The body-for-the-Other constrains precisely because it can never be grasped

Evidence

Yet there too the expression is not a happy one, for I can be embarrassed only by a concrete thing which is presented inside my universe and which hinders me as I try to use other tools. Here the embarrassment is more subtle, for what constrains me is absent. I never encounter my body-for-the-Other as an obstacle; on the contrary, it is because the body is never there, because it remains inapprehensible that it can be constraining. I seek to reach it, to master it, by making use of it as an instrument—since it is also given as an instrument in a world—in order to give it the form and the attitude which are appropriate. But it is on principle out of reach, and all the acts which I perform in order to appropriate it to myself escape me in turn and are fixed at a distance from me as my body-for-the-Other. Thus I forever act “blindly,” shoot at a venture without ever knowing the results of my shooting. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 916

Categorization

• QUESTION: The mechanism here — that the absent/unalienable body-for-the-Other constrains more than any present obstacle — seems to invert the ordinary phenomenology of embarrassment; worth tracing how Sartre cashes out that claim.
• BMF: The image of forever acting ‘blindly,’ shooting at a venture without knowing results, echoes the doomed self-consciousness of the narrator in ‘We’ who constantly performs himself as if watched, unable to grasp his own being.
• XREF: connects to: Access to another’s being requires their self-knowledge, which is impossible; The body cannot be simultaneously an object and the subject that reveals the world — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 826; The body is the instrument that cannot be used like other instruments (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Masochism fails on principle because one can never apprehend one’s own objectivity #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 963
• All empirical knowledge of one’s own body derives from the Other and alienates it #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 919
• The body constitutes meaning and marks the limits of interpersonal relations #expands (0.75)