Attempting to appropriate the Other destroys the incarnational freedom desire sought

Evidence

Yet conversely desire stands at the origin of its own failure inasmuch as it is a desire of taking and of appropriating. It is not enough merely that troubled disturbance should effect the Other’s incarnation; desire is the desire to appropriate this incarnated consciousness. Therefore desire is naturally continued not by caresses but by acts of taking and of penetration. The caress has for its goal only to impregnate the Other’s body with consciousness and freedom. Now it is necessary to take this saturated body, to seize it, to enter into it. But by the very fact that I now attempt to seize the Other’s body, to pull it toward me, to grab hold of it, to bite it, my own body ceases to be flesh and becomes again the synthetic instrument which I am. And by the same token the Other ceases to be an incarnation; she becomes once more an instrument in the midst of the world which I apprehend in terms of its situation. Her consciousness, which played on the surface of her flesh and which I tried to taste with my flesh, disappears under my sight; she remains no more than an object with object-images inside her. At the same time my disturbance disappears. This does not mean that I cease to desire but that desire has lost its matter; it has become abstract; it is a desire to handle and to take. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 989

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how flesh vs. instrument and incarnation are defined through reversal: the moment desire tries to possess, both bodies fall back to instrument/object levels.
• XREF: Echoes the reciprocal-incarnation structure that grounds Beauvoir’s later account of erotic reciprocity in The Second Sex — the reader’s stated purpose for this book. — connects to: Willing to be loved alienates the lover’s freedom into the body-for-others.; A fulfilled demand for love destroys the very condition the demand required. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 958; The desperate pursuit of meaning systematically destroys the meaning sought. (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Desire’s failure to reach incarnation can flip consciousness into masochistic submission #corroborates (0.85)
• Sadism originates in desire’s failure to sustain reciprocal incarnation #expands (0.82)
• The ideal of loving unity with the Other is structurally unrealizable and breeds conflict #corroborates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 941
• Submission to external authority can constitute rather than constrain the self #complicates (0.75)