Abstract
This article is a “thought experiment” that takes recourse to Lucien Freud's youthful portrait of himself as Acteon—the hunter whom the goddess Diana turned into a stag, as famously narrated by Ovid. In his drawing, Freud's crisis of presence is mobilized by a play on gender differentiation. More broadly, the piece is an exploration of what it involves being present as a person and of how personal transcendence opens up a propositional ontology that differs from the intentionality of life. The possibility of loss of personal transcendence is an ever-present preoccupation of humans wherever they are.