Present & Experienced.

Extracts from Being and Nothingness by Sartre.
All of these are sentences from the text that I have linked together.
And not the complete or actual passages themselves.
Although they advance as the text does itself.
Enjoy!

Language: by revealing to us abstractly the principal structures of our body-for-others (even though the existed body is ineffable) impels us to place our alleged mission wholly in the hands of the Other. We resign ourselves to seeing ourselves through the Other’s eyes → we attempt to learn our being through the revelations of language. Therefore it is language which teaches me my body’s structures for the Other. But it follows that even in reflection I assume the Other’s point of view on my body; I try to apprehend it as if I were the Other in relation to it. It is evident that the categories which I then apply constitute an emptiness or rather, a dimension which escapes me.

I am language. By the sole fact that whatever I may do, my acts freely conceived and executed, my projects launched toward my possibilities have outside of them a meaning which escapes me and which I experience. Seduction is the complete realization of language. In other words it can be our primitive expression. Thus I do not know my language any more than I know my body for the Other. I can not hear myself speak nor see myself smile. The problem of language is exactly parallel to the problem of bodies, and the description which is valid in one case is valid in the other. Seduction will perhaps determine me to risk much to conquer the Other-as-object, but this desire to appropriate an object in the midst of the world should not be confused with love. Love therefore can be born in the beloved only from the proof which he makes of his alienation and his flight toward the Other.