Gilles Deleuze and the desert island as a material utopia

Abstract

This essay seeks to unpack the idea of the absence of others as a primary structure, distinguished from the other as structure and the ego as the empirical result of the structure-other, which is formulated by Gilles Deleuze, particularly in “Michel Tournier and the World Without Others”. Going from the neurotic nature of the structure-other to the psychotic nature of the absence of others as structure I argue that this transition is crucial to reach the “Great Health”, marking a utopian point in Deleuze’s work. I distinguish private from social schizophrenia, claiming that the latter underlies a new communicability which is more corporeal than conceptual. It would also mark an economy which departs from an exchange economy to approach Bataille’s idea of solar economy. Finally, I describe the structural aspect of the dissipation of the other, or social schizophrenia, through the perverse structure, which stands against the pervert’s actual behaviors.