Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe on Color & Heidegger

'Consider this: One painter paints a red butterfly in the eighteenth century; a second paints another at the end of nineteenth. A connoisseur, Heideggerian in bent, looks at both. In the one, the colors mixed to make the butterfly’s red lead off toward minerals manipulated by elementary physics and crushed shellfish, in the other toward the Ruhr and industrial chemistry. In the latter case, the butterfly’s red is no longer seen by a perception developed in response to simple technology but to a more complex one in which material origin is, as a matter of course, inconceivable except as a formula facilitated by a machine. The origins of perception are less clearly in the earth as a visible earth, perception as recognition (as Heidegger wants it to be) has nothing to recognize. In these terms it can only recognize – Heidegger’s nightmare – an ungrounded ground, colors that are truthful but that have no recognizable origin as matter.' (Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, 31)

Etienne Balibar, “Citizen and Subject” (COMMA Conference at UC Santa Barbara, March 3)

[Below are some VERY fragmentary notes on Balibar's lecture at the COMMA conference "Subject/Citizen/Insurgency", March 3 2011, UC Santa Barbara. The notes are not very good: it was the end of a long day and, having only arrived in Santa Barbara two day before, I was pretty jetlagged.]

Lecture is part of a larger and longstanding project called Citizen Subject and other essays in philosophical anthropology. First essay was mentioned by Warren Montag – published in Topoi. The journal was edited by Nancy and asked the question: who comes after the subject? This was the start of a longstanding interest. Answer: after the subject comes the citizen. But I wasn’t sure what that meant. I’ve been thinking about it since; answer changed over the years. I’ve tried to organize the final reflections of this project around the topic for today:

Civic-bourgeois universalism and anthropological differences

1)    Intro

Initial idea: modernity brought about a transformation in the representation of the universal and the understanding of subjectivity that strictly combine the metaphysical and political aspects of these two notions. I call this: civic universality. Its main character, which accounts for its universality, is a rigorous equation between the capacities of the human and the powers of the citizen. In other words: the citizen is deemed to have the powers and the capacities of the human as such – and this transcends the strictly national idea of citizenship.

Story doesn't end here with this emancipatory gestures. It must also imply a new ways of forming the subject and its capacity to perform universal actions such as owning, loving, etc. and its communal activities (…)

Where the claim of universality is equality, its reality is that of discriminations and hierarchy. This contradiction is not just a contradiction between the ideal and the reality; it is something that starts from inside the very concept itself. Therefore the concept and its bourgeois background needs to be reformulated. We therefore need to take into account some anthropological differences, i.e. difference between humans. (…) This typical antinomy – inherent to the very concept of the universal itself – accounts for a typical equivocity or double bind to which the appropriation of civic rights in bourgeois society reverts (inclusion and exclusion). (…)

2)    Who shall be judge?

(Title is in fact a quote from Hobbes.)

First difference to examine: the issue of abnormality and the construction of the dangerous individual in the 17^th century (cf. Foucault). Foucault’s abnormal (1974-1975) and his essay “the dangerous individual”, when taken together, are among his most remarkable genealogies. He analyzes formations of power. Strategy of power used: ways of excluding certain groups of people. This becomes the objective of typically modern power institutions: medicine, the judiciary and school – i.e. the great apparatuses of bourgeois society. All of them work through the distinction between normal/abnormal, which is a moral and a pathological category.

Hence the age old question: who shall be judge?, is now given the democratic answer: judge shall be he who is normal. But this is ambiguous. Because what will destabilize the norm by practically enforcing it is that abnormalities will all be thrown together – mad, criminal, etc all become “abnormal”.

We find the foundation of a new category that becomes the other side of normality that threatens it and that could overthrow it, namely: perversity. The notion of the perverse individual substitutes the monstrous and gives it a pathological turn, and it leads to a concept of the “dangerous individual”. This becomes overdetermined as sexual, which should be traced to childhood. à Hence the importance of the family in society.

A question is crystallized here which concerns the subject as citizen: how fragile are the barriers between normal/abnormal. The concept of citizenship now should get a reflexive function:

Cf. Balibar, “Crime Privé, Folie publique” (1990) on the reform of the penal code in France and the law of 1838 that still governed the responsibility of mad men. We can use a simple logical typology.

3)    Hoc est corpus tuum

Other distinctions might be analyzed in similar terms: race, gender. But all of these anthropological and historical distinctions have a different history, and carry with them different aspects. At the same time they are all inserted in the overlapping idea of a civic universality.

(…)

The constitution of the citizen as a national subject is not so much the result of processes of normalization (though important) but of identification: aspects of a nation are found in the individual and then binds several individuals together. E.g. speaking the same language, sharing the same history. Obviously a reduction is involved here.

(…)

A genealogy of categories such as ‘race’ and ‘heritage’ would show that the racial and the cultural could never become absolutely separated in that they demand ‘affiliations’; it was indiscernible from the idea of a hierarchy (between races). And a racial element is always present in culture. It is worthwhile to trace that element and its constant re-introduction. One could call this a racism without races (concept I introduced a few years ago).

4)    One is Two and Two is One

The becoming subject of the citizen. In modern time the understanding of queer sexualities should underg

Finally I want to turn to feminism as a last example of the double bind of the universal. (…) Let’s not forget that feminism is a typically universalistic movement & revolution.  The revolution against this feminist revolution relies on a typically bourgeois representation of the feminine: a tendency to represent the feminine as a bearer of an element of nature itself in bourgeois society. It relies on a double inscription of the masculine as: the synecdoche of man. (…) Parity: one is two and two is one. Let us return to Freud’s theory of sexualities. Imbued with prejudices about the feminine and masculine, articulating the idea that their desires are entirely different while there is only once (concept of) libido. But he presents the decision to assume a masculine or feminine identity as open and not pre-determined. Recall the double bind of normality/abnormality here. (…)

From here it should become possible to shed new light on Lacan’s cryptic statement (Encore, 1972-1973): there is no such thing as a sexual relation (rapport sexuelle). [Note in passing: almost the same year as Foucault’s seminar. All of this is the influence of 1968.]

Cf. Copjec’s Read my Desire (1994). A discourse is always also an institution and political. There is nothing substantial that would distinguish the masculine from the feminine – a purely contingent choice, simply two different relations to the phallus, both equally misleading: one pretends to own the phallus; the other pretends to underlie it (???). There is only one sexuality, with two doors of entry. Thus: this would deprive the male or the female from any ‘owning’ or ‘ruling’.

(…)

Now moving to Butler’s Undoing Gender. This is not about a total relativity of sex/gender; Butler is a universalist herself, a non-normative universality. She is in an important sense a Lacanian herself, though in a heretic manner: she pushes to the extreme the Lacanian idea that there is no pleasure that is better or more normal than any other. Thus there os a realm of multiplicity: there are always more than one or two sexes. But there is more: she re-introduces binarism again: the distinction between man and women reappears through butch/femme but in a festive, parodying way.

5)    Concluding Remarks

This was a long presentation on the phenomenology of anthropological differences in the work of institution of civic universality. We can neither subtract these anthropological differences from the human, nor make them its essence. Race, sex, the pathological account for the fact that some being who are at the same time human and less than human becomes barred from rights, professions, communities, etc which are so many instances of the civic bourgeois universality in the broad sense. But Foucault insisted that there are different modalities of exclusion, and most work as “exclusive inclusions”: camps are an example of how this works.

The strange neighbor who remains a stranger is perhaps the clearest example today of the abnormal. The main form of exclusion without exclusion in bourgeois universality is precisely inclusion: every ‘body’ is included. Civic universality builds institutions to define, control and identify the foreign bodies. Hence the importance of the stranger her: it is the nonhuman against which society has to strive, and in its extremities it features the return of the nonhuman in the human. But on the other hand the stranger is also he human par excellence: nothing is more human than the stranger, the fragile, etc.

Last point: on subjection. In previous occasions: the Kantian notion of the subject with an individual conscience. (…) Cf. Marx’s 6^th thesis on Feuerbach: an essence of man that should not be distinguished from his social and political relations (versus an idealistic concept of the essence of man that is independent from these relations). Kant did not ignore anthropological differences but suppressed them in the realm of what he called the pathological. The pathological is not the empirical, it is precisely the body which is and is not me. W must take into account the idea of a split subject. We must reach the idea of “the uneasy subject” (Lacan), a subject uncomfortable with its own humanity.

Martin McQuillan’s ‘False Economy’: Free text now available

Martin McQuillan’s ‘False Economy’: Free text now available

Jameson on Sartre I (11/11/2010)

[Below are some notes from Jameson's seminar on Marxism. Reading material was Search for a Method.]

The next three sessions will be devoted to Sartre. Our motivation is to answer the question: what does it mean to be a Marxist. This was also Sartre’s question, whose confrontations with the French Communist Party where numerous. Our approach will be historical: You cannot look at Sartre as such and approach him as an a-historical thinker; to understand Sartre we need to understand that his work is situated in the historical formation of France in the 1940, 50s, and 60s. This also implies: answering the question: what does it mean to be a Marxist through Sartre will be from answering this question through Lukacs or Gramsci.

Why? All Marxists have to ask the question: what does it mean to be a Marxist, which kind of political strategy this implies or what kind of approach to capitalism. Every thinker will answer these questions differently. The difference marks their diversity and the different explorations of the world. But are these debates? Yes and no. I wouldn’t say these are debates about the nature of Marxism, but rather explorations of the world from different (Marxist) perspectives. Lukacs or Gramsci are as much ‘explorations of the world’ as they are internal debates in Marxism.

Sartre’s case is a little different in that regard: this is very much a philosophy and, resulting from that, a philosophical and at times extremely polemic debate. Whereas the previous polemics (and there have been many) were first of all explorations of the world with an underlying pro-Marxist principle, Sartre is fighting a war on two fronts: he is involved in a polemical debate with the PCF and with those who are against Marxism.

Sartre was what the PCF used to call a (progressive) bourgeois intellectual. Although Les Temps Modernes where immensely influential on left politics in post-war France (cf. its position on Indochina in 1946 and on the Algerian War in the 1950s), it was not allied with any party.

1946: Sartre published “Materialism and Revolution”, in which he formulates a sever critique of the PCF and criticizes their idea of materialism. He writes: “It is the philosopher’s business to make the truths contained in materialism hang together and to build, little by little, a philosophy which suits the needs of the revolution.” Sartre argues that you can be a materialist and still be an idealist, in other words: you can claim that materialism is everything and still base everything on ideas. This is a serious critique of what the PCF stood for at the time. Following a period of a bit more sympathy for the PCF (1950-1956) he would reiterate his critique in 1956 (Poland, Hungary).

1950-1953: The Korean War. Interestingly enough: Sartre takes position, sides with the communists. Interesting because: for many this was a decisive event, it made them see the true face of Stalinism and gave up on communism (including Merleau-Ponty). What follows is a thorough condemnation of American imperialism.

1956: The Hungarian Revolution. The Hungarian uprising was almost immediately repressed by the Russians. Sartre wrote “The Specter of Staline” in reaction to these events. He again defends a very humanist and existentialist perspective on Marxism. Still, Sartre makes some concessions: instead of designating the Russians and the PCF as a form of errant Marxism he calls them ‘lazy Marxists’, etc. Henry Lefebvre is praised in this essay – he was a member of the PCF and was against the repression of the Hungarian Revolution but remained largely silent during the whole affair.

So what was the party’s reaction to this? We’ve talked about institutions before. You had a series of surrealists who entered the party. But in this case: here is the guy from the outside who has never led the life of a communist militant … So someone coming from the outside trying to teach them Marxism and laying down political ideas for us. Of course, above all it's the Hegelian idea that bothers the party: this guy wants to swallow us, take us over, and become our intellectual spokesman of the party. (NB: this was also the position of the party toward the surrealists.) And there was the Moscow Issue: Sartre had gone to Moscow and gave advice (he believed that after Stalin communism/socialism should evolve).

1968: the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russia. This really was the drop, even for the hardliners.

(…)

Sartre’s position can be explained by looking the concept of a petit bourgeois. What is the petit bourgeois? It is neither this nor that. Example: third way, or France after the war (neither American nor Russian). As a result: a petit bourgeois is politically on the wrong side of the spectrum and unwitting. But in Search for a Method Sartre writes: “Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry.” The point is that there is a gap between the universal and its instantiation in the particular. The particular is no longer just the instantiation of the particular. This is where existentialism is inserted into Marxism.

The point here is similar to the point made by Kierkegaard in his critique on Hegel. Everything Kierkegaard wants to say is in fact summed up in the first few chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which the concept of the unhappy consciousness is explained. So Hegel knows all this, but Kierkegaard’s response is: it doesn’t matter, because the fact is that suffering is irreducible, it cannot be overcome – no kind of conceptual thinking can ever think this away, suffering is never the instantiation of a universal, and my instantiation will not allow me to transcend to the universal. A lot of what existentialism is comes out of this. Look at this quote from Search for a Method:

Compared with Hegel, Kierkegaard scarcely seems to count. He is certainly not a philosopher; moreover, he himself refused this title. In fact, he is a Christian who is not willing to let himself be enclosed in the system and who, against Hegel's “intellectualism,” asserts unrelentingly the irreducibility and the specificity of what is lived. There is no doubt, as Jean Wahl has remarked, that a Hegelian would have assimilated this romantic and obstinate consciousness to the “unhappy consciousness,” a moment which had already been surpassed and known in its essential characteristics. But it is precisely this objective knowledge which Kierkegaard challenges. For him the surpassing of the unhappy consciousness remains purely verbal. The existing man cannot be assimilated by a system of ideas. Whatever one may say or think about suffering, it escapes knowledge to the extent that it is suffered in itself, for itself, and to the degree that knowledge remains powerless to transform it. “The philosopher constructs a palace of ideas and lives in a hovel.”

But: in the early days it is the reaction against Hegel that grounds existentialism. But at this point in Sartre’s theory it is retooled as a reaction and criticism of (certain kinds of) Marxism. Sartre therefore talks about Marxism and ideology: Marxism is the unsurpassable horizon (horizon indépassable). Sartre calls this ideology, but that’s misleading; it’s not the concept of ideology that we’re accustomed to. Better would be to say: Marxism is hegemonic. In Sartre’s time it was the dominant intellectual movement. So how should we call these movements now?

In Search for a Method Sartre develops an existential form of Marxism. He talks about a rising class and constructs the concept of class as a sort of action at a distance. He writes:

It was at about this time that I read Capital and German Ideology. I found everything perfectly clear, and I really understood absolutely nothing. To understand is to change, to go beyond oneself. This reading did not change me. By contrast, what did begin to change me was the reality of Marxism, the heavy presence on my horizon of the masses of workers, an enormous, sombre body which lived Marxism, which practiced it, and which at a distance exercised an irresistible attraction on petit bourgeois intellectuals.

There is more at stake here than just immediate experience: the fact that revolutionary movements far away still affect you is an action at a distance. Ideas are set loose.

(…)

Now let’s return to Being and nothingness. Sartre there invents a concept taken from daily life: mauvais foi, bad faith. It’s adapted from everyday (and political) life in that sense that one can have an argument in bad faith, in which you will say anything in order not having to admit that the other has a point or is reasonable. So, bad faith is essentially a form of self-justification: not willing to admit that you are living a life in which you made the choices.

This is related to Sartre’s idea of stupidity. What is stupidity? It is a mode of conduct: you don’t want to know something so you invent strategies not to know it. In Sartre: what we don’t want to know is freedom. Cf. Sartre’s novel The Age of Reason, written in the late 30s and during the war.

You can’t know freedom in the abstract way. With all qualities stripped away the concept of freedom is nothing and is utterly irrelevant. This idea is ultimately grounded in his theory of the subject: a split subject. For Sartre the subject is two things:

-       The subject is nothing, with no properties whatsoever; consciousness is absolutely nothing.

-       And yet you are someone, you have a consciousness.

Bad faith plays back and forth between these two. The split is as follows: I am not what I am, and I am what I am not. This oscillation is what bad faith is about. When you’ve performed a cowardly act you’ll say: that’s not really me, it was just the heat of the moment – you’re escaping responsibility for the singular act, i.e. you’re unwilling to assume your role, to assume the universality of this absolutely singular act. This is what all the passages in Question on Method on Robespierre is all about: Sartre spent a lot of time researching the French revolution while also writing on Search for a Method. (We also encounter a serious critique of Lukacs in these passages).

Pannekoek Explains, Or, Bourgeois Culture as the Deep Structure of Capitalism (1920)

[T]he process of the revolution will be much slower and more difficult in Western Europe, because the bourgeoisie is much more powerful here than in Russia. But in what does this power consist? Does it consist of control over the State apparatus? The bourgeoisie already lost this control on one occasion. Does it consist of numerical superiority? The bourgeoisie confronts an overwhelming number of workers. Does it consist of the power of command over production? Or the power of money? In Germany, these things hardly mean anything anymore. The roots of Capital's power are much more deeply set. They lie in the reign of bourgeois culture over the population as a whole, as well as over the proletariat. Over the span of one hundred years of the bourgeois era, the spiritual life of the bourgeoisie has soaked into all of society, and has created a spiritual structure and discipline which, by way of thousands of channels, penetrated and dominated the masses. This will have to be gradually purged from the proletariat through a long and tenacious struggle. First, the liberal and Christian ideology was fought by social democratic enlightenment. But it is precisely the social democracy which shows how profoundly rooted and how adaptable Capital's spiritual rule over the masses actually is: it seemed to spiritually free the masses and to unify them in a new proletarian world-view, and now it is demonstrated that this organization created by the masses themselves has been fully converted to the side of the bourgeoisie and prevents their revolution. It is thus the case that the resistance which must be overcome by the proletariat alone in the old bourgeois countries is infinitely greater in its immense scale than in the new countries of Eastern Europe, where bourgeois culture of any kind is lacking and where a communal tradition favors the revolution.

Anton Pannekoek, 'The New Blanquism' (1920)

The unity of theory and praxis - the 1960s moment

Jameson failed to mention the pivotal transformation of Freudo-Marxism by Lacan and Althusser. (Actually, to be fair, he was just getting started on Lacan when he took a question from the audience. He failed to return to Lacan afterwards.) What seemed particularly debatable to me is the alignment of Deleuze and Guattari with Freudo-Marxism. Once you argue that Freudo-Marxism is a problematic because it destroys the unity between theory and practice, in which theory outbalances practice, you have to exempt Deleuze and Guattari from this. Guattari certainly developed his part of their theory out of a fairly militant psychiatric experiment (the use of la grille in La Borde). If you do decide to pair Deleuze and Guattari up with Freudo-Marxism, then the dynamic between theory and praxis in it would need to be rethought.

It seems to me that Jameson failed to address the unique politico-theoretical moment that took place in the 1960 and early ‘70s, when a.o. Althusser and Guattari invented a new form of Freudo-Marxism. Both of these authors seem to me to be concerned with the ambiguous and problematic relation between theory and practice that results from a combination of psychoanalysis and Marxism. In the case of Althusser the inescapability of theory vis-à-vis history/praxis would be the main point. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating! So what! We are interested in the mechanisms that ensure that it really is a pudding we are eating and not a poached baby elephant, though we think we are eating our pudding.” (Althusser, Reading Capital) (Ben Noys has done some interesting work on this.) For Althusser, grappling with the problem the outcome is that the only way to ensure a militant interaction between theory and praxis is by making the necessary detour of theory. ‘To reach the immediacy [or praxis and material reality], which is precisely not an immediacy, it is necessary, as always where theory is concerned, to make a long detour.” (For Marx, 254) The fact that this is also the outcome of his reworking the concept of ideology is significant.

In the case of Guattari the transformation of psychoanalysis into schizoanalysis is explicitly grounded in a militant psychiatric praxis. In the end, many of the concepts advanced by Guattari can be considered a failure: schizoanalysis, the molecular as the true basis for political action, micropolitics; whereas his more theoretical concepts still have an appeal: primarily the idea of an axiomatic of capitalism. But the re-grounding of psychoanalysis as political praxis, with these concepts as their primary elements, indicates an attempt to radically transform the militancy of theory, the sort of militancy which a Freudo-Marxist theory that started out from the concepts of repression, subject, and ideology seemed to be lacking at the time. That these concepts have now lost their practical efficacy may have to do with a change in political formation from the seventies to now. Guattari himself already suggested something like this when he collected his essays from the 1980s under the telling title The Winter Years (Les années d’hiver). It is up to us to develop a new relation between theory and practice.

Notes on Jameson (November 9, 2010)

[Below are some notes I took during Fredric Jameson's seminar on contemporary Marxism.]

Picking up on the Dialectics & Negativity Seminar last week with Zizek, Zupancic, and Dolar it might be a good idea to sketch out the history of the alliances of Marxism and psychoanalysis.


In the beginning: Freud was understood as a clinical matter – new set of ideas and techniques. So: when does it become a worldview? Early onwards Freudianism teams up with Marxism. Freudo-Marxism becomes a powerful vector for analyzing society. There are different stages we can discern:


1. In the 1920s Freud begins to write down his views on culture; that’s when psychoanalysis becomes a sort of philosophy, a social philosophy that enables us to analyze culture and politics. This is quickly picked up by Freud’s students. Case in point: Wilhelm Reich’s early work in the late 20s early 30s – The Sexual Revolution.

2. In the 1930’s one of the central interest of Freudianism becomes: what can it contribute to the study of social and political dynamics? Cf. Adorno, who picks up the concept of the fetish to analyze popular culture during the mid thirties (later on developed into the culture industry); and very important at the time: Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941), which highlights the social nature of the human and analyzes this from a psychoanalytical and leftist perspective.

3. In the 1960’s this kind of Freud-Marxism gets revived and reshaped by a.o. Deleuze and Guattari [sic].


Critique: there are many problems with the idea of Freudo-Marxism. Essentially, the theory of Freud-Marxism was misconceived. The problem is that you cannot put these two together; they cannot be combined. Why not? Both are unities of theory and practice. Such unities of theory and practice, since they are targeted at solving or thinking through a specific practical problem, do not address the same issues and even if their theoretical apparatuses may be blended, their practical problems remain distinct. Their practices of the self are incompatible. This is why they are not philosophies: philosophies are not about the unity of theory and practice, but a bout a total view of the world which does not include the self; whereas the self is never exempt from a unity of theory and practice such as psychoanalysis or Marxism. Both can be turned into philosophies, but that would mean undoing the unity of theory and practice. Freudo-Marxism does precisely that: in order to bring these two together it needs to turn them into a philosophy. Nut it loses practical efficacy in doing so.


Cf. In China: the concept of pan-Marxism, i.e. a form of Marxism that can explain everything, is conceived as bad Marxism. Instead they prefer a Marxism that can explain this or that, but not everything. This is also what philosophy does; it wants to totalize theory, much like pan-Marxism. In that respect philosophy is very much an institutional affair. And like any institutional framework it is mostly interested in preserving itself, keeping itself alive (I’m with Spinoza on this one – conatus). To refer back to the things we discussed about Lukacs and Althusser last week: Lukacs pointed out that all that bourgeois philosophy needs to proliferate is an institutional framework. And precisely for this reason Althusser was so concerned with the relation between Marxism and philosophy: asking questions such as ‘what is the status of philosophy’, how does it relate to Marxism, and can the party keep it alive? He was grappling with this problem.


(...)


What is fascinating about the work of Zupancic, Zizek, and Dolar is first of all the collaborative nature of their work. This is probably only possible in a relatively small country like Slovenia (in France you would have schools and collaborating theorists as well, but you would have different schools, whereas here we seem to have just one school [sic]). But as we’ve been able to see: they are very good at translating all kinds of things into a new language, and thus present things to us in an entirely new light, and from a new perspective. Why? I would say that they reintegrate heterogeneous philosophies by approaching them from a specific problem, which is probably very much a historical problem, our problem. The concept that best articulates this historical problem, and which serves as the key to most of the translating they do, is the ‘split’ or split subject.


Let’s take a simple example: Zizek on the death drive. The death drive, he says, is in us more than us. What does this mean? It means the death drive wants to go beyond us, because it wants to go beyond desire (generated by the split subject). The irreducible excess is the key. The stake of it is that a true philosophy (although it would be better to call it by another name, say theory) must acknowledge the fact that there is always excess, that something (the desire for practice) exceeds it. The Hegelian doctrine of objective appearance does this in an excellent way. Perhaps for this reason the Slovenian school is so concerned with criticizing many of the concepts and ideas developed in Freudo-Marxism (while still hanging on to both of these unities of theory and practice): the demystification of ideology, …


(...)


Let’s move on to Sartre. The best way to start Sartre is by reading Nausea. For Sartre nausea is not caused by being as such, but by the fact that I am an object in being. [The problem of objective appearance again.] Here we can find the first articulation of his principle of freedom, which is pivotal to understanding Sartre. For Sartre freedom is a difficult and horrible thing. (…) Take the example of the waiter in Being and Nothingness. The waiter is acting as if he is a waiter. He does not identify himself with his position as a waiter, but he must do so, so he plays out a role. Again, the problem here is how to overcome the constitutive divide between the self and the self as an object in the world. So how do you overcome this divide? You assume it; you assume the role of the waiter. If there is going to be a Sartre revival I think it should start off from here. The point Sartre here makes comes very close to a) the constitutive split in identity and b) performativity (as the solution to this practical problem, which cannot be solved in theory).


Precisely because this was at the center of Sartre’s thought he was also interested in the figure of the traitor (his work on Genet, several of his stories, and a lot of his political work on collaboration). The choice to betray family, friends, or political allies is always a turn away from the objective appearance, a revolt – in the end it is typically political, a political choice made in the void (freedom).