Sartre and Deleuze on Otherness1

Abstract This paper gives an account of Gilles Deleuze's and Jean-Paul Sartre's respective conceptions of “the Other” as this concept evolves in relation to Sartre's earliest insights into self/Other dynamics in his 1937 essay, The Transcendence of the Ego . By reading Deleuze through his early interlocutor—the philosopher and author Michel Tournier—I argue that the account of Otherness presented in Deleuze's early (and later disavowed) “Sartrean” works represents a critique of Sartre's own revisions to the concept of Otherness in his 1943 magnum opus , Being and Nothingness . Thus, we can read Sartre and Deleuze as offering competing views of how (and indeed if it is possible) to inherit Sartre's own early insights into the value of existential phenomenology for a “positive” account of interpersonal relationships.