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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What are the advantages of the act of annulment?
(a) The lover can take on a new identity.
(b) The lover can seek out a new love interest.
(c) The lover retreats into the idea of love when threatened by injury or jealousy.
(d) The lover is never without the attentions of the beloved.

2. In the section entitled "To Love Love," the term "annulment" refers to which of the following issues?
(a) The lover's desire annuls the lover's personal friendships.
(b) The object of desire smothers the lover with excessive attention.
(c) The lover's desire annuls the other.
(d) The object of desire rejects the lover's advances.

3. How is the heart described in the section entitled "The Heart?"
(a) As a symbol of fertility.
(b) As a pretext for intimacy.
(c) As a gift-object and an organ of desire.
(d) As a tired metaphor for romance.

4. In "To Be Ascetic," how does the narrator's asceticism take shape?
(a) Through fasting, sexual abstinence, and total seclusion.
(b) Through long walks alone in the desert.
(c) Through appearance (short hair, dark glasses) and monk-like habits (serious study, rising early).
(d) Through refusing to speak to friends about his condition.

5. In "What is to be done?" what problem does the author present?
(a) Finding a solution to a dispute.
(b) Deciding when to leave the other.
(c) Solving a difficult social crisis.
(d) Choosing between two alternatives: this, or that.

6. The section titled "All the delights of the earth"/Fulfillment is a quotation from which of the following authors?
(a) Novalis.
(b) Sade.
(c) Nietzsche.
(d) Ruysbroek.

7. How does the person concealing his feelings wish to be perceived?
(a) As tough and courageous.
(b) As unlovable.
(c) As worthy.
(d) As both pathetic and admirable; child and adult.

8. How does the lover come to perceive the contingencies that affect him?
(a) As hallucinations.
(b) As signs of love.
(c) As a kind of fate.
(d) As random unrelated events.

9. Which of the following phrases is an example of tautology, as presented by the author?
(a) The adorable is what is impossible.
(b) I love you because you are absent.
(c) I adore you because you are fascinating.
(d) The adorable is what is adorable.

10. In "The Tip of the Nose/Alteration," what does "the tip of the nose" refer to?
(a) A photograph of the author's mother.
(b) The nose of a German poet.
(c) The slightly decayed nose of a disinterred corpse.
(d) A figure in a Flemish painting.

11. The term "atopos" is associated with which of the following figures?
(a) Nietzsche.
(b) Meno.
(c) Plato.
(d) Socrates.

12. What effect does the other's atopia have on language?
(a) It inspires the lover to new and better descriptions of the other.
(b) It makes the lover take refuge in falsehoods.
(c) It makes language indecisive and false; the other cannot be qualified.
(d) It does not have any effect on language.

13. When the narrator states that "the other whom I love...is atopos," what does he mean?
(a) The other is a stereotype.
(b) The other is unfaithful.
(c) The other is unobtainable.
(d) The other is unique.

14. "Intractable/Affirmation" discusses which of the following themes?
(a) Love as an expression of self-sacrifice.
(b) How the lover affirms love as a value against and despite its devaluation.
(c) How love makes the lover more rational.
(d) The lover's eventual rejection of love as a value.

15. Which of the following terms is a definition of "atopos"?
(a) Unclassifiable.
(b) Untranslatable.
(c) Stereotype.
(d) Indolent.

Short Answer Questions

1. In this same section, the author invokes a scene involving a letter. Which of the following describes this scene?

2. What does the "scenography of waiting" refer to?

3. To whom is the narrator's asceticism addressed?

4. In the same section, what does the lover mourn when the love object is lost?

5. The lover associates atopia in the other with which of the following qualities?

(see the answer keys)

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