A Deleuzian response to Husserl's problem of intersubjectivity

Abstract

This thesis presents a confrontation between two ways of conceiving self-other relations and community. For Edmund Husserl, the unity of the self has a primary and categorically privileged position in the constitution of the community of persons. His epistemological concern with certainty seems to make this prioritization of unity necessary. For Gilles Deleuze, the self does not have a categorically privileged position. The unity of the self is not conceived as primary and irreducible, but as constituted out of difference, or differential components. Because unity is not prior, others are conceived as playing a primary and fundamental role in the constitution of the self. A Deleuzian conception of community is therefore based on the reciprocal relations between selves, and not grounded on the constituting activity of the transcendental ego. I argue that the Deleuzian account is more faithful to experience in recognizing an essential passivity in the way selves are constituted and interact to form a community.