Hate as Ontological Failure

Hate as Ontological Failure is Sartre's designation for the ultimate impasse of the for-itself's attempt to annihilate the Other as a way of recovering full, uncontested possession of its own being. In Sartrean ontology, the Other's Look constitutes "being-for-others" as an inescapable dimension of the for-itself: I am always already seen, fixed, and objectified from a perspective I cannot master. Hate proposes the most radical solution to this alienation — the elimination of the Other who holds that mortifying gaze. Yet the project collapses from within: even if the Other is destroyed, the being I had-for-them is not destroyed with them. It is sedimented into the irrevocable past, permanently inscribed as what I was for that Other, beyond any possible recuperation. The for-itself therefore remains hostage to a being-for-others it can never undo. Hate does not cancel alienation; it transforms it into a fixed, petrified form — precisely the form the for-itself most dreads.

This failure is not contingent but structural. Sartre describes hate as "the final attempt, the attempt of despair" — a phrase that signals not mere psychological defeat but an ontological limit condition. The very success of hate reproduces the alienation it aimed to dissolve, because being-for-others is not a property the Other possesses and can be deprived of, but a dimension constitutive of the for-itself itself. No external act can reach it. Hate thus reveals, by its failure at the outermost extreme, that the circle of being-for-others is inescapable — a circle that also conditions the experience of Mitsein, the "we," which Sartre treats as ontologically derivative of and dependent upon this same irreducible being-for-others.

This concept appears in jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological at the culmination of Sartre's analysis of the "fundamental modes" of being-for-others, after the treatments of love, masochism, sadism, and indifference. It functions as a kind of reductio ad absurdum that clinches the entire argument: if even the most extreme and violent strategy — the abolition of the Other — cannot free the for-itself from its being-for-others, then alienation in the Sartrean sense (one's being as always partially held by an exterior consciousness) is genuinely irremediable. The concept thus directly extends and specifies being-for-others and the Gaze: the Look that Sartre analyses through shame and the experience of objectification is precisely what hate targets and what survives hate's triumph. In this sense, hate as ontological failure is less a standalone concept than a proof-by-failure of being-for-others' inescapability.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, the concept sits in close structural dialogue with Lacanian alienation: both frame the subject's constitutive dependence on an exterior dimension (the Other's signifier for Lacan; the Other's Look for Sartre) as a condition that cannot be annulled by any act of the subject. The Lacanian Gaze is the concept closest to the Sartrean Look being targeted here — that evanescent, unlocatable object that inculpates and splits the subject — and hate's failure can be read as a dramatisation of why the gaze, as objet a, is structurally unapprehensible: it is not possessed by the Other as a person but inhabits the relational field itself. Identification and the big Other round out the picture: hate fails because what is sought — the dissolution of one's alienated image held by the Other — is not actually located in the empirical other who can be destroyed, but in the structural position of the big Other and the identificatory traces already laid down. The Mitsein (being-with) that Sartre then introduces as derivative of being-for-others further situates this concept as a hinge between individual ontology and intersubjective experience.

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

Thus the triumph of hate is in its very upsurge transformed into failure. Hate does not enable us to get out of the circle. It simply represents the final attempt, the attempt of despair.

The phrase "triumph of hate is in its very upsurge transformed into failure" is theoretically loaded because it locates the collapse not at the moment of hate's defeat but at the moment of its success ("triumph"), making the failure internal and simultaneous rather than subsequent; "the circle" then names being-for-others as a structural enclosure, and "attempt of despair" marks hate not as a psychological vice but as the ontological limit-case — the point at which the for-itself exhausts all available strategies and finds the circle unbreakable.