lines from the poem:
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care,
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap. (Carroll 1961, 179)
On the one hand, there is the series of demonstrable bodies (thimbles, forks, railway-shares, and soap); and, on the other, the series of intangible concepts (care, hope, life, smiles). The snark assembles both series, not because it is what both series have in common—strictly speaking, the two series share nothing—but because it traverses them. It contaminates one series with the other. It reflects elements of one series in elements of the other.12 If that is possible, it is because each series is itself not a collection of elements with something in common, but a collection of elements that exist only insofar as they differ from one another. Thus, the basis of the series, and of the synthesis of both series, is not similarity or analogy, but distance or difference. They are the result of what Deleuze calls a “disjunctive synthesis” (LS, 56). In a disjunctive synthesis, difference does not separate, it unites: “distance, [. . .] as that which relates one to the other [. . .] Incompossibility is now a means of communication” (LS, 198). It is important to note that difference does not unite series arbitrarily. Not every series can be combined. Deleuze (PS, 39) writes that the difference that constitutes the essence is not an exterior difference, but a difference that has been interiorized, that has become immanent. This means that, although it is impossible to determine what allows the artist to connect one series to another, there is something within a particular series that leads the artist to connect it with another. I will come back to this problem in the chapters on Cézanne and Proust.
Because the snark connects series—which are collections of differences—on the basis of their difference, it can be characterized as that which differentiates differences. Thus, the essence of a sign has, in itself, a differentiating or individuating function (DR, 146). This will be developed further in the second chapter. In the meantime, we can conclude that the essence is not the result of a constitution process that starts from a subject, but an origin in the sense that it forms the subject (and objects): “It is not the subject that explains essence, rather it is essence that implicates, envelops, wraps itself up in the subject. Rather, in coiling round itself, it is essence that constitutes subjectivity. It is not the individuals who constitute the world, but the world enveloped, the essences that constitute the individuals. [. . .] Essence is not only individual, it individualizes” (PS, 43).
A number of consequences attach to the differential nature of the sense of a sign. First, its instability and thus nontransparency: because each series consists of terms that owe their “identity” to their difference from other terms, and because this difference is volatile, the terms and thus the series can be said to be in perpetual displacement in relation to other terms and series (LS, 47). Since the sense turns on the communication between two different series, it can be said that sense is displaced in relation to itself. It is not a fixed identity but a becoming. Deleuze (LS, 93) describes this displacement also as a nonplace—or, more specifically, as a place without an occupant or an occupant without a place.13 It is an aleatory point (LS, 92). If we understand the two series as diverging lines made up of numerous points, the sense is the aleatory point that seems to be on both lines simultaneously, but never on one specific point at one precise moment. The aleatory point is like the object from another Carroll book, Alice in Wonderland: in the old sheep shop, Alice is confronted with an object that is never where she looks, but always on a higher or lower shelf (Bogue 2003a, 26).
The differential nature of sense also implies that sense is always new. In Proust and Signs, for example, Deleuze claims that the sense of the famous madeleine cookie in the Search is neither Combray as it was once experienced in the past by the narrator, nor Combray as the narrator knows it in the narrative present. On the contrary, when the narrator dips the cookie into his tea and is thus reminded of the town where he had spent his holidays as a child, the cookie reveals Combray in an absolutely new form, a form that is neither reducible to the present that Combray once was, nor reducible to the present that Combray is. Combray appears in its truth or essence, and not in its reality. The cookie reveals Combray in its eternity (PS, 8).
The idea of sense as difference is the core of Deleuze’s affirmative criticism on representational thought. According to Deleuze, representational thought is not only incapable of thinking the exterior in its exteriority (this was shown in the first postulate), it is also unable to conceive difference in itself. The first inadequacy shows itself in the assumption that thought has a natural affinity with the truth. The second inadequacy has to do with the fact that representational thought can think difference only by starting from identity. In other words, it can understand difference only as the opposite of the same, the similar, or the analogous. These four elements—the Same, the Similar, the Analogous, and the Opposed (DR, 334)—constitute the heart of the straitjacket of representation, which Deleuze describes in the fourth postulate of representation. These four elements refer to the specific way in which the search for identity determines, respectively, conception, perception, judgment, and imagination (DR, 174).
We will start by looking at how the creation of representational concepts is centered around the notion of the Same. According to Deleuze, Plato is the godfather of this identity-fetishism in conception. As is well-known, Plato distinguishes between an ideal and a sensible reality, the former being the level of the Ideas and serving as the ground for the latter. Plato’s Idea refers to that which remains the same throughout change and individual specification. Thus, it is general, unique, and, more importantly, essentially determined by its being constant, its being-what-it-is (auto kath’