From Immanence to Otherness

Date of Award

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Flakne, April

Keywords

Deleuze, Gilles, Phenomenology, Post-Modern Theory of the Other

Area of Concentration

Philosophy

Abstract

This thesis addresses the problem of immanence and the problem of the other. These two problems are connected because immanence is already an experience of alterity. The problem of immanence entails understanding how to think about immanence without making immanence dependent upon transcendence; i.e. the emergence of an inducted transcendence. So long as immanence is the emergence of transcendence, the alterity present in immanence makes sense, but the subject cannot creatively engage what appears immanently. Immanence that is structured by transcendence is given and as such it is given without the possibility of change. When Deleuze frees immanence from transcendence, the alterity present in immanence is no longer constrained to be the appearance of a transcendent truth, or transcendental meaning. I develop Deleuze�s perspective from Husserl and Sartre in order to show what it means to free immanence from transcendence. Once immanence has been freed from transcendence, I develop a theory of the other that a dresses otherness as the ambiguity between my otherness from myself and the otherness of the other. Immanence had to be freed from transcendence for the unfamiliar presence of the other, the ambiguity, to become a creative medium for the disambiguation that creates the meaning of self and the other. In contrast to the disambiguation of pre-personal ambiguity I describe a pre-personal structure that I call �the frame that frames�. The structure orchestrates the appearance of the self and other in function of a set of meanings held to be absolute. On the one hand I want to retain the possibility that things can appear this way; on the other hand I want to show why, in spite of this appearance, that is not how they have to be. The frame that frames is an attempt to develop a critical perspective from my theory of otherness.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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