To love is essentially to project being loved by the Other.
Evidence
The answer is easy: when the beloved projects being loved. By himself the Other-as-object never has enough strength to produce love. If love has for its ideal the appropriation of the Other qua Other (i.e., as a subjectivity which is looking at an object) this ideal can be projected only in terms of my encounter with the Other-as-subject, not with the Other-as-object. If the Other tries to seduce me by means of his object-state, then seduction can bestow upon the Other only the character of a precious object “to be possessed.” Seduction will perhaps determine me to risk much to conquer the Other-as-object, but this desire to appropriate an object in the midst of the world should not be confused with love. Love therefore can be born in the beloved only from the proof which he makes of his alienation and his flight toward the Other. Still the beloved, if such is the case, will be transformed into a lover only if he projects being loved; that is, if what he wishes to overcome is not a body but the Other’s subjectivity as such. In fact the only way that he could conceive to realize this appropriation is to make himself be loved. Thus it seems that to love is in essence the project of making oneself be loved. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 956
Categorization
- DEFINE: Sartre’s core redefinition of love as the project of making oneself loved, distinct from mere appropriation of an object.
- XREF: The paradox of love as demand-for-a-love-that-is-not-a-demand connects to Beauvoir’s working-out of reciprocity in The Second Sex. — connects to: To love is always to want to be loved in return, generating indefinite regress. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 958; Love is the enterprise of pursuing an unrealizable unity with the Other; Being loved means becoming the ground on which the world appears for the Other (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Love is the enterprise of pursuing an unrealizable unity with the Other
#expands(0.85) - Being loved means becoming the ground on which the world appears for the Other
#expands(0.80) - The ideal of loving unity with the Other is structurally unrealizable and breeds conflict
#complicates(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 941 - Willing to be loved alienates the lover’s freedom into the body-for-others.
#expands(0.78)