This book was first published in 2003: Developing a reading of some of Beauvoir and Sartre's most influential writings in philosophy, Max Deutscher explores contemporary philosophy in the light of the phenomenological tradition within which Being and Nothingness and The Second Sex occurred as striking events operating on the border of the modern and the 'post-modern'.

Contents: Preface; Genre and Gender: Situating theory; Doing lunch; 'A thin film of nothingness': Bound to be free; A void; On lacking reason for desire; Absent and intimate others: In parks and corridors; Coping with others; Intimacy bodily consciousness; Finding ourselves in technology: Lost in La Motte-Picquet-Grenelle; Divining others; 'The great echo...in the collective consciousness...'; Bibliography; Index.