Presencing EPIS - 2013

Sartre makes freedom the defining attribute of conscious experience – what he calls “being-foritself” – and, moreover, a ‘nothingness’. Perpetually escaping and ‘surpassing’ itself towards its objects, consciousness is what its objects are not - translucent, indeterminate, and transcendent where they are opaque, determinate, and immanent. Not being what its objects are, moreover, is what makes consciousness free on Sartre’s account. Brison’s experience of freedom in bondedness to another and of autonomy in need offers an important rejoinder to any such notion of freedom.

Further, just as it is known for its unflinching commitment to freedom, Being and Nothingness is equally noted for its treatment of interpersonal relationships as principally, if not exhaustively, conflictual and threatening rather than reciprocal, caring, and mutually supporting.

I ultimately hope to show that Being and Nothingness offers a richer account of being-for-others than this conflictual approach might suggest, and that it can offer some important insights towards what I call, following feminist theorists such as Jennifer Nedelsky and Susan Brison, relational selfhood even if these insights are largely held in check by a problematic subjectobject dichotomy.

Indeed, it should not go overlooked that, for Sartre, selfhood as such is in fact relational.

Although in Being and Nothingness Sartre account of relational selfhood renders it largely negative, the insight that selfhood as such is relational is very rich, and expands to allow for much more positive insights into being-for-others in Sartre’s later writings. For instance, in Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre speaks of an “appeal to another that is a promise of reciprocity,” and of making a “gift of myself” to another in such a way that “I do not seek my own ends, rather I submit myself to his.” (1992: 284-285). Moreover, in Notebooks for an Ethics, he describes the “structure of authentic love” as “to unveil the Other’s being-within-the-world, to