The topic of this article came out of an academic shock: one of those jarring halts where agreeable study is brought short by an incongruous idea or image. Such jolts can be a good thing: they force us to think anew, in the Deleuzian sense of event as a shock to thought. (Deleuze 1968) They can only occur if the underlying research is persuasive; when a convincing and absorbing flow is interrupted. The shock occurred to me during the reading of Hannah Richter’s ground-breaking PhD thesis on Deleuze, Luhmann and sense. (Richter 2018)
The thesis and subsequent monograph set the scene for a Deleuze and Luhmann encounter through a dialectics of closeness and distance around shared terms: above all sense but also paradox, structure, event, time and political pragmatics. (Richter 2023) The two works are essential reading for investigations around Deleuze and Luhmann. I knew that paradox and structure, but also system, were important for work on Deleuze and Luhmann, because of an interest in Luhmann’s work on autopoiesis and a hunch that this concept was as distant from Deleuze, time and politics as we could get.
Yet there is no doubting that the thinkers cover common ground and there are productive crossovers such as a situation of sense in relation to action and an understanding of the role of paradox for creativity or development. In a chapter on irony and humour, Richter shows this by drawing attention to the possibility of combining Luhmann’s ‘sobriety’ and Deleuze’s humour, and vice versa, not only for a richer interpretation, but also to arrive at more precise conceptual understanding of ideas about determinacy and contingency. (Richter 2018, 32)
It’s in a discussion of sense and contingency that the shock hit me through a concept that occurs many times in Richter’s analysis (17 times spread out through the work). For Richter, following Luhmann, sense ‘performs its own deparadoxification.’ Sense moves from the paradoxes of nonsense to the determination of sense – deparadoxification – but sense also moves towards nonsense and contingency — paradoxification. (Richter 2018, 40)
How can Deleuze’s paradoxes be removed, even within a stage, or instant, or sway in a dialectical movement? What are the implications of this new possibility? Can they be reconciled with Deleuze’s wider metaphysics, as Richter does in relation to time since ‘Luhmann’s systems deparadoxify the tautological character of their temporal mechanisms through this displacement in time’? (Richter 2018, 134) Is the idea of deparadoxification tenable within a Deleuzian account of politics if ‘in Luhmann, the political decision deparadoxifies the absence of both an ontological foundation for politics and the absence of effective, decision-making agency’? (Richter 2018, 165)
In what follows I try to work through these questions, not to deny the interest of the wider encounter between to the two thinkers, even less to reject the value of Richter’s dialectical enrichment of their ideas through contrasts and connections, but rather to illustrate the implications of that single concept ‘deparadoxification’, or ‘deparadoxization’ (Seidl, Lê and Jarzabkowski 2021), when taken in conjunction with two different definitions of paradox.