Deleuze’s “The Logic of Sense”, (Chapter 21, Twenty-First Series of the Event)

Sartre argues that a building can only be demolished within consciousness. Within being itself there is nothing but an indifferent rearrangement. It is thus only for consciousness that ‘events happen’. In “The Logic of Sense” Deleuze rejects this view on many fronts. How can events be locked within, and wholly relevant to, a consciousness that would bestow meaning onto its contents, when both the formation of this conscious milieu, and this bestowal of meaning, are themselves events? The subject always already finds themselves in a world of meaningful events: critical and significant, and thereby ‘singular’, points. Events are actualized within states of affairs; things undergo events in a thick present. One day I’ll die. But events outstrip this actualization and stretch into the virtual, where they are complex themes, or problems; always ongoing relative to any determined moment, the event escapes the present, and is exactly that which we don’t find in the things and states of affairs. Where death is, I will never be. Events, and the problems that form their opposite face, are singular, in the sense of tracing a singularity, and far from being ephemera chained within consciousness, they are the site of the production of significance, ‘sense’, itself.