Philosophy Today

Volume 65, Issue 3 (Summer 2021): 709–726

DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2021524415

Sartre’s Affective Turn:

Shame as Recognition in “The Look”
ELLIE ANDERSON

Abstract: Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of “the look” has generally been understood as an
argument for the impossibility of mutual recognition between consciousnesses. Being-
looked-at reveals me as an object for the other, but I can never grasp this object that I
am. I argue here that the chapter “The Look” in Being and Nothingness has been widely
misunderstood, causing many to dismiss Sartre’s view unfairly. Like Hegel’s account of
recognition, Sartre’s “look” is meant as a theory of successful mutual recognition that
proves the existence of others. Yet Sartre claims that such an account is plausible only
if recognition is affective, not cognitive. Situating Sartre’s account of the look within
his technical understanding of affect’s distinctness from cognition not only enables a
better understanding of Sartre’s view, but also reveals a compelling alternative to the
understanding of self-other relations in contemporary affect theory.

Key words: Sartre, recognition, affect, Hegel, shame

Introduction

T
he Look” is perhaps the most influential section of Jean-Paul Sartre’s
Being and Nothingness. Here, Sartre depicts our fundamental relations
to others through a phenomenological description of being-looked-
at. Sartre concludes that consciousness interminably oscillates between being an
object and being a subject, leading many to suggest that Being and Nothingness
offers a pessimistic, negative vision of intersubjectivity.1 This leads scholars to
conclude that the early Sartre denies the possibility of mutual recognition. I argue
against this dominant view here by showing that commentators have missed the
affective character of Sartrean recognition. Mutual recognition fails from a cogni-
tive perspective because it cannot furnish me with knowledge of my own or the
other’s subjectivity, but it succeeds affectively: the look produces the feeling of

© Philosophy Today ISSN 0031-8256

710 Ellie Anderson

shame that gives me positive proof of my being-for-others. While the emphasis

on shame in “the look” is widely noted, its role within Sartre’s argument about
affect’s opposition to cognition has been overlooked. Highlighting this aspect
of Sartre’s theory reveals that the look is meant to constitute a successful theory
of mutual recognition. Being-looked-at by another discloses self and other in
an affective mode of consciousness.
As such, Sartre’s point is not that recognition is impossible, but rather that it
is only impossible if we conceive of recognition as providing knowledge. Sartre’s
primary target here is Hegel, who takes recognition to be a form of cognition.
For Sartre, the Hegelian approach fails to resolve the problem of solipsism. The
look is Sartre’s effort to broach this problem by proposing an alternative to the
Hegelian model of recognition. Here, the felt experience of being an object under
the other’s gaze offers direct proof of the other’s existence. Sartre believes that
solipsism cannot be overcome on a cognitive level, but that the affective register
offers a refutation of solipsism.
Understanding “The Look” as an affective revision of Hegelian recognition
illuminates Sartre’s early theory of being-for-others by showing that the early
Sartre was not a mere pessimist about interpersonal relations. Yet it also suggests
that Sartre is a surprising resource for affect theory. Sartre’s dissociation of affect
from cognition is echoed by the recent “affective turn” across a variety of disci-
plines in the humanities (Clough 2010). Far from being a disembodied thinker of
voluntaristic subjectivity, as he is sometimes portrayed, Sartre is a phenomenolo-
gist deeply invested in the situated affective aspects of the human condition. His
argument that the look affectively reveals being-for-others is instructive for affect
theory, which generally rejects a strong distinction between self and others but
fails to furnish a convincing account of their imbrication.
In the first section of this article, I examine Sartre’s qualified rejection of
Hegelian recognition. While Sartre draws on Hegel’s account, he rejects Hegel’s
association of recognition with cognition. For Sartre, Hegel fails to resolve the prob-
lem of solipsism. In the second section, I turn to Sartre’s analysis in “The Look” in
order to show that recognition is rooted in affective consciousness. Third, I explain
Sartre’s proof against solipsism and put his view in dialogue with contemporary
affect theory. Drawing on Ruth Leys’s influential critique of affect theory, I suggest
that Sartre’s insistence that affect resolves the problem of solipsism may be worth
engaging for contemporary affect theorists. At the same time, I argue that, even
within Sartre’s own ontology, the affective consciousness of being-for-others does
not succeed as an account of recognition. Instead, Sartre succeeds in offering an
account of the experience of others, but Sartre’s insistence that the look is a form
of recognition implies a continuing reliance on the Hegelian ontology that Sartre
rejects. That is, Sartre’s own account would be strengthened were he to reject the
Sartre’s Affective Turn: Shame as Recognition in “The Look” 711

term “recognition” as a descriptor of the look in favor of describing the look as a

revelatory event of the other.

I. Sartre’s Critique of Cognition in Hegel

While Sartre discusses Hegel at some length in Being and Nothingness, Sartre
was open about the fact that he had not seriously studied Hegel at the time of its
publication in 1943. Scholars have since shown that the merely cursory encoun-
ters Sartre had with Hegel prior to 1943 began only after Simone de Beauvoir
recommended Hegel to Sartre in a July 1940 letter she sent him while he was a
prisoner of war. Beauvoir states in this letter that she looks forward to explain-
ing Hegel to Sartre because she finds affinities in their views of nothingness
(Beauvoir 2011: 314). Sartre’s analysis of Hegel is mediated by Beauvoir as well
as by the Hegelian climate of Paris in the early 1940s spawned by Jean Hyppolite
and Alexandre Kojève.
Yet it is clear from Being and Nothingness that reading Hegel profoundly
impacted Sartre. Indeed, Sartre critiques Hegel on multiple points in this text,
including an extended treatment of Hegel’s theory of recognition in the section
just prior to “The Look.” “The Look” itself should be read as Sartre’s response to
Hegel’s master-servant dialectic, as it 1) parallels the moves that Hegel makes in the
master-servant section of The Phenomenology of Spirit, 2) directly follows Sartre’s
critique of Hegelian recognition, and 3) employs the terminology of “recognition,”
“master,” and “slave.” This is no surprise, given the influence of the Kojèveian read-
ing of Hegel’s so-called “master-slave dialectic” at the time in France.2
Sartre retains three key features of Hegel’s master-servant scene. First, the
initial encounter between human beings is conflictual. Being-for-others involves
recognizing that one is not only a for-itself, but also an object in the midst of
other objects that others can perceive and manipulate. This realization engen-
ders a conflict between consciousness’s sense of being an object for the other
and consciousness’s inability to grasp itself as an object (Sartre 1984: 555). While
Hegel claims that this conflict is eventually overcome, Sartre asserts that it is a
permanent feature of relations with others. Second, for both Sartre and Hegel, this
conflict can lead to mutual recognition. Self and other mutually recognize that
they are not each other (378). While Sartre’s emphasis on reciprocity might at first
seem to run counter to his claim that there is an insurmountable scandal in the
conflict between consciousnesses, it in fact follows directly from it. It is because
two consciousnesses make reciprocal claims on one another that recognition is
conflictual. Each consciousness is at once subject and, as perceived by the other,
object; the reciprocity in this case is an essential feature of the conflict. Third, con-
sciousness emerges as self-consciousness through this conflict. Self-consciousness
is a negation that escapes being in the world. It identifies itself by excluding what
712 Ellie Anderson

is other to it—namely, the other self-consciousness. Sartre takes this insight to be

one of Hegel’s major contributions to the theory of recognition, because making
the other necessary for self-consciousness suggests a resolution to the problem
of solipsism (321).
Given that these three Hegelian features of struggle, reciprocity, and emergence
of self-consciousness in Hegel reappear in Sartre’s account of the look, Sartre’s
approach to recognition must be understood as Hegelian in key respects. Never-
theless, Sartre diverges from Hegel’s equation of consciousness with knowledge.
Due to this reduction of recognition to a truth-claim, Sartre charges Hegel with
“epistemological optimism” and “ontological optimism” (Sartre 1984: 328). The
problem with Hegel’s account of recognition for Sartre is its cognitive character.
On Sartre’s reading, truth is the measure of being for Hegel, and all conscious-
ness is reduced to cognition. For Hegel, recognition (Anerkennung) is a kind of
cognition (Erkenntnis). Recognizing the other means knowing that the other is
an other. Yet, for Sartre, affects give direct proof of the other’s existence in a way
that cognitions cannot.
On the surface, Sartre’s contention that that recognition is non-cognitive may
seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, as in English and German, the French
term for recognition includes “knowledge” within it (connaissance is the root of
reconnaissance). All the same, Sartre believes he has good reason to deny that
recognition is a form of knowledge. This contention hinges on Sartre’s threefold
division of being: being-in-itself, being-for-itself, and being-for-others. Being-in-
itself is the mode of being of entities or objects in the world. Being-in-itself is not
relational—this is why it is in-itself—but is instead independent and self-sufficient.
By contrast, being-for-itself is the mode of being of consciousness. It is intentional:
being-for-itself always intends an object (being-in-itself). Being-for-itself is not an
entity, but rather a relation (Sartre 1984: 472). Specifically, it is a negation, as its
way of being is to not be the being (in-itself) that it posits. Yet it is also concrete
and finite. The for-itself is immersed in the world, where it relates to beings, and
is a finite negation of the totality of these beings inasmuch as the for-itself sees the
entities in the world as what are not itself. Finally, being-for-others is consciousness
as it exists for other consciousnesses. Being-for-others emerges when a for-itself
is looked at by an other: the for-itself realizes that the other experiences it as if
the for-itself is an in-itself. Being-for-others attempts, but fails, to synthesize its
being-in-itself and its being-for-itself.
The theory of knowledge Sartre develops out of this ontology indicates why he
denies a cognitive account of recognition. For Sartre, all knowledge is knowledge by
a subject (the knower) of an object (the known). Only a for-itself can be a subject,
and only an in-itself can be an object. Because being-for-itself is not an object, it
cannot be known. This means that the other for-itself is in principle inapprehensible
as a freedom.3 When considering other freedoms, Sartre indicates, knowing “on
Sartre’s Affective Turn: Shame as Recognition in “The Look” 713

principle is removed from consideration” (Sartre 1984: 363, trans. modified). This
does not mean, as some critics have concluded, that Being and Nothingness denies
the possibility of recognition. Instead, it merely means that we do not recognize
the other by means of cognition. This is evident in Sartre’s assertion that the look
reveals “a fundamental connection in which the Other is manifested in some way
other than through the knowledge that I have of him” (Sartre 1984: 340, trans.
modified, my italics). Since Sartre narrowly conceives of knowledge as the relation
of a for-itself to an in-itself, a cognitive model of recognition can only ever reveal
the other as an object. But an object cannot recognize me. Sartre concludes his
discussion of Hegel by stating, “if we are to refute solipsism, then my relation to
the Other is first and fundamentally a relation of being to being, not of knowledge
to knowledge” (Sartre 1984: 329).

II. The Affective Consciousness of Being-Looked-At

Sartre takes up the challenge of refuting solipsism by presenting two moments of
the look. First, I look at the other; second, the other looks at me. Sartre privileges
the second moment because it engenders being-for-others. In the first moment,
I look at the other as an object. In the park, this other is a special class of object:
unlike the bench and trees, the other appears as a synthetic totality with a unique
perspective. The other-as-object is destabilizing because it reveals that my con-
sciousness is not the center of the world. Nonetheless, this other remains an
object of my consciousness (Sartre 1984: 450). In the second moment, the look is
reversed: the other looks at me. This moment is far more destabilizing because it
makes me conscious of myself as an object for the other. I feel known by the other
(as an in-itself) (Sartre 1984: 473). Having experienced myself up to this point
only as a for-itself, the look endangers me. In it, I first apprehend my facticity.
Being-looked-at involves a reciprocal internal negation. This is my denial
that I am the other and the other’s denial that he is me. When the other looks at
me, I feel myself as an object, which amounts to experiencing myself as different
from whatever makes me into an object. And yet I counter this negation (which I
experience as coming from the other) with a negation of my own: I deny that the
other is me. For Sartre, I negate the other by denying that he is an object—that is,
I recognize the other’s subjectivity—but also by denying that he is myself.4 Both
negations here are internal. External negation is a contingent, contrastive relation.
It involves a third being differentiating two objects. It is the “original relation of
this to that” (Sartre 1984: 262). For instance, “this cup is not that pen.” Internal
negation, by contrast, requires no such third-party observer to differentiate “this”
from “that.” Internal negation is a “concrete ontological bond”: X lacks y in such a
way that lacking-Y is a constitutive feature of X (Sartre 1984: 245). I could not be
myself without being not-the-other, nor could the other be herself without not-
714 Ellie Anderson

being-me. Thus, “I need the Other in order to grasp fully all the structures of my
being” (Sartre 1984: 303). While the for-itself attempts to recognize itself without
the other—for instance, through reflection—self-recognition is impossible because
the for-itself is a negation, not an entity. Thus, it cannot grasp itself as an object.
For Sartre, the reciprocal internal negation of being-for-others only makes
sense from within “the affective order” (Sartre 1984: 383). In the look, we do not
know that the other is a freedom; rather, we feel it in our being. The look of the
other is disclosed through feelings, and “these feelings themselves are nothing
more than our way of affectively experiencing our being-for-others” (Sartre 1984:
383). Sartre says very little in Being and Nothingness to clarify what he means by
“affect,” which is perhaps why commentators have overlooked it despite its be-
ing the linchpin of his account of being-for-others. And even though Sartre had
already formulated theories of the emotions in The Imagination (1936), Sketch
for a Theory of the Emotions (1939) and The Imaginary (1940), he makes but little
explicit use of them in Being and Nothingness. Nonetheless, in Being and Nothing-
ness, Sartre interprets affect and cognition as separate modes of consciousness.5
This viewpoint signals a break with The Imaginary, where Sartre equivocates about
whether affective consciousness is a kind of knowledge.6
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s analysis of affect emerges primarily through
the example of shame, although he also mentions fear and pride. While scholars
have long emphasized Sartre’s analysis of shame, they have only rarely shown how
it links up with his broader project of offering an affective alternative to Hegelian
recognition.7 In a recent article, for instance, Sebastian Gardner aptly shows that
Sartre rejects Hegel’s rationalism, but misleadingly suggests that Sartre’s alternative
is an “aporetic” account of intersubjectivity.8 Gardner misses the fact that inter-
subjectivity is only aporetic from a cognitive standpoint for Sartre. Affectively, the
existence of others is indubitable.
Unlike contemporary affect theorists, Sartre does not distinguish affects from
feelings, generally using the adjective “affective” and the noun “feeling.”9 For Sartre,
the feeling of shame is an intentional, pre-reflective structure of consciousness
that requires the other’s presence. Sartre goes so far as to say, “Shame is by nature
recognition. I recognize that I am as the Other sees me” (Sartre 1984: 302). Take
Sartre’s famous example of being caught looking through a keyhole. Before being
caught, I am completely bound up with the scene I am sneakily watching. There
is no such object as a “self ” anywhere to be found (Sartre 1984: 347–48). When I
hear footsteps, however, I am “suddenly affected in my being” because I experience
myself as an object (Sartre 1984: 349). I am not ashamed because I was caught in
an immoral or embarrassing act, but rather because I feel like an object for the
other. I sense that the other has a knowledge of me that I can never have of myself.
For Sartre, shame is affective in that shame links the self to the other through a
relation of being, not knowing. Unlike cognitions, affects are unmediated relations
Sartre’s Affective Turn: Shame as Recognition in “The Look” 715

to being. Sartre is thus in line with affect theory’s Spinozist suggestion that affects
are a “modification of the very power of existing” (Malabou and Johnston 2013:
6). For Sartre, both cognition and affect relate a subject to an object by means of
internal negation (Sartre 1984: 615). Yet the structure of their internal negations
is quite different. In cognition, the knowing subject denies that it is the known
object: in seeing a candle in front of me, I know that I am not that candle.10 In
recognizing the object’s difference from myself, I seek to appropriate it: Sartre
considers all knowledge a form of appropriation (Sartre 1984: 737).
By contrast, it is not necessary for affective consciousness to deny identity
with its object. The affect of shame, for example, depends on the fact that I am this
object. For Sartre, shame is “shame of self,” because the look of the other reveals
the self as an in-itself (Sartre 1984: 350). This shame in realizing that the self is not
simply the pure freedom of pre-reflective consciousness does not constitute a new
piece of knowledge about the self; instead, shame reveals the absence of knowledge
I have with respect to myself. Shame makes me feel known by another in a way
that I cannot know myself. The other has access to a mode of one’s being that is
real and yet inaccessible to the self: namely, one’s being an in-itself. The other’s look
thus implies a sovereignty over oneself. Hence Sartre’s claim that shame is a feeling
“in general of being an object: that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed,
and dependent being which I am for the Other” (Sartre 1984: 384).
The internal negation of affect is a negation of the world in its entirety. Affect
transforms the world from an ensemble of individual tools and objects into a look
that takes me—I who am a for-itself rather than an entity—to be a singular object
in the world. Affect is a “consciousness of self ” that reveals to the self its lack of
mastery over the world. I may attempt to capture my feeling, but “I cannot grasp
it. I find only myself,” and hence my feelings extend outside me into the world of
others (Sartre 1984: 142). My response is to try and negate the world that makes
me into an object, to affirm myself as pure transcendence. This negation is internal
because it affects the for-itself in its very being. I suffer a lack at the heart of my
being because affect presents me with myself as an object acted-upon in the world,
and I can never grasp this objecthood.
Sartre’s argument in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions clarifies the use of
affect in Being and Nothingness. Here, Sartre argues that emotions involve a magi-
cal attitude that constitutes how we relate to others. Sartre describes two ways of
encountering the world: instrumentally, as an ensemble of separate tools governed
by natural laws, or magically, as a holistic world of objects with psychic proper-
ties. The magical attitude is fundamental to human reality because it is the way
we encounter the world through emotions. In the magical world, consciousness
feels endangered because the natural laws of spatiality and distance no longer
hold: in this second attitude, there is no distance between consciousness and the
world. Consciousness thus feels endangered and tries to defend itself through the
716 Ellie Anderson

magical attitude of emotion. Crucially for our purposes, “the category of ‘magic’
governs the interpsychic relations between men in society and, more precisely,
our perception of others” (Sartre 1962: 56). This corresponds with the analysis of
shame in “The Look” and enriches it. When Sartre claims that I look at the other’s
eyes from a distance, but perceive the other looking at me without distance, he is
suggesting that the shift from looking at the other (as-object) to being looked at
by the other (as-subject) involves a shift from seeing the world as an ensemble of
tool-objects to seeing the world as a magical whole in which I as a consciousness
am endangered (Sartre 1984: 347).
This shift involved in our affective consciousness of the world is normative:
Being and Nothingness claims that one does not neutrally perceive the object of
affect, but rather judges it. Being-for-others is a form of being interested in the
being of others, of feeling their interest in oneself, and of evaluating both oneself
and others on the basis of this feeling (Sartre 1984: 339).11 A feeling is “a feeling
in the presence of a norm” (Sartre 1984: 141). Shame in particular is the feeling of
being judged by the other. Sartre states, “To be looked at is to apprehend oneself as
the unknown object of unknowable appraisals—in particular, of value judgments”
(Sartre 1984: 358). Given that only a free consciousness can value anything, being
the object of the look suggests that there is another freedom that surpasses one’s
own freedom. Sartre explicitly casts this experience of being judged by the other
in terms of slavery. Being the object of the other’s value judgment implies the self ’s
dependence on a freedom other than itself, and “it is in this sense that we can
consider ourselves as ‘slaves’ in so far as we appear to the Other” (Sartre 1984: 358).
Because this structure is fundamental to being-for-others, it is insurmountable.
Its affective character makes it impossible to experience from any other position
than one’s own pre-reflective self-consciousness, suggesting that this phenomenon
escapes understanding from a cognitive, let alone universal, point of view (Sartre
1984: 302).12 This explains Sartre’s insistence that the recognitive encounter can
only occur starting from the cogito (Sartre 1984: 329).
It is likely that the tendency to underplay the affective component of Sartre’s
“Look” is in part traceable to inconsistent translations in Hazel Barnes’s transla-
tion of Being and Nothingness. In addition to using the terminology of “affect” and
“feeling,” which are generally correctly rendered into English, Sartre frequently
uses the French verb éprouver to figure the character of the look. While the most
straightforward translation of this word is “to experience,” the term also suggests
“to undergo” or “to feel.” Its nominal form, épreuve, suggests a trial or ordeal.13
Importantly for our purposes, Sartre plays repeatedly on these other resonances
of the word, which more strongly echo the affective character of shame than does
the more neutral English word “experience.” In addition, éprouver is also closely
linked to prouver, or “to prove,” and Sartre plays on this inasmuch as, for him,
the ordeal (épreuve) of the look proves (preuve) the existence of others. Yet the
Sartre’s Affective Turn: Shame as Recognition in “The Look” 717

Barnes translation of Being and Nothingness in fact wrongly translates éprouver as

“to prove” on multiple occasions in the sections on being-for-others. For instance,
Barnes writes, “I in the recognition of my object-state have proof [éprouve] that he
[the other] has this consciousness” (Sartre 1984: 475). However, the translation of
“have proof ” here is incorrect. It should instead read “experience,” showing that
Sartre is stating that, in recognizing myself as an object, I experience the other’s
consciousness.14 As we have seen above, the other components of the chapter show
that we experience the other’s consciousness affectively. While it is true that this
experience provides evidence of the other’s existence, leaping to suggest that he
is directly saying so here elides the component of affective lived experience that
provides the basis for the proof of the other. The word Barnes often translates
as “proof ” instead refers to the (affective) experience of the other, and failing to
register this misses a key component of Sartre’s proof against solipsism.
One of the rare explicit formulations of affect in Being and Nothingness emerges
late in the text, in Sartre’s discussion of psychoanalysis. He states when discussing
affective dispositions that “a feeling is not an inner disposition but an objectifying
and transcending relation that learns [se fait apprendre] what it is from its object”
(Sartre 1984: 770, trans. modified). For Sartre, we neither project our feelings onto
the things involved nor receive feeling-impressions passively from the external
world. A feeling is a mode of consciousness that actively responds to its object, but
that also “learns what it is”—that is, is revealed to consciousness—through its ob-
ject. Although this formulation is somewhat opaque where it arises, it corresponds
exceptionally well to Sartre’s analysis of shame earlier in the text. He suggests that
apprehending the self-as-object teaches me what I am: namely, being-for-others.
For Sartre, shame has a tripartite structure: “I am ashamed of myself before the
Other” (Sartre 1984: 385). Having laid out the structure of affective consciousness,
we can see how shame aligns with it. The subject of shame is the pre-reflective
consciousness of the for-itself (here, the I). The object of shame is the self, or the
self apprehended as an in-itself. The catalyst for the affect of shame—the one who
transforms the world into a magical totality—is the other.15

III. Affect Theory and the Problem of Solipsism

According to Sartre, solipsism is only a problem if we take the other to be an
object (that we either know or fail to know). Sartre’s argument for the existence
of others is rather simple: we feel the other’s presence in our very being, and this
feeling reveals a real dimension of our being that could not be disclosed without
the other’s presence. Therefore, the other must exist. Sartre takes this argument
to be an extension of Descartes’s proof of the cogito. Whereas for Descartes, I
think, therefore I exist, for Sartre, I feel shame, therefore Others exist (Sartre 1984:
369). “Through shame, we confer on the Other an indubitable presence” (Sartre
718 Ellie Anderson

1984: 368). Shame-consciousness bears witness to the other’s existence, and

doubting the existence of the other is as absurd as doubting one’s own existence.
Now, Sartre does not mean to suggest that another person’s empirical pres-
ence can never be in doubt. It’s obvious that one might sometimes be mistaken:
entering a plaza, I might feel shame in the face of a person on the other end, only
to realize that the object before me is a statue. Yet this mistake occurs on the level
of the other-as-object. I was wrong that this particular object was an other. This
realization does not invalidate the entire structure of the look, for Sartre, because
even a misplaced feeling of shame refers me to other others: people who live in the
buildings up above the square and who may be looking down at me, the family I
will meet on the other side of the door when I return home, etc. In this case, my
feeling of shame and its proof of my being-for-others itself is not wrong, in the
same way that my thinking and its proof that I exist as a consciousness is not wrong.
The other is the only being through whom I can become an object, and because I
feel myself as an object, the other must exist (Sartre 1984: 373). The emphasis on
affect suggests that recognition is not a recognition of similarity for Sartre, but a
recognition of difference.16 Affect allows for a felt experience of difference.
This account of affect both overlaps with and diverges from contemporary
accounts of affect associated with the recent “affective turn” in a variety of disci-
plines, including philosophy. Associated with thinkers including Brian Massumi,
Catherine Malabou, and Eve Sedgwick, affect theory draws on the philosophical
tradition of Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza and/or the psychological work of
Silvan Tomkins in order to suggest that thinkers have failed to account for the
affective dimensions of existence. Unlike Sartre, affect theorists dissociate affect
from feeling, highlighting the prepersonal nature of affect.17 For this reason, as well
as his commitment to an ontology of radical freedom, Sartre is not an obvious ally
for affect theory. Affect theory resists grounding itself in subjectivity or agency. In
addition, Sartre emphasizes the intentionality of affect, which many contemporary
affect theorists reject. For Sartre, affect is a mode of consciousness; for Deleuzian
affect theorists, at least, subjective consciousness is not a primary category at all.
One of the issues with contemporary affect theory writ large is its underde-
veloped account of self-other relations. Affect theorists tend to take for granted
that self-other distinction is not a primary feature of experience, but something
overlaid through the social order, while affect circulates on a deeper level than
the distinction between self and others. While affect theory does not offer a
monolithic account of self-other relations, it does position itself as an alternative
to traditional notions of the split between self and other: affects are taken to be
prepersonal or even asubjective. They reveal that distinctions between self and
other are, at most, derivative of affective processes, and, at best, wholly artificial
(Massumi 2002: 9). This approach, however, fails to account for the persistence of
a pre-reflective consciousness as the only possible site of making sense of affect.
Sartre’s Affective Turn: Shame as Recognition in “The Look” 719

From Sartre’s perspective, it is simply incoherent to maintain a category that refers

to a mode of consciousness and claim that this category exists without reference to
consciousness. Massumi, for instance, describes affect as “autonomous” (1995: 96).
For existential phenomenology, describing affect as autonomous only makes sense
within the framework of subjective human values: strictly speaking, autonomy
can only refer to being-for-itself. Affect is autonomous by virtue of being a mode
of (free) consciousness, but affect itself does not float around between bodies in
excess of a “particular, functionally anchored perspective,” pace Massumi (1995:
2006). How could affect be anything but anchored to a perspective? Sartre would
not counter Massumi by suggesting that fixed individuals exist prior to affect, but
rather by arguing that affect is what fixes individuals. Affect is what anchors me to
a perspective. Following Sartre’s proof against solipsism, the distinction between
self and other is itself affective. Affective consciousness simultaneously reveals
the mutual imbrication of self and other, and suggests an insurmountable gulf
between my experience and that of other freedoms.
Related to this is the disagreement between affect theory and phenomenology
over intentionality. Both the Deleuzian approach to affect taken up by Massumi
and others, and the psychological model received from Tomkins, separate affect
from intention. For Massumi, this directly follows from separating affect from
cognition. As Leys states:
Massumi conceptualizes affect as inherently independent of meaning and
intention. What he and other affect theorists share . . . is a commitment to
the idea that there is a disjunction or gap between the subject’s affective
processes and his or her cognition or knowledge of the objects that caused
them. (Leys 2011: 450)
At least in Leys’s characterization, affect theory’s dissociation of affect from
intention is one and the same as affect’s dissociation from cognition. In short,
intention is cognitive. Yet, as Shaun Gallagher and Shiloh Whitney have noted,
describing affect as non-intentional is unintelligible from the standpoint of
phenomenology (Gallagher 2006; Whitney 2018). For phenomenologists such
as Sartre, all consciousness is intentional. Because affect is a mode of conscious-
ness, affect is intentional. As we have seen above, affect intends its object, but
its object can sometimes be itself. Massumi’s affect theory mistakenly associates
intention with cognition, rather than seeing cognition as merely one manifesta-
tion of intentionality.
Moreover, Sartre suggests that, even as affect is non-cognitive, it still learns
what it is from its object (as we saw above). This contrasts with Massumi’s
misreading of phenomenology, which, he states, involves a “closed loop of inten-
tionality” because of its insistence that pre-reflective consciousness accompanies
affects (Massumi 2002: 191).18 Massumi reads the phenomenological theory of
720 Ellie Anderson

intentionality as a version of subjectivism.19 For Sartre, however, affect relates the

subject directly to the world around it in an internal negation or bond of being.
As we have seen, the account of affect given in “The Look” is precisely an attempt
to show that consciousness and selfhood are not caught up in a closed loop, but
are instead in direct relation to the world of others. But Massumi not only equates
the phenomenological approach to intentionality with idealism; he also suggests
that intentionality is voluntaristic (Massumi 2002: 191). This is a naïve misread-
ing—and, in the case of Sartre, by no means a new one—that is clearly antithetical
to the account of the affects we have seen in Sartre thus far.
Leys critiques Massumi for leaping from evidence that actions often occur
involuntarily to the conclusion that “it is necessary to break with the whole idea of
intentionality” and replace it with an emphasis on corporeality (Leys 2011: 456). On
her reading, this false dichotomy is indicative of a latent mind-body dualism that
Massumi perpetuates. For Sartre, corporeality is interwoven with intentionality.
In the case of shame, for instance, my experience of being-looked-at as an object
by another is itself an intentionally embodied mode of consciousness. Sartre, a
thinker of transcendence with an emphasis on the insurmountable difference
between self and other, as well as an ontological bifurcation of being-for-itself
and being-in-itself, escapes dualism by virtue of his phenomenological emphasis
on intentionality.
All of this is not to say, however, that Sartre’s view of affect is immune to
criticism. Indeed, there are many issues that plague his view as it emerges in
“The Look” chapter alone: Sartre’s insistence on the “unhappy consciousness” of
oscillating between feeling like a subject and feeling like an object has resulted in
many compelling charges of dualism that, for many, render his view incoherent.20
I will close by granting that one element of Massumi’s critique of phenomenology
is incisive in relation to Sartre’s theory of being-for-others, but for reasons other
than those Massumi gives. Massumi suggests that the account of pre-reflective
consciousness encloses phenomenology in what Massumi calls “the déjà vu without
the portent of the new” (2002: 191). I noted above that I find Massumi’s suggestion
that phenomenology is subjectivist because of its theory of intentionality wrong-
headed. I do, however, think that Sartre’s account of the look is implicitly idealist,
if not subjectivist, in one respect: by claiming that the look is a form of recognition.

Conclusion
We have shown up to this point that 1) the look is what institutes being-for-others;
2) being-for-others is experienced in the self-objectifying affects of shame, pride,
and fear; 3) these affects are recognition. Relative to 3), one might be led to ask
in summary: what is recognized in recognition? For Sartre, two elements are rec-
ognized: one’s own objecthood and the other’s subjectivity (Honneth 2015: 95).
Sartre’s Affective Turn: Shame as Recognition in “The Look” 721

However, I would add that these are not recognized in an equally direct fashion.
It is precisely the immediate recognition of one’s own objecthood that leads to
the recognition of the other’s subjectivity. In the experience of being looked at,
one feels one’s status as an object. What is pre-reflectively recognized through
shame is oneself: specifically, oneself as in-itself. Yet the immediate structures of
my consciousness reveal me as a for-itself. This revelation of myself as an impos-
sible synthesis of the in-itself and the for-itself discloses my being-for-others.
The recognition of myself as an object offers the evidence needed for the sec-
ond component of recognition, the recognition of the other’s subjectivity. Through
shame—my own affective response to the other’s look—I recognize the other as a
subject (Sartre 1984: 387). The other is directly present to me as a foreign freedom,
but one that I cannot cognitively grasp (Sartre 1984: 361).
It remains unclear, however, why Sartre insists that the other’s subjectivity
is recognized in being-looked-at, rather than just being experienced (for the first
time). The section on psychic temporality in Being and Nothingness suggests that
the difference between recognition and knowledge is that the former involves a
pre-reflective familiarity with its object (Sartre 1984: 219). Applying this to the
case of the look, we can say that one recognizes oneself in the look because one is
pre-reflectively self-aware. Even as consciousness receives a new dimension of its
existence through being-for-others, it recognizes itself in this new dimension.21 It
is not clear, however, that we have a pre-reflective awareness of the other prior to
the look. The word “recognition” applies to my recognition of myself-as-object, but
should not apply to the other-as-subject. The other is revealed through the look,
but not strictly speaking recognized, because I do not have a pre-reflective aware-
ness of the other prior to the look. For Sartre, the revelation of the other through
the look discloses a “new type of being,” and thus a type of being with which pre-
reflective consciousness was presumably not already familiar (Sartre 1984: 302).
As such, it is unclear why he refers to the look as recognition, aside from
the fact that he is drawing on the Hegelian convention. As we saw in section II,
Sartre rejects the standard interpretation of recognition as a form of cognition.
This already put his use of the term on shaky ground: he rejected the cognition
(connaissance) of the term recognition (reconnaissance). Here, one could argue that
he also rejects the re- of recognition: that is, although we do re-cognize ourselves
in the look, we do not re-cognize the other because my being-for-itself was not
bound up with being-for-others from the outset. This is in contrast with Hegel’s
system, which motivates the use of the term “recognition” because of its rejection
of a dualistic ontology. The master and servant in The Phenomenology of Spirit
stage a temporary separation of an essentially unified self-consciousness: they do
not represent a permanent split. Sartre, however, affirms that self and other are
originarily and permanently split; there is neither a prior union nor an ultimate
synthesis between self and other in being-for-others. Consciousness is permanently
722 Ellie Anderson

an “unhappy consciousness” (Sartre 1984: 140). Thus, Sartre falls short of his own
insight in continuing to mobilize the term “recognition” to describe the look. It
may be truer to his account to claim that being-for-others introduces an irruptive
event of the other. While Sartre offers a compelling framework for the affective
nature of relations to others, he does not—in spite of his own claims—offer an
account of recognition.
Alternatively, one might suggest that Sartre does indeed offer an account of
recognition, but that his emphasis on the split between me-as-object and me-as-
subject offers an inadequate ontological basis. In order to offer a coherent picture
of reciprocal recognition—as Sartre claims to do—he would need to abandon
the rigid distinction between the two moments of the look: namely, looking and
being-looked-at. Sartre insists that the look does not result in a totality: he wants
to avoid Hegel’s optimism. However, he struggles to make sense of the fact that,
on the one hand, being-for-others involves me as both subject and object simul-
taneously, and, on the other, I cannot know this simultaneity. Sartre avows that
this tension results in a “contradictory conclusion” in which there is and is not a
totality between self and other in reciprocal recognition (Sartre 1984: 399). The
subject-object duality that Sartre retains in his tripartite theory of being does not
merely limit his analysis to being what many have considered pessimistic or even
paranoid (Oliver 2011: 57); rather, it results in incoherence.
Sartre acknowledges that being-for-others is incoherent—when considered
from the standpoint of cognition. After all, he takes his major contribution to be
the suggestion that recognition is affective rather than cognitive, rejecting Hegelian
optimism partially on these grounds. Additionally, Sartre describes recognition as
an ekstasis of the human condition, or a contradictory project doomed to failure.
Being-for-others is a key feature of the human condition, but as the impossible
project of synthesizing being-for-itself and being-in-itself. That is, Sartre asserts
that recognition is possible—indeed necessary—for being-for-others, but its aim
(to realize oneself as an in-itself-for-itself) is unrealizable.
In conclusion, Sartre’s affective argument against solipsism attempts to main-
tain the aspect of reciprocal internal negation so crucial to Hegel’s account, but
to recast this feature so as not to reduce the other to a similar, equivalent being to
oneself. Recognition is a felt experience of difference. This approach’s grounding
in phenomenology has advantages over contemporary affect theory, especially
that of Massumi, because of its anchoring in an intentional subjectivity. However,
Sartre’s formulation of the look as a form of recognition fails to live up to its own
ontology. It is ultimately limited by the Hegelian language to which it is a response,
bearing the imprint of the idea that the other is pre-reflectively known in advance,
rather than constituting a new event of being.
Pomona College
Sartre’s Affective Turn: Shame as Recognition in “The Look” 723

Notes
1. For an overview of pessimistic readings of Being and Nothingness, see Mirvish 1996.
Arguments include: Catalano 1986: 33–35; Desan 1954, Chapter 4; Flynn 1984,
Chapter 7, and 2014; Hughes 2002: 18; Natanson 1951: 47; Oliver 2001: 56–78, Stack
1977: 43; and Warnock 1970: 129–30. Heter 2006 takes a qualified approach.
2. While the term “master-slave dialectic” in English is not accepted among Hegel
scholars, who emphasize instead that the so-called “slave” is a servant (Knecht),
Kojève, Sartre, and their French contemporaries generally use the term “slave” in
referring to this section of The Phenomenology of Spirit.
3. “[T]he for-itself as for-itself can not be known by the Other” (Sartre 1984: 327).
4. “Thus,” Sartre writes, “originally the Other is Not-Me-not-object” (Sartre 1984: 379).
5. He contrasts them in a number of chapters, beginning with the Introduction (Sartre
1984: 11).
6. Here, he states that because affective consciousness is intentional, it could be consid-
ered a kind of knowledge. At the same time, he distinguishes affective consciousness
from what he calls “intellectual knowledge” (Sartre 2004: 69). Moreover, he describes
a mixture of cognitive and affective consciousnesses, suggesting an initial distinction
between the two (Sartre 2004: 72).
7. See Honneth 2015, van der Wielen 2014, Dolezal 2012, Louden 2009, Wider 2007. On
Honneth’s account, which is the most comprehensive, Sartre’s rejection of a cognitive
model of recognition hinges on the notion that certainty is something one can have
about one’s own feelings, but not about objects. van der Wielen (2014) helpfully reads
the look through Sartre’s account of the emotions; however, she overlooks affect as
a mode of consciousness in its own right by suggesting that affects pertain to the
imagination.
8. Gardner 2017: 47.
9. It is unclear whether Sartre distinguishes feelings from emotions. In Being and
Nothingness, the language of affect and feeling is freely used in Part Three, “Being-
for-Others,” with a discussion of emotion reserved for Part Four of the text, “Having,
Doing, and Being.” He does, however, describe phenomena such as fear alternatively
as feelings and as emotions in this text. The Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions dis-
tinguishes in passing between “feeling-joy” and “emotion-joy,” suggesting that the
former “represents an equilibrium” and the latter an impatient disturbance (Sartre
1962: 46, trans. modified).
10. That is, to know is to make oneself other than the known object (Sartre 1984: 219).
11. For a compelling account of the self-evaluation involved in being-for-others, see
Morris 2010.
12. Additionally, shame puts me in a position to self-evaluate. Because I appear as an
object to the other, I can treat myself as an object and pass judgment on myself. This
emphasis on value-judgment also intersects with Sartre’s technical definition of value
in Being and Nothingness, which is “the in-itself-for-itself ” (Sartre 1984: 267). That
is, the ultimate goal of human reality—and of the projects we freely undertake—is
to be an in-itself-for-itself (God), which is impossible.
724 Ellie Anderson

13. Sartre uses it as such, saying, for instance, “Je suis épreuve d’autrui” (‘I am the trial
of the Other’), which Barnes mistranslates as “I am the proof of the Other” (Sartre
1984: 474).
14. Barnes makes the same mistake in numerous places in the text, including Sartre
1984: 361, 374, and 674. She elsewhere accurately translates éprouver as experience,
such as in the keyhole example on 381.
15. Sartre suggests that “man is always a sorcerer to man” (1962: 56).
16. As Howie (2014: 61) puts it, recognition on Sartre’s view is “the recognition of
nonidentity.”
17. For a helpful overview, see Shouse 2005.
18. Similar critiques have been made of Sartre within secondary literature on “The
Look”: see Mirvish 1996.
19. Rather more colorfully, Massumi characterizes phenomenology as a “domesticating,
self-satisfied subjectivism-in-spite-of-itself ” (2002: 206).
20. See Dastur 2011.
21. “Consciousness was there before it was known. Therefore if consciousness is affirmed
in the face of the Other, it is because it lays claim to a recognition of its being” (Sartre
1984: 323).

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