Feminine Substance in Being and Nothingness

In the seeming exhaustiveness of Being and Nothingness, 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