"Master-slave is thus a metaphysical dynamic insofar as a body is always an object for others inasmuch as it is perceived. Perception designates an affective relation and, in the context of sexuality, signifies desire. Hence, a body is an object to the extent that it is desired, and is, in turn, a subject, inasmuch as it desires. Hence, being desired is equivalent to enslavement, and desiring is equivalent to mastering. Taken yet further, this dialectic suggests that the master, as the one who desires, is essentially without a body; indeed, it is a body which he desires to have. In other words, active desire is a way of dispensing with the existential problematic of being a body-object. In phenomenological terms, active desire is a flight from em- bodiment. The slave is thus designated as the body that the master lacks. And because the slave is a body-object, the slave is a body without desire. Hence, in this relationship, neither master nor slave constitute a desiring body; the master is desire without a body, and the slave is a body without desire.

We can speculate yet further upon this 'metaphysical' structure of bodily existence. The desire of the master must always be the desire to possess what he lacks, the body which he has denied and which the slave has a body —much less a person who desires. Whether or not the slave desires is irrelevant to the master, for his desire is self- sufficient; it posits the object of its desire and sustains it; his concern is not to be a body, but to have or possess the body as an object. But what does it mean to say that the master does not have a body? If the body is a "situation," the condition of perspective and the necessary mediation of a social existence, then the master has denied himself the condition for a genuine presence in the world and has become worldless. His desire is come to embody. The slave, on the other hand, is not a person expressive of consciousness thus both an alienation of bodily existence and an effort to recapture the body from this self-imposed exile, not to be this body, but this time to possess and control it in order to nurse an illusion of transcendence."

...the slave's desire would constitute a fatal contradiction in the slave's identity. Hence, the liberation of the slave would consist in the moment of desire, for desire would signal the advent of a subject, a body expressive of consciousness."