In the “Second Series of Paradoxes of Surface Effects” in Logic of Sense, Deleuze turns the play between causes and effects to the surface (so to speak). The two are transformed into bodies and events that manifest on the surface. In Alice in Wonderland, the animals (which are deep) are usurped as “nobility” by thickless card figures (p. 9). Deleuze suspects that Alice isn’t about the adventures of Alice (as the original title suggested) but about the single adventure of Alice: “her climb to the surface, her avowal of false depth, and her discovery that everything happens at the border” (9). It is on the surface where bodies produce events and have effects and Lewis Carroll saw this clearly. In Sylvie and Bruno, the character “[learns] his lessons in all manners, inside-out, outside-in, above and below, but never ‘in depth’” (10).
Manifestation is part of the hermeneutical cycle for Deleuze. Unlike Heidegger’s hermeneutical circle, Deleuze suggests it is a Möbius strip. This strip highlights the logical paradox of signification that “‘Z is true if A, B, and C are true…,’ and so on to infinity” (16). The truth of a proposition is much like the Snark in Alice. It is by unfolding and untwisting the Möbius strip that the dimension of sense appears as it animates the (truth of) the proposition (20). The image of the Möbius strip represents the hermeneutical cycle not as a circle but as “the coexistence of two sides without thickness, such that we pass from one to the other by following their length” (22). Sense is not an effect or a result but the extra-Being which inheres or subsists; it is an “event” but “on the condition that the event is not confused with its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs” (22). Language itself is the flat world of the sense-event.
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