Sartre on the body

It is noteworthy that the hefty chapter on the body occurs halfway through BN, tucked into Part Three (“Being-for-others”), sandwiched between “The existence of others” and “Concrete relations with others.” ¹ One has therefore to read well into the book before there is any explicit mention of the body. ² Still, there is no doubt that the human body is absolutely central to Sartre’s conception of human reality (what he calls Being-for-itself, the mode of being of conscious beings). ³ Being-for-itself, he famously says, “must be wholly body and it must be wholly consciousness; it cannot be united with a body” (BN: 305/412). ⁴