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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 isfounded.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 foun-

dation 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 founda-

tions 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 henames woman. He closely examines the relation-

ship 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

passion17 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 doesnot go into detail about it. Deleuze surpasses

S t i t l ti th t d i i t f thi

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 positionof woman. Because of this, the subject of

Deleuzes essay cannot properly be called femi-

nism 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 conse-

quences 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 concep-

tion 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 fasci-

nating 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 fini-

tude 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 ofhis contemporaries, was a child of existentialism,

but one who surpassed it by reacting to its insuf-

ficiencies and, by this reaction, gave birth to a

new philosophy.

The second paragraph of Description of

Woman sets out to summarize the entire prob-

lem of the Other18 that Deleuze presents to

define the meaning of the male-Other. Itdescribes the transition from the world without

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that all consciousness is consciousness of some-

thing, 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 some-thing but immanence itself, which he calls in this

essay pure consciousness.21 Deleuze is influ-

enced at this early stage by Sartres The

Transcendence of the Ego and the idea expressed

in it of an impersonal or pre-personal transcen-

dental 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 princi-

ple26 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 objec-

tive of objects27) that disrupts the immanence

of the pre-personal world by introducing possi-

bilities 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 worldcertainly exists, but it does not exist (actually)

outside of that which expresses it.28 Possibility

disrupts the immanence of the real world by plac-

ing 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.29The Other is the object of the possible: The

th i th i t f th d i

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-angerwhich 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 possi-

ble 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 supplementarydimension 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 itmagical consciousness.37 In this work Sartre tells

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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 magicalconsciousness, the emergence of the face (which

is not taken to be a human) appears simultane-

ously with the possibility in a worldthat 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 phenome-

nological 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 self-

consciousness 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 thepossibilities that he presents, the external possi-

ble worlds. But it is impossible to fully realize

possible worlds by forsaking the field of experi-

ence.

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 therealization of the external possible offered to us

b th l Oth 48 Th ld th t h ff i

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 impor-

tant criticism of Sartres approach to the Other.

Sartre says that the condition of possibility for

all experience is that the subject organize hisimpressions into a connected system. Thus we

find in things only what we have put into them.

The Other, therefore, cannot without contradic-

tion 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 andNothingness 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, with-out 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 divi-

sion 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 wellhave an inner life.52


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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 inits 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

consciousness54 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 externalpossible offered to

us by the male-Other.55 What makes this rela-

tionship external? Deleuze follows Prousts defi-

nition 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, itremains 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 dinnerparty, where one man makes a witticism and then

th th ff l h if h d t d

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

friendship58 because it is not voluntary and

contingent the way friendship is. Friendshippresupposes 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 func-

tions: 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 behav-ior 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 lack-

of-being, woman presents us with a fullness of

being. By seduction I aim at constituting myself

as a fullness of being and at making myselfrecognized as such. To accomplish this I consti-

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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 influ-

ence of seduction it is impossible to ignore her;

it is impossible to effect this cutting-off.68

Sartre sets out the two components of seduc-tion 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 aninfinite, undifferentiated series of other real

and possible acts which I give as constituting

my objective, unperceived being.69

The first component of seduction is what Sartre

calls hidden being and Deleuze refers to as inte-

riority. In The Transcendence of the Ego Sartre

calls this interiority a pure consciousness, with-

out any constitution of states or actions.70 He

also says of this interiority that: It is inwardforitself, not for consciousness.71 Interiority is

beyond contemplation72 because we can

contemplate our states but we cannot contem-

plate that which passively has states. It is, in a

sense, more internal to consciousness than are

states.73 This interiority, for Deleuze, is para-

doxical. 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 theimmaterial;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 moreof a carnal or ontological interiority that mani-

f t it lf t i di ti t i t

degraded projection of interiority.76 The undif-

ferentiated series is what constitutes this interi-

ority. It is also the indistinctness, for example,

that one may find in the famous interpenetrative

multiplicity of Bergson.77

The second component that Sartre attributesto 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, connec-tions, etc.).78

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 qual-

ities of the externalworld. 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 neces-

sity of desire. It remains contingent because it is

always possible to deny this world of the male-

Other through blindness ; therefore it is a weakerform 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 male-

Other 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 existoutside the subject expressing it. (What we call

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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 thesubject. 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 indis-

tinctness, 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 impos-

sible to ignore her the way we could the male-

Other. 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 person-

ality 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 meaningcan 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 iden-

tity of the material and the immaterial83 he is

echoing Sartres statement: being is not in itselfa quality although it is nothing either more or

l B t lit i th h l f b i li

towards woman as an ontological surging-up-in-

the-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 light-ness. 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 heav-

iness of the glass that is, its resistance to enter-

ing 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 instru-

mental 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 mate-

riality.

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 beingrevealing itself in the heavi-

ness 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 adver-sity, 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 meansindicate to us a hidden affection lived by some

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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 trans-form 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 exam-

ines 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 being-

there 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 iswhat Bergson calls an interpenetrative multiplic-

ity 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, accord-

ing 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 unreflectiveconsciousness in so far as it has no object to

fl t t id it lf A l it i t

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, unreflec-tive 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 thebody.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 exte-

riority; 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 presentsin 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 with-

out 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 thispossibility with the possibility woman is: not a

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ness of self. This isformalpossibility, 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 conditionsfor appearances, the law that gives sense to

appearance. And third, the flesh of the possi-

ble,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 qual-

ity 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 conscious-

ness of the body interiorizes the matter it

affects.107 This consciousness of the body,

according to Sartre, is a non-thetic conscious-

ness of the manner in which it is affected.108

On the part of woman, make-up is an auto-affec-

tion, 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 interi-

ority seen from the outside indistinctness is

the degraded projection of interiority.111 Itappears 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 func-

tion: the surfaces are rendered smooth and unre-

markable 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. Themake-up of the surfaces, such as the forehead,

k th f f th ki i i ifi t112

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 ishidden. Only in sleep, Deleuze says, is interior-

ity 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 appre-

hension 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, thatmakes 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

innuendo121 that he will later develop intogossip and slander. Gossip consists of signs to be

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deleuzesartre

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 thislater 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 tran-

scends 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 uplater 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 interi-

ority of the flesh. The body normally appears as

a form of exteriority, in a situation with otherobjects; but in realizing itself as flesh it becomes

i t i t it lf thi i h S t th t Th

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 sustainsit.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 being-

there 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 appro-

priation 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 reci-

procal incarnation133 takes place. In this waythe 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-sufficientinternality 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 failsthe test of self-sufficiency. Third, as a further

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faulkner

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 intro-

jection of the Others flesh) will remain, ulti-

mately, an unrealized being never reaching the

realm of the plenitude of being. It is preciselythis 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 funda-

mental 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 funda-

mental quality of the world, which he calls

essence, is not useless. Deleuze will go againstwhat he calls romanticism143 that can be found

in Sartre: the opposition between man and

things144 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 myselfand for myself.146 Deleuze in Statements and

P fil t t t li thi f d t l

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 we-

subject with Others. This perversion is the

attempt to acquire at least the interior life thatthey 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

missing152 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 partici-

pates 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 transcen-dence that the look offers us (the subjectivity of

the Other). The other is the supporting envi-

ronment of my being-unrevealed.155 Deleuze

focuses on the second element when he makes

the Other the accomplice-element of the exhibi-

tionist. 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 issuddenly transformed by this mineralization of

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deleuzesartre

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 chancethat 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 being-

seated 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 nothing-

ness 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 medi-

ocrity of Narcissus. On the other hand: The in-

itself 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 areminder 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 fail-

ure 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

d it i th li ti f th f d t l

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 turnedinto 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 senti-

ment 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 view-

points can be set within each other.174 Essence

is an individuating viewpoint superior to theindividuals themselves.175

Essence is Deleuzes alternative to representa-

tion. By exchanging the viewpoint that conscious-

ness takes on an object with the superior

viewpoint of the qualitative essence that is

common to the in-itself, both of the object expe-

rienced and ones in-itself, the object has an

immanent relationship with ones being. A qual-

itative essence does not need to be representedbecause it is the unique mode of being of being-

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faulkner

oneself as slimy-in-the-world, any representation

would be superfluous. The slimy in this case,

in Deleuzes terms, would be the superior view-

point 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 discov-

ered; 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 without-

secret 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 themanner 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, qualita-

tive, elemental desire for the plenitude of being.

We see the course of Deleuzes early confronta-

tion with sexual difference and his later disavowalof 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 strug-

gle with and criticism of sexual difference thatDeleuze pursued in his earlier work. Let us

b i fl i th iti f l diff

the sexes: the law measures their discrepancy,

their remoteness, their distance, and their parti-

tioning, establishing only aberrant communica-

tions between the noncommunicating vessels.181

Deleuze is referring to the Kantian moral law that

presents itself as an empty form without contentin 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 disjoin-

ing them still further.182 The law is the source of

the a priori Other that distributes individual

Others by acting as a partition that makespersons

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, noncom-

munication, vice, and guilt.183 We have seen in

Statements and Profiles that the interior is the

realm of the secret that is generated by accusa-

tions 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. Deleuzedescribes the manner by which Proust mixes

with the law a schizoid consciousness of the

law.185 In this consciousness of the law every-

thing is aggressiveness exerted or undergone in

the mechanisms of introjection and projec-

tion.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 isthe foundation for love. But at the same time this

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we saw, the caress fails to complete this introjec-

tion of the beloved into a pure interiority of

immanence, frustration results, and it is there-

fore 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 thisfailed 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 differ-

ence 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 imma-

nent 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 possibleworlds 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 expe-

rience. By postulating the Other as a structure ofexperience Deleuze has bracketed out inter-

bj ti it th d b hi h l t t th

us. The difference that is found in Sartres exam-

ination of blindness and seduction is the differ-

ence 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 ofexperience. What the male-Other offers is the

projection of himself upon the actualworld. 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 reveal-

ing 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 imma-

nence 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 exte-

rior but ends by distracting us from the pure

presence of the flesh.Deleuze surpasses Sartres notion of free-

dom 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 free-

dom, 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 remainsdependent on an external transcendent source to

it I th th t b k t ff

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faulkner

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 aestheticallyfrom the superior viewpoint of the unsituated-

object-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 femi-

nism. This must be kept in mind when reading

Description of Woman. What Deleuze is writ-

ing here is not feminism, but it may have conse-

quences 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 mindthat Deleuze is trying to account for the genesis

of sexual difference and not the subjective condi-

tion 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 communica-

tion of bodies on the level of desire and not on

the level of intentionality. It must be kept inmind that Deleuze is dealing with sexual differ-

diff t l l th l t f i i t h

this essay is its distinction between how the male-

Other 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 forminga 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 fundamen-

tal 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 philoso-

pher 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 philoso-

pher 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 transcen-

dence played a key role. But this nothingness

went unquestioned. It is often stated that

Deleuzes crusade against negativity was moti-

vated by his opposition to Hegel, but his opposi-

tion to Hegel only began in 1956.196 Sartre wasDeleuzes 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 seeis the oak in the acorn. Deleuze,

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16/20

notes

I would like to thank Daniel W. Smith for his help-

ful criticisms of earlier drafts of this work and

Keith Ansell-Pearson for his support and encour-

agement. 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.


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.


15 Being and Nothingness 137.

16 Ibid.

17 Dires et profils 68.

18 D i i d l f 30

22 For more on this see: Constantin V. Boundas,

Foreclosure of the Other: From Sartre to

Deleuze, Journal of the British Society for

Phenomenology24.1: 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.


27 Ibid.


29 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans.

Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 260.



32 Ibid.


34 What is Philosophy?17.


36 Ibid. 30.

37 Deleuze uses the word magical to describe the

transformation of the world: a magical transfor-

mation 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 conscious-

ness.

38 Deleuze tells the same story pointing out that

the face is neither subject nor object but a possi-

ble 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

deleuzesartre


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faulkner

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.


46 Ibid.





51 Ibid.


53 Ibid. 70.

54 The pure consciousness that is the a priori

Other is a notion that Deleuze derives fromLeibniz 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 returnsitself 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).


56 Proust and Signs 30.

57 Ibid 95

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid. 512.


64 Ibid.



67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.


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.


75 Ibid. 32.

76 The Transcendence of the Ego 85.

77 Ibid.



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. Itis quality that forces us to think.




85 Ibid. 427.

86 Ibid. 428.


88 Being and Nothingness 45455


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92 Ibid.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid.



97 Ibid.





102 Ibid. 442.


104 Ibid. 31.

105 Ibid.

106 Ibid.

107 Ibid.



110 Ibid. 35.

111 The Transcendence of the Ego 85.


113 Ibid. 37.

114 Ibid.


116 Ibid.

117 Ibid.


119 Ibid. 36.

120 Ibid.

121 Ibid.

122 Ibid.

123 Ibid.



129 Ibid. 507.



132 Ibid. 506.

133 Ibid. 508.


135 Ibid.

136 Ibid.

137 Ibid.

138 Ibid. 39.

139 Ibid. 38.



142 Ibid.


144 Ibid.

145 Ibid.



148 Ibid.

149 Ibid. 69.


151 Being and Nothingness 152.152 The Logic of Sense 320.

153 Ibid.



156 Ibid. 359.



159 Ibid

deleuzesartre


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faulkner


164 Ibid.

165 For more on the mime see The Logic of Sense

6365, 147; and What is Philosophy?15960.

166 Ibid. 75.



169 Francis Ponge, Le Grand Recuil (Paris:

Gallimard, 1961) 25 (my trans. throughout).

170 Ibid. 41.


172 Le Grand Recuil42.


174 Ibid.

175 Ibid. 162.




179 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodimentand Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist

Theory(New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 117.

180 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-

Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.

Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane




183Anti-Oedipus 69.





188 Ibid.

189 The Logic of Sense 191.190 Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty in

193 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Kafka:

Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan


194 Ibid.

195 Ibid.

196 See Gilles Deleuze, La conception de la

diffrence chez Bergson, Les Etudes Bergsoniennes

4 (1956).


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Deleuze in Utero

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