Flesh

Flesh names the Other’s body as the irreducibly contingent presence of another person: not a body detached from action and surroundings, but a living center around which a situation is organized. Its disclosure can exceed ordinary recognition, becoming an affective apprehension of contingency that the text identifies as a particular kind of nausea.

Definition and Contingency

The Other must appear bodily in a world shared with the observer, but no particular body, face, or set of sense organs is necessary. Face, senses, and presence are contingent forms through which the Other exists in a race, class, and environment, while the Other’s transcendence surpasses those forms. The observer encounters the body as an object among objects, yet apprehends in it the presence of a being who knows and whose existence cannot be reduced to that objecthood.

The Other’s own taste of himself becomes the Other’s flesh for the observer. Flesh is therefore not a hidden substance behind appearance; it is the pure contingency of presence as encountered from outside. The Other’s body is at once here, though it could be elsewhere, and configured as it is, though it could be otherwise. Its objective arrangement makes the Other’s contingent presence explicit within the observer’s world.

Disclosure in Acquaintance

Flesh is ordinarily obscured by clothing, make-up, haircuts, beards, and expression. Long acquaintance can bring an instant when these disguises are thrown off and the observer finds himself in the Other’s pure contingency. The face or another part of the body then affords an intuition of flesh—not simply knowledge, but an affective apprehension of absolute contingency. This encounter has the distinctive character of nausea.

That disclosure does not make the Other into a passive specimen. The body encountered as flesh is the facticity of a transcendence already surpassed, and it refers back to the observer’s own facticity: apprehending the Other’s body also non-explicitly apprehends the observer’s body as the center of reference from which the Other is indicated. The encounter thus joins two situated existences rather than presenting a detached body for inspection.

Body, Situation, and Action

A living body as flesh cannot be understood as an isolated object connected to other things only by external relations; that description applies to a corpse. The Other is given originally as a body in situation. There is no first body, followed later by action, and no preliminarily defined situation into which the body is subsequently inserted. The body is the objective contingency of the Other’s action and, through that action, the very basis in terms of which a situation exists.

The example of Pierre’s hand makes the point concrete. His body is not first a hand considered separately and only afterward a hand that might take hold of a glass. It is the complex of hand and glass: the flesh of the hand marks the original contingency of that practical complex. Flesh therefore names bodily presence as lived involvement in a world, not a merely anatomical object awaiting use.