Deleuze in utero: Deleuze — Sartre and the Essence of Woman

Abstract

The article is devoted to a detailed analysis of Deleuze’s early essay “Description of Woman” (1945). The author demonstrates that this text contains both the rudiments of the Deleuzian problems of immanence and abundance of desire and also reveals Sartre’s influence on Deleuze’s thought because what Deleuze found in Sartre prompted him to develop his own philosophy. Dissatisfied with Sartre’s concepts of love and desire, Deleuze pushes Sartre toward immanence, for which purpose he pares away those aspects of Sartre’s thought that he sees as problematic. The author shows how Deleuze in this early essay abandons Sartre’s intersubjectivity to discover a specific relationship with woman-as-object-of-desire. Rejecting Sartre’s model of the Other-as-subject, Deleuze arrives at what he calls the a priori Other. The article describes how Deleuze challenged Sartre’s understanding of sexual difference in order to find the ontological and bodily foundations of desire through a rejection of subjective desire in favor of a more fundamental desire. Deleuze hoped to develop a model of desire that would make it something immanent instead of a lack. The article shows that Deleuze’s attempt to discern this immanence in woman fails but that he subsequently provides an aesthetic method for realizing the immanence of desire and thus counteracts Sartre. One of the main points of Deleuze’s early text is rejection of Sartre’s masculine point of view, which makes male desire the foundation of female sexual difference. In conclusion, the author claims that the encounter with Sartre was a watershed event for Deleuze because it was Sartre’s philosophy that Deleuze tried to recast to allow for immanence. In this sense, Deleuze’s first essay is a mirror image of his last essay because both of them seek immanence.