The nothingness separating self and Other precedes and founds all relation

Evidence

The presupposition common to both idealism and realism is that the constituting negation is an external negation. The Other is the one who is not me and the one who I am not. This not indicates a nothingness as a given element of separation between the Other and myself. Between the Other and myself there is a nothingness of separation. This nothingness does not derive its origin from myself nor from the Other, nor is it a reciprocal relation between the Other and myself. On the contrary, as a primary absence of relation, it is originally the foundation of all relation between the Other and me. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 675

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — absence of relation as the very foundation of relation — is the load-bearing move underpinning all of Sartre’s intersubjectivity, worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to Heidegger’s Being-with and Levinas’s later critique that this makes the Other too abstract; also to Beauvoir’s development of the Other in The Second Sex. — connects to: All interpersonal relations rest on an unstable subject-object struggle. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 92; Nothingness is expelled from being yet gives the world its outlines; Self-presence requires an internal separation that is itself nothing (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• The Other is constituted by negation as the self which is not myself #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 675