Becoming Other, Becoming Imperceptible:A Philosophical Reading of A Gesture Life

Abstract

This paper explores Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life mainly from the perspective of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s postmodern ethics. Also employed are the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas’s most profoundly ethical insight and Buddhist-Taoist thought, which shows how we can directly access to the fundamental self by abandoning egotism. The protagonist Hata’s spiritual journey and the aesthetic experience of the reader are both processes of “becoming other,” or “becoming imperceptible,” which is fundamentally an operation of pure difference in the self and thus which is becoming what is other than the self, the outside of the subjectivity. The reader’s becoming other is possible through affects or the sensible as such, through which the reader comes to glimpse the outside of both her comprehension of the story and her fundamentally egotistic subjectivity. “Body without Organs” is the result of the becoming process through which the reader is drawn close to the point of no-self. Therefore, this paper is an essentially philosophical reading of A Gesture Life.