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Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

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DESCRIPTION OF WOMAN: for a philosophy of the sexed other

Gilles Deleuze Published online: 03 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Gilles Deleuze (2002): DESCRIPTION OF WOMAN: for a philosophy of the sexed other , Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 7:3, 17-24 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725022000032454
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ANGELAKI

journal of the theoretical humanities volume 7 number 3 december 2002

For Alain Clment

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

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

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/02/030017-08 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/0969725022000032454

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world, this world without a subject, encloses within itself the principle of its own negation, its own annihilation: an object among others, but an object that nonetheless has its own specificity that most objective of objects which we call the Other. The Other is in this tired world, and yet, through its attitude and its gestures, its soft step, its calm breath and its ease, it can express a world in which there is no tiredness. This is what the Other is: the expression of a possible world.3 The expression of an absent external world, an expressing without an expressed. The world expressed by the Other, the entire universe that is the Other, is inscribed in that category of objects of which Valery spoke: the action of the presence of absent things. The action of a hollow presence, but one which is enough to force the old universe back into me, to make it stick in my throat, to make me conscious that this time it is really me who is tired. A magical transformation of tiredness into being tired (du fatiguant en fatigu). It is me, and me alone: a responsibility that is too great, unbearable, identical to contingency. I am ashamed. This shame, this prick of consciousness that destroys any serene and objective description, this consciousness of the Other, is a timidity, a dissimulated hatred of the Other. But is the Other simply the enemy, the hateable? Is the Other nothing but the expression of a possible external world? Is it not also the offer of a friendship? I will overcome my tiredness; I will turn the sun, the street, and even the fatigue into so many encouragements; I will sacrifice myself without reciprocity; I will sacrifice this tiredness that has now become my own, that has become me, that was so dear to me; I will finally realize this absent external world that the Other reveals to me in a word, I will team up with the Other. An optimistic vision At what price will it be verified? And what, in relation to the authentic, is the respective meaning of hatred and friendship? This constitutes the entire problem of the Other. But it is not our problem; we have spoken of it only insofar as the description of woman cannot be made without reference to the male-Other. The male-Other is defined not as a consciousness, nor as another I, but objectively as a possible exteriority. Woman, however, is completely different. Here we must be simplistic, and adhere to the nave image: the woman in make-up, who torments the tender, misogynist, and dissimulating adolescent. In vain would we seek the expression of an absent external world on the face of this woman. In her, everything is presence. Woman does not express a possible world; or rather, the possibility she expresses is not an external world, it is she herself. Woman expresses only herself: self-expression, innocence, serenity. One could say that she lies at an intermediary position between the pure object, which expresses nothing, and the male-Other, which expresses something other than itself, an external world. With woman, we are made to witness the genesis of the Other: she is born of the object, but in the passage from object to Other. On the other hand, she can clearly be distinguished from the male-Other. I can, in my own eyes, ridicule the Other, gravely insult him, deny the possibility of the world he expresses that is, I can reduce the Other to a pure, absurd, and mechanical comportment. In effect, what we call comportment is expression itself, cut off from the possible external world that it sketches as a hollowness, which it expresses as an absence. Comportment is the expressing cut off from the expressed. Certainly, in the case of the maleOther, the expressed is absent, but it is nonetheless that toward which the expressing tends in its entirety. Closed in on itself, cut off from its own overcoming, the Other takes on an absurd air, reduced to incoherent gestures. Woman, on the contrary, in her enormous presence, is impossible to deny or insult; with her, it is impossible to effect this cutting-off. It is as if there were no external world; the expressed is the expressing. Woman is given in an un-decomposable block, she simply appears, and in her the internal is the external, the external the internal. The coincidence of the expressing and the expressed is consciousness. Her consciousness is defined objectively from the outside, but as such it is very particular: it is not situated, it is a pure consciousness that expresses itself, a consciousness of self and not a consciousness of something. The whole of a womans flesh is consciousness, and all her consciousness is flesh.

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Woman is her own possibility, she possibilizes herself. Such is her mystery, her grace. It has not been emphasized enough that grace is defined by a mixture of heaviness and lightness, such that heaviness is what is most light, and lightness is what is most heavy. The body of woman is the overflowing triumph of the flesh, of materiality. A softness of the abdomen that can be seen despite the dress that surrounds the ordinary things of women: her legs, arms, and the rest, but mostly a softness of the abdomen. A sun, it made your blood swarm and then again two big lights on her body, the throat, and above, this face where she was wearing her thick mouth always closed oh! prudence and her eyes that were singing all the time like beautiful greenfinches.4 Woman is essentially incarnated; but the more she is ensconced in materiality, the more she makes herself immaterial and is taken up by the expression of herself, by becoming the very possibility of being that she herself is. As a thing, she is conscious; and in being conscious, she is a thing. She is indissolvably the possibility of being and the being of the possible, the flesh of the possible in other words, the lightness of heaviness and the heaviness of lightness. This is what grace is: this union of contraries, a strict identity of the material and the immaterial. Woman is conscious of her own heaviness, her immersion in the world, her own weight. (Let us be clear here: it is not a question of groaning under her weight, it is not that; to be conscious is not to submit to her weight like a signification, too heavy, not enough ; it is a question of a pure consciousness.) A softness of the abdomen, as Giono says. Consciousness is softness. And the danger that weighs down on woman like a weight of disgrace is that she loses this consciousness, that she is no longer anything but an abdomen, an overflowing materiality, a make-up that is running: then she is a thing. Let us not speak of it: it is too painful, a woman who has lost her being. For her being is this unbelievable unity of consciousness and flesh. Woman is a consciousness, and yet she expresses nothing external to herself. She is an unusable consciousness, a gratuitous consciousness, autochthonal, unreceptive. She is useful for nothing (elle ne sert rien), an object of luxury. The nature of luxury objects is that they do not serve any great purpose. But there are two ways of being unusable. First, an object can be so precise, so meticulous, so precious that it no longer has any application; it is a superfluous object addressing itself so directly to its possessor that the latter cannot depend on it to act. In effect, the self (moi) that acts is always substitutable, more or less an anyone, never unique. But beyond the self that acts, the luxury object addresses itself to a self that is more profound, more internal, more feminine a self, for example, that enjoys seeing its useless initials imprinted on a cigarette. An object of luxury used by a being of luxury, a being, this time, that is so general and so vast that every use is too particular. In this sense, woman is cosmic. She is thing and consciousness, thing in consciousness, consciousness in thing. And pure consciousness, a consciousness of itself, that pushes the matter it affects to a cosmic coefficient, and twists it in a return to the self. The consciousness of woman does not open itself to a plurality of absent external worlds, or close itself on the matter that it possibilizes or universalizes. Woman is a concrete universal, she is a world not an external world, but the underworld of the world, a tepid interiority of the world, a compress of the internalized world. Hence the prodigious sexual success of woman: to possess the woman is to possess the world. This synthesis of being and the possible is what we call the necessity of woman. The moral consequence: one can never be friends with a woman. May our young men and women renounce hypocritical theories. Friendship is the realization of the external possible offered to us by the male-Other. But woman has no external world to offer us. Woman is not that which can deny, in a perfectly executed proposition, this world I once believed to be objective this tired world, for example by substituting another world in its place, a world in which there is no tiredness. In her essence, she is simply that which has the power to dis-interest me in everything else, because she is herself a thing without relation to other things, because she is a world without exteriority. This is what one expresses by saying This woman is desirable.

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It is well known that there is a profound contrariety between the friend and the lover. When I say This woman is desirable, it is not me who projects this signification on her (recall the great principle). It is not me who desires her, it is she who appears to me as desirable. But in this very world centered around the woman, my friend can, on the contrary, find her to be contemptible and ugly: the revelation of a possible world in which she is not lovable. Whence the famous conflict between love and friendship. Am I going to realize the possible external world that this Other reveals to me? The woman senses this conflict, and can do one of two things: either she can attempt to put me on bad terms with my friend, or she can seduce him, she can impose on him the expression of a world in which she is desirable, reducing him to the muted existence of a rival next to me a rival of whom I am jealous, and no longer a friend who only exists in the opposition of worlds. All this constitutes the pretext of innumerable novels. Let us therefore retain this opposition between the woman and the male-Other. Nonetheless, cannot the woman express a possible external world? Can she not, like the maleOther, propose a tired world, or a non-tired world, and so on? Once and for all, this is not the role of woman, for she would then lose her essence. The man who experiences pleasure in seeing woman express an external world is what I call a sadist (from inoffensive forms of sadism to the most subtle and most evolved forms, in which a mask of suffering and fear is imposed on the woman, the expression of a world of pain). A single example: the wrinkled brow of the maleOther, the surprised forehead, which wrinkles itself in order to see better and to understand, expresses a possible world, an external resistance to be penetrated. Large, long, well-drawn furrows, separated by equal folds of flesh the ease of such wrinkles on a forehead made for just this. Ah!, the wrinkle on a womans forehead, by contrast: a thousand disordered and clumsy little cracks, of short duration, quickly renounced, reappearing elsewhere, a little lower down, without success, like the moving cuts of a pocket knife or the folds of crumpled paper. This inability of the forehead to behave in a coherent manner is enough to make one cry, it is ridiculous and touching. (Ridiculous and touching: a curious alliance of words that always leaps to mind.) The sadist said to the woman: sit down here and furrow your brow. But there is a devil within. It seems that women want a philosophy of the asexual Other. It is women themselves who run to their ruin: they want to express an external world, every possible external world; they want to raise themselves to the level of the male-Other, to go beyond it. But in doing so they lose their essence. A double danger weighs on woman, quite apart from any question of age. Too old, woman reduces herself to an inexpressive thing; too young, she wants to make herself into a maleOther. Once again, we must be simplistic: her place is not the exterior, it is in the home, the interior. The life of the interior and the interior life the word is the same. Woman is her own possible: she expresses not an external world but the inner world. Or rather, the inner life is this identity of the material and the immaterial, which constitutes the very essence of woman. Whereas the male-Other is defined above all by exteriority, woman is an interiority enormous, hot, and full of life. Make-up is the formation of this interiority. We have seen how the consciousness of self dematerializes and interiorizes the matter it affects. And we must not forget that we have constantly defined this consciousness by the outside. From this point of view, make-up appears not as a mask, which is applied to a face in order to cover its expression, but as the feminine Persona itself, instituting a supernatural order, that is to say, internalizing nature. In a book with a promising title (but which does not keep its promises), Andr Billy speaks of this consubstantial accord of flesh and greasepaint, I know not what accord of the flesh with civilization.5 We know now that what maintains this accord between nature and the Persona is the very act of internalizing nature in the form of the Persona, it is consciousness itself. This consciousness is essentially localized in the neck and the ankles these are the places of grace: the ankles, or better yet, high-heeled shoes, conscious of the weight of the body; and the neck, conscious of the weight of

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the head. For the male-Other, by contrast, the neck is never conscious. One can distinguish two kinds of make-up. First, there is the make-up of surfaces, built on a base of paste and powder, which consists in making the surface absolutely smooth, insignificant in the etymological sense, inexpressive, in order to protect it from being situated, from revealing any mark of exteriority (wrinkles, scars, etc.). On the other hand, there is the make-up of orifices, which is concerned with the accusation of interiority. Sometimes the exterior is internalized: the black mascara that surrounds the eye ensconces the look and renders it internal to itself. Sometimes the interior is externalized, while retaining, beyond its externalization, its internal being: reddened lips are the opening out of a thick interiority, while this same redness seems to prolong itself in the interior (itself red), a redness that always goes further, under the skin, under the surface, to which it gives a rosy hue. In this way, the make-up of orifices even seizes hold of surfaces. And not only the lips, but also the nails: here again, the redness is prolonged, it is prolonged to the point where one gives up the absurd habit of leaving the crescent moons white. This leads to the problem of the eyebrows, which is posed at the same time as the problem of the juncture of the two types of make-up. Womans hair marks a proliferation, an inner exuberance, an inexhaustible internal fecundity. But is this not more or less the meaning of bodily hair in general? Why, then, does woman pluck her eyebrows? It is because, despite appearances, the eyebrows are the mark of an exteriority, or rather, the mark of a frontier between the interior and the exterior. Below the eyebrows lies the interiority of the eyes; above them, the exteriority of the forehead. But the woman suppresses every boundary between the internal and the external, she seeks to reduce the external to the internal as much as possible, to assure the primacy of the internal. Hence the suppression of the eyebrows: their plucking constitutes the juncture between the two types of make-up. There are further signs of an internal proliferation: the beauty mark and freckles. Dont imagine freckles to be a failing. They bring out her color, they make her skin seem to be some rare essence, like a precious wood. Since then, I have more than once, without realizing it, searched for these spots on beautiful faces, and have been slightly disappointed by their absence.6 I do not understand at all why woman is ashamed of freckles and fights them with make-up, while on the contrary she cultivates the beauty mark (or at least she cultivated it for a long period of time). This can only be explained through an error woman makes about her own essence. Freckles evoke a mysterious and a perfect lan a supple trajectory issued from I know not what throwing-stone. They are like bubbles that arise from within, that appear on the surface but do not inflate, without popping and without volume. One can run ones hand over them and not feel them, they do not rise above the skin, they are a simple blossoming on the surface, a proliferation without thickness, an enervating charm. One can see freckles but one cannot touch them, their outlines are purely visual, and the spots themselves are out of reach. It is impossible to grasp them with two fingers, to play with them with one finger, to make them protrude. Nonetheless, they are there, within reach, not fleeing, immutable and serene. The freckle resembles the reflection of Narcissus or the torture of Tantalus: within reach and yet out of reach. This indifferent and inexorable presence, which one can see but not touch, I will call the noumenon. The noumenon is truly the symbol of the interior on the exterior which, beyond its exteriority, maintains its being as interior. Moreover, it lies at the limit of make-up in its entirety, which tends to become noumenal: make-up is that which can be seen but cannot be touched. Interiority is the inviolable. Dont mess up this hairdo, Dont touch this makeup: a verbal defense proffered by woman, but one which, beyond the words, reveals the true ontological meaning of make-up. By contrast, one should mistrust the beauty mark, which has a certain thickness, allows itself to be played with, and is not noumenal. Moreover, the beauty mark stands alone, it does not come in groups, it lies there like an accused black spot. In short, it prepares for and sustains an ironic reversal: rather than the face having a beauty mark, it is

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the beauty mark that has the face, the entire face being organized around the beauty mark a disastrous effect, which freckles, given their multiplicity, their exquisite lightness, and their perfection, are incapable of sustaining. The secret is nothing but a hidden interiority. Situated at the summit of the interior life, this is nonetheless not its most interesting aspect: what woman thinks, and above all what makes her laugh, which men will never understand. There is a great difference between timidity before woman, and this other timidity that inspires the male-Other, of which we have already spoken. Woman is not like the Other, she does not reveal a new world. She simply looks at me, she thinks something about me, and her thoughts make her laugh. Seeing myself as the effect of innuendos, of interpretations, of secrets I will never know, of whisperings against my honor, I am seized with confusion. And my attempts at seduction were nothing more than a will to impress the woman, to reduce her interpretation to a pure expression, to a mirror in which I will find myself as I want to be, as in fact I believed myself to be. At the other pole, sadism is a violent seduction, it is a matter of destroying in the woman the secrets that she has, and thereby destroying the secret that she is For if the woman has secrets insofar as she is a subject, she is the object of the Secret itself, and of the Innuendo. The secret is itself a category of things it is something one does not say aloud, which by its very nature must be understood by half-words. It is true that, for children, the secret is not simply a category of things, since for them everything, strictly speaking, is a secret: secret alphabets, winks of the eye, nudged elbows nothing with regard to nothing. This is innuendo in the pure state: a form without matter. And these same children, on the other hand, are absolutely receptive, they have a nave consciousness, they reflect and express all sorts of things which they do not even try to interpret: a matter without form. But then comes puberty. Puberty is the encounter between the form without matter and the matter without form and this concerns the girl, the woman. Adolescents nudge each other, no longer for no reason, but when a girl walks by. The secret has been incarnated, the form of the secret has been materialized, matter has been informed. The secret has become woman, and everything that touches on sexuality. It is a scandal. From this is born the complex of puberty whose muffled influence will weigh on us for the rest of our life the provincial life, the door-to-door life, which one talks about in a hushed voice. The lie is interiority preserved and defended. It is well known that woman lies enormously. Is this truly a lie, or is it rather the affirmation of a feminine truth? There are two kinds of lies. In the first, the interior life is defended against any offensive return of the exterior: lies are imaginative secretions for digesting the hardest exteriorities, the systematic refusal of any extrinsic determination (cf. woman and her age). In the second, rather than handing over her inner life to the lover who wants her, woman would prefer to deform, disfigure, or nearly scuttle her life before she externalizes it. Such are the assurances of love. Sleep is interiority handed over, the interiority that offers itself. This is once again the essential interiority, the interiority we had lost with makeup no longer the hidden interiority, or the interiority preserved from every external reach, but rather the interiority that spreads itself out, frees itself entirely from the exterior, but as the interior, the inviolable. Why had we lost it? I now know why. The look is one of the essential elements of the feminine persona, of make-up, and it is what made us leave the realm of essence, and led us toward a mental, secondary, and derived interiority the lie, the secret. But here it is once again, this feminine essence, and we are going to understand it better since now her eyes are closed. We no longer have to worry about seduction, for she is asleep. Like a beating heart, or a chest that regularly rises and falls, she declares this pure identity of the material and the immaterial, of being and the possible. The woman is now within my reach. Will we once again encounter the experience of make-up both within reach and out of reach? What is the meaning of this interiority that is given to the exterior as interior? Upon reflection, it might seem that interiority as such can never appear on the exterior, it can never be given. I can only have knowledge of what hides the interior and

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covers it. In order to constitute a total interiority, I have erected piles upon piles of clothing around this body, and walls upon walls around the house, and the only wall and the only clothing that is given to me on the exterior is, by definition, not interior But we should distrust antinomies, they ring false. A simple gesture destroys them. The piling up of clothes is merely an obstinacy, a childish persistence in error. A woman is never more internal to herself than when she is nude; when she is sleeping, she is given over entirely to exteriority. The essence of the feminine life is this: to be within my reach and yet out of reach. A secret, but an essential secret, neither mental nor carnal the noumenon. The accidental secret is the secret someone has. Someone has a secret, and they protect it, reinforce it, under the cover of an exteriority that would make it disappear as a secret. It is a secret only insofar as it appears to the Other as a lack to be filled, as something to know that he does not know. The woman who is sleeping, by contrast, is the secret no longer the having of the secret, whether mental or carnal, but the possibility of the secret; the being of the secret displayed in its exteriority, but which retains its being as secret beyond this exteriority. A secret without matter, and a secret that does not hide itself. Here, there is nothing to know; the secret is inviolable, because there is nothing to violate, except a body. And yet, cannot this interiority be untied, unlaced, undone at least through the action of the lover, through the caress? This final hope must be abandoned: the caress is not that which undoes, but that which realizes. We have often spoken of an interiority that would give itself to the exterior as interior. Or rather, the interior is the hollowing out of the exterior, its twisting in on itself. It is the negation of a thickness, a hollow thickness. Let us therefore go further: not only the secret without matter, without any distinction between form and matter, the secret of the secret, the secret of itself; but beyond this, the secret without any thickness. This is the ideal term towards which woman tends, and never reaches. But she never approaches it more closely than under the caress, which should not be confused with groping. In fact, it is the caress that denies all thickness; in tracing a delicate and subtle curve, the caress ceaselessly folds exteriority, draws it into itself, renders it internal to itself. The caress essentially expresses the synthesis of being and the possible, this consciousness of oneself that lightens the flesh, this identity of the material and the immaterial, of the exterior and the interior. The untiring gesture of the amorous modeler. Now if the caress, as the act of the lover, can approach the feminine essence, it is because woman herself is being as caress, the secret without thickness. But this being is never realized, it is always held back by the remainders of an exteriority that is infinitely reborn, so that the caressing must begin anew. There is no total immateriality, no pure interiority without thickness, into which one could be drawn. And, moreover, this total negation of thickness would be rather disappointing. What would she then be, in effect, other than water, a reflection? We have already seen this image: the freckles, the reflections of Narcissus, the noumenon what one can see but not touch. But woman would here lose everything: a total interiority realized in reflection would not have its own existence, but would exist only in reference to what is reflected. It would be dangerous to realize an ideal drawn from a form of absence, a filling-in of the dotted line. In a pure interiority, woman would be dissolved, she would turn into water. The lover would find his reflection in her, but woman herself, reduced to being as caress, would lose her substance. Fortunately, being as caress only ever takes shape as a hollowness, which guides the hands of the lover just as it guided the operations of make-up: a pure absence that grounds the necessity of the caress as an act. Woman also has need of a lover a lover who caresses her, and that is all. Such is the true ontological status: the being of woman is never realized, and can never be realized without contradiction, without dissolution. Her being exists only under the form of an act effectuated by the Other. Woman is neither object nor subject; she is no longer simply that which one has, but she is not yet that which is; she is the lan of the object towards subjectivity. Neither an object in the world nor the subject of a possible world. She is not a subject, she does not reach being. She is a being

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

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

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