A third observer can disarm the Other’s gaze by transcending it in turn

Evidence

Nevertheless the Other’s existence brings a factual limit to my freedom. This is because of the fact that by means of the upsurge of the Other there appear certain determinations which I am without having chosen them. Here I am—Jew, or Aryan, handsome or ugly, one-armed, etc. All this I am for the Other with no hope of apprehending this meaning which I have outside and, still more important, with no hope of changing it. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1229 (#expands, via linked claim)

So long as we considered the for-itself in its isolation, we were able to maintain that the unreflective consciousness can not be inhabited by a self; the self was given in the form of an object and only for the reflective consciousness. But here the self comes to haunt the unreflective consciousness. Now the unreflective consciousness is a consciousness of the world. Therefore for the unreflective consciousness the self exists on the level of objects in the world; this role which devolved only on the reflective consciousness—the making-present of the self—belongs now to the unreflective consciousness. Only the reflective consciousness has the self directly for an object. The unreflective consciousness does not apprehend the person directly or as its object; the person is presented to consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the Other. This means that all of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 727 (#expands, via linked claim)

This doubleness of discourse, this necessity of the Other to the self, this inscription of identity in the look of the other finds its articulation profoundly in the ranges of a given text. And I want to cite one which I am sure you know but will not remember necessarily, though it is a wonderful, majestic moment in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, when he describes himself as a young Antillean, face to face with the white French child and her mother. And the child pulls the hand of the mother and says, “Look, Mama, a black man.” And he said, “For the first time, I knew who I was. For the first time, I felt as if I had been simultaneously exploded in the gaze, in the violent gaze of the other, and at the same time, recomposed as another.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 207 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Other’s gaze imposes unchosen determinations on my being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1229; Assume the Other’s freedom to become limited by their gaze — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1234; The Other’s look makes the self haunt an unreflective consciousness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 727 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The Other’s gaze imposes unchosen determinations on my being #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1229
• Assume the Other’s freedom to become limited by their gaze #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1234
• The Other’s look makes the self haunt an unreflective consciousness #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 727
• Identity gets constituted when the Other’s gaze names it #expands (0.80) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 207
• Sartre sees the Other’s gaze as falsifying essence-free being #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 632
• The Other’s gaze reveals one’s own nausea as fleshly object. #expands (0.75)
• The Other’s objective body cannot itself produce my objectification under his gaze #qualifies (0.75)