Possession is a magical relation projecting the ideal of the in-itself-for-itself

Evidence

We can not insist too strongly on the fact that this relation is symbolic and ideal. My original desire of being my own foundation for myself is never satisfied through appropriation any more than Freud’s patient satisfies his Oedipus complex when he dreams that a soldier kills the Czar (i.e., his father). This is why ownership appears to the owner simultaneously as something given at one stroke in the eternal and as requiring an infinite time to be realized. No particular act of utilization really realizes the enjoyment of full possession; but it refers to other appropriative acts, each one of which has the value of an incantation. To possess a bicycle is to be able first to look at it, then to touch it. But touching is revealed as being insufficient; what is necessary is to be able to get on the bicycle and take a ride. But this gratuitous ride is likewise insufficient; it would be necessary to use the bicycle to go on some errands. And this refers us to longer uses and more complete, to long trips across France. But these trips themselves disintegrate into a thousand appropriative behavior patterns, each one of which refers to others. Finally as one could foresee, handing over a bank-note is enough to make the bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession. In acquiring the object, I perceive that possession is an enterprise which death always renders still unachieved. Now we can understand why; it is because it is impossible to realize the relation symbolized by appropriation. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1375 (#expands, via linked claim)

In the first place it is easy to see abstractly that we originally aim at possessing not so much the mode of being of an object as the actual being of this particular object. In fact it is as a concrete representative of being-in-itself that I desire to appropriate it; that is, to apprehend that ideally I am the foundation of its being in so far as it is a part of myself and on the other hand to apprehend that empirically the appropriated object is never valid in itself alone nor for its individual use. No particular appropriation has any meaning outside its indefinite extensions: the pen which I possess is the same as all other pens; it is the class of pens which I possess in it. … With all possession there is made the crystallizing synthesis which Stendhal has described for the one case of love. Each possessed object which raises itself on the foundation of the world, manifests the entire world, just as a beloved woman manifests the sky, the shore, the sea which surrounded her when she appeared. To appropriate this object is then to appropriate the world symbolically. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1381 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Possession in desire is a double reciprocal incarnation of both bodies — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 978; The ideal of possession is an impossible synthesis of assimilation and resistance; Possession is an internal bond of being, not an external relation — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1366 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Possession is an ideal symbolic relation that no concrete act can fully realize #expands (0.92) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1375
• Possession aims at appropriating being-in-itself and symbolically the whole world. #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1381