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DELEUZE IN UTERO: deleuze-sartre and

the essence of woman
Keith W. Faulkner
Published online: 03 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Keith W. Faulkner (2002) DELEUZE IN UTERO: deleuze-sartre and the essence of
woman, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 7:3, 25-43

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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 7 number 3 december 2002

E very now and then there comes along a

strange document in philosophy. Deleuze’s
1945 essay “Description of Woman”1 is such a
document. It reveals the beginning of Deleuze’s
thought, his first investigations into immanence
and desire without lack. It reveals to us also the
influence of Deleuze’s maître, namely Sartre.2
This essay will reveal his fidelity to and betrayal
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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 Sartre’s existentialism. Deleuze felt that
Sartre was a “breath of fresh air”;3 even though
he “did not feel drawn towards existentialism or
towards phenomenology”4 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 Sartre’s 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 Sartre’s problems.
In Deleuze’s 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. Sartre’s conception of love centers on the
desire to capture the Other’s freedom. Deleuze
criticizes this as being the “pure work of souls.”6
Iris Murdoch made the same criticism when she
said “Sartre’s 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
deleuze–sartre and the
essence of woman
other.”8 Deleuze is “ill at ease”9 with these
“mixtures of consciousnesses”10 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 other’s
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: 10.1080/0969725022000032463

25
 deleuze–sartre
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 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
souls”14 where one subject projects his mode of
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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 being”15 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 passion”16 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 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
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 this-
woman-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 situ-
ated 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
Deleuze’s 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 Deleuze’s confrontation
with Sartre and not to explore these conse-
quences for feminism. This early essay, although
important, does not represent Deleuze’s 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 Deleuze’s 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 of
his 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 Other”18 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 Other’s absence, consciousness and its
object are one.”19 Where phenomenology states
26

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 Sartre’s 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
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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-
ple”26 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 objects”27) 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 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 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.”29
The Other is the object of the possible: “The
other is the existence of the encompassed possi-
ble.”30 This is Michel Tournier’s unique contri-
bution to Deleuze’s early thought. It is one of the
major points where Deleuze differs in a slight but
important way from Sartre.
27
faulkner
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-anger
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 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 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
 deleuze–sartre
from the outside.’”40 All of these possibilities are
presented in a world “which reveals itself as
already horrible.”41 Unlike Sartre’s 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 simultane-
ously 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:
“Sartre’s text on the look and Lacan’s on the
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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 the
possibilities 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 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 impor-
tant criticism of Sartre’s 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 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 Sartre’s, 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, 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 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
28

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
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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 rela-
tionship external? Deleuze follows Proust’s 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 one’s 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 main-
tain an external relationship between the men.
What makes this relationship contingent (merely
possible) is that it is voluntary, as the relation-
29
faulkner
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 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 solipsism”61
in which the Other’s “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 myself
recognized as such. To accomplish this I consti-
tute 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
 deleuze–sartre
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 Deleuze’s 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
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infinite, 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 inward for
itself, not for consciousness.”71 Interiority is
“beyond contemplation”72 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 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 mani-
fests itself to us as an indistinctness or interpen-
etrative multiplicity. Sartre seems to point to the
concept of the virtual in Bergson when he speaks
of this interiority: “Indistinctness … is interior-
ity seen from the outside … indistinctness is the
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 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, “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 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 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 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 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 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
30

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 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
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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 beloved’s 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 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 Sartre’s 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 immaterial”83 he is
echoing Sartre’s 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
31
faulkner
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 woman’s 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 being revealing itself in the heavi-
ness of an object. Using Sartre’s 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
woman’s 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 them-
selves.”89 The various expressions: “frowns, this
redness, this stammering, this slight trembling of
the hands, these downcast looks which seem at
 deleuze–sartre
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
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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 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 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
Deleuze’s 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 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 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 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 with-
out distances, without exteriority, would fall back
into the pure necessity of an in-itself. In Sartre’s
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 possible”104 that is the pure unsit-
uated consciousness, the unreflective conscious-
32

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 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
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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 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 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. The
make-up of the surfaces, such as the forehead,
makes the surfaces of the skin “insignificant”112
so that they do not present any external qualities.
For example, a wrinkle would express age, a qual-
ity that is objectified and externalized, and not a
pure quality of the interior.
33
faulkner
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 interior-
ity handed over,”114 only when the body gives
itself without pretence. This is directly in line
with Sartre’s 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
Other’s body that one has a “pure intuition of the
flesh.”116 We have a direct understanding of this
fleshiness, this “taste of himself”117 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 aspect”119 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
Sartre’s 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.
 deleuze–sartre
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
form”123 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 Deleuze’s essay;
it is one of the main points where he opposes
Sartre. Sartre conceives the secret (what he calls
“freedom”) as that which alienates one’s being by
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standing over against it as a possibility that tran-
scends our consciousness. The secret in Deleuze’s
sense is an aspect of being itself. Deleuze
surpasses Sartre’s reading of sexual desire
towards Sartre’s concept of the desire to be God.
He reads through Sartre’s 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-secret”124 is achieved. It is
here that he takes up Francis Ponge’s 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 passion”126 may not be so useless after
all.
The caress is that which “realizes”127 the interi-
ority 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
Other’s body is originally a body in situation;
flesh, on the contrary, appears as the pure contin-
gency 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 one’s 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 Other’s body,”132 he means that
the quality of fleshiness that the Other presents
us is introjected into our body and a “double reci-
procal incarnation”133 takes place. In this way
“the caress ceaselessly folds exteriority, draws it
into itself, renders it internal to itself.”134 The
caress “twists”135 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 reborn”136 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 Other’s
flesh, her introjection of that flesh would appear
to exist “only in reference to what is
reflected.”139 Woman would only be able to real-
ize herself as flesh because she mirrors the flesh
34

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 Other’s flesh) will remain, ulti-
mately, 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.”
Deleuze’s 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
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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 against
what he calls “romanticism”143 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 being-
an-object, an essence, not as a representation
to oneself but as a pure consciousness as an
object.
35
faulkner
“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 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 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 Sartre’s “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 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
 deleuze–sartre
literally: the exhibitionist becomes “a thing
seated at the base of the world. It is not by
chance that I employ the word ‘seated’
[s’asseoir], 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’ [s’asseoir]. 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-seated’”158
and the objectification, because it depends on the
Other, will “never succeed at realizing this being-
seated which I grasp in the Other’s look.”159
Deleuze invokes the myth of Narcissus who
stands before the lake and makes himself an
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object for himself by the reflection of his Other.
“But is there not here a failure on the part of
Narcissus?”160 Deleuze’s 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 me”163 is “like a
reminder in me of odious finitude”164 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
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 senti-
ment that is aroused by a particular object an
external relationship between the consciousness
of the sentiment and its object. Ponge’s
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 common”171
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 the
individuals themselves.”175
Essence is Deleuze’s 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 one’s in-itself, the object has an
immanent relationship with one’s being. A qual-
itative essence does not need to be represented
because it is the unique mode of being of being-
in-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
36

oneself as slimy-in-the-world, any representation
would be superfluous. The “slimy” in this case,
in Deleuze’s 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
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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 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, qualita-
tive, elemental desire for the plenitude of being.
We see the course of Deleuze’s early confronta-
tion 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 difference”179 in his theory of
difference. This charge comes from a reading of
Deleuze’s 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 that
Deleuze pursued in his earlier work. Let us
briefly examine the critique of sexual difference
in Deleuze’s 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
37
faulkner
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 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 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 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, 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 world”184
because the law inserts lack into desire. This
formed part of Deleuze’s 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 “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 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
 deleuze–sartre
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 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
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attempt to go beyond this model of sexual differ-
ence that presupposes transcendence and lack.
“Here all guilt ceases”191 where “the alternative
of the ‘either/or’ exclusions”192 is done away
with. One of their main objectives is to eliminate
“any idea of guilt from the start”193 by showing
that the “demands of a hidden transcendence”194
are false and proceed “in the name of an imma-
nent power”195 of which transcendence is the
mere shadow.
In conclusion, Deleuze has placed a series of
brackets around certain aspects of Sartre’s work
that he finds problematical. He does this to find
and accentuate an aspect of Sartre’s 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 someone’s 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 of
experience Deleuze has bracketed out inter-
subjectivity 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 Sartre’s 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 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 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 Sartre’s 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 Other’s 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 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 funda-
mental quality, but this attempt fails because it
too depends on the Other as a presence that effec-
tuates his being unrevealed. This need for the
38

Other’s 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 one’s situated viewpoint on the
world and approaches the world aesthetically
from 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-
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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 Deleuze’s
“Description of Woman” defines woman from a
male-centered perspective. But one of the main
points of his essay is its opposition to Sartre’s
male-centered perspective. Sartre based woman’s
sexual difference upon a male’s 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 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 in
mind that Deleuze is dealing with sexual differ-
ence 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
39
faulkner
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 forming
a crucial part of female desire. But it must be
kept in mind that it is not Deleuze’s 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
Deleuze’s 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. Deleuze’s “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
Deleuze’s crusade against negativity was moti-
vated by his opposition to Hegel, but his opposi-
tion to Hegel only began in 1956.196 Sartre was
Deleuze’s first “master” and Sartre’s 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.
 deleuze–sartre
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 d’autrui sexuée,” Poésie 28 (1945):
28–39 (my trans. throughout).
2 See Deleuze’s article on Sartre: “Il a été mon
maître,” Arts (29 Oct.–3 Nov. 1964): 8–9.
Reprinted in Jean-Jacques Brochier, Pour Sartre
(Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1995) 78–88. Also see
Michel Tournier, “Gilles Deleuze” in Deleuze and
Religion (New York: Routledge, 2001) 202. Here
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he states that Deleuze was, at that time, “heavily
influenced by Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant.”
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,” Poésie 36
(1946): 68–78 (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: 32–43.
23 Gilles Deleuze and Félix 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 transfor-
mation of tiresomeness into being tired. This
seems to be a reference to Sartre’s notion of
magical consciousness. But there is one important
difference. For Deleuze this consciousness is not
someone’s 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
Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen,
1971) 86.
40 Ibid. 88.
41 Ibid. 89.
40
 faulkner
42 Joseph P. Fell says of magical consciousness: 61 Ibid.
“here the magic seems to originate in the world,
62 Ibid. 512.
not in a reaction to the world.” Emotions in the
Thought of Sartre (New York: Columbia UP, 1965) 63 “Description de la femme” 30.
28.
64 Ibid.
43 What is Philosophy? 17.
65 Being and Nothingness 484.
44 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
66 “Description de la femme” 30.
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 67 Ibid.
171.
68 Ibid.
45 “Description de la femme” 29.
69 Being and Nothingness 484–85.
46 Ibid.
70 The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest
47 “Dires et profils” 70. Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill
& Wang, 1993) 91.
48 “Description de la femme” 32.
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71 Ibid. 84.
49 Being and Nothingness 307.
72 Ibid.
50 The Logic of Sense 307.
73 Ibid. 83.
51 Ibid.
74 “Description de la femme” 31.
52 “Dires et profils” 69.
75 Ibid. 32.
53 Ibid. 70.
76 The Transcendence of the Ego 85.
54 The “pure consciousness” that is the a priori
Other is a notion that Deleuze derives from 77 Ibid.
Leibniz and Proust. “This concept of the other
78 Being and Nothingness 485.
person goes back to Leibniz, to his possible worlds
and to the monad as expression of the world. But 79 Proust and Signs 42–43.
it is not the same problem, because in Leibniz
80 Ibid.
possibles do not exist in the real world” (What is
Philosophy? 17). In Proust and Signs this pure 81 Gilles Deleuze speaks of “a quality that leads
consciousness is called an essence: “Proust is the mind naturally from one idea to another” in
Leibnizian: the essences are the veritable monads, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s
each defining itself by the point of view with which Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V.
it expresses the world, each point of view returns Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 100. It
itself to an ultimate quality at the foundation of the is “quality” that forces us to think.
monad” (41). Woman as an a priori structure of
82 “Dires et profils” 77.
experience is an “essence” in the sense that she is
“an ultimate quality at the foundation of the 83 “Description de la femme” 31.
monad” that Deleuze speaks of. Gilles Deleuze,
84 Being and Nothingness 258.
Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard
Howard (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000). 85 Ibid. 427.
55 “Description de la femme” 32. 86 Ibid. 428.
56 Proust and Signs 30. 87 “Description de la femme” 31.
57 Ibid. 95. 88 Being and Nothingness 454–55.
58 Ibid. 30. 89 Ibid.
59 Ibid. 90 Ibid.
60 Being and Nothingness 495. 91 Ibid. 438.

41
 deleuze–sartre
92 Ibid. 127 “Description de la femme” 38.
93 Ibid. 128 Being and Nothingness 506.
94 Ibid. 129 Ibid. 507.
95 “Description de la femme” 30. 130 “Description de la femme” 38.
96 Being and Nothingness 440. 131 Being and Nothingness 507.
97 Ibid. 132 Ibid. 506.
98 “Description de la femme” 31. 133 Ibid. 508.
99 Being and Nothingness 434. 134 “Description de la femme” 38.
100 “Description de la femme” 32. 135 Ibid.
101 Being and Nothingness 432. 136 Ibid.

102 Ibid. 442. 137 Ibid.

138 Ibid. 39.
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103 “Description de la femme” 30.

104 Ibid. 31. 139 Ibid. 38.

105 Ibid. 140 “Dires et profils” 68.

106 Ibid. 141 Being and Nothingness 784.

107 Ibid. 142 Ibid.

108 Being and Nothingness 434–35. 143 “Dires et profils” 75.

109 “Description de la femme” 37. 144 Ibid.

110 Ibid. 35. 145 Ibid.

111 The Transcendence of the Ego 85. 146 Being and Nothingness 365.

112 “Description de la femme” 34. 147 “Dires et profils” 70.

113 Ibid. 37. 148 Ibid.

114 Ibid. 149 Ibid. 69.

115 Being and Nothingness 451. 150 The Logic of Sense 320.

116 Ibid. 151 Being and Nothingness 152.

117 Ibid. 152 The Logic of Sense 320.

118 “Description de la femme” 37. 153 Ibid.

119 Ibid. 36. 154 “Dires et profils” 73.

155 Being and Nothingness 360.
120 Ibid.
156 Ibid. 359.
121 Ibid.
157 “Dires et profils” 73.
122 Ibid.
158 Being and Nothingness 352.
123 Ibid.
159 Ibid.
124 “Dires et profils” 76.
160 “Dires et profils” 74.
125 See Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses
(Paris: Gallimard, 1942). 161 Being and Nothingness 121.
126 Being and Nothingness 784. 162 Ibid. 120.

42
 faulkner
163 “Dires et profils” 74. 193 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka:
Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan
164 Ibid.
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994) 45.
165 For more on the mime see The Logic of Sense
194 Ibid.
63–65, 147; and What is Philosophy? 159–60.
195 Ibid.
166 Ibid. 75.
196 See Gilles Deleuze, “La conception de la
167 Being and Nothingness 361.
différence chez Bergson,” Les Etudes Bergsoniennes
168 “Dires et profils” 75. 4 (1956).
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.
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173 Proust and Signs 166–67.

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 Félix Guattari, Anti-
Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 296.
181 Proust and Signs 142–43.
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
Deleuze’s Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New Keith W. Faulkner
York: Zone, 1991) 85. 45 Napton Drive
Leamington Spa CV32 7UX
191 Anti-Oedipus 69.
UK
192 Ibid. E-mail: k.w.faulkner@warwick.ac.uk
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