ANGELAKI

journa l o f the the oretical humani tie s volume 7 num ber 3 de cembe r 200 2

very now and then there comes along a strange document in philosophy. Deleuzes 1945 essay Description of Woman1 is such a document. It reveals the beginning of Deleuzes thought, his first investigations into immanence and desire without lack. It reveals to us also the influence of Deleuzes matre, namely Sartre.2 This essay will reveal his fidelity to and betrayal of Sartre. Deleuze is famous for his innovative readings of philosophers and literary writers. Long before his engagements with Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, Deleuze was engaging with Sartres existentialism. Deleuze felt that Sartre was a breath of fresh air;3 even though he did not feel drawn towards existentialism or towards phenomenology4 he saw something in Sartre that would be the beginnings of his own philosophy. This essay, along with Statements and Profiles,5 which he published a year later, attempts to work out the nature of what Deleuze calls a fundamental passion. Deleuze remains unsatisfied with Sartres conceptions of love and desire as worked out in Part Three, Chapter Three of Being and Nothingness. Although Deleuze does not often make direct references to Sartre, he alludes to certain of Sartres problems. In Deleuzes reading of Sartre he attempts to push Sartre towards immanence. To do this he will have to bracket out certain aspects of Sartre that he finds problematical for the following reasons: 1. Sartres conception of love centers on the desire to capture the Others freedom. Deleuze criticizes this as being the pure work of souls.6 Iris Murdoch made the same criticism when she said Sartres lovers are out of the world, their struggle is not an incarnate struggle.7 This is because what each one seems to crave is that he should be imaginatively contemplated by the

keith w. faulkner DELEUZE IN UTERO deleuzesartre and the essence of woman

other.8 Deleuze is ill at ease9 with these mixtures of consciousnesses10 that surpass the bodies and set up an abstract notion of the Other as another I rather than focusing on the concrete phenomenon. So in his essay Deleuze will bracket off this aspect of inter-subjectivity in Sartre and seek out the concrete relations with woman-as-desirable-object. 2. One of the unfortunate consequences of an inter-subjective model of desire is that it presents us with two subjects each imagining the others consciousness of them. While this would allow us to examine the structure of consciousness on both sides, it would not allow us to examine the structure of the Other. If we are left with only subjects this would dissolve the problem of the Other.11 So Deleuze will also bracket off the

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/02/030025-19 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/096972502200003246 3

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Other-as-subject in order to find what he calls the a priori Other. 3. This leads us to the problem of sexual difference. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze will say that it is initially in the Other and through the Other that the difference of the sexes is founded. 12 We will see that this insight was originally worked out in this early essay. Sartre makes a mistake when he declares that I am the one who desires, and desire is a particular mode of my subjectivity.13 This would make the foundation of sexual difference a function of one subject founding, through its own desire, the sexuality of another subject. If this were the case we would be again stuck in the pure work of souls14 where one subject projects his mode of desiring on another subject. Further, this would result in a continuous play of mirrors where sex is only a game of the soul and bodies are the mere tools of this game. So Deleuze, in this essay, will seek out the ontological and corporal foundations of desire. He will bracket out the subject of desire and seek a more fundamental desire. 4. The unstated but underlying quest of this essay is to seek a more fundamental desire. Sartre deals with this desire under the heading of the desire to be God. Sartre proclaims that desire is a lack of being15 and the fundamental passion of humanity is to gain for itself a plenitude of being, a state of for-itself-in-itself. But Sartre condemns this desire as a useless passion16 that can never be fulfilled. Deleuze desperately tries to work out a model of desire that is not a lack under the notion of a qualitative essence that he names woman. He closely examines the relationship of quality and being to try to work out an immanence of desire. He fails at the end of this essay to find this immanence in woman, but he takes up the problem of the fundamental passion 17 again in Statements and Profiles that is a direct continuation of the first essay. It is here that he proposes an aesthetic method of realizing this immanence of desire, but he does not go into detail about it. Deleuze surpasses Sartre in postulating that desire is not of thiswoman-here as an object situated in the world, but of woman as the unsituated plenitude of being. In this way he will bracket out the situated object of desire. Although this essay is called a description of woman, it is not its primary aim to define woman. Rather, it seeks to define the process of desire that produces a difference between the sexes. Because he is focusing on this process he does not consider the subjective identity position of woman. Because of this, the subject of Deleuzes essay cannot properly be called feminism even though it may have consequences for feminism. It is my intention in this essay to bring out the key aspects of Deleuzes confrontation with Sartre and not to explore these consequences for feminism. This early essay, although important, does not represent Deleuzes final conception of woman. It would be interesting to map the trajectory of his thought on the question of woman from these early essays to his conception of becoming-woman, but this is not my purpose here. My sole purpose is to examine the problems and questions that Deleuze started with and see how they relate to his later works. Description of Woman is full of ideas, in utero, that Deleuze will develop later. In fact, if for no other reason, these early articles are fascinating because they reveal the early formation and working out of Deleuzes later obsessions, such as: pure immanence, the non-actual but fully real virtual, the notion that desire is not lack, the displacement of the subject away from a foundational role, and his rejection of the finitude of man. We have a rare opportunity in examining these essays to find out what first motivated him to choose the path of philosophy he did. And what we find is that he, like many of his contemporaries, was a child of existentialism, but one who surpassed it by reacting to its insufficiencies and, by this reaction, gave birth to a new philosophy. The second paragraph of Description of Woman sets out to summarize the entire problem of the Other18 that Deleuze presents to define the meaning of the male-Other. It describes the transition from the world without Others, the objective world, to the world of the Other, that brings possibilities into this world. In his essay on Tournier, Deleuze states that in the Others absence, consciousness and its object are one.19 Where phenomenology states

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that all consciousness is consciousness of something, for Deleuze, in the absence of Others all consciousness is something: Signification is inscribed objectively in the thing.20 Throughout his philosophical career Deleuze espoused a form of immanence that is not immanent to something but immanence itself, which he calls in this essay pure consciousness.21 Deleuze is influenced at this early stage by Sartres The Transcendence of the Ego and the idea expressed in it of an impersonal or pre-personal transcendental field.22 Deleuze describes this in his last book as a real world no longer in relation to a self but to a simple there is. 23 And in the essay on Tournier he describes a world without Others in which Consciousness ceases to be a light cast upon objects in order to become a pure phosphorescence of things in themselves.24 Deleuze is going against a tradition in philosophy in which consciousness is the light cast upon things that makes them visible. He reverses this by starting with a plane of immanence [that] is entirely made of Light.25 The great principle26 with which Deleuze starts Description of Woman is the great principle that he will follow until his death: the principle of immanence. But what interrupts this immanence? The Other is an object in the world (the most objective of objects27) that disrupts the immanence of the pre-personal world by introducing possibilities into it. But what is possibility? Let it be understood that the possible is not here an abstract category designating something which does not exist: the expressed possible world certainly exists, but it does not exist (actually) outside of that which expresses it.28 Possibility disrupts the immanence of the real world by placing within it a supplementary reality. In a purely objective world there is no room for error. Everything is as it appears. The world is no longer a given in a world with possibilities; rather, there is a swarm of possibilities around reality, but our possibilities are always Others.29 The Other is the object of the possible: The other is the existence of the encompassed possible.30 This is Michel Tourniers unique contribution to Deleuzes early thought. It is one of the major points where Deleuze differs in a slight but important way from Sartre. Possible worlds have nothing to do with the Other as a thinking subject. For Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, the Other is a phenomenon in the world that is interpreted by another subject: The Other is a phenomenon which refers to other phenomena, to a phenomenon-of-ange r which the Other feels towards me, to a series of thoughts which appear to him as phenomena of his inner sense. What I aim at in the Other is nothing more than what I find in myself.31 The expressions of the Other, expressions of anger, for example, appear to another subject as a phenomenon, a phenomenon that refers to an inner sense that remains inaccessible: These phenomena, unlike all others, do not refer to possible experiences but to experiences which are outside my experience and belong to a system which is inaccessible to me.32 In the case of Sartre, what the Other expresses is an inner sense, the thoughts and feelings of the Other. For Deleuze the Other expresses possible worlds.33 A possible world is not something that is in the consciousness of the Other. It is what the Other expresses, not what he or she thinks. Deleuze gives the following example of a possible world in What is Philosophy?: China is a possible world, but it takes on a reality as soon as Chinese is spoken or China is spoken about within a given field of experience. This is very different from the situation in which China is realized by becoming the field of experience itself.34 When Chinese is spoken the land of China does not appear before us in the field of experience itself but gives a supplementary dimension to reality: the action of the presence of absent things.35 Deleuze and Tournier extrapolate their theory of the Other as possible world from a reference that Sartre makes to the face in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. There is a special sort of consciousness that Deleuze calls a pure consciousness that expresses itself,36 and Sartre in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions calls it magical consciousness.37 In this work Sartre tells the following story about the face.38 A face emerges at the window. We do not at first take it as that of a man.39 Numerous possibilities manifest themselves in this world: the window, it could easily be broken, or it could be opened

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from the outside. 40 All of these possibilities are presented in a world which reveals itself as already horrible. 41 Unlike Sartres later work, here the face is not described as another consciousness, but only as the condition for magical consciousness to emerge. In magical consciousness, the emergence of the face (which is not taken to be a human) appears simultaneously with the possibility in a world that appears horrible. 42 According to Deleuze, The other is a possible world as it exists in a face that expresses it.43 It must be remembered that the face does not express a possible world because it looks at me; in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari condemn the look in favor of the face: Sartres text on the look and Lacans on the mirror make the error of appealing to a form of subjectivity or humanity reflected in a phenomenological field or split in a structural field. The gaze is but secondary in relation to the gazeless eyes, to the black hole of faciality.44 The face is a pure expresser of possible worlds and not the expression of the humanity or subjectivity of the Other. The emergence of possibility into the world makes the tiredness into being tired,45 makes the previously objective world a contingent world (one among many possibilities). This gives birth to the prick of consciousness,46 to a selfconsciousness that realizes its mediocrity.47 Mediocrity is the experience of being separated from the possibilities that the Other presents. One attempts to overcome this mediocrity by teaming up with the Other to participate in the possibilities that he presents, the external possible worlds. But it is impossible to fully realize possible worlds by forsaking the field of experience. Deleuze devotes the first section of Description of Woman to setting up the definition of the male-Other. The Other that we offer our friendship to in order to overcome our mediocrity is the male-Other: Friendship is the realization of the external possible offered to us by the male-Other.48 The world that he offers is precisely external. Because it is not himself that he is expressing, the expressed is absent. This is one of the key points to keep in mind as Deleuze contrasts the male-Other to woman. The male-Other and woman designate two ways the world can be structured. This idea that the Other is a structure of the world is an important criticism of Sartres approach to the Other. Sartre says that the condition of possibility for all experience is that the subject organize his impressions into a connected system. Thus we find in things only what we have put into them. The Other, therefore, cannot without contradiction appear to us as organizing our experience; there would be in this an over-determination of phenomenon. 49 Sartre places the responsibility for organizing experience in the consciousness of the subject that organizes his own experiences, and reduces the Other to another subject or an object of my experience. Deleuze reacts to this in The Logic of Sense: The error of philosophical theories is to reduce the Other sometimes to a particular object, and sometimes to another subject. (Even a conception like Sartres, in Being and Nothingness, was satisfied with the union of the two determinations, making of the Other an object of my gaze, even if he in turn gazes at me and transforms me into an object.)50 Deleuze is reacting to the Sartre of Being and Nothingness and championing a version of the Other which he extrapolates from Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions in which the Other is a pure surging up in the world and not another subject. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze makes it clear what he means by the Other: the Other is neither an object in the field of my perception nor a subject who perceives me: the Other is initially a structure of the perceptual field, without which the entire field could not function as it does.51 He offers the same version of the Other in Statements and Profiles with the added division of male-Other and woman:
We must be clear here: we are speaking of the male-Other as an ontological and categorical surging-forth [surgissement ], in an anonymous block; we are speaking of the a priori Other, and not of a particular Other, who may well have an inner life.52

And:
Certainly, woman can also reveal a possible external world (tired or not tired), but this no longer concerns woman in her essence; it

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simply concerns a particular woman the beloved, for example.53

The rest of Description of Woman will deal with this division between the two ways that the world can be structured by the a priori Other in its two forms of woman and male-Other. It is very important when reading this essay to remember the distinction between woman and this woman-here or the beloved, between the Other as the structure of our experience and the Other that is the particular person that we can see before us. This distinction is important for understanding the difference between a pure consciousness 54 that is not consciousness of something outside itself (i.e., the structure of consciousness that is a priori woman) and a consciousness of something that presents us with an exteriority. The world of the male-Other is not like the world of woman. The relationship that one has with the male-Other is that of friendship. Friendship is the realization of the external possible offered to us by the male-Other.55 What makes this relationship external? Deleuze follows Prousts definition of friendship: According to Proust, friends are like well-disposed minds that are explicitly in agreement as to the signification of things, words, and ideas.56 The relation between friends is contingent upon this fragile agreement. One sacrifices ones own view of the world in order to bring it into accord with the possible world that the Other offers us and, as such, it remains external and merely contingent. According to Deleuze, a friend is not enough for us to approach the truth. Minds communicate to each other only the conventional; the mind engenders only the possible. [They] are lacking in necessity and the mark of necessity.57 In Proust and Signs friendship is a function of what Deleuze calls worldly signs. Worldly signs are the empty phrases that Marcel hears at a dinner party, where one man makes a witticism and then the other man offers a laugh as if he understood something. These signs are empty. They maintain an external relationship between the men. What makes this relationship contingent (merely possible) is that it is voluntary, as the relation-

ship to the male-Other always is. But woman can offer us more than friendship. Woman opens up the possibility of love, and as Deleuze states: A mediocre love is worth more than a great friendship 58 because it is not voluntary and contingent the way friendship is. Friendship presupposes a good will and accord between possible worlds among men; love does violence to thought and generates a deeper and necessary accord: What does violence to us is richer than all the fruits of our goodwill or of our conscious work, and more important than thought is what is food for thought. 59 Sartre himself proposes something like this in Being and Nothingness when he talks about seduction and blindness . Blindness for Sartre, put simply, is the state of oblivion in which I see other people as instrumentalities, as pure functions: the ticket-collector is only the function of collecting tickets; the waiter is nothing but the function of serving the patrons.60 In this way one could practice a sort of factual solipsism61 in which the Others being is hidden by the complexity of indicative references.62 This is the fundamental possibility of ignoring the Other that Deleuze is referring to when he says: 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.63 Deleuze defines this comportment as expressing cut off from the expressed.64 The expressed, the being-there of the Other, is absent from the world, and the expression, the mechanical behavior of the other person, expresses nothing. This possibility of ignoring the being-there of the male-Other clearly distinguishes it from the world that woman presents to us. Seduction is at the heart of the world that woman presents to us. Whereas the male-Other presents us with a lackof-being, woman presents us with a fullness of being. By seduction I aim at constituting myself as a fullness of being and at making myself recognized as such. To accomplish this I constitute myself as a meaningful object.65 The object that is woman, in this case, is meaningful because, as Deleuze puts it, the expressed is the expressing. 66 No longer is there an absence of being-there (the expressed), as with the case of

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the male-Other. Instead there is the fullness of being a pure presence, Woman is given in an un-decomposable block,67 and under the influence of seduction it is impossible to ignore her; it is impossible to effect this cutting-off.68 Sartre sets out the two components of seduction that will be key for Deleuzes conception of woman: hidden being and possible-world. Consider the following quote from Being and Nothingness :
My acts must point in two directions: On one hand, toward that which is wrongly called subjectivity and which is rather a depth of objective and hidden being; the act is not performed for itself only, but it points to an infinite, undifferentiated series of other real and possible acts which I give as constituting my objective, unperceived being.69

degraded projection of interiority.76 The undifferentiated series is what constitutes this interiority. It is also the indistinctness, for example, that one may find in the famous interpenetrative multiplicity of Bergson.77 The second component that Sartre attributes to seduction is the possible world:
On the other hand, each of my acts tries to point to the great density of possible-world and must present me as bound to the vastest regions of the world. At the same time I present the world to the beloved, and I try to constitute myself as the necessary intermediary between her and the world; I manifest by my acts infinitely varied examples of my power over the world (money, position, connections, etc.).78

The first component of seduction is what Sartre calls hidden being and Deleuze refers to as interiority. In The Transcendence of the Ego Sartre calls this interiority a pure consciousness, without any constitution of states or actions.70 He also says of this interiority that: It is inward for itself, not for consciousness.71 Interiority is beyond contemplation72 because we can contemplate our states but we cannot contemplate that which passively has states. It is, in a sense, more internal to consciousness than are states.73 This interiority, for Deleuze, is paradoxical. It is both a pure consciousness and a pure object. It is the pure being-there that in the inner life is this identity of the material and the immaterial;74 in other words, woman is a world unto herself, not the external world but the underworld of the world, a tepid interiority of the world, a compress of the internalized world.75 When we approach this interiority from the outside it appears to us as an object, but an object that is more than an object. Woman possesses a virtual dimension that is not reducible to some mental interiority. It is more of a carnal or ontological interiority that manifests itself to us as an indistinctness or interpenetrative multiplicity. Sartre seems to point to the concept of the virtual in Bergson when he speaks of this interiority: Indistinctness is interiority seen from the outside indistinctness is the

The possible world that Sartre presents here is what Deleuze would call the external possible world that the male-Other presents us. We see why Deleuze calls the Other an a priori structure of the world: the male-Other presents himself as the necessary intermediary between us and the world. He gives it qualities that it would not have without him, such as wealth, power, and strength. But the male-Other gives us only qualities of the external world. What he expresses is not himself. By his acts he contextualizes himself into an external world that we participate in with him. But this external possible world remains on the level of friendship because it lacks the necessity of desire. It remains contingent because it is always possible to deny this world of the maleOther through blindness ; therefore it is a weaker form of seduction. What are the differences between the external possible world that the male-Other offers us and the internal world that woman offers? The maleOther points us towards the actualized forms of the world. Woman, on the other hand, directs us to something virtual. The world that she expresses is an internal world. Deleuze describes this world: the world so expressed does not exist outside the subject expressing it. (What we call the external world is only the disappointing projection, the standardizing limit of all these worlds expressed.)79 The internal world is the essence of woman: Essence is indeed the final quality at the heart of a subject; but this quality

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is deeper than the subject It is not the subject that explains essence, rather it is essence that implicates, envelops, wraps itself up in the subject. 80 Essence is interiority, an interiority that is pre-personal. It is the transcendental field, the pure internal difference that constitutes the subject. Interiority is an object and a pure consciousness. As an object it is purely material but, as we will see, this material immaterializes itself and spiritualizes itself by explicating itself. This object of interiority gives off signs that provoke the mind into thought. By its very indistinctness, this interior calls for explication. The imagination of the lover is forced to associate ideas:81 the beloved becomes waves, hair, clouds, a melody, etc. The internal world that she expresses becomes linked with all these partial objects that haunt the world of the lover. Because this movement of thought is forced it is impossible to ignore her the way we could the maleOther. She does not, like the male-Other, act as the necessary intermediary between us and the world; rather, she is the world that the lover is trying to explicate. It is not the beloveds personality that the jealous lover attempts to penetrate; it is the woman at the heart of the beloved: Jealousy will be the revelation of woman within the very heart of the beloved.82 The essence of woman is more internal than the beloved. It is not the secret that she has; it is the secret that she is. Deleuze develops a vocabulary that is partly his own in Description of Woman, but its meaning can be traced back to a certain reference that Sartre makes in Being and Nothingness. The terms material and immaterial in Deleuze are developed from Sartres discussion of being and quality. The material for Deleuze is being, and the immaterial is the expression of being, its quality. When Deleuze postulates a strict identity of the material and the immaterial83 he is echoing Sartres statement: being is not in itself a quality although it is nothing either more or less. But quality is the whole of being revealing itself within the limits of the there is. 84 When Deleuze places woman within the material or being, he is making a move away from placing woman as a phenomenological subject and towards woman as an ontological surging-up-inthe-world. The material is the pure being-there or the there is of woman. The immaterial is the quality that reveals itself from this being-there. This quality of womans being-there has two coefficients or two modes: heaviness and lightness. Heaviness is a term taken directly from Sartre: What I perceive when I want to lift this glass to my mouth is not my effort but the heaviness of the glass that is, its resistance to entering into an instrumental complex which I have made appear in the world.85 It is heaviness that most expresses the inertia of being, its quality of being useless. Deleuze describes woman as being useless in order to place her outside the instrumental complex of useful things. This is what he means by calling woman an object of luxury. But this objectness of woman is not the same as that of a table or chair. Woman is only an object in so far as she is a being, but this being is not situated the way an object is. A chair can be used to sit on because it can be situated beneath us, but woman is not this-object-here that can be used. She is a pure objectness prior to all specification. Only a pure object can be immaterial in its materiality. Heaviness is what Sartre calls a coefficient of adversity. 86 Deleuze makes up his own term to describe lightness: a cosmic coefficient. Quality is the whole of being revealing itself in the heaviness of an object. Using Sartres terminology, when we utilize an object it surpasses its qualities in the realizing of our projects. Only when the object manifests itself as useless, as pure adversity, do we truly take notice of those qualities that express the whole of being. By objectifying herself woman makes herself a magical object: the more she is ensconced in materiality, the more she makes herself immaterial.87 Lightness, the cosmic coefficient, is not the expression of a womans inner states: emotional manifestations or, more generally, the phenomena erroneously called the phenomena of expression , by no means indicate to us a hidden affection lived by some psychism. 88 They express being and not the subject: They refer to the world and to themselves.89 The various expressions: frowns, this redness, this stammering, this slight trembling of the hands, these downcast looks which seem at

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once timid and threatening these do not express anger; they are the anger.90 These gestures do not refer to something hidden in the mind of a woman; in other words, the expressed does not exist outside its expressions. We will now see how Deleuze seems to transform these simple elements taken from Sartre into a new conception of consciousness as a thing. Let us consider an example of consciousness of the quality or sensation of pain that Sartre examines in Being and Nothingness. What then is pain? Sartre asks. Simply the translucent matter of consciousness, its being-there , its attachment to the world 91 Pain is a quality by which consciousness can manifest its beingthere to itself. It exists on a plane of pure being, 92 a plane that is immanent to itself. Pain is a perfect example of a quality that manifests a coefficient of adversity, that reveals a useless being to us, and as such it cannot be situated: This pain however does not exist anywhere among the actual objects of the universe.93 This being of pain is both material and immaterial. It is in the object but it is not reducible to an object. It is a cosmic coefficient in that it reveals a world-as-pain. Of course Sartre is not speaking here of a pain that is localized in a particular organ but of a pure pain: Pure pain as the simple lived cannot be reached; it belongs to the category of indefinables and indescribables which are what they are.94 Here we see pure consciousness at work, a consciousness of self and not a consciousness of something.95 What this pure consciousness seems to be aware of is what Bergson calls an interpenetrative multiplicity and Deleuze calls qualitative difference, an awareness prior to all specification. This pure consciousness cannot be apprehended as an object because it lacks distance from us, according to Sartre: The pain is neither absent nor unconscious; it simply forms a part of that distanceless existence of positional consciousness for itself.96 Pure consciousness is unreflective consciousness in so far as it has no object to reflect on outside itself. As long as it remains at this level, consciousness is internal to itself, but as soon as it distances the pain, or projects it into an object, it realizes an exterior world. The first movement of reflection is therefore to transcend the pure quality of consciousness in pain towards a pain-as-object.97 Now we are in a better position to understand Deleuzes statement: As a thing, she is conscious; and in being conscious, she is a thing. 98 For Sartre the spontaneous, unreflective consciousness is no longer the consciousness of the body consciousness exists its body. 99 This state of consciousness is one of plenitude, one in which the body coincides with the world, not an external world, but the underworld of the world, a tepid interiority of the world, a compress of the internalized world.100 Sartre is expressing something like this when he says that the body conditions consciousness as pure consciousness of the world.101 But this world is a world lacking distance from consciousness. Consciousness is not able to examine this world as an object because there is no distance between it and the world within it. It is the immanence of this world that appeals to Deleuze, its lack of exteriority. Quality, before it is externalized into an object, exists as an essence that exists the body. In the example of pain we saw that for the unreflective consciousness, pain was the body. 102 In other words, quality is the essence at the heart of pure consciousness, that is prior to its individualization. The male-Other was defined as a possible exteriority; that is, the possible is presented as an external world at a distance from consciousness. This form of possibility separates the possibilities from pure consciousness and is surpassed towards the possibilities that the Other presents in a gap. On the other hand, woman does not present an exterior world; the possibility she expresses is not an external world, it is she herself.103 But it would seem that a world without distances, without exteriority, would fall back into the pure necessity of an in-itself. In Sartres terms, exteriority opens up contingency, presents a world of possibilities that consciousness would surpass itself towards. Deleuze opposes this possibility with the possibility woman is: not a possibility of transcending but a possibility of internal unfolding. There are three ways Deleuze presents the possibility of woman. First, the being of the possible104 that is the pure unsituated consciousness, the unreflective conscious-

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ness of self. This is formal possibility, the being behind appearances, the thing that its appearance refers to. Second, the possibility of being,105 the unsituated quality that is immanent to being, that allows being to express and explicate itself. This is transcendental possibility, the conditions for appearances, the law that gives sense to appearance. And third, the flesh of the possible,106 this quality that exists the body in an unmediated proximity to it. This is the synthesis that is both the being that appears and the quality that gives sense to appearances. It is in this way that woman possibilizes herself, not by seeking possibilities to surpass towards, but by seeking the immanent possibilities of her being. What is the role of make-up in the formation of this interiority? We have seen how consciousness of the body interiorizes the matter it affects.107 This consciousness of the body, according to Sartre, is a non-thetic consciousness of the manner in which it is affected.108 On the part of woman, make-up is an auto-affection, but from the outside it is a creation of a Persona. In other words, make-up is the attempt to make this internality appear at the surface, on the face. Strictly speaking, interiority as such can never appear on the exterior.109 What the face manifests is, therefore, not internality but the noumenon. It is the symbol of the interior that appears on the exterior which maintains its being as interior.110 The noumenon appears to us as indistinctness: Indistinctness is interiority seen from the outside indistinctness is the degraded projection of interiority.111 It appears as a hole, or a spot without thickness. Sartre calls these holes an appeal to being. It is the symbol of that interiority presented to us on the surface. This is how the two make-ups function: the surfaces are rendered smooth and unremarkable while the orifices are accentuated. The orifices present a fascinating barrier between the outside and the inside. They do not express anything; rather, their function is to entrap. The make-up of the surfaces, such as the forehead, makes the surfaces of the skin insignificant112 so that they do not present any external qualities. For example, a wrinkle would express age, a quality that is objectified and externalized, and not a pure quality of the interior. But make-up leads us astray. Make-up hides interiority by symbolizing it on the exterior; it remains a hidden interiority, or the interiority preserved from every external reach.113 It remains a noumenon. It only presents us with a cover that gives us no knowledge of what is hidden. Only in sleep, Deleuze says, is interiority handed over,114 only when the body gives itself without pretence. This is directly in line with Sartres position: The flesh is the pure contingency of presence. It is ordinarily hidden by clothes, make-up, the cut of the hair or beard, the expression, etc.115 Sartre describes a moment when we become so familiar with the Others body that one has a pure intuition of the flesh.116 We have a direct understanding of this fleshiness, this taste of himself117 that becomes for me a quality-of-the-world, an apprehension of the world that Sartre calls nausea. However it is presented, what is important is that interiority is handed over;118 it is no longer a hidden secret, but a cosmic coefficient. The secret has two aspects: as an interior life and as a category of things. The first, the interior life of woman or what woman thinks is not the most interesting aspect119 of the secret. What woman thinks constitutes her as another subject that is the realm of pure spirits and not the realm of essences that Deleuze is more concerned with. This aspect of the secret constitutes what Sartre calls the freedom of the Other. In Sartres model of seduction the aim of desire is to capture this freedom, and as Deleuze says, that makes her a mirror in which I will find myself as I want to be.120 But this would utterly reduce the woman to a simple objectified subject. Deleuze wishes to progress beyond this hidden secret to another form of the secret as a category of things. In this form of secret, woman is no longer the subject that has secrets. She is the secret. Deleuze mentions here two forms of innuendo 121 that he will later develop into gossip and slander . Gossip consists of signs to be interpreted. They appeal to the realm of facts, something unknown that can be known. This is what Deleuze calls form without matter,122 a pure sign seeking its object, but the object is noumenal; it can be seen but not reached.

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Slander is a secret that consists of expressions without reference or interpretation because there are no facts that it refers to. It reveals the pure being-there of the secret; it is matter without form123 and refers to the plenitude of being, the pure in-itself, that refuses all thought. It is this later form of the secret that tends towards the absolute secret. The absolute secret is a limit. In the face of pure interiority interpretation becomes impossible. It is the irrational remainder or the unthinkable that exists at the heart of thought. The secret is a key juncture in Deleuzes essay; it is one of the main points where he opposes Sartre. Sartre conceives the secret (what he calls freedom) as that which alienates ones being by standing over against it as a possibility that transcends our consciousness. The secret in Deleuzes sense is an aspect of being itself. Deleuze surpasses Sartres reading of sexual desire towards Sartres concept of the desire to be God. He reads through Sartres concept of sexual desire a more fundamental desire to achieve a state of immanence. Deleuze ends Description of Woman with a note of the futility of sexual desire (in the caress) to achieve this state. But he takes up the problem again in Statements and Profiles in the guise of the mime, where he claims that the unity of contradictories, of the secret and the without-secret124 is achieved. It is here that he takes up Francis Ponges quest of Le parti pris des choses125 in his notion of becoming a thing or an object for oneself. He does not develop this thought here but it will show up later in Proust and Signs as style and in other works as the plane of immanence. It becomes clear that, for Deleuze, what Sartre calls a useless passion126 may not be so useless after all. The caress is that which realizes127 the interiority of the flesh. The body normally appears as a form of exteriority, in a situation with other objects; but in realizing itself as flesh it becomes interior to itself: this is why Sartre says that The Others body is originally a body in situation; flesh, on the contrary, appears as the pure contingency of presence.128 The caress realizes this interiority by cutting off all transcendence. By rendering the flesh immanent to itself the caress reveals the flesh by stripping the body of its action, by cutting it off from the possibilities which surround it; the caress is designed to uncover the web of inertia beneath the action i.e., the pure being-there which sustains it.129 This realization of the flesh actualizes the fundamental passion to coincide with ones own being, to achieve a state of immanence. Deleuze describes this state of being as a negation of a thickness.130 As we saw above, this means that the qualities that make up the world are experienced without any distance from the body. Woman does not normally realize her flesh because she transcended it towards her possibilities and towards the object.131 The world of projects that transcend our beingthere is the world of projection. What the caress does is to introject the quality of the flesh into itself. This is the meaning of appropriation. When Sartre says that the caress is an appropriation of the Others body,132 he means that the quality of fleshiness that the Other presents us is introjected into our body and a double reciprocal incarnation133 takes place. In this way the caress ceaselessly folds exteriority, draws it into itself, renders it internal to itself.134 The caress twists135 the qualities that it finds on the exterior (the flesh of an Other) and makes those qualities a concrete universal, an interior world. But this attempt to achieve an immanence of being-there fails to maintain itself. By the end of the essay Deleuze has failed to find what he sought from woman: a complete self-sufficient internality of pure immanence. There are three reasons for this. First, the caress cannot be an act that is carried out all the time. Every time the caress stops it must be infinitely reborn136 so that caressing must begin anew.137 Second, her being exists only as an act effectuated by the Other.138 This means that even though she achieves a state of immanence, it is only due to an act that has a transcendent source. She fails the test of self-sufficiency. Third, as a further consequence of being dependent on the Others flesh, her introjection of that flesh would appear to exist only in reference to what is reflected. 139 Woman would only be able to realize herself as flesh because she mirrors the flesh

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of the Other that she introjects. All this leads Deleuze at the end of the essay to conclude that woman (or anybody who depends on the introjection of the Others flesh) will remain, ultimately, an unrealized being never reaching the realm of the plenitude of being. It is precisely this failure that causes Deleuze to take up the problem again, one year later, in Statements and Profiles. Deleuzes second article, Statements and Profiles, is about a fundamental passion that profiles.140 But what does this mean? Deleuze is taking up something that Sartre talks about at the end of Being and Nothingness: Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the in-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God.141 Sartre describes this as a project of the appropriation of the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality.142 This fundamental passion is to re-appropriate the plenitude of being-there as an object. But Deleuze and Sartre part ways on the exact nature of this object, this fundamental quality of the world. For Sartre this being-in-itself as a fundamental quality of the world remains purely symbolic. It is an ideal for consciousness; this makes the passion to become this object a useless passion. For Deleuze the passion to become this fundamental quality of the world, which he calls essence, is not useless. Deleuze will go against what he calls romanticism143 that can be found in Sartre: the opposition between man and things 144 that is its visual obstinacy,145 the visual metaphor that states that for something to be conscious of something it must be external to what it represents. As Sartre says: Even if I could see myself clearly and distinctly as an object, what I should see would not be the adequate representation of what I am in myself and for myself.146 Deleuze in Statements and Profiles must recontextualize this fundamental passion as posing the possibility of beingan-object, an essence, not as a representation to oneself but as a pure consciousness as an object. Statements and Profiles deals with the perversion of those who cannot or do not want to go beyond mediocrity towards the Team,147 of those who are incapable of forming a wesubject with Others. This perversion is the attempt to acquire at least the interior life that they lack,148 that is to become an essence. Deleuze is not making a moral accusation by describing this perversion; he presents it without any pejorative meaning.149 This essay is a precursor to his work on perversion in The Logic of Sense in which: The perverse world is a world in which the category of the necessary has completely replaced that of the possible.150 This is the world of the in-itself. According to Sartre the in-itself, being by nature what it is, cannot have possibilities.151 Being can only have possibilities by facing an externality, a world of Others. In perversion the structure-Other is missing 152 and concrete Others are reduced to the role of accomplices-doubles, and accomplices-elements. 153 Take the case of exhibitionism in Statements and Profiles: the exhibitionist makes himself an object only in order to participate, through violence and surprise, in the inner life of a woman.154 When Sartre considers being looked at, he sees it as alienating. Becoming-an-object for-an-Other isolates and makes one self-conscious. Deleuze reverses this. The exhibitionist actually participates in the inner life of woman by becoming a fundamental quality of the world, in this case surprise. But how is this possible? There are two elements in Sartres look. One is the transcendence that the look offers us (the subjectivity of the Other). The other is the supporting environment of my being-unrevealed.155 Deleuze focuses on the second element when he makes the Other the accomplice-element of the exhibitionist. The exhibitionist shares with the woman the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality, i.e., surprise. The mediocre individual stuck in his solitude is suddenly transformed by this mineralization of his being. Sartre describes this transformation as a solidification and abrupt stratification of myself which suddenly pushes me into a new dimension of existence the dimension of the unrevealed .156 Deleuze takes this solidification

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literally: the exhibitionist becomes a thing seated at the base of the world. It is not by chance that I employ the word seated [sasseoir ], for he must become a thing, a mineral, he must be mineralized. A thing seated at the base of the world, and it is not by chance that we employ the word seated [sasseoir]. That it becomes a thing, a mineral. That it mineralizes itself.157 But this remains contingent on the presence of the Other, as Sartre puts it: When I am alone, I cannot realize my being-seated158 and the objectification, because it depends on the Other, will never succeed at realizing this beingseated which I grasp in the Others look.159 Deleuze invokes the myth of Narcissus who stands before the lake and makes himself an object for himself by the reflection of his Other. But is there not here a failure on the part of Narcissus? 160 Deleuzes first poem describes this failure. It describes the fissure of nothingness between the for-itself and the in-itself. Sartre describes the difference between a pure object and a consciousness: Of this table I can say only that it is purely and simply this table. But I cannot limit myself to saying that my belief is belief; my belief is the consciousness of belief.161 The in-itself is the simply this, the pure being-there of things, consciousness is divided from itself by reflection, the gap of torsions (Dires et profils 74): that is the mediocrity of Narcissus. On the other hand: The initself is full of itself, and no more total plenitude can be imagined,162 and having this in-itself that is the thing in me that is not me163 is like a reminder in me of odious finitude164 and not the plenitude of the in-itself that Sartre compares to God. The failure of Narcissus is the same failure as woman. It is realized by an act performed by the Other and thus lacks the necessity that the pure in-itself is. Deleuze invokes the mime, but what is the mime?165 The true mime is the mime of things. It is the acquisition of the full-being.166 In other words it is the realization of the fundamental passion, the unity of pure consciousness with the pure object, i.e., consciousness as an in-itself. This is something Sartre explicitly denied: I cannot be an object for myself.167 But Sartre is limited by a phenomenological perspective of visual metaphors. To answer the challenge of representation Deleuze has recourse to the aesthetic. Deleuze turns to Ponge to find a method of being-object: Ponge wants things to be turned into feelings.168 Ponge writes that this pebble, because I conceive it to be a unique object, makes me feel a particular sentiment, or perhaps rather a complex of particular sentiments.169 A phenomenological approach would make a sentiment that is aroused by a particular object an external relationship between the consciousness of the sentiment and its object. Ponges approach is more radical: I take myself, by objects, out of the old humanism, away from actual man and what is in front of him. I add to man the new qualities that I name.170 This approach is transversal. It allows man to share all the realities that I possess in common171 with the object. Deleuze finds in Ponge what he will later find in Proust: the differential qualities. When I say that a walnut resembles a praline, that is interesting. But what is more interesting is their difference. Feel the analogies, that is something. Name the differential quality of the walnut, and behold the result, progress.172 Deleuze develops this concept of differential quality into what he calls essence in Proust and Signs . Two objects share the same quality or essence when they achieve a viewpoint proper to each of the two objects,173 so that the viewpoints can be set within each other.174 Essence is an individuating viewpoint superior to the individuals themselves.175 Essence is Deleuzes alternative to representation. By exchanging the viewpoint that consciousness takes on an object with the superior viewpoint of the qualitative essence that is common to the in-itself, both of the object experienced and ones in-itself, the object has an immanent relationship with ones being. A qualitative essence does not need to be represented because it is the unique mode of being of beingin-itself. Sartre comes closest to this when he describes the slimy in Being and Nothingness: everything takes place for us as if sliminess were the meaning of the entire world.176 Within this quality there is no outside. One experiences

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oneself as slimy-in-the-world, any representation would be superfluous. The slimy in this case, in Deleuzes terms, would be the superior viewpoint that sees the world through itself, while Sartre believes that the slimy is a symbol of the world for consciousness. Essence reveals at once the interiority of pure consciousness and the unrevealed. The in-itself of the thing is the unity of contradictories, of the secret and the without-secret,177 and of what Deleuze calls complication and explication. The object in-itself contains all essences virtually; this means that it contains qualities yet to be discovered; in becoming-object the qualities of the world unfold for themselves. Pure consciousness is nothing other than this point of unfolding. It is here that the secret noumenal and the withoutsecret meet. The fundamental passion is none other than the desire to unfold this inner world, the world of the in-itself. We see in these two early works of Deleuze a move from sexual difference to perversion. Deleuze describes the way desire undergoes a sort of displacement in this structure, and the manner by which the Cause of desire is thus detached from the object; on the way in which the difference of sexes is disavowed by the pervert. 178 We have seen this same movement at work here where the desire of the other sex is surpassed towards a more fundamental, qualitative, elemental desire for the plenitude of being. We see the course of Deleuzes early confrontation with sexual difference and his later disavowal of it in miniature here. The charge has been made against Deleuze that he fails to take into account sexual difference179 in his theory of difference. This charge comes from a reading of Deleuzes later works with Guattari where they affirm that there are not two sexes but n sexes,180 multiple and elementary non-human sexes. But it fails to take into account the struggle with and criticism of sexual difference that Deleuze pursued in his earlier work. Let us briefly examine the critique of sexual difference in Deleuzes early work. The first question that we ask is: what causes the division of the sexes? In Proust and Signs Deleuze determines that it is the law that divides the sexes: the law measures their discrepancy, their remoteness, their distance, and their partitioning, establishing only aberrant communications between the noncommunicating vessels.181 Deleuze is referring to the Kantian moral law that presents itself as an empty form without content in the form of an empty imperative. It is the source of a priori guilt because we can obey the law only by being guilty because the law is applied to parts only as disjunct, and by disjoining them still further.182 The law is the source of the a priori Other that distributes individual Others by acting as a partition that makes persons appear. It is in and through transcendent guilt that sides take shape, series are arranged, persons figure in these series, under strange laws of lack, absence, asymmetry, exclusion, noncommunication, vice, and guilt.183 We have seen in Statements and Profiles that the interior is the realm of the secret that is generated by accusations of guilt, jealousy, and frustration. Deleuze describes this as an unpleasant world184 because the law inserts lack into desire. This formed part of Deleuzes critique of Sartre: it was not the transcendence of the Other as a freedom that made the Other transfix us by its gaze but the Other as a transcendence of the secret and the instantiation of the law. One of the main reasons Deleuze sides with perversion and the mime is that it removes the law of lack from desire. We now ask: how does the Law divide the sexes? The division of the sexes is a tactic that consciousness takes in order to cope with the a priori guilt that the law imposes on it. Deleuze describes the manner by which Proust mixes with the law a schizoid consciousness of the law.185 In this consciousness of the law everything is aggressiveness exerted or undergone in the mechanisms of introjection and projection.186 In other words, consciousness is unable to handle the guilt of the law so it displaces it into a woman who becomes guilty a priori: To love supposes the guilt of the beloved.187 It is the foundation for love. But at the same time this consciousness wants to make reparation for this guilt, so it seeks by the caress to introject the original goodness of the law into itself, and in this way it confers a judgment of innocence upon the being one knows nevertheless to be guilty.188 As

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we saw, the caress fails to complete this introjection of the beloved into a pure interiority of immanence, frustration results, and it is therefore as a result of frustration that the good object, as a lost object, distributes love and hatred.189 The war of the sexes is only an extension of this failed attempt to complete the object of desire. Woman thus appears as a secret because of the frustration of desire to achieve its object. Woman becomes the object of the law: The object of the law and the object of desire are one and the same, and remain equally concealed.190 This is why Deleuze defines woman as interiority: only by being hidden can she take on this role of the law. The moves that Deleuze and Guattari make in Anti-Oedipus to multiply the sexes are an attempt to go beyond this model of sexual difference that presupposes transcendence and lack. Here all guilt ceases191 where the alternative of the either/or exclusions192 is done away with. One of their main objectives is to eliminate any idea of guilt from the start193 by showing that the demands of a hidden transcendence194 are false and proceed in the name of an immanent power195 of which transcendence is the mere shadow. In conclusion, Deleuze has placed a series of brackets around certain aspects of Sartres work that he finds problematical. He does this to find and accentuate an aspect of Sartres work that expresses a turn towards immanence. Let us review some of these steps that he has taken: The first part of my essay presented possible worlds not as the property of someones inner life or their hidden mental reality but as an expression of an exterior world. Deleuze, in presenting possible worlds this way, has had to put aside or bracket off the notion of the Other as another subject. The a priori Other avoids this mistake of treating the Other as just another subject or as a special object in the field of experience. By postulating the Other as a structure of experience Deleuze has bracketed out intersubjectivity as the mode by which we relate to the Other. We then examined the difference between friendship and love as the different ways in which the male-Other and woman manifest the world to us. The difference that is found in Sartres examination of blindness and seduction is the difference that Deleuze finds between possibility and necessity. This very distinction demonstrated that the root of sexual difference lies in the way that the a priori Other structures our field of experience. What the male-Other offers is the projection of himself upon the actual world. He stands as an intermediary between us and the world. Woman, on the other hand, presents us not with a subject but a fundamental quality at the heart of the subject, its interior. This interior provokes an interior world of fantasy and not an external world of things. Next we saw that by taking woman out of the instrumental complex she is revealed as pure adversity. In this way she manifests the plenitude of being as a fundamental quality. And by revealing the plenitude of being as pure adversity Deleuze effectively brackets out the possibility of woman being a situated object of desire in the world. This quality becomes unsituated as a pure consciousness. This was effected by a unity of consciousness and the body. Consciousness and the body are one on a pre-reflective level because the quality it exists has no distance from it. It is here that Deleuze finds a form of pure immanence in Sartre. This immanence of the flesh can be experienced by the lover when the beloved sleeps. It is ordinarily covered over with make-up that remains situated on the face. Make-up attempts to symbolize the interior on the exterior but ends by distracting us from the pure presence of the flesh. Deleuze surpasses Sartres notion of freedom as the Other-as-subject that has secrets or an interior mental life towards woman as the unsituated quality that is the secret. No longer an inter-subjective quest to capture the Others freedom, desire becomes the quest for the plenitude of being or the essential secret. Although the caress is the best way to bracket out the object as situated, the object still remains dependent on an external transcendent source to caress it. In the same way the pervert brackets off the Other as subject to share with her a fundamental quality, but this attempt fails because it too depends on the Other as a presence that effectuates his being unrevealed. This need for the

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Others presence is like a reminder of finitude blocking the pervert from being a self-sufficient object. So the only solution is to become an object for oneself. This happens when one is taken out of ones situated viewpoint on the world and approaches the world aesthetically from the superior viewpoint of the unsituatedobject-as-quality. Finally we saw that the difference of the sexes has its source in the empty form of the law that distributes guilt and lack. This accounts for the aggressive nature of sexual love and desire in its futile attempt to attain a state of plenitude. France of the 1940s had no philosophical feminism. This must be kept in mind when reading Description of Woman. What Deleuze is writing here is not feminism, but it may have consequences that act as a precursor to feminist concerns. I cannot go into these here but I would like to address some of its possible objections: 1. It may be objected that Deleuzes Description of Woman defines woman from a male-centered perspective. But one of the main points of his essay is its opposition to Sartres male-centered perspective. Sartre based womans sexual difference upon a males desire for her. Deleuze displaces it to an impersonal and a priori source: the ontological surging up of woman. Any accusation of a male-centered perspective would ignore this fact. 2. It could also be objected that Description of Woman makes woman into an object that does not express her subjective understanding of her sexual difference. It must be kept in mind that Deleuze is trying to account for the genesis of sexual difference and not the subjective condition of having a sexual identity. One of his key moves is to bracket out the self-reflective subject in order to discover a pure consciousness. Having a sexual identity takes place on a reflective level; what Deleuze is dealing with is the communication of bodies on the level of desire and not on the level of intentionality. It must be kept in mind that Deleuze is dealing with sexual difference on a different level than later feminists such as de Beauvoir. 3. Finally, it may be objected that Description of Woman is all about male desire. This is partially true. One of the main issues of this essay is its distinction between how the maleOther appears to other men and its difference from the ontological surging up of woman. But Deleuze goes further than this towards a fundamental passion to achieve a state of pure interiority. This passion could be seen as forming a crucial part of female desire. But it must be kept in mind that it is not Deleuzes task to focus on the particular differences in desire of men and women; rather, he attempts to find a fundamental form of desire without lack. This will remain unconvincing for those who can only conceive of molar forms of desire of a particular transcendent object. Why should we be interested in these early essays? Are they not the vague ramblings of an undeveloped philosophic mind? We would not look at the childhood drawings to understand an artist, so why would we need to understand Deleuzes early essays? A philosopher is not like any other artist. One begins writing philosophy because of a problem that motivates it. A philosopher is drawn into philosophy by a problem that is worked out again and again in every new essay. But the problem that is formative for a philosopher has a beginning, an event that provokes thought. Deleuzes event was Sartre. In the late 1940s, France was infected with existentialism, a philosophy in which negativity and transcendence played a key role. But this nothingness went unquestioned. It is often stated that Deleuzes crusade against negativity was motivated by his opposition to Hegel, but his opposition to Hegel only began in 1956.196 Sartre was Deleuzes first master and Sartres philosophy would be the first that he would try to rewrite in the name of immanence. Deleuze tells us that to understand a philosopher we must understand the problem that motivates him. If we do not do that we will understand nothing. This applies to Deleuze as well. To understand Deleuze we must study the early formation of his thought as well as what results in the later work. And what we see is the oak in the acorn. Deleuze, in a quest to build a philosophy of immanence, is consistent in his work, so that his very first essay mirrors his last: they both seek what is immanent.

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I would like to thank Daniel W. Smith for his helpful criticisms of earlier drafts of this work and Keith Ansell-Pearson for his support and encouragement. I would also like to thank Christine Battersby. 1 Gilles Deleuze, Description de la femme: Pour une philosophie dautrui sexue, Posie 28 (1945): 2839 (my trans. throughout). 2 See Deleuzes article on Sartre: Il a t mon matre, Arts (29 Oct.3 Nov. 1964): 89. Reprinted in Jean-Jacques Brochier, Pour Sartre (Paris: Jean-Claude Latts, 1995) 7888. Also see Michel Tournier, Gilles Deleuze in Deleuze and Religion (New York: Routledge, 2001) 202. Here he states that Deleuze was, at that time, heavily influenced by Sartres LEtre et le nant. 3 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia UP, 1987) 12. 4 Ibid. 5 Gilles Deleuze Dires et profils, Posie 36 (1946): 6878 (my trans. throughout). 6 Description de la femme 28. 7 Iris Murdoch, Sartre Romantic Rationalist (London: Vintage, 1999) 130. 8 Ibid. 9 Description de la femme 28. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, 1990) 317. 13 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1956) 502. 14 Description de la femme 28. 15 Being and Nothingness 137. 16 Ibid. 17 Dires et profils 68. 18 Description de la femme 30. 19 The Logic of Sense 311. 20 Description de la femme 29. 21 Ibid. 30. 22 For more on this see: Constantin V. Boundas, Foreclosure of the Other: From Sartre to Deleuze, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24.1: 3243. 23 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What is Philosophy? , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 17. 24 The Logic of Sense 311. 25 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 60. 26 Description de la femme 29. 27 Ibid. 28 The Logic of Sense 307. 29 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 260. 30 The Logic of Sense 307. 31 Being and Nothingness 307. 32 Ibid. 33 Description de la femme 29. 34 What is Philosophy? 17. 35 Description de la femme 29. 36 Ibid. 30. 37 Deleuze uses the word magical to describe the transformation of the world: a magical transformation of tiresomeness into being tired. This seems to be a reference to Sartres notion of magical consciousness. But there is one important difference. For Deleuze this consciousness is not someones consciousness but a pure consciousness. 38 Deleuze tells the same story pointing out that the face is neither subject nor object but a possible world: Suddenly a frightened face looms up that looks at something out of the field. The other person appears here as neither subject nor object but as something that is very different: a possible world, the possibility of a frightening world. What is Philosophy? 17. 39 Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1971) 86. 40 Ibid. 88. 41 Ibid. 89.

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42 Joseph P. Fell says of magical consciousness: here the magic seems to originate in the world, not in a reaction to the world. Emotions in the Thought of Sartre (New York: Columbia UP, 1965) 28. 43 What is Philosophy? 17. 44 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 171. 45 Description de la femme 29. 46 Ibid. 47 Dires et profils 70. 48 Description de la femme 32. 49 Being and Nothingness 307. 50 The Logic of Sense 307. 51 Ibid. 52 Dires et profils 69. 53 Ibid. 70. 54 The pure consciousness that is the a priori Other is a notion that Deleuze derives from Leibniz and Proust. This concept of the other person goes back to Leibniz, to his possible worlds and to the monad as expression of the world. But it is not the same problem, because in Leibniz possibles do not exist in the real world (What is Philosophy? 17). In Proust and Signs this pure consciousness is called an essence: Proust is Leibnizian: the essences are the veritable monads, each defining itself by the point of view with which it expresses the world, each point of view returns itself to an ultimate quality at the foundation of the monad (41). Woman as an a priori structure of experience is an essence in the sense that she is an ultimate quality at the foundation of the monad that Deleuze speaks of. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000). 55 Description de la femme 32. 56 Proust and Signs 30. 57 Ibid. 95. 58 Ibid. 30. 59 Ibid. 60 Being and Nothingness 495. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 512. 63 Description de la femme 30. 64 Ibid. 65 Being and Nothingness 484. 66 Description de la femme 30. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Being and Nothingness 48485. 70 The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993) 91. 71 Ibid. 84. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 83. 74 Description de la femme 31. 75 Ibid. 32. 76 The Transcendence of the Ego 85. 77 Ibid. 78 Being and Nothingness 485. 79 Proust and Signs 4243. 80 Ibid. 81 Gilles Deleuze speaks of a quality that leads the mind naturally from one idea to another in Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humes Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 100. It is quality that forces us to think. 82 Dires et profils 77. 83 Description de la femme 31. 84 Being and Nothingness 258. 85 Ibid. 427. 86 Ibid. 428. 87 Description de la femme 31. 88 Being and Nothingness 45455. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 438.

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92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Description de la femme 30. 96 Being and Nothingness 440. 97 Ibid. 98 Description de la femme 31. 99 Being and Nothingness 434. 100 Description de la femme 32. 101 Being and Nothingness 432. 102 Ibid. 442. 103 Description de la femme 30. 104 Ibid. 31. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Being and Nothingness 43435. 109 Description de la femme 37. 110 Ibid. 35. 111 The Transcendence of the Ego 85. 112 Description de la femme 34. 113 Ibid. 37. 114 Ibid. 115 Being and Nothingness 451. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. 118 Description de la femme 37. 119 Ibid. 36. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Dires et profils 76. 125 See Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1942). 126 Being and Nothingness 784. 127 Description de la femme 38. 128 Being and Nothingness 506. 129 Ibid. 507. 130 Description de la femme 38. 131 Being and Nothingness 507. 132 Ibid. 506. 133 Ibid. 508. 134 Description de la femme 38. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid. 138 Ibid. 39. 139 Ibid. 38. 140 Dires et profils 68. 141 Being and Nothingness 784. 142 Ibid. 143 Dires et profils 75. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 146 Being and Nothingness 365. 147 Dires et profils 70. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid. 69. 150 The Logic of Sense 320. 151 Being and Nothingness 152. 152 The Logic of Sense 320. 153 Ibid. 154 Dires et profils 73. 155 Being and Nothingness 360. 156 Ibid. 359. 157 Dires et profils 73. 158 Being and Nothingness 352. 159 Ibid. 160 Dires et profils 74. 161 Being and Nothingness 121. 162 Ibid. 120.

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163 Dires et profils 74. 164 Ibid. 165 For more on the mime see The Logic of Sense 6365, 147; and What is Philosophy? 15960. 166 Ibid. 75. 167 Being and Nothingness 361. 168 Dires et profils 75. 169 Francis Ponge, Le Grand Recuil (Paris: Gallimard, 1961) 25 (my trans. throughout). 170 Ibid. 41. 171 Dires et profils 75. 172 Le Grand Recuil 42. 173 Proust and Signs 16667. 174 Ibid. 175 Ibid. 162. 176 Being and Nothingness 773. 177 Dires et profils 76. 178 The Logic of Sense 319. 179 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 117. 180 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 296. 181 Proust and Signs 14243. 182 Proust and Signs 132. 183 Anti-Oedipus 69. 184 Dires et profils 68. 185 Proust and Signs 132. 186 The Logic of Sense 192. 187 Proust and Signs 132. 188 Ibid. 189 The Logic of Sense 191. 190 Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty in Deleuzes Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1991) 85. 191 Anti-Oedipus 69. 192 Ibid. Keith W. Faulkner 45 Napton Drive Leamington Spa CV32 7UX UK E-mail: k.w.faulkner@warwick.ac.uk 193 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994) 45. 194 Ibid. 195 Ibid. 196 See Gilles Deleuze, La conception de la diffrence chez Bergson, Les Etudes Bergsoniennes 4 (1956).