Love and Entitlement: Sartre and Beauvoir on the Nature of Jealousy

Hypatia 26 (1):102-122 (2011)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This paper argues that an essential and often overlooked feature of jealousy is the sense that one is entitled to the affirmation provided by the love relationship. By turning to Sartre's and Beauvoir's analyses of love and its distortions, I will show how the public nature of identity can inhibit the possibility of genuine love. Since we must depend on the freedom of others to show us who we are, the uncertainty this introduces into one's sense of self can trigger anxiety and pathological attempts to control those others upon whom one's self-value depends. In jealousy one tries to possess the other person's freedom in the hopes that a constant positive evaluation can be thereby secured. The belief that one is entitled to the self-perfection that such affirmation promises reveals both the important existential role that the beloved plays in the jealous person's psychic structure and the manner in which gender inequalities can promote such distortions of love

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Love analyzed.Roger E. Lamb (ed.) - 1997 - Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.
Self Love.Stephen David Ross - 2010 - International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series:129-152.
Love: a history.Simon May - 2011 - New Haven: Yale University Press.
Love’s Vision.Troy Jollimore - 2011 - Princeton University Press.
Love is all forgiving: reflections on love and spirituality.Petŭr Dŭnov - 2004 - Deerfield Beach, Fla.: Health Communications.
Love: its forms, dimensions, and paradoxes.İlham Dilman - 1998 - New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press.
Love.Bennett W. Helm - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The idea of a duty to love.S. Matthew Liao - 2006 - Journal of Value Inquiry 40 (1):1-22.

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-09-30

Downloads
179 (#100,373)

6 months
12 (#122,242)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Irene McMullin
University of Essex

Citations of this work

Beauvoir on how we can love authentically.Matthew Robson - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Self-awareness and alterity: a phenomenological investigation.Dan Zahavi - 1999 - Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Being and nothingness.Jean-Paul Sartre - 1956 - Avenel, N.J.: Random House.
The gay science.Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - 1974 - New York,: Vintage Books. Edited by Walter Arnold Kaufmann.

View all 29 references / Add more references