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ONTOLOGY OF SEXUAL

DESIRE
An Existentialist Approach to Understanding Human Sexuality
By: Tanya Richardson
SARTRES BASIC
TERMINOLOGY
Transendence
Our Freedom
Facticity
Our limits
Being-for-itself
The being of consciousness
Being-in-itself
The existence of things


IN-ITSELF VS. FOR-ITSELF
Example: Humans and Plants
Subjects and objects
Persons and things
Consciousness and non-consciousness
The difference
Non-consciousness:
objects or things
Essence precedes existence
Conscious:
subjects or persons
Existence precedes Essence

SEX AND LOVE
Why does the lover want to be loved?
Love is the struggle of self-definition and
authenticity
Helps in distinguishing love from friendship
Love is the seductive strategy to win the other
over
... if such desire were a desire for
pleasure, then it would be impossible to
make sense of how it is that such desire
could come to attach itself to an
object, that is, to another human
being...
-Christopher Hamilton
SEXUAL
DESIRE
Sexual desire is conflict
sex object
sex is performed out of power and not
pleasure
Masturbation
The Caress
The individuals attempt to incarnate the other


we realize in desire I make myself flesh in the
presences of the Other in order to appropriate the
Others flesh. This means that it is not merely a
question of my grasping the Others shoulders or
thighs of my drawing a body over against me it is
necessary as well for me to apprehend them with this
particular instrument which is the body as it produces
a clogging of consciousness.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

DESIRE
Exist as pure flesh
Losing both Self and Freedom
Embodied creatures
Desiring of someone in their flesh or
objective body.
Individual becoming aware of himself
...if I achieve what I want in my sexual desire
for you, namely, possessing your freedom, then I
have thereby thwarted or frustrated my own
desire. But you, too, are caught in the same
process in your desire for me: if you capture me
in my freedom, then I am no longer free, and
you have failed to achieve what you want to
achieve.
-Christopher Hamilton

FAILURE OF
DESIRE
Conflict with themselves
Doomed to failure
Orgasm
frustration of desire
death and failure of desire


SADISM
Once again I have even lost the precise comprehension
of what I am searching for and yet I am involved in the
search I feel this and I suffer from it but without being
capable of saying what I wanted to take; for along with
my disturbance, the very comprehension of my desire
escapes me. I am like a sleepwalker who wakens to find
himself in the process of gripping the edge of the bed
while he cannot recall the nightmare which provoked the
gesture
-Jean-Paul Sartre
THE OBSCENE
Being-for-others
An individuals relationships with other people
being objectified according to the judgments of
others
Our relations with others are essentially
confrontations and relations of conflict.
Humiliation
Reducing the other to an object
the sadist's effort is to ensnare the Other in his
flesh by means of violence and pain, by
appropriating the Other's body in such a way
that he treats it as flesh so as to cause flesh to
be born. But this appropriation surpasses the
body which it appropriates, for its purpose is to
possess the body only in so far as the Other's
freedom has been ensnared within it.
-Jean-Paul Sartre
THE SADIST
Sadists
preserve their own freedom and
win from the other a consciousness of
having been reduced to an object,
To do this, the sadist must use themselves
as instruments


the sadist refuses his own flesh at the same
time that he uses instruments to reveal by force
the Other's flesh to him. The object of sadism is
immediate appropriation. But sadism is a blind
aIley, for it not only enjoys the possession of the
Other's flesh but at the same time in direct
connection with this flesh, it enjoys its own non-
incarnation.
-Jean-Paul Sartre
CONCLUSION
Self-Discovery through
human relations
WORK CITED
Cumming, Robert. The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. New York, NY:
Random House Inc, 1965.
Hamilton, Christopher. "Sexual Desire: Some Philosophical
Reflections." Richmond Journal of Philosophy. (2004): 27-33.
Martin, Thomas. "Sartre, Sadism, and Female Beauty Ideals."Feminist
Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre. (1999): 90-104.
Rae, Gavin. "Sartre on Authentic and Inauthentic Love." Existential
Analysis 23 (): 75-88.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York, NY: Washington
Square Press, 1966.
Spade, Paul V. "Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness." (1996): 1-
243.

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