ANGELAKI

journa l o f the the oretical humani tie s

volume 7 num ber 3 de cembe r 200 2

For Alain Cl ment

oman does not yet have a philosophical

status. This is an urgent problem. The
philosophies of the Other (Autrui) are strange
to us, we are ill at ease with them, and for a
simple reason: the world proposed to us by
the Other is an asexual world. Reciprocities,
communications, communions these mixtures
of consciousnesses are the extremely pure work
of souls. Sartre seemed to have seen this
insufficiency in the philosophies of the Other
when he criticized Heidegger for having allowed
human reality to be asexualized.2 So Sartre
himself devoted a chapter to desire, and another
to love. But the progress is only apparent. What
now becomes sexed is the person who makes
love it is the lover and not the beloved. The
beloved is sexed only insofar as he or she is in
turn a lover. We find here the classic illusion
of a reciprocity of consciousnesses: the Other
would simply be another I that has its own
structures only in the sense that it is itself a
subject. But this is to dissolve the problem of
the Other. It is as if the lover alone were sexed,
as if it were the lover who conferred the opposite
sex on the beloved; moreover, it is as if there
were no essential difference between habitual
love and homosexuality. Such a vision is
contrary to any sincere description, in which it
is the Other as such and not another I that
would be revealed in its sex, that would be
objectively lovable and would impose itself
on the lover. Phenomenology must be a phenomenology of the beloved. Sartres world is much
more desolate than the other: a world of objectively asexual people, with whom one can only
think of making love an absolutely monstrous
world.

gilles deleuze
translated by keith w. faulkner
DESCRIPTION OF
WOMAN
for a philosophy of the
sexed other 1
The great principle: things do not have to wait
for me in order to have their signification. Or, at
least, I have no consciousness of their having
waited for me which from the descriptive point
of view amounts to the same thing. Signification
is inscribed objectively in the thing: for example,
there is fatigue, and that is all. There is this large
round sun, this uphill street, this tiredness in the
small of the back. As for myself, I am here for
nothing (Moi je ny suis pour rien). It is not me
who is fatigued. I do not invent anything, I do
not project anything, I make nothing come into
the world; I am nothing, not even a nothingness;
above all, I am not nothing but an expression.
I do not attach my little significations to things.
The object does not have a signification, it is its
signification: fatigue. Now this strictly objective

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/02/030017-08 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/096972502200003245 4

17

woman
world, this world without a subject, encloses
within itself the principle of its own negation, its
own annihilation: an object among others, but an
object that nonetheless has its own specificity
that most objective of objects which we call the
Other. The Other is in this tired world, and yet,
through its attitude and its gestures, its soft step,
its calm breath and its ease, it can express a world
in which there is no tiredness. This is what the
Other is: the expression of a possible world.3
The expression of an absent external world, an
expressing without an expressed. The world
expressed by the Other, the entire universe that
is the Other, is inscribed in that category of
objects of which Valery spoke: the action of the
presence of absent things. The action of a
hollow presence, but one which is enough to
force the old universe back into me, to make it
stick in my throat, to make me conscious that
this time it is really me who is tired. A magical
transformation of tiredness into being tired (du
fatiguant en fatigu ). It is me, and me alone: a
responsibility that is too great, unbearable, identical to contingency. I am ashamed. This shame,
this prick of consciousness that destroys any
serene and objective description, this consciousness of the Other, is a timidity, a dissimulated
hatred of the Other. But is the Other simply the
enemy, the hateable? Is the Other nothing but
the expression of a possible external world? Is it
not also the offer of a friendship? I will overcome
my tiredness; I will turn the sun, the street, and
even the fatigue into so many encouragements; I
will sacrifice myself without reciprocity; I will
sacrifice this tiredness that has now become my
own, that has become me, that was so dear to me;
I will finally realize this absent external world
that the Other reveals to me in a word, I will
team up with the Other. An optimistic vision
At what price will it be verified? And what, in
relation to the authentic, is the respective meaning of hatred and friendship? This constitutes the
entire problem of the Other. But it is not our
problem; we have spoken of it only insofar as the
description of woman cannot be made without
reference to the male-Other.
The male-Other is defined not as a consciousness, nor as another I, but objectively as a

possible exteriority. Woman, however, is

completely different. Here we must be simplistic, and adhere to the nave image: the woman in
make-up, who torments the tender, misogynist,
and dissimulating adolescent. In vain would we
seek the expression of an absent external world
on the face of this woman. In her, everything is
presence. Woman does not express a possible
world; or rather, the possibility she expresses is
not an external world, it is she herself. Woman
expresses only herself: self-expression, innocence, serenity. One could say that she lies at an
intermediary position between the pure object,
which expresses nothing, and the male-Other,
which expresses something other than itself, an
external world. With woman, we are made to
witness the genesis of the Other: she is born of
the object, but in the passage from object to
Other. On the other hand, she can clearly be
distinguished from the male-Other. I can, in my
own eyes, ridicule the Other, gravely insult him,
deny the possibility of the world he expresses
that is, I can reduce the Other to a pure, absurd,
and mechanical comportment. In effect, what we
call comportment is expression itself, cut off
from the possible external world that it sketches
as a hollowness, which it expresses as an absence.
Comportment is the expressing cut off from the
expressed. Certainly, in the case of the maleOther, the expressed is absent, but it is nonetheless that toward which the expressing tends in its
entirety. Closed in on itself, cut off from its own
overcoming, the Other takes on an absurd air,
reduced to incoherent gestures. Woman, on the
contrary, in her enormous presence, is impossible to deny or insult; with her, it is impossible
to effect this cutting-off. It is as if there were no
external world; the expressed is the expressing.
Woman is given in an un-decomposable block,
she simply appears, and in her the internal is the
external, the external the internal. The coincidence of the expressing and the expressed is
consciousness . Her consciousness is defined
objectively from the outside, but as such it is
very particular: it is not situated, it is a pure
consciousness that expresses itself, a consciousness of self and not a consciousness of something. The whole of a womans flesh is
consciousness, and all her consciousness is flesh.

18

deleuze
Woman is her own possibility, she possibilizes herself.
Such is her mystery, her grace. It has not been
emphasized enough that grace is defined by a
mixture of heaviness and lightness, such that
heaviness is what is most light, and lightness is
what is most heavy. The body of woman is the
overflowing triumph of the flesh, of materiality.
A softness of the abdomen that can be seen
despite the dress that surrounds the ordinary
things of women: her legs, arms, and the rest, but
mostly a softness of the abdomen. A sun, it made
your blood swarm and then again two big lights
on her body, the throat, and above, this face
where she was wearing her thick mouth always
closed oh! prudence and her eyes that were
singing all the time like beautiful greenfinches.4
Woman is essentially incarnated; but the more
she is ensconced in materiality, the more she
makes herself immaterial and is taken up by the
expression of herself, by becoming the very
possibility of being that she herself is. As a thing,
she is conscious; and in being conscious, she is a
thing. She is indissolvably the possibility of being
and the being of the possible, the flesh of the
possible in other words, the lightness of heaviness and the heaviness of lightness. This is what
grace is: this union of contraries, a strict identity
of the material and the immaterial. Woman is
conscious of her own heaviness, her immersion in
the world, her own weight. (Let us be clear here:
it is not a question of groaning under her weight,
it is not that; to be conscious is not to submit to
her weight like a signification, too heavy, not
enough ; it is a question of a pure consciousness.) A softness of the abdomen, as Giono says.
Consciousness is softness. And the danger that
weighs down on woman like a weight of disgrace
is that she loses this consciousness, that she is no
longer anything but an abdomen, an overflowing
materiality, a make-up that is running: then she
is a thing. Let us not speak of it: it is too painful,
a woman who has lost her being. For her being is
this unbelievable unity of consciousness and
flesh. Woman is a consciousness, and yet she
expresses nothing external to herself. She is an
unusable consciousness, a gratuitous consciousness, autochthonal, unreceptive. She is useful for
nothing (elle ne sert rien), an object of luxury.

19

The nature of luxury objects is that they do

not serve any great purpose. But there are two
ways of being unusable. First, an object can be so
precise, so meticulous, so precious that it no
longer has any application; it is a superfluous
object addressing itself so directly to its possessor that the latter cannot depend on it to act. In
effect, the self (moi) that acts is always substitutable, more or less an anyone, never unique.
But beyond the self that acts, the luxury object
addresses itself to a self that is more profound,
more internal, more feminine a self, for example, that enjoys seeing its useless initials
imprinted on a cigarette. An object of luxury
used by a being of luxury, a being, this time, that
is so general and so vast that every use is too
particular. In this sense, woman is cosmic. She is
thing and consciousness, thing in consciousness,
consciousness in thing. And pure consciousness,
a consciousness of itself, that pushes the matter
it affects to a cosmic coefficient, and twists it in
a return to the self. The consciousness of woman
does not open itself to a plurality of absent external worlds, or close itself on the matter that it
possibilizes or universalizes. Woman is a concrete
universal, she is a world not an external world,
but the underworld of the world, a tepid interiority of the world, a compress of the internalized
world. Hence the prodigious sexual success of
woman: to possess the woman is to possess the
world. This synthesis of being and the possible is
what we call the necessity of woman.
The moral consequence: one can never be
friends with a woman. May our young men
and women renounce hypocritical theories.
Friendship is the realization of the external
possible offered to us by the male-Other. But
woman has no external world to offer us.
Woman is not that which can deny, in a perfectly
executed proposition, this world I once believed
to be objective this tired world, for example
by substituting another world in its place, a
world in which there is no tiredness. In her
essence, she is simply that which has the power
to dis-interest me in everything else, because she
is herself a thing without relation to other things,
because she is a world without exteriority. This is
what one expresses by saying This woman is
desirable.

woman
It is well known that there is a profound
contrariety between the friend and the lover.
When I say This woman is desirable, it is not
me who projects this signification on her (recall
the great principle). It is not me who desires
her, it is she who appears to me as desirable. But
in this very world centered around the woman,
my friend can, on the contrary, find her to be
contemptible and ugly: the revelation of a possible world in which she is not lovable. Whence the
famous conflict between love and friendship. Am
I going to realize the possible external world that
this Other reveals to me? The woman senses this
conflict, and can do one of two things: either she
can attempt to put me on bad terms with my
friend, or she can seduce him, she can impose on
him the expression of a world in which she is
desirable, reducing him to the muted existence of
a rival next to me a rival of whom I am jealous,
and no longer a friend who only exists in the
opposition of worlds. All this constitutes the
pretext of innumerable novels.
Let us therefore retain this opposition
between the woman and the male-Other.
Nonetheless, cannot the woman express a possible external world? Can she not, like the maleOther, propose a tired world, or a non-tired
world, and so on? Once and for all, this is not the
role of woman, for she would then lose her
essence. The man who experiences pleasure in
seeing woman express an external world is what
I call a sadist (from inoffensive forms of sadism
to the most subtle and most evolved forms, in
which a mask of suffering and fear is imposed on
the woman, the expression of a world of pain). A
single example: the wrinkled brow of the maleOther, the surprised forehead, which wrinkles
itself in order to see better and to understand,
expresses a possible world, an external resistance
to be penetrated. Large, long, well-drawn
furrows, separated by equal folds of flesh the
ease of such wrinkles on a forehead made for just
this. Ah!, the wrinkle on a womans forehead, by
contrast: a thousand disordered and clumsy little
cracks, of short duration, quickly renounced,
reappearing elsewhere, a little lower down, without success, like the moving cuts of a pocket
knife or the folds of crumpled paper. This inability of the forehead to behave in a coherent

manner is enough to make one cry, it is ridiculous and touching. (Ridiculous and touching: a
curious alliance of words that always leaps to
mind.) The sadist said to the woman: sit down
here and furrow your brow.
But there is a devil within. It seems that
women want a philosophy of the asexual Other.
It is women themselves who run to their ruin:
they want to express an external world, every
possible external world; they want to raise themselves to the level of the male-Other, to go
beyond it. But in doing so they lose their essence.
A double danger weighs on woman, quite apart
from any question of age. Too old, woman
reduces herself to an inexpressive thing; too
young, she wants to make herself into a maleOther. Once again, we must be simplistic: her
place is not the exterior, it is in the home, the
interior. The life of the interior and the interior
life the word is the same.
Woman is her own possible: she expresses not
an external world but the inner world. Or rather,
the inner life is this identity of the material and
the immaterial, which constitutes the very
essence of woman. Whereas the male-Other is
defined above all by exteriority, woman is an
interiority enormous, hot, and full of life.
Make-up is the formation of this interiority.
We have seen how the consciousness of self dematerializes and interiorizes the matter it affects.
And we must not forget that we have constantly
defined this consciousness by the outside. From
this point of view, make-up appears not as a
mask, which is applied to a face in order to cover
its expression, but as the feminine Persona itself,
instituting a supernatural order, that is to say,
internalizing nature. In a book with a promising
title (but which does not keep its promises),
Andr Billy speaks of this consubstantial accord
of flesh and greasepaint, I know not what
accord of the flesh with civilization.5 We know
now that what maintains this accord between
nature and the Persona is the very act of internalizing nature in the form of the Persona, it is
consciousness itself. This consciousness is essentially localized in the neck and the ankles these
are the places of grace: the ankles, or better yet,
high-heeled shoes, conscious of the weight of the
body; and the neck, conscious of the weight of

20

deleuze
the head. For the male-Other, by contrast, the
neck is never conscious.
One can distinguish two kinds of make-up.
First, there is the make-up of surfaces, built on a
base of paste and powder, which consists in
making the surface absolutely smooth, insignificant in the etymological sense, inexpressive, in
order to protect it from being situated, from
revealing any mark of exteriority (wrinkles, scars,
etc.). On the other hand, there is the make-up of
orifices, which is concerned with the accusation
of interiority. Sometimes the exterior is internalized: the black mascara that surrounds the eye
ensconces the look and renders it internal to
itself. Sometimes the interior is externalized,
while retaining, beyond its externalization, its
internal being: reddened lips are the opening out
of a thick interiority, while this same redness
seems to prolong itself in the interior (itself red),
a redness that always goes further, under the
skin, under the surface, to which it gives a rosy
hue. In this way, the make-up of orifices even
seizes hold of surfaces. And not only the lips, but
also the nails: here again, the redness is
prolonged, it is prolonged to the point where one
gives up the absurd habit of leaving the crescent
moons white.
This leads to the problem of the eyebrows,
which is posed at the same time as the problem
of the juncture of the two types of make-up.
Womans hair marks a proliferation, an inner
exuberance, an inexhaustible internal fecundity.
But is this not more or less the meaning of bodily
hair in general? Why, then, does woman pluck
her eyebrows? It is because, despite appearances,
the eyebrows are the mark of an exteriority, or
rather, the mark of a frontier between the interior and the exterior. Below the eyebrows lies the
interiority of the eyes; above them, the exteriority of the forehead. But the woman suppresses
every boundary between the internal and the
external, she seeks to reduce the external to the
internal as much as possible, to assure the
primacy of the internal. Hence the suppression of
the eyebrows: their plucking constitutes the juncture between the two types of make-up.
There are further signs of an internal proliferation: the beauty mark and freckles. Dont
imagine freckles to be a failing. They bring out

21

her color, they make her skin seem to be some

rare essence, like a precious wood. Since then, I
have more than once, without realizing it,
searched for these spots on beautiful faces, and
have been slightly disappointed by their
absence. 6 I do not understand at all why woman
is ashamed of freckles and fights them with
make-up, while on the contrary she cultivates the
beauty mark (or at least she cultivated it for a
long period of time). This can only be explained
through an error woman makes about her own
essence. Freckles evoke a mysterious and a
perfect lan a supple trajectory issued from I
know not what throwing-stone. They are like
bubbles that arise from within, that appear on the
surface but do not inflate, without popping and
without volume. One can run ones hand over
them and not feel them, they do not rise above
the skin, they are a simple blossoming on the
surface, a proliferation without thickness, an
enervating charm. One can see freckles but one
cannot touch them, their outlines are purely
visual, and the spots themselves are out of reach.
It is impossible to grasp them with two fingers,
to play with them with one finger, to make them
protrude. Nonetheless, they are there, within
reach, not fleeing, immutable and serene. The
freckle resembles the reflection of Narcissus or
the torture of Tantalus: within reach and yet out
of reach. This indifferent and inexorable presence, which one can see but not touch, I will call
the noumenon. The noumenon is truly the
symbol of the interior on the exterior which,
beyond its exteriority, maintains its being as interior. Moreover, it lies at the limit of make-up in
its entirety, which tends to become noumenal:
make-up is that which can be seen but cannot be
touched. Interiority is the inviolable. Dont
mess up this hairdo, Dont touch this makeup: a verbal defense proffered by woman, but
one which, beyond the words, reveals the true
ontological meaning of make-up. By contrast, one
should mistrust the beauty mark, which has a
certain thickness, allows itself to be played with,
and is not noumenal. Moreover, the beauty mark
stands alone, it does not come in groups, it lies
there like an accused black spot. In short, it
prepares for and sustains an ironic reversal:
rather than the face having a beauty mark, it is

woman
the beauty mark that has the face, the entire
face being organized around the beauty mark a
disastrous effect, which freckles, given their
multiplicity, their exquisite lightness, and their
perfection, are incapable of sustaining.
The secret is nothing but a hidden interiority.
Situated at the summit of the interior life, this is
nonetheless not its most interesting aspect: what
woman thinks, and above all what makes her
laugh, which men will never understand. There is
a great difference between timidity before
woman, and this other timidity that inspires the
male-Other, of which we have already spoken.
Woman is not like the Other, she does not reveal
a new world. She simply looks at me, she thinks
something about me, and her thoughts make her
laugh. Seeing myself as the effect of innuendos,
of interpretations, of secrets I will never know, of
whisperings against my honor, I am seized with
confusion. And my attempts at seduction were
nothing more than a will to impress the woman,
to reduce her interpretation to a pure expression,
to a mirror in which I will find myself as I want
to be, as in fact I believed myself to be. At the
other pole, sadism is a violent seduction, it is a
matter of destroying in the woman the secrets
that she has, and thereby destroying the secret
that she is For if the woman has secrets insofar as she is a subject, she is the object of the
Secret itself, and of the Innuendo. The secret is
itself a category of things it is something one
does not say aloud, which by its very nature must
be understood by half-words. It is true that, for
children, the secret is not simply a category of
things, since for them everything, strictly speaking, is a secret: secret alphabets, winks of the eye,
nudged elbows nothing with regard to nothing.
This is innuendo in the pure state: a form without matter. And these same children, on the
other hand, are absolutely receptive, they have a
nave consciousness, they reflect and express all
sorts of things which they do not even try to
interpret: a matter without form. But then comes
puberty. Puberty is the encounter between the
form without matter and the matter without
form and this concerns the girl, the woman.
Adolescents nudge each other, no longer for no
reason, but when a girl walks by. The secret has
been incarnated, the form of the secret has been

materialized, matter has been informed. The

secret has become woman, and everything that
touches on sexuality. It is a scandal. From this is
born the complex of puberty whose muffled
influence will weigh on us for the rest of our
life the provincial life, the door-to-door life,
which one talks about in a hushed voice.
The lie is interiority preserved and defended.
It is well known that woman lies enormously. Is
this truly a lie, or is it rather the affirmation of a
feminine truth? There are two kinds of lies. In
the first, the interior life is defended against any
offensive return of the exterior: lies are imaginative secretions for digesting the hardest exteriorities, the systematic refusal of any extrinsic
determination (cf. woman and her age). In the
second, rather than handing over her inner life to
the lover who wants her, woman would prefer to
deform, disfigure, or nearly scuttle her life before
she externalizes it. Such are the assurances of
love.
Sleep is interiority handed over, the interiority
that offers itself. This is once again the essential
interiority, the interiority we had lost with makeup no longer the hidden interiority, or the interiority preserved from every external reach, but
rather the interiority that spreads itself out, frees
itself entirely from the exterior, but as the interior, the inviolable. Why had we lost it? I now
know why. The look is one of the essential
elements of the feminine persona, of make-up,
and it is what made us leave the realm of essence,
and led us toward a mental, secondary, and
derived interiority the lie, the secret. But here
it is once again, this feminine essence, and we are
going to understand it better since now her eyes
are closed. We no longer have to worry about
seduction, for she is asleep. Like a beating heart,
or a chest that regularly rises and falls, she
declares this pure identity of the material and the
immaterial, of being and the possible. The
woman is now within my reach. Will we once
again encounter the experience of make-up
both within reach and out of reach? What is the
meaning of this interiority that is given to the
exterior as interior? Upon reflection, it might
seem that interiority as such can never appear on
the exterior, it can never be given. I can only
have knowledge of what hides the interior and

22

deleuze
covers it. In order to constitute a total interiority,
I have erected piles upon piles of clothing around
this body, and walls upon walls around the house,
and the only wall and the only clothing that is
given to me on the exterior is, by definition, not
interior But we should distrust antinomies,
they ring false. A simple gesture destroys them.
The piling up of clothes is merely an obstinacy,
a childish persistence in error. A woman is never
more internal to herself than when she is nude;
when she is sleeping, she is given over entirely to
exteriority. The essence of the feminine life is
this: to be within my reach and yet out of reach.
A secret, but an essential secret, neither mental
nor carnal the noumenon. The accidental secret
is the secret someone has. Someone has a secret,
and they protect it, reinforce it, under the cover
of an exteriority that would make it disappear as
a secret. It is a secret only insofar as it appears to
the Other as a lack to be filled, as something to
know that he does not know. The woman who is
sleeping, by contrast, is the secret no longer the
having of the secret, whether mental or carnal,
but the possibility of the secret; the being of the
secret displayed in its exteriority, but which
retains its being as secret beyond this exteriority.
A secret without matter, and a secret that does
not hide itself. Here, there is nothing to know;
the secret is inviolable, because there is nothing
to violate, except a body.
And yet, cannot this interiority be untied,
unlaced, undone at least through the action of
the lover, through the caress? This final hope
must be abandoned: the caress is not that which
undoes, but that which realizes. We have often
spoken of an interiority that would give itself to
the exterior as interior. Or rather, the interior is
the hollowing out of the exterior, its twisting in
on itself. It is the negation of a thickness, a
hollow thickness. Let us therefore go further: not
only the secret without matter, without any
distinction between form and matter, the secret
of the secret, the secret of itself; but beyond this,
the secret without any thickness. This is the ideal
term towards which woman tends, and never
reaches. But she never approaches it more closely
than under the caress, which should not be
confused with groping. In fact, it is the caress

23

that denies all thickness; in tracing a delicate and

subtle curve, the caress ceaselessly folds exteriority, draws it into itself, renders it internal to
itself. The caress essentially expresses the synthesis of being and the possible, this consciousness
of oneself that lightens the flesh, this identity of
the material and the immaterial, of the exterior
and the interior. The untiring gesture of the
amorous modeler. Now if the caress, as the act of
the lover, can approach the feminine essence, it
is because woman herself is being as caress, the
secret without thickness. But this being is never
realized, it is always held back by the remainders
of an exteriority that is infinitely reborn, so that
the caressing must begin anew. There is no total
immateriality, no pure interiority without thickness, into which one could be drawn. And, moreover, this total negation of thickness would be
rather disappointing. What would she then be, in
effect, other than water, a reflection? We have
already seen this image: the freckles, the reflections of Narcissus, the noumenon what one can
see but not touch. But woman would here lose
everything: a total interiority realized in reflection would not have its own existence, but would
exist only in reference to what is reflected. It
would be dangerous to realize an ideal drawn
from a form of absence, a filling-in of the dotted
line. In a pure interiority, woman would be
dissolved, she would turn into water. The lover
would find his reflection in her, but woman
herself, reduced to being as caress, would lose her
substance. Fortunately, being as caress only ever
takes shape as a hollowness, which guides the
hands of the lover just as it guided the operations
of make-up: a pure absence that grounds the
necessity of the caress as an act. Woman also has
need of a lover a lover who caresses her, and
that is all. Such is the true ontological status: the
being of woman is never realized, and can never
be realized without contradiction, without dissolution. Her being exists only under the form of
an act effectuated by the Other. Woman is
neither object nor subject; she is no longer
simply that which one has, but she is not yet that
which is; she is the lan of the object towards
subjectivity. Neither an object in the world nor
the subject of a possible world. She is not a
subject, she does not reach being. She is a being

woman
that takes shape only as a hollowness, an unrealized being whence a final aspect of grace, and
the reason for the ridiculous need a man feels to
protect the woman.
Does the caress exhaust the whole of love?
Certainly, it grounds the possibility of love. But
beyond the caress, love poses a completely different problem: impurity. Impurity
belongs to the dynamic of
woman or, if one prefers, to a
moral description. But we would
then leave the domain of a
description of essences.

notes
Translators note: I would like to thank Daniel W.
Smith for looking over this translation and for
providing useful comments on how it could be
improved.
1 Gilles Deleuze, Description de la femme: Pour
une philosophie dautrui sexue, Posie 28 (1945):
2839.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans.
Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library,
1956) 498.
3 I borrow this expression from an unpublished
text of Michel Tournier.
4 Jean Giono, Le Chant du monde (Paris: Gallimard,
1934) 120. [English translation: Jean Giono, The
Song of the World, trans. Henri Fluchre and
Geoffrey Myers (Washington, DC: Counterpoint,
2000).]
5 Andr Billy, La Femme maquille (Paris:
Flammarion, 1932) 78.
6 Jules Romains, Les Hommes de bonne volont, 27
vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 193246), vol. 3, Les
amours enfantines 60.

Keith W. Faulkner
45 Napton Drive
Leamington Spa CV32 7UX
UK
E-mail: k.w.faulkner@warwick.ac.u k