Sartre's theorisation of desire does not permit of a concept of perversion. All sexual attitudes, from algolagnia to zoophilia, are ultimately reducible to variations on the essential aim of sexual desire: the "perpetual attempt of an embodied consciousness to come to terms with the existence of others".¹ In L"Etre et le néant this aim is stated to be impossible a priori. In later works such as the Cahiers a glimmer of hope appears on the horizon in the form of a Utopian society where conflict would no longer form the basis of human relations: "the element of the same".² But the present reality of alienation (economic, ontological, social, and so on) effectively extinguishes this ray of hope. Human relations continue to unfold under the sign of alterity; it is the presence of the Other — original and sempiternal — which ensures that the original purity of desire will be defiled, deviated and perverted.