Me-as-Object
ELI5
There's a version of you that exists in how other people see you — not just an impression they have, but a real part of who you actually are — and you can never fully get a hold of it yourself because it only comes into being through their eyes.
Definition
The Me-as-object is Sartre's term for the dimension of selfhood that is produced through being-for-others — the ontological stratum in which the for-itself is fixed, spatialized, and rendered opaque by the Look of another consciousness. It is not a mere representation or image "cut off" from the subject and deposited in a foreign mind; rather, it is a perfectly real being that belongs to me as the very condition of my selfness in relation to the Other. Crucially, it is asymptotic: it is a limit that I can approach but never fully coincide with, because it is constituted through a double, reciprocal internal negation — each For-itself defines itself as "not the Other" — and this structural distance means the Me-as-object can never be fully reappropriated by either party. It belongs to neither subject exclusively yet conditions both.
The Me-as-object is thus not an accident of social misperception but an ontological necessity inscribed in the very structure of intersubjectivity. Shame, the privileged phenomenological disclosure of the Look, reveals that another consciousness holds a dimension of my being I cannot master from within my own first-person transparency. The Me-as-object is therefore my being as seen, as fixed, as already-there — a mode of existence I am condemned to have but never to be for myself. It represents the most radical "ekstasis" of the for-itself: selfhood produced at the point where interiority and exteriority cease to be clearly distinguishable.
Place in the corpus
The concept of Me-as-object appears in jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness as an internal specification of the broader category of Being-for-others. It names the concrete product — the crystallized objectal dimension — that being-for-others deposits within the ontological structure of selfhood. In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concept of Being-for-others, it functions as the what: if being-for-others is the structure, the Me-as-object is what that structure produces on the side of the subject who is seen. It answers the question of what the Look actually delivers: not a representation, but a real, asymptotic dimension of one's own being.
In relation to the canonical concepts of Alienation and Extimacy, the Me-as-object occupies a structurally analogous but distinct position. Like Lacanian alienation, it describes a selfhood constituted through an external field — the Other — that the subject cannot fully inhabit or recuperate. Like extimacy, it names a dimension of the self that is simultaneously most intimate (it is my being) and radically exterior (it exists only for and through another consciousness, at a locus I cannot occupy). The concept also resonates with the Master–Slave Dialectic: the reciprocal negation through which each For-itself constitutes itself as "not the Other" echoes the Hegelian structure of mutual recognition, but without Hegelian sublation — the Me-as-object remains an irremediable asymptotic limit rather than a moment to be overcome. In relation to Identification, the Me-as-object marks the site where identification would have to do its work: it is precisely this fixed, objectal dimension of the self — already shaped by the Other's gaze — that any identificatory capture must take as its material.
Key formulations
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (page unknown)
my being-for-others—i.e., my Me-as-object—is not an image cut off from me and growing in a strange consciousness. It is a perfectly real being, my being as the condition of my selfness confronting the Other.
The quote is theoretically loaded because it refuses the representationalist reading — the Me-as-object is explicitly not a mere "image cut off from me" — and insists instead on its ontological reality: it is "perfectly real being," and more precisely my being, thereby collapsing the apparent safe distance between the subject and its objectal dimension. The phrase "condition of my selfness confronting the Other" is decisive: it positions the Me-as-object not as a consequence of intersubjectivity but as its precondition, making otherness constitutive of selfhood rather than merely threatening to it.