Absence and Presence

In Sartre's ontology, absence and presence are not merely empirical conditions (someone is here or not here) but full-fledged structures of being — modes through which the for-itself and its others are constituted in their factical, situated reality. To be absent is not simply to be nowhere; it is to be "elsewhere in my world" — that is, one's absence is always indexed to a particular world, a particular set of relations, in which one is already given and already meaningful. Absence does not annul the being of the absentee; it reveals it. Just as presence discloses the contingent thereness of another for-itself, so absence discloses the same facticity from another angle: the fact that the Other was here, and is no longer, defines the situation and the contingencies of all parties involved. Absence is thus an ontological predicate carried by the structure of being-there (être-là), not a mere privation of presence.

This insight belongs to Sartre's broader account of being-for-others and facticity. Because each consciousness is irreducibly situated — thrown into a world it did not choose, embodied in a contingent form — both its presence and its absence are real modifications of the intersubjective field. Sartre's example, "his absence yesterday similarly defined our contingencies and our facticities," underscores that absence operates retroactively: it structures the factical situation of all those for whom the absentee is already-given. Nausea, as the pre-reflective apprehension of one's own bodily contingency, is the affective underside of this same structure — the mood in which facticity, normally recessive, forces itself on consciousness as an inescapable, sticky thereness. Absence and presence are, in this sense, two positive faces of the one structure of factical being-in-the-world.

This concept appears in the source jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological as part of Sartre's analysis of the body and its multiple ontological planes. It functions as a specification of the broader doctrine of Being-for-others: because another consciousness is always already given to me within my world — through the instrumental context, through shared facticity — that consciousness leaves a mark that is not erased by physical departure. Absence is therefore an extension of the structure of Being-for-others rather than its negation: the Other continues to define my situation even when absent, just as their Look continues to constitute a dimension of my being I cannot fully appropriate. The concept also tightly articulates with Facticity: if facticity is the unchosen, contingent givenness that freedom cannot dissolve, then another's absence is a factical modification of my situation — it "happened" and sediments into the past of my being-there with the same ontological weight as their presence.

In relation to Nausea as Ontological Mood, absence/presence can be read as the intersubjective correlate of the solitary apprehension of contingency that nausea names: nausea is the pre-reflective encounter with one's own factical surplus, while absence is the encounter with another's factical surplus through their removal from the scene. The concept is more distantly related to the Lacanian Gaze and Objectality: where Lacan's gaze theorizes the Other's look as a constitutive stain that the subject can never locate or master, Sartre's absence-structure similarly insists that the Other's being-for-me is never fully under my control, persisting as a real determination of my situation even across temporal and spatial distance. Absence, like the gaze, is never simply nothing.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (page unknown)

absence is a structure of being-there. To be absent is to-be-elsewhere-in-my-world; it is to be already given for me... his absence yesterday similarly defined our contingencies and our facticities.

The phrase "structure of being-there" is theoretically loaded because it refuses to treat absence as a mere lack or negation, instead assigning it full ontological positivity within the framework of être-là (being-there); and "already given for me" echoes the language of facticity and givenness, tying the absentee's non-presence directly to the constitutive, unchosen field of another's factical situation.