Transcendence-Transcended
ELI5
When you treat someone else as an object — even just by going about your own business and fitting them into your plans — you "freeze" their freedom into a fixed thing you can read and predict, even though from their own point of view they are just as free and open as you are.
Definition
Transcendence-transcended is Sartre's technical designation for the ontological status the Other acquires the moment I make him an object of my project. In Sartrean ontology, the for-itself is constitutively transcendence: it is always already surpassing the given toward its possibilities, never coinciding with any fixed being-in-itself. But when I project myself toward my own ends, I necessarily surpass the Other's own surpassing — I overtake his freedom, fixing it as a thing among things in my world. The Other's transcendence, which is in principle the same absolute movement of escape from the in-itself that I am, is thereby "transcended" — caught, frozen, rendered a feature of the landscape of my projects rather than an originary openness. The Other appears not as pure subjectivity co-present with mine, but as a used-up freedom, a facticity masquerading as spontaneity.
The second occurrence sharpens the consequence: once the for-itself has made the Other a transcendence-transcended, the Other's free surpassing of the given — his very project — appears retrospectively as "meaningful, given conduct in the world." That is, what was existentially a free act is retroactively transformed into a readable, determinate behavior: signification, social meaning, and psychological sense are precisely the sediment deposited when freedom is frozen from the outside. The concept thus captures the constitutive violence that subtends all intersubjective meaning-making: meaning is always already the corpse of another's freedom.
Place in the corpus
The concept appears exclusively in jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological and is a precise specification within Sartre's analysis of Being-for-others. Being-for-others names the general ontological structure in which consciousness constitutes itself as object for another; transcendence-transcended names the specific mode in which this objectification is enacted from the side of the objectifying consciousness rather than from the side of the one who is objectified. It thus completes the reversibility at the heart of the Look: if shame reveals me as transcendence-transcended for the Other, then my own objectifying gaze casts the Other into the symmetrical position.
The cross-referenced concept of Gaze is directly implicated: Sartre's "making an object of the Other" is precisely the operation that the Lacanian gaze, in a different theoretical register, complicates. Where Sartre treats the objectifying look as a genuine capture of the Other's transcendence (even if reversible), Lacan's gaze is never fully wielded by any subject — it is the objet a, a constitutive absence in the visual field that pre-empts any mastering look. Transcendence-transcended can thus be read as the Sartrean idealisation that Lacanian theory deconstructs: the moment of apparent triumph over the Other's subjectivity is precisely where the gaze rebounds, revealing the subject's own split. The concept also touches Facticity and Nausea as Ontological Mood: what I freeze in the Other as transcendence-transcended is his facticity — the contingent, nausea-inducing given-ness of embodied existence — elevated into legible social meaning.
Key formulations
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (page unknown)
In the fundamental phenomenon of making an object of the Other, he appears to me as a transcendence-transcended. That is, by the mere fact that I project myself toward my possibilities, I surpass and transcend the Other's transcendence.
The phrase "transcendence-transcended" is theoretically loaded because it holds two senses of transcendence in a single hyphenated tension: the Other's transcendence (his radical freedom, his perpetual surpassing of the given) is itself surpassed — converted from an active movement into a passive, overtaken object — by the mere fact of my projecting "toward my possibilities." The violence is structural, not intentional: it is the inevitable byproduct of any project, revealing that intersubjectivity is constitutively asymmetrical and that objectification is not a moral failing but an ontological inevitability.