Diasporatic Being
ELI5
The For-itself — Sartre's name for conscious human existence — is never simply "in one place" with itself the way a rock is; it is always spread out between its past, its present, and its future, much like a people scattered across different lands who still somehow belong together. "Diasporatic Being" is just Sartre's striking word for that built-in scatter.
Definition
Diasporatic Being names the specific ontological structure of the For-itself's mode of existing in time — a quasi-multiplicity that is neither simple unity nor simple plurality but a constitutive dispersion that nonetheless coheres. Sartre borrows the term "diaspora" from the historical experience of a people at once profoundly cohesive and irreducibly scattered, and elevates it to a formal ontological descriptor: the For-itself is "diasporatic" insofar as it never coincides with itself yet is not simply fragmented into discrete parts. Its being is stretched across the three temporal ekstases — past, present, and future — in such a way that it is always, simultaneously, what it has been, what it is not yet, and what it is fleeing toward. This ekstatic dispersal is not accidental or derivative but is the very intra-structure of the For-itself's being: the For-itself does not first exist and then become dispersed in time; rather, it temporalizes itself by existing, and that temporalization just is its diasporatic character.
The concept is closely tied to Sartre's rejection of any account of temporality that would either build time up from non-temporal atoms or impose it from the outside onto a preformed subject. Because the For-itself is constitutively non-self-coincident — "it is what it is not and not what it is" — its being is always already spread out, and this primal ontological dispersion is what grounds all secondary multiplicities in the world, including number itself. Diasporatic Being is thus not a metaphor imported for color but a precise technical coinage: it marks the point at which Sartre's phenomenological ontology insists that the plurality we encounter in the world (objects counted, moments sequenced) must be traced back to a more fundamental, pre-objective dispersal internal to consciousness itself.
Place in the corpus
Within the source jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological, Diasporatic Being appears at the intersection of two central arguments: the analysis of the For-itself's ontological structure and the analysis of temporality. It is best understood as a specification — indeed, a naming — of the formal property that follows from the For-itself's constitutive non-self-coincidence. The cross-referenced concept of the For-itself establishes that consciousness is never a self-identical thing but is always at a distance from itself, structured by lack and temporal ekstasis; Diasporatic Being is simply the label Sartre coins for that distributed, yet cohesive, mode of existing. Equally, it presupposes the contrast with the In-itself: the In-itself is the region of opaque, undivided self-coincidence — pure positivity without internal scattering — and the diasporatic character of the For-itself is precisely what distinguishes consciousness from that brute plenitude. Facticity provides the anchoring pole of the dispersion: the past as facticity is one ekstatic moment of the diaspora, the "what I have been" that I carry without being able to be it again.
The concept also sits in implicit dialogue with the cross-referenced notion of Consciousness. Sartre's treatment, as noted in the canonical synthesis, grants consciousness a sovereign, translucent, nihilating role — in direct tension with Lacanian decentring. Diasporatic Being belongs entirely to the Sartrean side of that tension: it is a concept that names consciousness's self-dispersal as a positive ontological achievement (the ground of temporality and number) rather than as a failure of mastery or an effect of the signifier. It is thus an extension and internal elaboration of the For-itself / In-itself ontology, offered as Sartre's answer to the question of how a being that is "nothing" can nonetheless be the ground of all worldly multiplicities.
Key formulations
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (p.136)
In the ancient world the profound cohesion and dispersion of the Jewish people was designated by the term 'Diaspora.' It is this word which will serve to designate the mode of being of the For-itself; it is diasporatic.
The quote is theoretically loaded because it holds together two apparently opposed terms — "cohesion" and "dispersion" — and attributes both simultaneously to the For-itself's mode of being, thereby capturing precisely the non-self-coincident yet unified structure that defines the For-itself against the simple, undivided plenitude of the In-itself. The deliberate move from a historical-social descriptor ("Diaspora") to an ontological predicate ("it is diasporatic") signals that the For-itself's temporal self-dispersal is not a contingent feature but its essential, structural character.