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Deleuze's Theory on Otherness

The question of the Other has become one of critical issues on the postmodern agenda in that it might overturn the identical thought which has supported humanism of modernity. In the modern history, the minorities such as blacks, natives, women have been oppressed as the others in the scheme of modern dichotomy. With postmodern era emerging, they are trying to restore their voices which have been silenced in the male dominated history. However, it is not an easy task to find the place of the others if one clings to the existing order of man-centered society. It is necessary to come up with an alternative not based in the scheme of the Same, but in the Difference of the Other. As a radical thinker of postmodernity, Gilles Deleuze provides an alternative thought on the other. In his writing on a novel of Michel Tournier, Vendredi, DU les limbes du Pacifique, he contends that the other has to be considered as a priori structure of the perceptual field, not as concrete other subjects and objects. The Other, as the absolute structure, establishes the relativity of others as terms actualizing the structure within each field. In short, the other is the basic structure without which our daily lives are not possible. The point, however, is that Deleuze is not content to elaborate the idea of the other but examines the limit of the other and explores the world without others. While tracing the unique story of the hero confined in the unmanned island, Deleuze explains that Robinson has discovered the surface of the "otherwise-Other." Thus Deleuze argues for the wholly other than the Other, beyond the structure-Other, which is otherness of the other.Deleuze's theory of otherness is associated with his other critical concepts such as the body without organs, becoming, event, assemblage. etc. The surface of the absent Other Robinson discovered is nothing other than the plane of consistency, which Deleuze invites us to discover. The world with others is that of the Same, or of the variations of the Same. Deleuze shows the world without others as an alternative of the absolute Difference and absolute deterritorialization, where we find the politics of becoming.