Desire is doomed to failure because coitus and pleasure are not its essential goal

Evidence

Nevertheless desire is itself doomed to failure. As we have seen, coitus, which ordinarily terminates desire, is not its essential goal. To be sure, several elements of our sexual structure are the necessary expression of the nature of desire, in particular the erection of the penis and the clitoris. This is nothing else in fact but the affirmation of the flesh by the flesh. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that it should not be accomplished voluntarily; that is, that we can not use it as an instrument but that we are dealing with a biological and autonomous phenomenon whose autonomous and involuntary expression accompanies and signifies the submerging of consciousness in the body. It must be clearly understood that no fine, prehensile organ provided with striated muscles can be a sex organ, a sex. If sex were to appear as an organ, it could be only one manifestation of the vegetative life. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 987

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the ontological account of why sex cannot be a voluntarily usable instrument: it must be an autonomous manifestation of vegetative body-life.
• XREF: The ‘ensnarement of consciousness in the body’ and the failure of embodied desire bridges toward Beauvoir’s account of the flesh and the erotic. — connects to: Desire proves human reality is constituted as a lack — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 354; Desire must be its own lack, not a merely physiological state — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 355; Desire is defined by its transcendent object, not by pursuit of pleasure — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 972 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Coitus is a contingent modality rather than the essential goal of desire #corroborates (0.95)
• Pleasure follows from desire rather than desire being caused by pleasure #expands (0.80) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2231