Only the dead remain permanent objects, never revealing themselves as subjects
Evidence
Thus the Other-as-object is an explosive instrument which I handle with care because I foresee around him the permanent possibility that they are going to make it explode and that with this explosion I shall suddenly experience the flight of the world away from me and the alienation of my being. Therefore my constant concern is to contain the Other within his objectivity, and my relations with the Other-as-object are essentially made up of ruses designed to make him remain an object. … Only the dead can be perpetually objects without every becoming subjects—for to die is not to lose one’s objectivity in the midst of the world; all the dead are there in the world around us. But to die is to lose all possibility of revealing oneself as subject to an Other. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 797
Categorization
- DEFINE: Sharply defines the two unstable modes of the Other (object/subject) and the only escape from their oscillation: death.
- DEEPTHINKING: The dance between objectification and subject-revelation of the Other, and the stark claim that only the dead are stable objects, is a dense structural insight at the core of being-for-others.
- XREF: Connects to Beauvoir’s account of how women are fixed as immanent objects and to Levinas’s ethics of the face that resists objectification. — connects to: The dead persist only through the survivor’s freedom that carries them — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 419; Only death is an image of undistorted, not-hypostasized life — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 88; Only the Other’s being, not the for-itself, contains death — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1272 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Only death is an image of undistorted, not-hypostasized life
#corroborates(0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 88 - The dead body becomes just another object among the world’s forms
#expands(0.85) — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 2557 - Only the Other’s being, not the for-itself, contains death
#complicates(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1272 - The body’s substratum is only apprehended in the corpse
#expands(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 906 - The self split into subject and object can only be dreamed, never lived.
#corroborates(0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1785