What the sadist really seeks to appropriate is the Other’s freedom, not the flesh.

Evidence

What the sadist seeks to appropriate is in actuality the transcendent freedom of the victim. But this freedom remains on principle out of reach. And the more the sadist persists in treating the other as an instrument, the more this freedom escapes him. He can act upon the freedom only by making it an objective property of the Other-as-object; that is, on freedom in the midst of the world with its dead-possibilities. But since the sadist’s goal is to recover his being-for-others, he misses it on principle, for the only Other with whom he has to do is the Other in the world who has only “images in his head” of the sadist assaulting him. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 999 (#expands, via linked claim)

For the sadist the object realized is ambiguous, contradictory, without equilibrium since it is both the strict consequence of a technical utilization of determinism and the manifestation of an unconditioned freedom. … At the moment of the abjuration the result sought is attained: the body is wholly flesh, panting and obscene; it holds the position which the torturers have given to it, not that which it would have assumed by itself; the cords which bind it hold it as an inert thing, and thereby it has ceased to be the object which moves spontaneously. In the abjuration a freedom chooses to be wholly identified with this body; this distorted and heaving body is the very image of a broken and enslaved freedom. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 996 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sadism is an illusory attempt to capture freedom through flesh; Sadism fails because the victim’s transcendent freedom fundamentally escapes capture — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 999; Sadism seeks to capture an unconditioned freedom within a determined technical mechanism — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 996 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Sadism is an illusory attempt to capture freedom through flesh #corroborates (0.95)
• Sadism fails because the victim’s transcendent freedom fundamentally escapes capture #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 999
• Sadism seeks to capture an unconditioned freedom within a determined technical mechanism #expands (0.88) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 996
• Sadism founders because enslaving another’s freedom is inherently self-contradictory. #expands (0.85)
• Attempting to appropriate the Other destroys the incarnational freedom desire sought #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 989
• The will to dominate presupposes sadism, not vice versa #responds-to (0.80)
• Sadism is the attempt to reverse grace’s relation, making facticity contain hidden freedom. #expands (0.80)