The first sentence or phrase of Derrida's seminar series on The Beast and the Sovereign, which formed the core of the last chapter, is quite remarkable: ‘La… le’. This untranslatable couple of syllables, which might sound like a stutter, an inauspicious start, is initially translated into English as ‘Feminine… masculine’ with the French original in square brackets, which gets much closer to the connoted meaning (drawing attention to the gender of ‘la bête et le souverain’) than the sound or the literal meaning which might be rendered ‘the… the’. That rendition would lose not only the point but the subtle shift in the repeated sound– not a tuneful ‘la… la’ or a standard repeated definite article where the masculine prevails ‘le… le’, but ‘la… le’, so close and yet so different in this particular language. The dreaded gender mistake, failing to get the difference right, can be a point of terror for many Anglophone students of French, or even Anglophone teachers of French. English masks sexual difference at certain points where French reveals it (the sexed object), and vice versa (the sexed possessive); it also leans towards an objectification of the animal as ‘it’ where French can only ever render ‘it’ as ‘il’ or ‘elle’, he or she since there is no uniquely neuter pronoun in that language. The language in which Derrida is speaking also permits another stutter, sounding like ‘eh, eh’, which relates to the homophony in French between the conjunction ‘and’ (et) and the copulative ‘is’ (est).