2020

Heinämaa, Sara

Several discussions of the self-other relation in contemporary phenomenology draw from Sartre’s concept of the look and his related analysis of shame. Sartre’s early account informs broad topical areas, including investigations of gender and race, social and self-conscious emotions, the origins of norms and normativity, and the conditions of alienation and reification. This chapter clarifies the type of bodily objectification effected by the Sartrean look. It parallels Sartre’s account of objectification to Edmund Husserl’s account and its later reformulations by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The comparison highlights the fact that bodily objectification is discussed in two different senses in contemporary phenomenology. The Sartrean and Husserlian accounts are shown to differ in three crucial respects: first, with respect to the type of “object” that is at issue; second, with respect to the axiological dimensions of the state of being bodily objectified; and third with respect to the conditions under which bodily objectification happens or is performed.