Absence

In Sartre's phenomenological ontology, "absence" names a determinate, intentionally structured mode of encountering the Other — not a mere privation or logical gap, but a positive phenomenal datum that consciousness runs up against in its concrete experience. Sartre invokes Husserl's own admission that the Other "as he is revealed to our concrete experience is an absence" in order to expose the internal limit of Husserlian intersubjectivity: if the Other is genuinely given as absent — i.e., as a presence whose mode of being is precisely not-being-here — then the subject's relation to the Other cannot be grounded in the epistemological model of "full intuition" (Erfüllung) that Husserl's constitutive phenomenology requires. Absence here is not the simple non-presence of an object; it is the specific mode in which another consciousness appears to a consciousness that cannot directly coincide with it. The negation that separates self and Other is therefore internal and ontological, not external and spatial.

This is the crux of Sartre's diagnostic move: both idealism and realism spatialize the negation between self and Other, treating it as a gap traversable in principle by cognition. Husserl improves on Kant by making intersubjectivity constitutive rather than merely regulative, but remains caught within a knowledge-based relation — and knowledge, as the model of "full intuition," is structurally incapable of grasping absence as a positive, irreducible ontological fact. The result, as Sartre argues, is that Husserlian philosophy cannot account for the Other without either collapsing into solipsism or reintroducing a quasi-theological guarantee (the Leibnizian God as external harmonizer). Absence thus marks the point where phenomenology's cognitive frame breaks against the irreducible alterity of the Other.

This concept appears exclusively in jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological (p.235), within Sartre's extended critical survey of philosophical attempts to resolve the problem of the Other. It functions as a hinge concept in Sartre's argument: by citing Husserl's own concession that the Other is given as an absence, Sartre simultaneously credits Husserl with phenomenological honesty and convicts him of theoretical inconsistency. The concept thus lives at the intersection of phenomenology (the Husserlian tradition of intentional constitution), solipsism (the impasse that emerges when the Other cannot be positively intuited), and negation (the internal not-being that separates self from Other). Relative to those canonical cross-references: where the canonical treatment of negation distinguishes external from internal negation (with Sartre's own for-itself defined by its internal not-being-the-in-itself), "absence" specifies what internal negation looks like from the side of the Other — the Other is not merely different from me but is constitutively not-here as a positive existential determination. Relative to knowledge, the concept marks the precise point where the epistemological model (full intuition, cognition as the primary relation to the Other) fails: you cannot have a "full intuition" of an absence without abandoning the very architecture of intentional fulfillment that Husserl's theory of knowledge rests on.

Within the broader Lacanian frame the corpus sustains, "absence" resonates with the structure of the subject as lack and with the way the Other is never fully present but always barred. Lacan's own account of the Other's absence — most directly in the fort/da analysis and the account of the signifier as what "murders the thing" — approaches absence not via phenomenological intuition but via the symbolic substitution that installs lack structurally. Sartre's "absence" thus sits at the pre-Lacanian, phenomenological threshold: it correctly identifies that the Other cannot be given as a full presence, but it remains tied to the vocabulary of intuition and consciousness rather than rearticulcating absence through the signifier and the subject's constitutive division.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.235)

Husserl understood this since he says that 'the Other' as he is revealed to our concrete experience is an absence. But within Husserl's philosophy, at least, how can one have a full intuition of an absence?

The phrase "full intuition of an absence" is theoretically explosive because it places two incompatible Husserlian commitments in direct collision: "full intuition" (Erfüllung) is the positive, presence-based model of intentional fulfillment that grounds Husserlian epistemology, while "absence" names a mode of givenness that is constitutively non-fulfillable — making the question rhetorical and the contradiction internal to Husserl's own system rather than an external critique.