ABSTRACT
Michele Le Doeuff satirises the way that Jean-Paul Sartre, who affects to read consciousness as a bodily mode, erases sexual difference. In distinguishing the 'objective' body-for-others from the body-for-myself Sartre risks ignoring the body itself as part of the facticity with which the for-itself must negotiate. Sartre reads consciousness as what exists, actively, for itself, and this is to operate as a no-thing that nothings. Luce Irigaray though criticising Sartre for making objectification seem inevitable, sides with him in requiring no different being from what exists in itself, in order to explain the consciousness of the body for itself. There are the debates between scientific reductionism in physics and in economics, and the persisting visions based in consciousness and social consciousness –moral and immoral –of reality. The dogged alternatives of extreme materialism, or of a mystery in simply being conscious–a dichotomy only exacerbated by 'analytical philosophy'.
