Welcome to PEP Web! Viewing the full text of this document requires a subscription to PEP Web. If you are coming in from a university from a registered IP address or secure referral page you should not need to log in. Contact your university librarian in the event of problems. If you have a personal subscription on your own account or through a Society or Institute please put your username and password in the box below. Any difficulties should be reported to your group administrator. Username: Password: Can't remember your username and/or password? If you have forgotten your username and/or password please click here and log in to the PaDS database. Once there you need to fill in your email address (this must be the email address that PEP has on record for you) and click "Send." Your username and password will be sent to this email address within a few minutes. If this does not work for you please contact your group organizer. Athens user? Login here. Not already a subscriber? Order a subscription today.

(1999). American Imago, 56:133-144

Feminine Substance in Being and Nothingness

Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi

In the seeming exhaustiveness of Being and Nothingness, (1966) Sartre anxiously but incompletely expressed approach and recoil from the feminine as Other. While he described the phenomenology of love in terms of engagement with the free subjectivity of the beloved, he addressed the (masculine) subject's relation to female embodiment as the movement of the for-itself's encounter with the facticity, in which one attempts aggressively to appropriate the autonomy of the Other, then, in recoil, one flies from the obscenely intimate entanglements of other-being. In this essay, I will examine the unstable relation of the for-itself (man) to the in-itself (woman as an objective structure) in the brief, but suggestive chapter, “Quality as a Revelation of Being,” in the section preceding the conclusion of Being and Nothingness.1

In this chapter, Sartre attempted to anatomize the existential symbolism of things by locating his discussion in two qualities of being: the externality of facticity and the subjectively infused situation. Within this framework, he established another binary field within which he laid out his meandering fretwork of world-in-situation. He divided being along the archaic cleft between the feminine as the continuous, and the masculine as the discontinuous, separate, and apart. Given the importance of his anxiety concerning the annihilation of the for-itself' composure by too-intimate contact with facticity, the potentiality of the engulfment of the masculine self by a yielding, plastic femininity must be construed as a permanent danger. For Sartre, desire describes the experience of the body-in-situation, “… [is] a passion by which I am engaged in the world and in danger in the world” (505). The danger in the case of feminine being is the experience of “being swallowed up in the body” (505).

Although Sartre declared that he would pursue a psychoanalysis of “presexual structures,” in order to examine the way

- 133 -

[This is a summary or excerpt from the full text of the book or article. The full text of the document is available to subscribers.]