I WAS just down the road at the local cafe thinking about how certain body and face shapes seem to wind up being fixed to class distinctions, when suddenly a recollection of a third year undergrad class recurred to me.

The lecturer was introducing Deleuze, and she had a photo. Deleuze
I remember seeing it and thinking ‘Wow, he looks so much like a frog.” Not insulting French slang, either, but he had an oddly stretched face, all mouth. I think it may have been this picture, but taken off the theorycards which already stretches his face, and then I think the lecturer must have stretched it some more. He doesn’t look like a frog now… I’m a lil disappointed. (Ah well, there’s always Sartre!) ;-) Anyway, I think someone might have said something like, “Wow, I didn’t know he was bald!” The lecturer responded, “Yes, lots of them are bald. But differently. Like, Foucault’s baldness is transgressive, it’s a statement. It’s a gay man’s baldness, even though I don’t think he shaved it ever. Deleuze, though, his is more conservative, more bourgeois, male-pattern baldness.”

I recall being slightly defensive of Deleuze (as was my wont) and thinking, ‘But he can’t help it!’ Makes me laugh now, both the bizarre conversation and my response… this, people, is philosophy at is most erudite. Now for a paper entitled ‘Towards a Politics of the Comb-Over.’