International audience The pictorial work of Lalla Essaydi, whose distinct mark is the recurring figure of veiled and unveiled Moroccan women dressed in traditional dresses, has an explicit intention claimed by the artist, that is, to thwart the numerous and persistent stereotypes about women from the Maghreb or more generally the Arab world. By so doing, the artist defuses the harmful effects of Western fantasmatic projections on the Arab woman. Thus, Essaydi's artistic commitment is carried out in the name of her desire for deconstructing orientalist prejudices about the Maghrebine woman.Lalla Essaydi has endeavored to loosen the simplifying grip of the orientalist gaze, producing thus a work that seeks to reveal the complexity of the Maghrebine female subject, where it is often reduced, in the reifying, condescending or contemptuous gaze of the orientalist writer or artist, to a fantastical projection, i.e., debased to the status of an object devoid of a proper gaze but offered to the gaze of the other, a "being there" without any subjective productivity or desiring virtualities. Essaydi's art is animated by an ideal of feminine power that seems to circumscribe the artistic project within limits dictated by the issue of identity, at the risk of reducing the transidentity forces great art feeds on in general. This potential tension between the claim to identity, on the one hand, and artistic freedom, on the other, is nevertheless stabilized in the dialogical structure of the work. The otherness (of "speech", of the law...) is nested at the heart of the dialogical (or divided) subject. Identity claims and imaginary temptations are connected in Essaydi's work with this intrinsic dialogism and its unconscious ramifications as identified in the vitality of desire at work and the enigma of the Other's enjoyment.