ABSTRACT
With men, one finds both a material and spiritual relationship between subject and object in place of the intersubjective relationship desired by women. There is another difference: the relationship with the object, with the other, with the world is realized through an instrument which can be the hand, sex, and even a tool added to the body, language, or a third mediator. These differences between the being and speaking of woman and man can help us to interpret the way in which male philosophers have conceived carnal love, and can make apparent the feminine character of the author's words on loving relations, particularly on the caress. It seems that a man weds to have a woman in his home who will remind him of his immediate context and of sensible perception. The sexuate body and the sexual relationship are not bewitching or possession, submersion or nausea, they are not ambiguity, and the feminine body, or the feminine, is not equivocation.
