Absence is a mode of being between human-realities, not between persons and places

Evidence

If we take the expression “absence” in its empirical and everyday usage, it is clear that I do not use it to indicate just any kind of “not-being-there.” In the first place, if I do not find my package of tobacco in its usual spot, I do not say that it is absent even though I could declare that it “ought to be there.” This is because the place of a material object or of an instrument, even though sometimes it may be precisely assigned, does not derive from the nature of the object or instrument. To be exact, its nature can barely bestow on it a location but it is through me that the place of an instrument is realized. Human-reality is the being which causes a place to come to objects. … It is in relation to Thérèse that Pierre is absent from this location. Absence therefore is a bond of being between two or several human-realities which necessitates a fundamental presence of these realities one to another and which, moreover, is only one of the particular concretizations of this presence. For Pierre to be absent in relation to Thérèse is a particular way of his being present. In fact absence has meaning only if all the relations of Pierre with Thérèse are preserved: he loves her, he is her husband, he supports her, etc. In particular, absence supposes the maintenance of the concrete existence of Pierre: death is not an absence. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 765

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sartre redefines absence as not a negative relation to a place but a positive bond between human-realities — death is not absence.
• XREF: This anticipates Beauvoir’s account of how another’s absence constitutes my world, and Sartre’s later treatment in The Second Sex of how Thérèse-like relations structure mutual recognition. — connects to: For idealism the object’s objective being is constituted by absence, not plenitude — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 149; Absence is perceived as vividly as presence against a background field — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 498; Reality-TV fascination stems from the paradox of simulated absence, not voyeurism. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 103

Broader Connections

• Absence is perceived as vividly as presence against a background field #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 498