ontological dimension of our bodily being-for-others. He also describes
it as a form of “alienation,” not simply in the sense of “objectification”
discussed earlier, but in the etymological sense of being alien or “other”
to itself by virtue of the Other’s “haunting” presence: “In the same way
that a being-for-others haunts my facticity (which is non-thetically
lived), so a being-an-object-for-others haunts – as a dimension of escape
from my psychic body – the facticity constituted as a quasi-object for an
accessory reflection” (BN 357 ).This is the body as a quasi “thing
amongst things, as my facticity of being ‘in-the-midst-of-the-world,’”
and temporally, as past.
“Concrete Relations with Others”
Among the reflections gathered in his posthumously publishedNote-
books for an Ethics, Sartre declares: “No love without that sadistic-
masochistic dialectic of subjugation of freedoms that I have described.
No love without deeper recognition and reciprocal comprehension of
freedoms (a missing dimension inBeing and Nothingness)” (NE 414 ).
This is the portion ofBNwith which Sartre was least pleased.^20 One can
see why. The seemingly insuperable relation of “an original nihilation”
with the in-itself and among for-itselfs just described infects our con-
crete relations with Others. This prereflective “flight” from the in-itself
which, we saw, the Other confers on me, I experience as alienation.
But it’s a matter of (prereflective) experience, not (reflective) knowledge.
It is part of my facticity which I must recognize by assumingattitudes
with respect to it. This is the key to Sartre’s analysis:
Such is the origin of my concrete relations with the Other; they are wholly governed
by my attitudes with respect to the object which I am for the Other. And as the
Other’s existence reveals to me the being which I am without being able either to
appropriate that being or even to conceive it [since this occurs prereflectively], this
existence will motive two opposed attitudes.
(BN 363 )
Either I will try to capture the Other’s freedom by enchanting it with my
own (Masochism) or I will attempt to subjugate that freedom while
(^20) Sartre confesses: “What is particularly bad inL’Etre et le Ne ́antis the specifically social
chapters, on the ‘we,’ compared to the chapters on the ‘you’ and ‘others’” (Schilpp 13 ).
212 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness