The World with(out) Others, or How to Unlearn the Desire for the Other

Abstract

What are we to do with Gilles Deleuze’s most fascinating yet troubling text ‘Michel Tournier or the World without Others’ which can be found in the appendix of The Logic of Sense (1990) and which devotes itself to the reworking of the Crusoe-myth in Michel Tournier’s Friday from 1967? Does this text, as Peter Hallward once argued, ultimately show that ‘Deleuze works very literally toward a world without others; that he denies the philosophical reality of all relations — with and between others’ (1997, p. 530)? Does Deleuze’s utterly non-moralizing philosophy- and that it is non-moralizing is probably both the best known and the most significant feature of his thought — does it, in its striving for a thought of ‘difference in itself, lead us into the dead end of an absolute solipsism; into ‘the singular as absolute, beyond relation, as sovereign or self-constituent’ (Hallward 1997, p. 530)? And, thus, do we have to read Deleuze’s article as his most explicit and radical statement of a move ‘out of this world’ — philosophically challenging but ethico-politically inefficient, a claim Hallward makes in view of Deleuze’s œuvre as a whole.