Possession

Possession is, for Sartre, an attempted union between a person and a thing: more than a legal right or an ability to use, it is a way the for-itself seeks to find itself in an enduring object outside itself. Objects become part of the possessor’s lived world and seem to carry the possessor’s being, but this appropriation cannot deliver the complete self-identity it promises. The thing remains independent, and the desire to possess it opens onto an unachievable ideal of being its own foundation.

Beyond Use and Legal Ownership

Sartre begins by asking what it means to possess. Use cannot define ownership: a person in a café may use a plate and glass without owning them, while a picture on a wall may belong to someone who cannot use it in the same practical sense. Nor does ownership rest simply on a right to destroy an object. Such rights vary with social arrangements: an owner in a planned economy may not be entitled to close a factory, and a master in imperial Rome could possess a slave without having the right to kill him.

Law can regulate and sanctify possession, but Sartre distinguishes the right to possess from the appropriative relation itself. Even if a more just collective order ceased to protect some forms of individual property, private relations between people and things could remain. He likewise rejects the claim that ownership is simply theft: stolen property may have been acquired unjustly and may deprive another person, but those facts do not explain what possession is as a relation. The thief, no less than the lawful owner, treats the stolen money as his own; an account of possession must explain both relations rather than settle the question by naming one lawful and the other criminal.

The Object as Part of the Possessor

Possession is not merely an external label attached to an otherwise unchanged object. Sartre argues that it seems to touch the object’s very being: the possessed thing appears to its owner and to others as belonging to someone. He points to funeral practices in which the dead are buried with their belongings. The cup from which the dead person drank, the knife he used, and the corpse are treated as parts of a single dead person; the explanation that the objects are buried for practical use is, in his account, a rationalization after the custom has already taken shape.

The same logic, Sartre suggests, illuminates the burning of widows in Malabar: a woman understood as possessed by her dead husband is treated as already dead in the eyes of the community, with burning marking the passage from death by right to death in fact. Objects that cannot be buried with their owner may be imagined as haunted. A house remains possessed by its former occupant despite money or effort spent to dispel the haunting; ancestral Lares, in Sartre’s formulation, are layers of possession deposited on the house’s walls and furnishings. Relics matter for a related reason: the possessor is encountered through the object, because possession establishes an internal bond of being rather than a merely temporary connection.

A Relation That Makes a World

Sartre rejects a realistic account that treats subject and object as independent substances joined only from the outside. The object remains substantial and independent, but the possessing subject is marked by insufficiency of being; a substance cannot appropriate another substance as though their relation were an external transfer. The bond instead unifies possessor and possessed as an ideal dyad. To desire a particular thing is therefore not only to want that object; it is to want to be united with it in the relation of possessor and possessed.

Ownership also gives objects a place in a particular environment. Sartre’s example is a lamp: it is not only a bulb, shade, and wrought-iron stand, but also the power to light a desk, books, and table, and a particular illumination of work and habits of reading or writing late. Its meaning comes from its integration into that situation. Removed from the desk and work and placed among unsorted objects on a salesroom floor, it is no longer that person’s lamp; it returns to the generic class of lamps. Through possession, a person raises things into a functional order and sustains their status as possessions through the continuity of a life. If they are taken away, they die as that person’s possessions, as an arm would die if severed from the body.

Creation, Independence, and the Limits of Having

Sartre calls possession a relation of continuous creation. To have is first to create: the possessor inserts an object into the form of a personal environment, and the object seems to exist through its place and use there. Money makes this connection especially visible in a society organized by an extensive division of labor. It is less a possession in itself than an instrument for possessing: the strength it represents becomes effective in the purchase of a concrete thing. Buying appears symbolically to create the object, and money makes desire seem immediately operative. A person standing before a shop window with money already in a pocket can experience the displayed objects as more than half theirs.

Yet creation cannot be stopped at either end without disappearing. If the object were wholly the possessor, only subjectivity would remain; if it were wholly independent, it would become indifferent materiality. Possession tries to sustain both sides: the thing seems to be the possessor’s own expression while remaining an independent object that continues to exist when the possessor turns away. A pen may be so integrated into the act of writing that it seems entirely one’s own, but it remains intact and is not changed by ownership. Simply picking up and contemplating a pipe does not secure possession; it is in passing beyond the object toward a purpose, by using it, that possession can be enjoyed.

The contradiction is central to Sartre’s account. The possessed object is founded by the possessor in the human world and seems, as emanation, to return to the possessor; but it remains an in-itself, permanent, impenetrable, and outside. The possessor transfers himself into the object and encounters himself there in an objective form, yet cannot abolish its independence. Possession thus symbolizes the ideal of an in-itself-for-itself: a being that would be its own foundation. The possessor seeks to enjoy a stable being outside himself, and possession can also serve as a defense against the Other, since what belongs to someone already presents that person in an objective form.

An Ideal That Cannot Be Completed

The unity promised by possession remains symbolic. No act of appropriation satisfies the original desire to be one’s own foundation. Sartre compares this limit to Freud’s patient, who does not satisfy the Oedipus complex merely by dreaming that a soldier kills the Czar, identified as his father. Ownership can feel given all at once and yet demand a lifetime for its realization, because each act of use points toward further acts without completing the relation it symbolizes.

A bicycle makes the sequence concrete. Looking at it and touching it are not enough; riding it is also insufficient, and even a ride for its own sake gives way to the wish to use it on errands. The imagined acts expand into longer uses and trips across France. Although handing over a bank-note can establish ownership, realizing possession in this experiential sense would take an entire life. Death makes the undertaking visibly unfinished. Possession is not a concrete activity like eating, drinking, or sleeping that could satisfy a particular desire; it persists as a symbol of a completeness the possessor cannot achieve. Its force lies in the very distance between having the thing and becoming, through it, the self-grounding being that having seems to promise.