Conflict

In Sartre's phenomenological ontology, "Conflict" names the irreducible ontological structure underlying all intersubjective relations. It is not a sociological or psychological contingency but an a priori feature of the encounter between consciousnesses: every for-itself constitutes itself through a mutual, asymmetrical internal negation with every other for-itself, such that each consciousness must negate the other's freedom (transcendence) in order to assert its own. This structure means that neither cooperative nor collective formations — neither the We-subject (the experience of a shared "us" in unified praxis) nor the Us-object (the experience of being collectively objectified by a third party) — succeed in transcending or resolving the originary antagonism. Both the We-subject and the Us-object are derivative, unstable, and ultimately parasitic on the more fundamental two-body conflict of transcendences: they presuppose it, they cannot sublate it.

The theoretical pivot Sartre executes at this juncture is double. First, he displaces Heidegger's Mitsein (being-with) as the foundational category of intersubjectivity: if the essence of relations between consciousnesses is conflict, then Dasein's constitutive "being-with-others" cannot be ontologically primary — it is, at best, a secondary, phenomenally accessible surface over an abyssal antagonism. Second, Sartre treats this conclusion not as a terminus but as a threshold: once conflict is established as the irreducible ontological form of the for-itself's relation to other for-itselves, the inquiry must turn to the for-itself's relation to the in-itself — to action, doing, being, and having — where the for-itself enacts ontic modifications on the world rather than being constituted through another's gaze.

This concept lives at the argumentative apex of Sartre's account of intersubjectivity in Being and Nothingness (source: jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological), functioning as the synthetic conclusion that integrates and transcends the analyses of Being-for-others, the Gaze, love, masochism, sadism, hate, and the Look. In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, Conflict operates as the ontological ground from which several of them are derivations. Being-for-others — the dimension of existence in which the for-itself is constituted as an object by another consciousness — is already the site where conflict is born: the Look that produces the Me-as-object is itself an act of transcendence that negates my transcendence, making being-for-others structurally antagonistic rather than complementary. Masochism and the Gaze, in Sartre's schema, are not perversions or anomalies but specific strategies within conflict: masochism is the attempt to resolve the conflict by freely assuming one's own objecthood, thereby making the Other's transcendence redundant, while the gaze is the weapon by which each consciousness stakes its claim to subjecthood at the other's expense.

Critically, Sartre's notion of Conflict stands in productive tension with the Lacanian concepts that surround it in the cross-reference network. Lacanian Alienation shares with Sartrean Conflict the insistence that intersubjectivity is constitutively asymmetric and that no collective or imaginary resolution restores the lost wholeness — but where Sartre grounds this in the mutual negation of free consciousnesses, Lacan grounds it in the subject's structural subordination to the signifier of the Other, displacing the existentialist frame entirely. Similarly, the Lacanian Gaze as objet a departs sharply from Sartre's Gaze as the Look of another consciousness: for Lacan, phenomenology (including Sartre's phenomenological ontology) remains trapped within the visible/invisible axis and the primacy of intentional consciousness, unable to account for the gaze as a pre-subjective, Real-register object that pre-exists any individual looker. Sartre's Conflict, then, occupies a historically significant but theoretically limited position in the corpus: it names the antagonism that Lacanian theory will subsequently radicalize by stripping it of its existentialist-voluntarist presuppositions and relocating it in the logic of the signifier and the drive.

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

the essence of the relations between consciousnesses is not the Mitsein; it is conflict.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it performs a direct ontological displacement: "Mitsein" — Heidegger's foundational category of co-being — is explicitly named and refused, while "conflict" is installed in its place as the true "essence," elevating antagonism from a contingent social phenomenon to a structural-ontological necessity. The opposition between these two terms condenses the entire distance between Sartre's phenomenological ontology and Heideggerian existential analytics.