Desire strips the world of meaning to reduce self and Other to pure facticity.

Evidence

The movement of desire which goes from the surrounding “environment” to the desired person is an isolating movement which destroys the environment and cuts off the person in question in order to effect the emergence of his pure facticity. But this is possible only if each object which refers me to the person is fixed in its pure contingency at the same time that it indicates him to me; consequently this return movement to the Other’s being is a movement of return to myself as pure being-there. I destroy my possibilities in order to destroy those of the world and to constitute the world as a “world of desire”; that is, as a destructured world which has lost its meaning, a world in which things jut out like fragments of pure matter, like brute qualities. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 985

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘world of desire’ as a destructured world that has lost meaning — the for-itself’s collapse of its own possibilities.
• XREF: This isolation of the Other into pure facticity connects to the chapter’s later discussion of sadism and the body-as-instrument vs. body-as-flesh distinction. — connects to: For Sartre, the For-itself is constituted by desire, so annihilating desire destroys consciousness itself. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 59; Desire singles out undifferentiated, nearly motionless flesh as the image of pure facticity; Desire radically alters both the body’s lived being and the correlated world — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 980 (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: The dissolving of environment into contingency in desire parallels the grafting metaphor’s erasure of infrastructure — a world stripped of its meaning-bearing relations.

Broader Connections

• Desire singles out undifferentiated, nearly motionless flesh as the image of pure facticity #exemplifies (0.85)
• Desire strips the Other’s body of movement and garb to reveal pure flesh #expands (0.85)
• Desire radically alters both the body’s lived being and the correlated world #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 980
• Surrealist desire reduces woman to the status of a fetishized equivocal object. #exemplifies (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 595