Being seen is first felt as bodily vulnerability and non-escape

Evidence

What I apprehend immediately when I hear the branches crackling behind me is not that there is someone there; it is that I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt, that I occupy a place and that I can not in any case escape from the space in which I am without defense—in short, that I am seen. Thus the look is first an intermediary which refers from me to myself. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 723

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains what ‘being seen’ means for Sartre: not the perception of a watcher but a lived awareness of one’s own vulnerable, situated body.
• XREF: Foundation for Beauvoir’s account of women being constituted as object and other by the male gaze — the explicit cross-reference goal of this reading. — connects to: Being seen alienates my flight into an object I cannot escape; Oppressed persons first grasp their shared condition as being looked at from outside.
• SEED: The claim that proximity of the look is felt as vulnerability rather than perception could anchor an essay on surveillance and the felt body — how being watched is experienced as exposure, not as an information or security matter.

Broader Connections

• Being seen alienates my flight into an object I cannot escape #expands (0.90)