But it ended in violence ...

Sartre's discussion of Desire is situated within his attempt to explicate the modes of being of a subject. “It is as body-in-situation that I apprehend the Other's transcendence transcended, and it is as body-in-situation that I experience myself in my alienation for the Other's benefit” The argument is based on the previous conclusions reached about freedom and consciousness and it can be seen as an attempt to marry the work of Hegel with Sartre's own conceptions of Desire and freedom. For Sartre concrete relations end up being an antagonistic affair wherein we seek to fulfill our own desire to realize our freedom through our interaction with Others.

“For the Other I am irremediably what I am, and my very freedom is a given characteristic of my being. Thus the in-itself recaptures me at the threshold of the future and fixes me wholly in my very flight, which becomes a flight foreseen and contemplated, a given flight. But this fixed flight is never the flight which I am for myself; it is fixed outside”

Thus the ensuing antagonism is derived from the tension created by the impediment to my freedom offered by my relationship to the Other. On the one hand the Other founds my being in so far as he is the object of desire, and on the other hand the Other prevents my escape from my own facticity. The Other, for Sartre, perceives me in my facticity. The Other recognizes me as I am, whereas, for me, I am always a being aiming at my own possibilities. “The Other looks at me and as such he holds the secret of my being, he knows what I am. Thus the profound meaning of my being is outside of me, imprisoned in an absence.”12 Therefore, within a hypothetical dialogue with Hegel's conceptualization, Desire is most adamantly not an act toward self-consciousness but rather an act towards ambiguity and absence, in that it aims at capturing what is most vital about myself, namely my freedom.


Sartre does make an attempt to investigate 'we' relations at this part of Being of Nothingness, but even these acts of identification with the Other fall within the categories laid out here. Namely there are two possible repercussions of concrete relations the first where the individual attempts to recognize the Other qua Other, and the attitude which relies on seeing the Other as an object. But to acknowledge the Other qua Other in Sartrean terms leads to a position wherein we must become object for the other. These two attitudes, therefore, provide two points on a conceptual circle of desire for Sartre. “(S)exual exchange is a 'circle' in which the inversion of sadism into masochism, and masochism into sadism, follows accordingly to the ontological necessity that every determinate individual is what he is not, and is not what he is”

On the theme of Desire and self-consciousness the central contention between Hegel and Sartre is that Sartre believes that consciousness is the desire to be; it is a form of negation on the positive external world. Hegel sees desire as a process which pushes our consciousness into the truer realm of self-consciousness. Sartre is then closer to Kojeve's contention when Kojeve claims “Generally speaking, the I of desire is an emptiness that receives a real positive content only by negating action that satisfies desire in destroying, transforming and “assimilating” the desired non- I” The challenge of the Other is then derived merely from its facticity. Accordingly then for a synthetic relation to hold between the self and other it would have to be imaginary; a relation which goes beyond the other's own facticity. Such an act will always be self defeating as the other is always presented in its facticity and so we are plunged back into the pessimistic circle envisaged by Sartre earlier. “The incantation of presence is an imaginary venture that can only claim plausibility in an imaginary world and hence is still no absolute satisfaction for desire... Desire thus reveals our ineluctable freedom in that face of ontological exile.” So when we talk of absence in terms of desire we talk of potentialities, Sartre has formed his ontology on this notion. The prospect of the individual realizing himself in his relationship to the other through the potential moment of recognition and mediation as in Hegel's conceptualization has been removed. For Sartre consciousness is a rupture in the world around us, it is violence.

“In contrast to the knowledge that keeps man in a passive quietude, Desire dis-quiets him and moves him to action. Born of Desire, action tends to satisfy it, and can do so only by the “negation,” the destruction, or at least the transformation, of the desired object ... Thus, all action is “negating.””

The necessity of this pessimistic view of Desire is based, then, on two dominant themes within Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness'; Idealism and Freedom. The subject displaying desire is incapable of fulfilling his/her desire because he/she is radically separated from the level of being which he perceives the Other as involved in, which is facticity. At the same time the subject acts towards his/her own freedom, therefore the mitigation of such potentials produces an antagonistic relationship on the basis that the facticity of the Other impedes the Desire of the subject. Such a conclusion takes a position on the absence/presence dialectic, elaborated on in the first section, which negates the other position, in this case the presence of the Other within concrete relations.


The possibility then for reconciliation or a synthetical ‘I’ statement within concrete relations ends in violence for Sartre. This violence though is in the impediment of the intellect on the physical. As such this a) paves the way for an Adorno reading and b) hints at the aim of this blog; imagined bodies.