國立臺灣大學外國語文學系

碩士論文

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures

College of Liberal Arts

National Taiwan University

Master’s Thesis

後現代時代的存在主義倫理學

An Existential Ethics for a Postmodern Age

許景順

Chingshun J. Sheu

指導教授：唐格理 博士

Adviser: Kirill Thompson, Ph.D.

中華民國 104年 3月

March 2015

2

Acknowledgements and Dedication

I would first of all like to thank Professor Kirill Thompson for his wise guidance

and unwavering support. His continual engagement with, and constant injection of

new thinking into, this work has been invaluable to its completion, and to my personal

and academic growth.

The deepest gratitude also to Professor Joyce Liu, of National Chiao-tung

University, and Professor Chris Hein for their incisive and insightful questions. I

could not have asked for more intelligent or supportive oral examiners. I also

benefited deeply from Professor Liu’s study group on Alain Badiou and its after-

session discussions.

Heartfelt appreciation is owed Professor Hung-chung Li for taking time to

discuss my project with me and for pointing out its overall direction when I myself

was still unsure. Thank you to Professor Duncan Chesney for providing helpful

comments at the proposal stage, and for introducing me to existentialism in my

undergraduate days. Thank you to Professor Li-chun Hsiao for directing me to the

work of Alain Badiou and thus enabling the provenance of this study.

There are innumerable contributors to the completion of this study whom I have

neither the mental capacity nor the discernment to adequately name; for this, my

utmost gratitude is accompanied by a humble apology. The contributors are many,

but the shortcomings are my responsibility alone.

Finally, I would like to thank my mother, without whom this project would have

never come into existence—nor I. This thesis is dedicated to her.

3

Abstract

The ethical turn in postmodern thought has made ever more pressing the

question, How is one to live one’s life? In this thesis, I propose an answer based on

Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, extended upon by the work of Alain Badiou.

Chapter One introduces an existential understanding of ethics and meaning,

presenting concepts such as the ethical chain, the economy of meaning, and bad faith,

that lead us to a perspectivist non-binding normative ethics that is compatible with the

three poststructuralist tenets of performativity, contextualization, and the amelioration

of difference.

Chapter Two addresses the validity today of Sartrean existentialism—including

not only Being and Nothingness but also the Notebooks for an Ethics, the two

volumes of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and the Hope Now interviews with

Benny Lévy—via a series of Refutations to charges that it is outdated; that it is

irrational; that it is not universal and therefore not a philosophy; that it is nihilist; that

it absolutizes freedom and is therefore relativist; that it is humanist; that it is

metaphysical, or ontotheological; and that it is incompatible with the poststructuralist

belief in the decentering of the center. I establish that Sartrean existentialism

withstands these criticisms.

Chapter Three brings in the work of Alain Badiou to elaborate upon Sartre’s

rather vague notion of an Apocalypse, which Badiou calls an event. I provide

biographical and intellectual links between the work of Sartre and that of Badiou,

before detailing how Badiou extends and enhances the Sartrean framework in his

development of the structure of an event.

4

Chapter Four employs the Sartrean-Badiouian existentialist framework in a

reading of John Williams’s novel, Stoner, whose protagonist seems ordinary and

unsuccessful, but who is shown with the aid of my reading to lead a life full of

meaning. This reading also brings in details of Badiou’s four truth procedures and

thus makes concrete his often abstract thought.

Chapter Five concludes with a summary of the previous four chapters, followed

by a direct comparison of Sartre’s and Badiou’s thought. I then engage with two other

leading postmodern ethical theories, Richard Rorty’s liberal ironism and Emmanuel

Levinas and Jacques Derrida’s ethics of the Other, to show how Sartrean-Badiouian

existentialism offers the more comprehensive ethical framework.

Keywords: ethics, ethical chain, economy of meaning, existentialism,

poststructuralism, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Badiou, Stoner

5

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements and Dedication 2

Abstract 3

Contents 5

I. Introduction: Background and Outline 6

II. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism: Refutations 17

1. Existentialism is passé 19

2. Existentialism is a form of irrationality 20

3. Existentialism is not universal and therefore not a philosophy 21

4. Existentialism is a form of nihilism 26

5. Existentialism absolutizes freedom and is therefore a form of relativism 32

6. Existentialism is a form of humanism 36

7. Existentialism is a form of metaphysics or ontotheology 43

8. Existentialism maintains a fixed and stable center 45

III. Alain Badiou’s Existentialism: Structural Addenda 48

IV. A Meaningful Life: Reading John Williams’s Stoner 63

V. Conclusion: Summary and Response to Criticism 82

Works Cited 92

6

Chapter One1

Introduction: Background and Outline

Western ethics has traditionally begun with Socrates’ concern, reported by Plato

and rendered by R.E. Allen, as to “whether the just also live better than the unjust and

are more happy” (Republic 34/352d);2 Socrates pursues: “For the argument is not

about something adventitious, but about the way one ought to live.” Socrates

intimates the seriousness of the answer in his Apology, when he says that “the

unexamined life is not for man worth living” (100/38a). But aside from this

prerequisite, what makes a life worth living? What makes a life meaningful? As Jean-

Paul Sartre would agree (Anderson 75), ethics is the inquiry into what a meaningful

life is. If we understand meaning as that which provides (some form of) justification,

then another way to think this question is in the formulation by Hazel E. Barnes:

Ethics is “the need to justify one’s life” (9), or have it justified to oneself. Where

might this justification come from? What is it that gives life meaning? In our

postmodern era, with its Nietzschean cry of the “death of God”3 and fragmentation of

grand narratives,4 the source can only be humans ourselves: “[T]here are only men

and real relations between men” (Sartre, Search 76).

The most direct and intuitive way to attain meaning is for one to grant it to

oneself. Notwithstanding that Friedrich Nietzsche had already pointed out the

1 The following abbreviations will be used for texts that frequently appear in parenthetical citation:

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (BN), Notebooks for an Ethics (NE), Critique of Dialectical

Reason, 2 vols. (CDR I, II), and Hope Now with Benny Lévy (HN); Alain Badiou’s Being and Event

(BE), Logics of Worlds (LW), and Philosophy and the Event (PE); and John Williams’s Stoner (S). 2 The number-letter combination refers to standard Stephanus pagination for Plato. 3 See Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I.66-67 (esp. p373). 4 See Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, 37-41. Although it is common to see the

assertion that grand narratives had once been legitimate (for instance, see William Barrett’s Irrational

Man, 24-25), it would be more logical to side with Bernard Williams in saying that the difference

between the belief in grand narratives in the present and in the past is not a difference in kind but

merely in degree (163).

7

illogicality of this endeavor,5 Sartre attempts to let being justify itself by

differentiating between two aspects of being that are in fact one. Being-in-itself, what

we might call the being part of being, is completely full, inert, and indiscernible:

“Being is equally beyond negation as beyond affirmation. . . . [It] is not a connection

with itself. It is itself. It is an immanence which can not [sic] realize itself, an

affirmation which can not affirm itself, an activity which can not act, because it is

glued to itself” (27).6 Its counterpart is being-for-itself, which we might call the

becoming part of being; the for-itself is nothing but relation—it is literally nothing

(472). Thus, the for-itself is “as if”7 derived from the in-itself in order to found the

latter (789-90), since “[b]eing can not be causa sui . . . . Being is itself. This means

that it is neither passivity nor activity” (27). This attempt to give meaning to oneself is

what Sartre calls “the project of being God” (724), and it is doomed to failure when

actively pursued (HN 56), for it falls into bad faith, which is the denial of either our

being-in-itself (full being, or facticity) or our being-for-itself (empty becoming, or

transcendence) in favor of the other aspect (BN 98). Thus, “being which I am” is bad

faith for denying the being that I am not, and “being what I am not” is bad faith for

denying the being that I am (111). Sartre believes in Being and Nothingness that the

two sides “are [in] and ought to be capable of a valid coordination” (98), but he

postpones its elucidation to the indefinite future; in Notebooks for an Ethics, however,

he seems to reach the conclusion that this coordination can only be achieved by not

actively pursuing it. Instead, we should forgo all statements that employ the

existential verb “to be”: “the only meaningful project is that of doing (not that of

being)” (475).8 This reverses the analysis provided in Being and Nothingness, where

5 See Beyond Good and Evil, section 21 (p28). 6 Excluding ellipses, all cited texts are quoted as-is unless otherwise noted. 7 The exact provenance of the for-itself is left up to metaphysics, and Sartre says nothing more on the

topic (788; NE 11). 8 This we might say is the performative aspect of Sartre’s thought, an anti-essentialism or anti-

8

Sartre says that “the desire to do is here reduced to a certain desire to be” God (742).

But the pursuit of becoming an ens causa sui, to be justified, is an exercise in bad

faith. It seems we can only escape it by choosing to be ethical,9 for “the ethical

modality implies,” Sartre says, “that we stop wanting to have being as a goal, we no

longer want to be God, we no longer want to be ens causa sui” (HN 59). We must

“reject” the God project (Anderson 53-54).

If meaning can only come from humans, and we cannot bestow it upon

ourselves,10 then it follows that meaning must come from others. But we cannot

simply bestow meaning on someone for being who she11 is, for that would be valuing

her in-itself over her for-itself and once again falling into bad faith. The answer is to

“tak[e] the other person’s undertaking as an end”12 (NE 49), so that an economy of

meaning arises that passes through the world (of human work): “The work being the

particularity of the person and his image as given back by the world, it is in treating

my work as inhabited by a concrete freedom that you treat my Me as freedom.

Whereas if you turn directly toward this Me, it evaporates into abstract freedom”

(141).

This focus on the economy of meaning is in direct contrast to the current

commonly held view of a binding normative ethics, which revolves around the idea of

obligation (Bernard Williams 174). However, the project of a binding normative

ethics faces a daunting logical impasse. To effect a prescribed action from a certain

foundationalism that Fredric Jameson sees as the precursor of the turn against metaphysics in

poststructuralism (12-13), the so-called “death of the subject.” See below. 9 The idea of a subjective choice appears in Alain Badiou’s thought under the guise of a decision to be

faithful to an event—or not to. See Chapter Three. 10 This is to say that even when we ourselves find something to be meaningful, the ultimate source of

that meaning lies outside ourselves. 11 For the traditional impersonal masculine pronoun I substitute “one” in abstract contexts and the

feminine pronoun in concrete ones. 12 My emphasis.

9

state of affairs, one must traverse three aporiae in what I will call the ethical chain:13

that between the descriptive and the evaluative, which is known as the fact-value

distinction and is addressed by perspectivism;14 that between the evaluative and the

prescriptive, which is David Hume’s is-ought fallacy, or G.E. Moore’s naturalistic

fallacy;15 and that between the prescriptive and actual action, which is the ancient

question of akrasia. None of the former stages logically entails the latter.

Is it possible to arrive at a normative ethics that is not binding? Sartre addresses

the above impasses by traversing the ethical chain in reverse, for even though the

former terms do not entail the latter ones, the latter presuppose the former. When

there is an action in the world, the doing of that action implies that the actor thought

she ought to do it, which implies that she was (perhaps non-thetically) aware that

there is a good to be obtained by that action, which implies a certain perspective of

viewing the situation in order to derive such a good. And the ethical chain will always

be invoked, even for inaction, because as Sartre says, “Not to choose is, in fact, to

choose not to choose” (BN 619). For Sartre, there is no “gap between decision and

action” (Bell 114). The idea that value comes from action, then, is the meaning behind

his statements that “existence precedes and conditions essence” and that we are

“condemned to be free” (BN 567). “Whatever we do, then, we give rise to a morality,

like it or not” (Stone et al., “Dialectical” 204).

An objection immediately comes to mind: What of actions that go against or are

13 For a detailed discussion of the three aporiae, see Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of

Philosophy, 122-27, 130. 14 For an understanding of perspectivism, see Iris Murdoch’s “Vision and Choice in Morality” and

Cristoph Cox’s Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation. For an example of perspectivism in Sartre,

see Being and Nothingness, 39 and 621; for Sartre’s perspectivist view of ethics, see his discussion of

moralities in his 1964 Rome lecture, as presented in Robert Stone and Elizabeth Bowman’s “Dialectical

Ethics: A First Look at Sartre’s Unpublished 1964 Rome Lecture Notes,” 205-06; for an excoriation of

the denial of perspectivism, a denial that Sartre calls the “spirit of seriousness,” see Being and

Nothingness, 796 and Chapter Two, Refutation 3 of this study. 15 For more on Moore’s naturalistic fallacy, see Murdoch’s “Metaphysics and Ethics.”

10

indifferent to ethical values?16 The answer is that, according to the ethical chain,

every action has meaning for its actor; so if ethics is the pursuit of meaning, then

every action is ethical. Barnes offers the illuminating example of Dostoevsky’s

Underground Man, who “asserts that he prizes his freedom not to be ethical. He does

not have to justify himself, he is not obliged to choose happiness or any other self-

evident good. He chooses his independence of all regulating value systems. . . [This]

is to identify oneself solely with the subjective” (19). The good perceived in going

against ethical values, according to Barnes, is in purely manifesting one’s being-for-

itself, the part of oneself that strives for meaning and that makes us human (BN 59).

This is the logic behind what Sartre calls the game of “loser wins,” in which a “defeat,

which has been prepared for, meditated, carried to an extreme, will change . . . into

the finest of [subjective] victories” (Saint 68).17 And pushing this logic to its ultimate

end results in suicide, which elevates the for-itself at the expense of the in-itself (Gary

Cox 167n2). At the other extreme, the for-itself cannot be denied; this leads to the

founding fallacy of the concept of a binding normative ethics: “The perfectly

coherent, rigidly observed code of ethics may well be maintained at the cost of

foregoing all spontaneity. To be perfectly what one has chosen to be will inevitably

exclude much that is precious in what he might otherwise have been” (Barnes 21-22).

Humans are not machines, and there will always be different perspectives, different

values, and different opinions on what to do in a given situation. Denying this

freedom not only denies humanity, but also denies the possibility of change.18 Thus, a

16 This section is also a response to Thomas Anderson’s critique of Linda Bell’s interpretation of the

idea that “one who wills the end wills the means”; in brief, Anderson fails to see how akrasia does not

exist for Sartre. See Anderson’s Sartre’s Two Ethics, 62-63. 17 For more on the concept of loser wins, see Jeremy N.J. Palmer’s “Les Séquestrés d’Altona: Sartre’s

Black Tragedy.” Curiously, Linda A. Bell seems to confuse “loser wins” with “winning through failure”

(96-103): The latter is persevering in the face of certain failure and ultimately changing the situation to

achieve situational success; the former is construing situationally losing as subjectively winning. 18 Alain Badiou tentatively agrees; see the discussion of his Ethics in Chapter Three.

11

truly existential ethics has the one binding norm that it cannot make its norms

binding.

But if every action is ethical, then are there still norms? The above discussion of

bad faith and the God project makes clear that the meaning one perceives (or

presupposes) will not redound to one’s own justification if it is purely subjective. We

must ultimately concede that it is possible for a solitary individual to remain outside

the economy of meaning and not receive any justification whatsoever (Bernard

Williams 28). On the other hand, this position is delimited to one of pure indifference,

for if this individual were to act against those within the economy of meaning, this

interaction would presuppose the existence of meaning in those outside herself (if

there were none, she would not engage them), and she would reenter the economy of

meaning.19 “[N]o existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself” (Beauvoir

67)—the purely subjective position, as Barnes notes, is unsustainable (24-25). Or as

Sartre puts it, “this will, which is bent on denying the evidence and on rejecting being,

burns alone in defiance of all, infinitely alone, and feeds on itself” (Saint 68).

So we see that the ethical norm for meaning is that it not be solipsistic; but what

power does this norm have over and above immediate and proximal meaning? In

other words: How extensive is this economy of meaning? Simone de Beauvoir is

correct in saying that “the interests at stake do not allow themselves to be put into an

equation; the suffering of one man, that of a million men, are incommensurable with

the conquests realized by millions of others, present death is incommensurable with

the life to come” (148). And yet, even putting aside cold calculation, there is still

reason for us to want to expand the economy of meaning as far and widely as

19 Similarly, Bernard Williams maintains that any interaction between people “must involve some

minimal trace of an ethical consciousness” (28). Even Jürgen Habermas says that we are all implicated

in “the [non-discursive] communicative practice of everyday life” (100) and thus minimally ethical.

12

possible. The notion that we need expand it just far enough to give our lives

immediate justification presupposes that our lives are static; whereas the truth is that

we move around, we enter into new situations, we meet new people, so that even if a

certain person or place in the world currently has nothing to do with us, it is still in

our interest to extend the economy of meaning to include that person or place—even

more so with the fast-paced globalization of postmodernism—and the interest is

mutual. Thus, even though meaning cannot be quantified or commensurably

compared,20 there is still reason for agreeing with Alain Badiou when he says that “il

n’y a nul point d’arrêt”—there is no halting point (Peut-on 114).

We have so far been discussing existential ethics; what of the postmodern age? It

must first be noted that, as Badiou points out, the current globalized capitalist social

order is the same as that which Karl Marx was critiquing in the 19th century, differing

only in degree (Rebirth 11-15) or speed (Philip Wood 62). Perhaps what makes

postmodernity its own era21 is the appearance of poststructuralism as a philosophical

reaction to Western capitalist excesses.22 This movement works to decenter the

structural foundations of thought that have led to systemic violence and destruction;

Philip R. Wood summarizes the problem well:

A being that sees itself faced by objects that are either representations of its own

will to power or, alternately, something not merely distinct from, but something

20 The belief that it can constitutes the main logical fallacy of utilitarian ethics; see Friedrich

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, section 228 (p157); Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity,

112; and Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 87-91. 21 The question of whether postmodernity is in fact a new era is outside the scope of this study; suffice

it to say that it is possible for a difference in degree to grow great enough to qualify as a difference in

kind. 22 I recognize that what exactly constitutes postmodernism and/or postmodernity is and has been the

subject of intense debate, into which this study will not wade; here I will merely invoke Jean-François

Lyotard’s understanding of the postmodern as a reaction to the modern that came borne within it in a

nascent state: “In an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves” (79). Thus, I treat

poststructuralism as not a philosophy but a philosophical reaction.

13

separate from itself, a being that posits itself, in the final analysis, as sub-iectum

(whether as God, Absolute Spirit, or the modern subject of humanism) can

exercise only violence. (“‘Democracy’” 102)

To rephrase this passage in line with our discussion above: Whoever seeks to be an

ens causa sui puts oneself at the center of the structure of thought and relegates every

other being, via objectification and alienation, to its margins, thus necessarily

preventing their own respective attainments of meaning. The one ambiguous term in

the above quotation is the “modern subject of humanism”; we will see in Chapter Two

how equating the humanist subject with the ens causa sui is a heavy-handed

assumption that is ultimately false (or unavoidable, in which case theoretically

militating against it would get us nowhere).

To address this structural problem of the center and its margins, poststructuralists

make use of what I see as three key concepts: performativity, contextualization, and

the amelioration of difference.23 Here, I will sketch out these concepts and briefly

note how existentialism shares in the same principles.

The idea of performativity comes from the kind of utterance called the

performative, first prominently discussed by J.L. Austin in his “Performative

Utterances”; a performative, he says, is an utterance that does something rather than

just reporting it (1290-91). Performativity, then, can be seen as a paradigm shift from

static being to dynamic becoming, either in identity (Judith Butler), linguistic

signification (Jacques Derrida), or justificatory meaning (Sartre, in his

23 The entry on poststructuralism in M.H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms notes six “[s]alient

features or themes”: (1) the “primacy of theory” as “an account of the general conditions of

signification,” (2) the “decentering of the subject,” (3) “[r]eading, texts, and writing,” (4) the “concept

of discourse” and “discursive formations,” (5) “a hermeneutics of suspicion” regarding what texts

actually mean, and (6) “evaluative relativism” (247-51). It can be shown that these six can be classified

according to my three key concepts, or that both result in the desired decentering of the center.

14

aforementioned emphasis on doing over being; see also note 8). If the base upon

which thought is built is construed as performative, it renders the fixed structural

center fluid and shifting, thus contributing to its decentering.

Contextualization derives from Nietzsche’s genealogical method and made an

influential philosophical appearance with Derrida’s proclamation that “il n’y a pas de

hors-texte,” which he later glossed as “there is nothing outside context” (“Afterword”

136). The deployment of this idea in his early work (notably Of Grammatology in

1967) is particularly masterful, as is its key use in Michel Foucault’s early work (such

as in the discursive analysis made use of in Discipline and Punish). Contextualization

brings with it the structural insight that, just as the center creates its margins, it is

precisely because of these margins that the center is the center—the two are

interdependent. Sartre’s oeuvre demonstrates precisely this interdependence, moving

from the radical freedom of Being and Nothingness24 to the radical situatedness of the

Critique, with the Notebooks acting as a theoretical bridge that maintains the

consistency of the whole.

This leads us to the third concept, the amelioration of difference. By ameliorating

difference, one can problematize the differentiation of center and margin, opening up

new possibilities of restructuring, destabilizing the structure, or abolishing it

altogether.25 Taking inspiration from Nietzsche26 and the linguistic insights of

Ferdinand de Saussure, Derrida posits the concept of differance, which, if it were a

concept proper, “would be said to designate a constitutive, productive, and originary

causality, the process of scission and division which would produce or constitute

24 Yet even in this work, the longest single chapter is on the situation; see Chapter Two, Refutation 5,

as well as Terry Keefe’s “The Other in Sartre’s Early Concept of ‘Situation.’” 25 These are merely logical possibilities, not all of which are equally attainable or desirable; but a

poststructuralist would probably say that none would be worse than the current structure. 26 See Beyond Good and Evil, sections 192 (p104-05) and 268 (p216-17).

15

different things or differences” (“Différance” 9); but precisely because it is what

produces differences and concepts, the logic that enables the concept to exist qua

concept, it cannot itself be a concept.27 The fact that every positively existing concept

that can be differentiated from every other necessarily partakes of differance makes

this “difference of difference” ubiquitous and therefore antecedent. Gilles Deleuze

does something similar when he posits the philosophical concept of the “dark

precursor,” the “differently different” that “relates different to different”—what makes

possible his “disjunctive synthesis” (146). In other words, Deleuze construes

difference as having a connecting function of identity analogous to that of sameness,

thereby ameliorating difference. As for Sartre, in looking back on his own early work,

he says that the true formulation of consciousness is a “relationship of each to each,

which precede[s] the creation of a closed whole or even prevent[s] the ‘wholes’ from

ever being closed” (HN 71); here too difference is seen as ubiquitous and

antecedent.28

The above constitutes a preliminary delineation of the possibility of this project:

to consider the unity of the work of Sartre and Badiou and the bearing of this thought

on ethics in our postmodern age. The rest of this study progresses as follows: Chapter

Two acknowledges that existentialism is not currently in vogue, and addresses

theoretical criticisms leveled against it via a series of Refutations. Complete refutation

of the last few criticisms necessitates introducing Badiou’s thought and delineating its

theoretical links, over and above biographical ones, to Sartre’s, and this is the topic of

Chapter Three. The subsequent chapter demonstrates the analytical power of this

Sartrean-Badiouian existentialism as an ethical theory by employing its concepts in a

27 See also the entry for “differance” in Niall Lucy’s A Derrida Dictionary, 25-27. 28 For a consideration of the similarities between Derrida’s differance and Sartre’s nothingness, see

Josh Toth’s “A Différance of Nothing: Sartre, Derrida and the Problem of Negative Theology.”

16

reading of John Williams’s Stoner, a novel of the life of a professor of English

literature in the United States of the late-19th to mid-20th centuries; the choice of this

novel is particularly apt for giving flesh to an abstract philosophical system given that,

from an external or factual perspective, Stoner’s life would seem to be what Badiou

calls an “atonic world,” and yet there is an abundance of affirmation and meaning

flowing through the novel open to illumination by theoretical analysis. Finally, the

concluding chapter summarizes the thesis, responds to a number of possible

criticisms, and juxtaposes my results with some other prominent ethical theories in the

vein of Continental philosophy.

17

Chapter Two

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism: Refutations

It cannot be denied that existentialism is long past its heyday. The rise of

structuralism in the sixties and Sartre’s apparent support of Stalin despite the latter’s

atrocities29 (Sartre later recanted)30 certainly did nothing to ameliorate the waning

influence of existentialism. But was it merely a fading away, or was existentialism

rendered philosophically obsolete? In this chapter, I will address key criticisms of

existentialism in the form of a series of Refutations to see what parts of the Sartrean

edifice still stand. Sartre himself had already engaged his critics early on in his widely

influential lecture, “Existentialism and Humanism”;31 however, I will not be quoting

from this text, given how it is an unrefined popular lecture that Sartre later regretted

publishing (Braddock 103).32 Instead, I will rely on the more canonical philosophical

texts, from Being and Nothingness, the Notebooks, the two volumes of the Critique, to

the late-in-life interviews, Hope Now. This begs the question of continuity. The link

between Being and Nothingness and the Critique is provided in the posthumously

published Notebooks; but even for scholars working before the publication of the

Notebooks, it should be evident that the jump from Being and Nothingness to the

Critique is, for the most part, a matter of translation of terms: Fredric Jameson sees

this switch of terms, and concomitant extension of concepts, as an effort to engage

with the problem of being-with-others (“Sartre’s Critique, Volume 1” 225-26).33 We

29 See Ronald Aronson’s “Celebrating the Critique’s Fiftieth Anniversary,” 9-10, for Sartre’s analysis

of Stalin’s inevitable rise and Sartre’s desire to see this “deviation” corrected; see also Sartre’s

conditional justification of terror in Thomas C. Anderson’s Sartre’s Two Ethics, 127-28. 30 “At certain moments I persuaded myself that the Party’s pseudo-ideas must contain some truths and

have a solid base and that what seemed stupid was only on the surface. . . . I think that was a mistake”

(HN 64). 31 Also known as “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” or simply “Existentialism.” 32 But for a considered appraisal of this work, see Glenn Braddock’s “Sartre on Atheism, Freedom, and

Morality in The Humanism of Existentialism.” 33 For a correspondence of some of the terms, see Jameson’s “Introduction” to the second volume,

18

are then left with the conundrum of Hope Now. While the reversal of previously held

positions and the serious consideration of radically new subject matter in these

interviews do give the appearance that the interlocutor, Benny Lévy, has hijacked the

conversation from a foggy-minded old man, the presence of Lévy and his new ideas

may have been welcomed by Sartre himself. In the second volume of the Critique,

Sartre writes that “being-other does not presuppose that there is a being-yourself

blocked from underneath. Being-yourself is precisely the recuperation of being-other.

It is the dialectical movement of comprehension” (451); and in Hope Now, he says

that intersubjectivity is “not a matter of two enclosed ‘wholes,’” but “a relationship of

each to each, which precede[s] the creation of the closed whole or even prevent[s] the

‘wholes’ from ever being closed” (71). Bear these quotes in mind when reading the

following long quotation said by Sartre to Lévy:

What our collaboration brings to me are plural thoughts that we have

formed together, which constantly yield me something new even though, a

priori, I agree with their whole content. I thought that whatever you could

say to modify one of my ideas . . . was essential . . . . [W]hat one sees in this

exchange is an old man who has taken a very intelligent guy to work with

him but who nevertheless remains the essential figure. But that isn’t what

happens between us. And it isn’t what I want. We’re . . . jointly working on

ethics, an ethics that will, furthermore, often be in contradiction with certain

ideas that I have had. That’s not [a] problem. (HN 74)

We see here a Sartre who is fully aware that Lévy is modifying his thought and deems

this to be “essential,” so much so that he accepts “a priori” whatever Lévy brings to

247-49. Relatedly, Steve Martinot believes, quite sensibly, that it is “a continuity enveloping a shift in

focus” (56); see his “The Site of Postmodernity in Sartre,” 56-58.

19

the table. And he does not find contradictions with his earlier positions to be a

“problem.” This is what he “want[s].” Sartre’s hedges against contradiction

notwithstanding, it is only by reading Hope Now that I myself could fully understand

Sartre’s thought as a whole. Since it is possible, we should take Sartre at his word here

and treat Hope Now as an integral part of his oeuvre.34

The criticisms that I will be addressing are as follows: that existentialism is

outdated; that it is irrational; that it is not universal and therefore not a philosophy;

that it is nihilist; that it absolutizes freedom and is therefore relativist; that it is

humanist; that it is metaphysical, or ontotheological; and that it is incompatible with

the poststructuralist belief in the decentering of the center. Some of these criticisms

have been briefly addressed in Chapter One; here I will bring the full weight of

textual evidence to give a detailed treatment. Finally, I concede up front that complete

refutation of the last point requires the theoretical resources of Alain Badiou’s work,

which I see as an extension and expansion of Sartre’s thought; that will be the main

subject of the following chapter.

1. Existentialism is passé

As mentioned above, there are various valid reasons to think that existentialism

in academia today has become a sort of cottage industry, centered on the North

American Sartre Association and its publication, Sartre Studies International. But just

because it lacks prominence does not mean it is uninfluential. In France, there still

34 For a detailed, intricate, and sympathetic account and analysis of the reception and canonicity of

Hope Now, see its introduction, written by Ronald Aronson; a briefer consideration of thematic

continuation can be found in Shlomit C. Schuster’s “Revisiting Hope Now with Benny Lévy.” Ronald

E. Santoni argues aggressively that Hope Now should be taken seriously in his “In Defense of Lévy and

Hope Now.” By the time of Peter Caws’s “The Curve of the Epoch,” there seemed to be a critical

consensus in favor of accepting Hope Now as a due part of the Sartrean oeuvre (24).

20

seems to be an undercurrent of thought related to Sartre;35 and a recent (2014) Oxford

call for papers sees clear signs of a revival:

In recent years . . . a flurry of publications on Sartre demonstrates a clear

revival of interest in his work. Large-scale events and celebrations further

evidence this renewed interest, e.g. the BNF exhibition on Sartre in 2005

and the ‘Nuit Sartre’ at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, in June 2013.

(“Thinking”)

All the way back in 1984, Alfie Kohn was already writing about how existentialism

had not died, just gone underground: “[E]xistentialist thought has not so much blown

away as decomposed in order to fertilize various fields of thought” (381).36 So it

seems clear that a study of existentialism is not entirely anachronistic; the question

that remains is whether its influence extends far enough into the poststructuralism-

dominated zeitgeist of today to still be a subject of contemporary interest. The

remaining Refutations aim to demonstrate that it does and is.

2. Existentialism is a form of irrationality

This unfortunate moniker was perhaps aggravated by William Barrett’s

immensely popular introduction to existentialism, Irrational Man. But he calls it

irrational not because it is anti-reason, but because it is anti-positivism, as one can

readily perceive:

Positivist man is a curious creature who dwells in the tiny island of light

composed of what he finds scientifically “meaningful,” while the whole

surrounding area in which ordinary men live from day to day and have their

35 See Elizabeth A. Bowman’s “Thanks to BHL, France Rediscovers Her Hated Sartre,” 68. 36 See also 388-89.

21

dealings with other men is consigned to the outer darkness of the

“meaningless.” Positivism has simply accepted the fractured being of

modern man and erected a philosophy to intensify it. Existentialism,

whether successfully or not, has attempted instead to gather all the elements

of human reality into a total picture of man. (21)

The phenomenological basis of existential thought attempts to take into account every

facet of the subjective experience of existence. Further illumination is provided by

Barnes in her translator’s introduction to Being and Nothingness:

[Sartre] includes the irrational among [his] data and recognizes that man’s

irrational behavior is an important part of him. But the final appeal, the

standard of judgment, is reason. It is true that Sartre regards the universe as

being fundamentally without purpose and without any rational organization

save what man puts into it. But this is merely to assert that reason is human

in origin. (xlii-xliii)

In existentialist thought, we see concepts such as nothingness, angst (Heidegger),

absurdity (Camus), faith (Kierkegaard), event (Badiou), etc. that appear to be

irrational; but what these thinkers are doing is taking already existing phenomena and

subjecting them to rational philosophical analysis in an effort to reach a fuller

understanding of human existence. Therefore, contrary to this criticism, we might say

that existentialism is fundamentally rational.37

3. Existentialism is not universal and therefore not a philosophy

If by “universal” one means “to presume an objective reality that holds for all,”

37 For an analytical treatment of Sartre’s early phenomenology, see Gregory McCulloch’s Using

Sartre.

22

then the fact that existentialism is phenomenological itself already falls afoul of this

criticism. Sartre, for instance, introduces the term “transphenomenality of being” to

describe the fact that “the being of the phenomenon, although coextensive with the

phenomenon, can not be subject to the phenomenal condition—which is to exist only

in so far as it reveals itself—and that consequently it surpasses the knowledge which

we have of it and provides the basis for such knowledge” (BN 9); on the impossibility

of objectively grasping all phenomena, he notes, “The truly objectifying intentions are

empty intentions, those which aim beyond the present subjective appearance at the

infinite totality of the series of appearances” (22);38 and he says of the impossibility

of making purely objective judgments, “There is no absolute point of view which one

can adopt so as to compare different situations” (703). Sartre does not even allow for

a universal human essence, since “with man the relation of existence to essence is not

comparable to what it is for the things of the world. Human freedom precedes essence

in man and makes it possible; the essence of the human being is suspended in his

freedom” (60);39 hence, regarding human nature:

Character is a stable set of relations with the other person, with tools, and

with the world, under the pressure of freedoms external to oneself. If it is

stable it is because the pressure is constant and the institutions are stable.

Character is the product of an institutional and traditional society. Character,

that is, nature. (NE 6)

There are other ways to achieve universality. One of them is to posit a universal

human condition, that is, of being essentially inessential. This is manifested as a

repudiation of what Sartre calls the “spirit of seriousness,” which is a denial of

38 My emphasis. 39 My emphasis.

23

perspectivism. Whereas perspectivism says that there is no logical connection

between the physical existence of a thing and its value, the spirit of seriousness

“considers values as transcendent givens independent of human subjectivity, and it

transfers [a] quality . . . from the ontological structure of things to their simple

material constitution” (BN 796). Thus, concepts such as play (BN 742), game, risk,

challenge, contest, and festival (NE 374) all have to do with freedom and ethics.40

But how is it universal? The answer is that it is universal because it is posited as

universal. The Sartrean position of humans as the source of nothingness (and

therefore signification) in the world is still valid today, as seen in the light of the

Lacanian idea that only humans are able to enter into the Symbolic.41 Sartre fortifies

this notion with methodology borrowed from Henri Lefebvre, what he calls the

progressive-regressive method.42 Quoting from Robert V. Stone and Elizabeth A.

Bowman’s concise summary in their study of Sartre’s unpresented and unpublished

1965 Cornell lecture:

This method starts with what is lived immediately in order to grasp it

critically. Its first move is to ‘regressively’ uncover intelligible structures of

praxis and of human groupings which have been brought together in, and

condition, that lived present. One then proceeds to ‘progressively’ reunite

these same structures in the present in order to grasp their interplay within

40 I should note here that although Linda A. Bell is often seen as an advocate of play rather than

renunciation as a means of escape from the God project (see Anderson 179), her idea of play is to make

it “regulative” (126-27), to shift it from the foreground to the background, as it were. But this still

presupposes the ultimate goal of being God, and is thus not an escape at all. A more suitable conception

comes from Yiwei Zheng, who sees play as a reversal of priority, so that, even if we cannot entirely

eschew the God project, it is subordinated to the doing of the action itself; see Zheng’s Ontology and

Ethics in Sartre’s Early Philosophy, 111-15. My own argument takes into consideration Sartre’s

Critique and sees play as merely referring to the possibility of revaluation of a given situation. 41 Guillermine De Lacoste notes in “A Lacanian Elucidation of Sartre” that Lacan appropriated Sartre’s

ideas of the look and the correlation between desire and lack (40n16). For a look at Lacan’s use of

Sartrean concepts, see Joan Copjec’s Imagine There’s No Woman, chapter eight. 42 For its original formulation, see Sartre’s Search for a Method, 51-52n8.

24

living history. (“Sartre’s” 57)

This method was formulated for the Critique, which deals with groups and in which

being-for-itself is renamed praxis,43 but it can also be applied to the earlier works:

Starting from empirical observations, Sartre regresses to uncover a phenomenological

basis for them (e.g. the separation of the in-itself and the for-itself) before progressing

to analyze phenomena (e.g. bad faith). What ensures that there is something to

uncover behind empirical observation is Sartre’s conception of le vécu, or lived

experience: “the terrain in which the individual is perpetually overflowed by himself

and his riches and consciousness plays the trick of determining itself by forgetfulness”

(“Itinerary” 39); more soberly, it is “the ensemble of the dialectical process of psychic

life, in so far as this process is obscure to itself because it is a constant totalization . . .

which also totalizes consciousness. . . . [It] is perpetually susceptible of

comprehension, but never of knowledge” (41).44 This returns to the idea that

subjective experience is fundamentally irrational (or nonrational), and that all we can

do is to try as best we can to rationally understand it.

Now that we have established the universal applicability of Sartre’s method and

results, we must address the reverse side of the question: the universality of existential

values. To examine this, Sartre applies his progressive-regressive method to the

“Liège mothers,” “a small number of mothers of ‘thalidomide babies’ who

committed infanticide in the Belgian town of Liège in the late ’50s. Taken as a

sleeping pill during pregnancy, the drug thalidomide caused extensive deformities,

43 Recall that praxis and totalization refer to the workings of the for-itself, whereas the practico-inert,

totality, and exis are on the side of being-in-itself—and that the two sides are dialectically connected

via interiorization and exteriorization: Sartre says that praxis is “active passivity,” while exis is

“passive activity” (CDR I 489). 44 On the same page, Sartre also mentions Lacan; De Lacoste sees a Lacanian influence here on

Sartre’s idea of the not-entirely-rational vécu (21).

25

especially very short, flipper-like limbs” (Stone et al., “Dialectical” 198).45 Sartre

maintains that the ethical dilemma here is not a choice between “the absolute value of

life” and denying “a life deprived at the start of all the chances of being truly human”

(200). If the latter were a valid norm, then not only should lower-class children be put

to death, since their oppression prevents them from becoming fully human, but upper-

class children as well, since they “are possessed by their possessions.” The true

opposition here is between the world as it is and the possibility of a better world:

[T]he normative character of the murders lies not in obeying an imperative

or in positing a value, but in struggling for a future in which all neonates are

promised the wholeness of human life. . . The infanticides did not oppose

one set of imperatives to another. They opposed praxis to the practico-inert,

which includes all imperatives. The act of the Liège mothers was normative

without being universalizable or repeatable or wishing to be. Instead it was

singular so as to make way for the universal. (201)46

The act itself is universal, not in the sense of “if you were in the same situation”

(which for someone who was not actually in that situation is impossible, given that

there is no universal objective vantage point), but with respect to the intention behind

45 This article is a report on Sartre’s unpublished 1964 Rome lecture and is thus treated in the literature

as authoritative, even almost as first-hand material; the same applies to Stone and Bowman’s article on

Sartre’s 1965 Cornell lecture, cited above. 46 Note that Stone and Bowman include imperatives in the practico-inert, which is the Critique’s term

for the coefficient of adversity of being-in-itself—that part of the in-itself with which one interacts. The

practico-inert also has the extended meaning of being the alienated result of previous praxis (i.e. action

done in freedom); thus, according to Stone and Bowman, imperatives are the result of previous action

returning in the guise of obstacle. In other words, no matter how much we strive for a better world, the

(conceptual) result of that striving will work against us. Here, they are in fact alluding to a four-page

footnote in the first volume of the Critique in which Sartre argues this point with dialectical brilliance;

his solution is the straightforward abolition of values:

[V]alue is not the alienation either of the aim or of realized objectivity; it is the alienation

of praxis itself. . . . From the point of view of ethics, this means that values are bound up

with the existence of the practico-inert field, . . . and that if a liquidation of these [practico-

inert] structures is to be possible . . . [then] values will disappear with them. (248-49)

The question of what Sartre (and Badiou) conceive of as the end of ethics will be taken up at the end of

Chapter Three.

26

it of striving for a better future.

Here Anderson has an objection: Is Sartre, with this example, not committing the

fallacy of overgeneralization (118)? As we saw Sartre demonstrate in Chapter One,

every action presupposes a good perceived to be attained/attainable via that action.

Striving to attain a good is the same as striving to improve a subjectively apprehended

situation (for if attaining a good does not improve a situation, how is it good?), so an

action, such as that done by the Liège mothers, pursued for the sake of bettering the

world falls under this analysis and is therefore universal; this is the sense in which

Sartre writes, “All desire posits truth and freedom” (NE 417). In another sense, Sartre

here analyzes the case of the Liège mothers using his progressive-regressive method

to uncover need as the motor of all struggles. “Need is felt lack” (Stone et al.,

“Dialectical” 207), lack being the term used in Being and Nothingness for the desire

to be the in-itself-for-itself (BN 267)—that is, to be God (140). We have seen that to

attain meaning, one must renounce the God project as the end of action in favor of

action as such; how this is formulated in terms of the Critique will be seen in the next

Refutation and in Chapter Three.

4. Existentialism is a form of nihilism

Sartre’s entire oeuvre is an attempt to attain meaning; this is his optimism.

Whether his thought is nihilist depends on how successful he is at this endeavor. I

read Sartre as ultimately successful in a highly abstract manner, which is later

concretely hypostasized by Badiou.

There are two Sartrean attempts at escaping from the nihilism of the God project

into the economy of meaning. The purely individual level is treated in Being and

27

Nothingness, and it is in the end a failure.47 This can be seen in the analyses of human

relations in III.iii.1-2 (Part Three, Chapter three, sections I and II) that all end in some

form of appropriation (i.e. objectification) of the other or pursuit of the God project,

as well as in such infamous lines as, “Man is a useless passion” (784), or that “it

amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations”

(797). Sartre’s consideration of the We-subject is in the same vein, for he explicitly

says that it “is not an inter-subjective consciousness” (536): The feeling of “being-

with” or of Mitsein, which one apprehends “laterally,” “is of the psychological order

and not ontological” (549) because it only modifies one’s own consciousness “but

does not appear on the foundation of a concrete ontological relation with others”

(550). Thus, given that neither a direct approach nor a lateral one can lead to being-

with, Being and Nothingness would seem to conclude that nihilism is inevitable.

However, this is not the entire picture. For one thing, those two nihilistic quotes

are embedded in the context of pursuing the God project, so it is no surprise that

failure is inevitable. Furthermore, there are certain notorious hints in this work that

suggest a way out: The footnote at the end of Part One says, “[The above] does not

mean that we can not radically escape bad faith. But this supposes a self-recovery of

being which was previously corrupted [and which] we shall call authenticity, the

description of which has no place here” (116n9); the footnote at the end of III.iii.2

says, “These considerations do not exclude the possibility of an ethics of deliverance

and salvation. But this can be achieved only after a radical conversion which we can

not discuss here” (534n13); and most tantalizing of all, at the very end of the work,

after some meditations on what rejecting the God project would actually mean, Sartre

47 This supposedly is the target of Jean-Luc Nancy’s critique of Sartre in The Inoperative Community

(3-4) for not opening up his subject to intersubjectivity, which in fact he does, as we will see below.

28

writes, “All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory reflection,

can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future work”

(798). This “future work” turned out to be the posthumous Notebooks.

“Authenticity,” “conversion,” and “pure reflection”—what do these terms mean?

The first term is briefly defined in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew as “consist[ing] in

having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities

and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror

and hate” (65). We must be clear here and note that this is not a form of bad faith, for

to “assume responsibilities and risks” is not the same as to assume the role of

someone who shoulders these responsibilities and risks, let alone to identify with this

role. But how does a decision to assume the situation turn into the ethical value of

authenticity, bearing in mind that value is alienated praxis that imposes itself? The

question, then, transforms into the problem of ethical conviction discussed by Bernard

Williams. Referring to Sartrean existentialists,48 he says that “they think that the

source of ethical conviction must be a decision,” but “[t]his cannot be right because

ethical conviction, like any other form of being convinced, must have some aspect of

passivity to it, must in some sense come to you” (169). This passivity arrives in the

Critique in the guise of an Apocalypse; I will address this below.

Conversion and pure reflection are explained in the Notebooks. The first

enigmatic mention of conversion is on page 4, where Sartre writes, “Morality:

permanent conversion. In Trotsky’s sense: permanent revolution.” This line seems to

equate conversion with revolution, and permanent conversion or revolution with

morality. We will see later that “revolution” here means an Apocalypse, which I

48 He makes this clear in 243n13.

29

interpret as an occurrence that draws one into the economy of meaning; Badiou goes

further in saying that this occurrence, which he calls an “event,” in fact convokes

meaning itself, and I see it as the “motor” of the economy of meaning. The permanent

revolution, then, is an economy of meaning in which meaning does not disappear (e.g.

through objectification or alienation). We see at this point that conversion seems to be

some kind of meaning-giving activity or status-transformation. A later mention of

conversion is somewhat more illuminating: On page 10, Sartre glosses this word as

meaning the “recognition of myself as ec-static For-itself which leads to recognition

of the spirit as detotalized totality.” Above this line on the same page, Sartre says that

to “will the detotalized totality” is “[t]o have the other in myself as an other and yet as

a free source of my acts.” Thus, a conversion is the recognition that I, as an agent, am

capable of pursuing others’ goals even without appropriating those goals as my own.

But if they are not my goals, why would I pursue them? And by pursuing them, would

I not then turn them into my own goals?

This brings us to the last term, pure reflection. Anderson notes that there are

three levels of awareness, two of which are reflective: “Being God is a value humans

naturally, prereflectively seek. Accomplice or impure reflection chooses to accept this

value and seeks to attain that impossible goal. Pure, nonaccomplice reflection chooses

to reject it” (53). This is borne out in the Notebooks, where Sartre says that “accessory

reflection is just the prolongation of the bad faith found nonthetically within the

primitive project, whereas pure reflection is a break with this projection” (560). This

new, pure reflection is other-directed, as when Sartre says, “Impure reflection . . . is

originally bad faith because it does not want to see its own failure. But only bad faith

can be at the origin of good faith. Pure reflection is good faith and as such an appeal

to the good faith of the other person” (12). In Being and Nothingness, Sartre treats

30

“good faith” as a form of bad faith that “wishes to flee the ‘not-believing-what-one-

believes’ by finding refuge in being” (115); here, though, it seems to mean acting in

authenticity. The “appeal” as a form of action receives lengthy treatment in the

Notebooks, and I see it as an entryway into the economy of meaning: The appealing

party asks for aid in the realization of her own project and offers in return, in the act

of appealing itself, recognition of the appealed to party’s freedom and ability to aid

(or not) her project and thereby bestow meaning on it; this recognition of ability to

bestow meaning bestows, in turn, meaning on the appealed to party’s existence. Thus,

through this form of non-binding reciprocity, both parties are brought into the

economy of meaning (283-85).49 Moreover, as mentioned in Chapter One, the

economy of meaning passes through human work;50 that is, the product of one’s

project plays a role in another’s. If we also recall that one cannot attain meaning on

one’s own, then we see that even our own project is only meaningful when it has

meaning for others. This is what Sartre means when he writes that “ethics” means

“absolute generosity, without limits, as a passion properly speaking and as the only

means of being. There is no other reason for being than this giving”; and if we view

human facticity as a work, then “it [is] not just my work that is a gift. Character is a

gift[,]” too (129).

The notion of ethics as “passion,” as passivity, brings me to the second,

intersubjective, attempt to escape nihilism, an attempt laid out in the Critique. The

first volume of the Critique presents us with what might be called an evolutionary

49 Interestingly, Sartre says of the appeal that it does not “seduce” the appealed to party with the

proposed end of the project, nor does it try “to realize unity through a general heteronomy” or through

“some common work”; instead, it “recognize[s] differences and bring[s] them into liaison through this

very recognition” (285). The appeal, to foreshadow Badiou, is indifferent to difference. And although

“common work” is inessential to the structure of the appeal, it does play a key role in a more fleeting

form of shared meaning, as I discuss below. 50 This can open up a discussion of the influence of Sartrean ethics on animals and the environment,

but such a discussion is outside the scope of this study.

31

“cycle” of social groups. Beginning from serialization, which is Sartre’s preferred

term for atomization,51 Sartre describes how an “Apocalypse”52 brings people

together into a fused group (357-58), how the people pledge themselves to the group

to preserve it in the face of insufficient outside threat (419, 425, 430), and how this

pledge leads to Terror (430) and dissolves into the institution (600-01) with its

authority and sovereign (607-08), thereby returning people to their original serialized

condition. The key stage in this “cycle” is the fused group that comes about due to an

Apocalypse; more specifically, an Apocalypse is said to have occurred when, “though

seriality still exists at least as a process which is about to disappear, and although it

always may reappear, synthetic unity is always here” (357). Thus, “[a] fused group is

in fact still a series, negating itself in re-interiorizing exterior negations; in other

words, in this moment there is no distinction between the positive self (the group in

formation) and this self-negating negation (the series in dissolution)” (358).53 To

borrow Badiou’s use of the future anterior tense for this concept (which he calls an

event), a fused group is what will have been a spontaneously formed group. Sartre

does not explain exactly what kind of event an Apocalypse is, merely giving the

French Revolution as running example; Badiou will later explain that whether an

incident is an event or not is undecidable. It would not be inaccurate to say, though,

51 In the 1973 essay “Elections: A Trap for Fools,” Sartre explains the difference between the two

terms:

[T]he word “atomization” . . . does not convey the true situation of people who have been

scattered and alienated by institutions. They cannot be reduced to the absolute solitude of

the atom even though institutions try to replace their concrete relations with people by

incidental connections. They cannot be excluded from all forms of social life: a soldier

takes the bus, buys the newspaper, votes. All this presumes that he will make use of

“collectives” along with the Others. But the collectives address him as a member of a series

(the series of newspaper buyers, television watchers, etc.). He becomes in essence identical

with all the other members, differing from them only by his serial number. We say that he

has been serialized. (201) 52 The term is borrowed from André Malraux’s novel of the Spanish Civil War, Days of Hope (CDR I

357). 53 After a block quote from the Critique in his introduction to volume one, Fredric Jameson adds that

“the reader will find that, with a little practice, this rather startling prose quickly becomes readable

enough” (237). He is not wrong.

32

that it constitutes meaning in the form of a common project, imposed from the outside

(this is its passivity); in fact, we might say that it is the creation of meaning ex nihilo

and the motor of the entire economy of meaning. Within the fused group, one receives

meaning from reciprocal relations with other members in pursuing the common

project, and not directly from the pursued project itself (399-402).

But if the fused group is destined to return to seriality, then its meaning is lost

and Sartre is guilty of nihilism after all. This view of the first volume of the Critique,

says Jameson, is a misunderstanding: This volume merely sets out “the basic

sociological and even metaphysical concepts, the static instruments,” to be used to set

history “in motion” in volume two (226); and “the notion that it sets in place a

cyclical view of history” is “the fundamental error so many readers (including myself

[Jameson], in an earlier effort) have made” (227). Thus, we are free to examine the

possibilities of each individual stage, and it should be readily apparent that our

examination should focus on the fused group and its possible prolongation. “The idea

of a perpetual apocalypse is naturally very attractive,” Sartre notes in his 1972 essay,

“The Itinerary of a Thought” (57), but he was never able to achieve this goal. It is

Badiou who finally sees the wrong turn that Sartre takes and proposes new concepts

and ideas, even a new system, to avert it. We will investigate these contributions in

detail in the next chapter.

5. Existentialism absolutizes freedom and is therefore a form of relativism

The idea that Sartre overpromotes freedom and ends up in the quagmire of

ethical relativism can be refuted on three fronts: to debunk ethical relativism, to show

that freedom does not lead to relativism even of the “if God is dead then anything

goes” type, and to show that Sartre’s analysis of freedom is sober and realistic.

33

Bernard Williams shows54 that ethical relativism, in the strict sense of taking

every ethical outlook as more or less equally acceptable, is not relativism at all but the

“nonrelativistic morality of universal toleration” (159). To truly understand the

question (and thus arrive at a clear answer), we must analyze the actual situation of

what happens when one is presented with an ethical outlook different from one’s own.

Here, Williams draws a distinction between real and notional confrontations of ethical

outlooks: The confrontation is real if one can feasibly tack on to the new outlook “and

[still] retain [one’s] hold on reality”; if not, then it is notional (160-61). Given that

deliberation over whether to switch ethical outlooks inevitably leads to comparative

value judgments, relativism can only hold in cases where there is no real

confrontation (but the reverse is not true: Simply finding a confrontation to be

notional does not guarantee the applicability of relativism) (161-62). The question of

ethical relativism then depends on whether there exists relativistic notional

confrontations of ethical outlooks. Williams believes that, in the modern world,

synchronous spatial ethical differences all constitute real confrontations (163),

presumably due to the effects of globalization. Regarding our relation to ethical

outlooks of the future, Williams says, “we can have both a purely notional

confrontation with another set of values and also some responsibility for them,” for

those values are in some way a continuation of ours (172-73). It seems that relativism

with respect to future ethical outlooks would be a form of bad faith, in that one would

thereby deny that what one does and how one acts today can have any effect on

tomorrow. Relativism with respect to ethical outlooks of past societies suffers from a

similar shortcoming. Either a past ethical outlook is still valid today, in which case the

confrontation is real and not notional; or it is invalid today, in which case we might

54 The entire section of his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy on relativism, 156-67 and 172-73, is an

illuminating exercise in ethical philosophizing.

34

try to answer the question of why it was valid in the past, thereby bringing in

questions of discursive legitimacy asked by thinkers such as Foucault or those

associated with the Frankfurt School (166-67) and isolating a real conflict on the

ideological or discursive level. In any case, even if the above discussion does not

completely shut the door on ethical relativism, the likelihood of finding a valid case in

the real world is negligible for the purposes of an existential ethics, which Sartre

emphasizes must deal with concrete relations (NE 103-04).

If the strict version of ethical relativism is untenable, then perhaps its weaker

cousin might be. This is the idea that, if God is dead and there is no legitimating grand

narrative, then we may all do as we wish. This is false according to two possible

interpretations that may not be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, simply because

the legitimator of a grand narrative is dead does not kill off the grand narrative itself;

this is the essential thrust of Fredric Jameson’s idea of the “political unconscious,” the

grand narrative gone “underground” (Lyotard xi).55 On the other hand, even if grand

narratives are dead, we are still constrained by, and must navigate, local narratives:

Gilles Deleuze notes, “It is with God that everything is permitted” by “holy

justification”; if God is dead, then (to take an artistic example) “it would be a mistake

to think that the painter works on a white and virgin surface,” for now “painting is

invaded and besieged by photographs and clichés that are already lodged on the

canvas before the painter even begins to work” (Francis 11-12). If relativism is the

perfectly neutral freedom of choice between ethical outlooks, then it is ultimately

impossible.56

55 For the use of this concept in defending Marxism, see Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. 56 Badiou: “If God is dead . . . , this does not mean that everything is possible” but “that there is [for

us] precisely nothing better, nothing greater, nothing truer, than the answers of which we are capable”

(“Commitment” 34).

35

This brings us to the third question: Does Sartre acknowledge this impossibility?

Many critics (including himself, later on) consider his construal of freedom in Being

and Nothingness as absolute to be patently untenable.57 And yet, the longest section

of the very same book (IV.i.2) is devoted to analyzing situations that concretely limit

one’s facticity.58 It seems, then, that Sartre has fallen into the trap of bad faith,

treating one’s transcendence and facticity separately. There is a curious passage in the

first volume of the Critique which I believe unifies both levels. In analyzing the

“organized connection” of “discipline” that, within the group, takes “a certain form of

exteriority which, paradoxically, sustains [the] bonds of interiority with everyone

else,” Sartre delineates three different “signifying layers”: “[T]he first is concrete

praxis; this includes the second, which is power (freedom-terror) and function [sic]

(right-duty); and this in turn includes the third, which is an inert skeleton” (490). Keep

in mind that these three levels refer to one and the same free discipline. Here we

might borrow from Simone de Beauvoir to better understand this passage. Beauvoir

posits three levels of freedom: “ontological freedom,” which is Sartre’s absolutely

free for-itself; “moral freedom,” which is consciously actualized ontological freedom;

and “power,” which is situated freedom in the material world (Daigle 141). It is

evident that each level of freedom is a prerequisite for the next, in the same way that

each of Sartre’s signifying layers “includes” the next. Indeed, even though Beauvoir is

speaking of three levels of freedom and Sartre of only one discipline, the structure is

still analogous: The layer of concrete praxis is pure, undiluted freedom; the layer of

power and function elaborate on the distribution and actualization of praxis; and the

inert skeleton is the result of actualization that one sees from the outside. This is a

57 Thomas Anderson repeatedly criticizes this point; see chapters 2 and 3 of his Sartre’s Two Ethics.

For Sartre’s self-repudiation, see “The Itinerary of a Thought,” 34. 58 See Terry Keefe’s “The Other in Sartre’s Early Concept of ‘Situation.’”

36

more sober and plausible account of freedom.

We have previously discussed the impetus to extend the economy of meaning as

widely as possible; here we note that, if meaning is freely obtained from others, then

freedom is the outward signification of meaning.59 If one is committed to the

broadest ethical life, then one has an impetus to pursue the freedom of others; and

having demonstrated that ontological, moral, and material freedom are all of a piece,

we cannot simply pursue the ontological freedom of others (which in any case would

make little sense, since it is the universal human condition) but must also push for

concrete, systemic, material freedom—the outward manifestation of which is “the

small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does

not render back completely what his conditioning has given him” (Sartre, “Itinerary”

35), the clinamen60 of minimal difference.61

6. Existentialism is a form of humanism

The last three Refutations will be devoted to the group of related criticisms

gathered under the banner of the “death of the subject.” Refutation 6 will answer

criticisms of the Cartesian cogito, which I refer to as the phenomenological subject;

Refutation 7 will respond to criticisms of the Aristotelian sub-iectum, which I call the

59 Freedom is necessary, but not sufficient, for meaning. 60 In Being and Nothingness, Sartre refutes the idea of “freedom as a series of capricious jerks

comparable to the Epicurean clinamen” (583), but agrees that freedom is “a transformation . . . which is

possible” (585). We might sum up Sartre’s early and late views of freedom by saying that it is the

possibility of minimal difference—i.e. the existence of the clinamen. Incidentally, Badiou uses the term

clinamen to refer to subjectivization, which (we will see) is fundamentally aleatory and satisfies the

need of freedom or chance; see his Theory of the Subject, 59. 61 Seizing on Sartre’s idea of “authentic love” as meaning “to unveil the Other’s being-within-the-

world, to take up this unveiling, and to set this Being within the absolute; to rejoice in it without

appropriating it; to give it safety in terms of my freedom, and to surpass it only in the direction of the

Other’s ends” (NE 508), Yiwei Zheng notes that this seems to not require any actual action; one need

only “step back and watch, showing love for others’ freedoms and projects but without doing anything”

to further them (132). However, this interpretation ignores that if meaning truly comes only from

others, then this “rejoicing” of another’s project is precisely the end to which aiding that project is a

means; and according to Sartre’s understanding of the ethical chain, as mentioned in Chapter One, one

cannot truly will the end without willing the means.

37

philosophical subject; and the last Refutation will bring Sartre in line with

poststructuralist responses to criticism of the philosophical subject, as well as leave

the door open for Alain Badiou.

Is the subject of the Cartesian cogito no longer valid? To answer this question,

we must first know what that subject is. We start from René Descartes’s Meditations

on First Philosophy. In six meditations, Descartes uses what we might

anachronistically call the transcendental reduction to uncover what exactly exists

necessarily despite the most pessimistic doubts about the sensory world. He arrives at

the famous conclusion that, since he thinks, he must exist: “[T]his pronouncement ‘I

am, I exist’ is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind”

(18/25).62 The question here is: How does thinking and existing enter into a causal

relationship? Cogito ergo sum means that thinking presupposes existing as a subject;

logically speaking then, not existing would mean not thinking; but could there be

something other than thinking that presupposes existing? Descartes himself is

doubtful: “[P]erhaps it could also come to pass that if I were to cease all thinking I

would then utterly cease to exist” as a subject (19/27). Immanuel Kant might have

agreed. His transcendental idealism, according to his Critique of Pure Reason, is

based on the presupposition that humans are all rational and therefore all synthesize a

priori perceptions of space and time, without which “nothing can be thought or

known, since the given representations would not have in common the act of the

apperception ‘I think,’ and so could not be apprehended together in one self-

consciousness.” Understanding, the faculty of knowledge, depends on the synthetic

“unity of consciousness” that gives rise to objects; without it, my perceptions would

62 The second number refers to original Latin pagination.

38

not necessarily be my perceptions (156-57/137-38b).63 Nietzsche disagrees with both

Descartes and Kant. Regarding Descartes’s connection of thinking to being, Nietzsche

points out in Beyond Good and Evil that there are “a whole series of daring

assertions” embedded in the sentence “I think”: “that it is I who think, that there must

necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the

part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that . . .

I know what thinking is” (23/16).64 He instead postulates that thought comes of its

own accord, whether we want it to or not, and that the leap from “thinking” to the “I

think” is an unfounded one based on the faulty logic of grammar (24/17). In another

section, Nietzsche takes issue with Kant: When Kant says he perceives by means of a

faculty, Nietzsche points out, he’s merely saying that he perceives by means of a

means of perception: Vermöge eines Vermögens (18-19/11). Thus for Nietzsche, Kant

is saying nothing at all.65

In response to the above, Sartre divides the I into transcendence and facticity,

for-itself and in-itself, in which the will is a movement of nothingness (the for-itself)

toward being (the in-itself) (BN 137-38). Similar to how Nietzsche believes the I to be

an illusion, Sartre (as we have seen in Chapter One) takes the reductive unity of

transcendence and facticity to be bad faith: Humans are what we are not, and are not

what we are, and trying to reduce one to the other is phenomenologically incoherent,

not to mention dishonest. And against Kant, Sartre denies the completely isolated

imperceptibility of noumena (McCulloch 105-06), instead referring to the

“transphenomenality of being” (that being qua being is beyond what we can perceive

at any one time) as not “hidden behind phenomena” but “coextensive with” it, as

63 The second number refers to original German pagination; “b” refers to the second edition. 64 The second number refers to section. 65 For a more detailed exploration of Nietzsche’s criticisms of Descartes, Kant, and metaphysics in

general, see Sarah Kofman’s “Descartes Entrapped.”

39

noted above. On the whole, Sartre tries to incorporate criticisms against the

phenomenological subject while still preserving its coherence.

An even greater threat to the phenomenological subject is posed by structuralism.

Structuralists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss try to straightforwardly deny the

philosophical importance of the phenomenological subject, instead emphasizing the

relations between positions in a structure (Caws, “Sartrean” 304). This reductionist

view of the subject, along with structuralism’s bias toward the synchronic and relative

neglect of diachrony (Copleston 417), gave rise to poststructuralism. To give just one

example, the “death of the author” is premised on the notion that a text should be

judged based on its own merits; the author is seen to no longer be the sole authority of

textual meaning. But this also obstructs any analysis of the diachronic evolution of

textual discourse, as Foucault recognized when positing his corrective concept of the

“author-function.” He suggests four main characteristics of the author function (I have

added emphases and notes to highlight diachronic concepts):

[It] is tied to the [constantly evolving] legal and institutional systems that

circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not

operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given

culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its

creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not

refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously

gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that

individuals of any class can come to occupy [throughout history]. (“What”

1485)

As this example shows, the “post” of poststructuralism manifests itself in one aspect

40

as the recovery of diachronic history and, as a direct result, a historicized,

contextualized subject (Schrift 4-6). Foucault’s efforts are exemplary in this regard.

His major conceptual premise, taken from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals

and on display throughout his oeuvre, is that all concepts (or manifestations of

concepts), including those of the subject, are historically and discursively constructed

(Schrift 47). The subject as we know it today was formed through the various

conceptions of ethics and care for the self that appear throughout history. As Foucault

says in an interview, “I believe . . . that the subject is constituted through practices of

subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty,

as in Antiquity, on the basis . . . of a number of rules, styles, inventions to be found in

the cultural environment” (“Aesthetics” 50-51). By tracing this history through

Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Foucault both historicizes and contextualizes the

subject (Schrift 47-51). And similarly for deconstructor Jacques Derrida: Contrary to

popular belief, Derrida does not want to liquidate the subject; in fact, he once said, “I

believe that at a certain level both of experience and of philosophical and scientific

discourse, one cannot get along without the notion of the subject. It is a question of

knowing where it comes from and how it functions” (qtd. in Schrift 27). His point is

simply that there is no absolute concept of the subject outside of however it is

situated. Thus, the state of the phenomenological subject today is that it is a

coalescent formation of non-originary thoughts and wills and various historically

discursive constructs.

Sartre himself waded into the structuralist debate in the first volume of the

Critique, devoting a whole section (II.iii.3—Book II, Chapter III, Section 3) to Lévi-

Strauss. Reanalyzing Lévi-Strauss’s study of social relations, Sartre notes that

normative arrangements of marriage in endogamy or exogamy are forms of the

41

pledge, which we mentioned in Refutation 4 when discussing the Critique’s “cycle”

of history, and that “the arrival of [a] child in the milieu of the pledge is the equivalent

for him of making a pledge . . . not as a passive object receiving his statute from

outside, but as a free common agent who has been granted his freedom” (485). But

how is being inserted into a social structure a form of freedom? Sartre himself at first

had the same question. As he recounts in a long footnote that continues to the next

page, he at first “thought that total indeterminacy was the true basis of choice,” so that

having a child be pledged into a group is to let the child, “with all his power and in

complete knowledge, decide whether to remain in the group, whether to change his

function . . . in it, or whether to withdraw.” Only later did Sartre realize that there is

no such thing in this case as objective indeterminacy, and that “[w]hatever one does,

in fact, one prejudges”; “it is necessary to decide . . . on behalf of the child, and

without being able to consult him, and . . . he will always bear the weight of this

decision throughout his life. But it is also true that it can mark him only to the extent

that he has freely interiorized it” (486). In other words, our facticity is ineluctably

interrelated with its surrounding social structure, but through our transcendence, we

can always choose what kind of structure with which to identify.66 This brings us

back to the three signifying layers of free discipline; we see now that Lévi-Strauss’s

notion of structure is merely the third layer, the inert skeleton, and that he neglects the

simultaneous existence of the first two layers; he “silently ignor[es] the practical

totalization as the support and reason for the inertia at the moment of the combination

of terms” into a structure (CDR I 492). The proof of this is that, since the structure is

the product of group praxis, “it is always possible for the group, as totalizing action,

66 Sartre’s term, “to interiorize,” is more accurate than “to identify with,” because what one interiorizes

also changes dialectically with one’s interiorization; and also because the notion of identity becomes

problematic in Hope Now and in the work of Badiou. For considerations of the notion of identity, see

Chapter Four.

42

under the pressure of new circumstances, to dissolve it entirely” (CDR I 489). Indeed,

Lévi-Strauss’s conception of structure leaves no space for its provenance or demise,

which are diachronous concepts. In brief, Sartre redefines structure as “a specific

relation of the terms of a reciprocal relation to the whole and to each other through the

mediation of the whole,” where the whole is “a unity of the interiorized multiplicity”

(CDR I 499). The relation of Sartre to structuralism is perhaps best summed up by

Sartre himself: “I am in no way hostile to Structuralism [sic] when the structuralist

remains aware of the limits of his method” (qtd. in Caws, “Sartrean” 298).67 With

regard to the phenomenological subject, Sartre holds his own.

We should not confuse the phenomenological subject with the philosophical one;

the former is unavoidable, but the latter, according to poststructuralists, is to be

deconstructed. Thus, we should also distinguish between two forms of humanism (of

which we have already considered the form that asserts, with Sartre, that we can only

view the world from a human perspective), for as Bernard Williams notes, to think

that our unavoidably human perspective “implies that we regard human beings as the

most important or valuable creatures in the universe . . . is to make the mistake of

identifying the point of view of the universe [with] the human point of view” (118).

This ungrounded conflation that, as we will shortly see, grounds Western metaphysics

is the error of construing proximity as predication:

This proposition of the proper [i.e. what is proper to or genitive of] . . . is

not to be taken in the metaphysical sense: the proper of man, here, is not an

essential attribute, the predicate of a substance, a characteristic among

others, however fundamental, of a being, object or subject, called man. No

67 The entire exchange between Sartre and Lévi-Straussian structuralism is explored in fascinating

detail in Peter Caws’s “Sartrean Structuralism?”

43

more can one speak in this way of man as the proper of Being. Propriety,

the co-propriety of Being and man, is proximity as inseparability. But it is

indeed as inseparability that the relations between being . . . and its essential

predicate were thought in metaphysics afterward. (Derrida, “Ends” 133)

In other words, there is no logical reason to believe that humans are at the center of

Being.68

With that in mind, let us now examine what I call the philosophical subject.

7. Existentialism is a form of metaphysics or ontotheology

In its original, Aristotelian sense, the sub-iectum is the “ground” of or “that

which underlies”69 philosophical thought (Philip Wood 58-59)—the First Cause, that

is, God, the ens causa sui. Thought that rests on this ground is what Derrida calls

“metaphysics” or “ontotheology” (“Ends” 116). One famous example of such a sub-

iectum is the Hegelian absolute Spirit: On its journey toward self-consciousness,

which never goes outside itself, it illumines the world and draws it into existence

(Wood, “Revisionary” 172-73). But if it never goes outside itself, then the resulting

logic is circular, for “each entity would have to exist in its identifiable identity

‘before’ it could be compared with the other, and ‘at a distance’ from the other; and

yet it is this very comparison that is supposed to establish such identity” (175). Thus,

from what we might call the Hegelian fallacy, we see that the ens causa sui is rejected

because it is irrational (BN xli). However, we should note that the Hegelian fallacy

does not kill the phenomenological subject: The chicken-and-egg question of “which

came first, consciousness or the world” elides over the dialectical nature of our

68 For Sartre’s own critique of the “racism” of humanity (and of humanity as an abstract totality), see

his War Diaries, 25-27. 69 Italics removed.

44

entering into the world and the world’s formation of us (BN 157-58). It is not circular

logic if our relation to the world has no point of origin; or, as Derrida might have said,

if we are always already in the world.70 Wood next tries to extend the Hegelian

fallacy to the Critique (indeed, this is the point of his article) (186-87), but in doing so

he falls afoul of a key terminological distinction that Jameson points out in his

introduction to the first volume: the conflation of “totalization” (which, remember, is

simply praxis) with “totality” (what in the terminology of Being and Nothingness is

the in-itself-for-itself, or ens causa sui) (230). Sartre’s understanding of history (or

“History,” the capital-letter existence of which it is his task to prove in the Critique,

volume two) differs from Hegel’s absolute Spirit in that Sartre does not see history as

inside, or forming, a totality. Indeed, he says that the group in history “is not an actual

totality, but a shifting and ceaselessly developing totalization” (CDR I 384). To the

extent that capitalized History exists, it is totalized and not presupposed from the start,

either.

We are now able to understand why Derrida’s infamous criticism of Sartre’s

project in “The Ends of Man” is unwarranted. When he says, “Being in-itself and

Being for-itself are of Being; and this totality of beings . . . was nothing other than the

metaphysical unity of man and God” (116), he is viewing being-in-itself and being-

for-itself as two aspects of one combined (somewhat Heideggerian) Being; but we

have already seen that Sartre denies the possibility of combining the in-itself with the

for-itself, be it in a “metaphysical unity of man and God” or as a “totality.”71 And if

70 Note that by world Sartre does not mean the physical world (which always preexists every

individual) but the phenomenological perception of that world, what he calls “the contingent upsurge of

one orientation among the infinite possibilities of orienting the world” (BN 419). 71 His definition of ontology “as the specification of the structures of being of the existent taken as a

totality” (BN 395) refers to the structures, and not the existent, as a totality; in any case, the totality is

certainly not humanity. This is very similar to Badiou’s idea of mathematics as the inscription of

ontology, for which see the next chapter and the conclusion.

45

this description of Sartre’s project makes it resemble a form of negative theology, the

response to this should be clear: Sartre wants us to renounce the God project, so his

work is if anything a repudiation of negative theology.72

8. Existentialism maintains a fixed and stable center

We have seen that existentialism does not place humanity at the center of

philosophy; but that does nothing to show how it decenters the center. Even if we only

consider the case of humanity, there is still the center, composed of a certain group of

people who are the primary focus of thought, and its complementary marginal groups.

Thus, it is worth noting that the group on which Sartre focuses, the fused group of the

Apocalypse, is not in fact any one group but a structural position. Moreover, it also

adheres to the three key concepts of poststructuralism discussed in the previous

chapter: performativity, context, and amelioration of difference.

The Apocalypse is performative in that it is pure action with no speculation,

theory, or identity.73 Everyone is simply caught up in it. Let me quote again from the

passage in the Critique describing the Apocalypse, with phrases denoting action and

performativity emphasized:

Everyone reacted in a new way . . . as an individual incarnation of the

common person. . . . From this moment on, there is something which is

neither group nor series, but what Malraux, in Days of Hope, called the

Apocalypse . . . . [The fused group is] unstructured, that is to say, entirely

amorphous [sic] . . . . [S]eriality exists at least as a process which is about

to disappear . . . . Or, to put the same point in another way, throughout a

72 See the endnotes to Josh Toth’s “A Différance of Nothing” for an elaboration of research related to

the connections between Sartre, Derrida, and negative theology. 73 Badiou will say that the event is ephemeral.

46

city, at every moment, in each partial process, the part is entirely involved

and the movement of the city is fulfilled and signified in it. . . . [W]e must

make it clear that [the group] would congeal into a [serial] collective if it

were not structured in a temporal development, the speed and duration of

which . . . depend on the circumstances and situation. (357-58)

An Apocalypse is “irreducible to the mass gathering, the mass statute, etc., [nor] to

organized, semi-organized, or institutionalized groups” (383); it is an Apocalypse

because those caught up in it believe it to be an Apocalypse, which is to say that its

definition employs the same tautological logic as the performative utterance: The

sentence that I utter is (e.g.) a promise because I sincerely say “I promise.”

As the mention of “the circumstances and situation” suggests, an Apocalypse is a

highly contextual event. Sartre goes on to analyze how the “structuration” of the

actual events of the French Revolution in Paris were greatly dependent on elements of

exis: the Saint-Antoine district as poverty-stricken and under the symbolically

repressive shadow of the Bastille; the “skirmishes and repressed uprisings” and “the

Réveillon affair” massacre as part of the collective memory; and the layout of the

district (“a hodological determination of the lived space of the district”)74 leading to

the realization that it might possibly be the site of a crossfire-induced massacre (358-

59). Moreover, the fused group engages in constant (re-)interiorization, or totalization,

of its situation, thus making it a part of itself and part of its basis for future praxis:

[T]he praxis of a group is to constantly reorganize itself, . . . to

interiorize . . . the things produced and the results attained, to make of

[them] its new structures, and thereby to transcend this rearrangement

74 “Hodological” here means “the environment viewed in terms of our personal orientation” (Search

79n).

47

towards new objectives—or rather, to make this internal rearrangement, as

structures which have to be transcended (because attained)[,] the

transcendence of old objectives[.] (385)

In this way, context is continuously considered and dialectically incorporated into the

fused group.

With this emphasis on action over identity and the constant (re-)interiorization of

context, difference is inevitably made unimportant. If we recall from Refutation 3 that

“[c]haracter is a stable set of relations with the other person, with tools, and with the

world, under the pressure of freedoms external to oneself” that are “stable,” then it

should be no wonder that Sartre says, “There are no ‘characters’ in the Apocalypse.

There one is always surprised. [‘]I did not think him capable of that[’]” (NE 6). Each

member of the fused group is fundamentally the same, together creating a “synthetic

unity [that] is always here” (357); and it has no leaders, for “the crowd in situation

produces and dissolves within itself its own temporary leaders,” within each of whom

can be seen “a common individual (that is to say, one whose praxis is common [i.e.

shared])” (382).

We have seen how Sartre’s thought leads ultimately to an Apocalypse; but what

exactly are its effects? How are we to respond to an Apocalypse and its aftereffects?

And how important is an Apocalypse for human existence? To answer these

questions, we now turn to the thought of Sartre’s currently most prominent follower,

Alain Badiou.

48

Chapter Three

Alain Badiou’s Existentialism: Structural Addenda

To say that Badiou develops Sartre’s ideas, we must not only demonstrate a

connection on the philosophical level, but on the biographical level as well, to show

how the linkage is not merely an arbitrary theoretical grafting. Certainly Sartre knew

of Badiou and his work: He approvingly mentions Badiou’s novel, Almagestes,75 in a

1946 interview (“Long” 62-63), and in the seventies he was involved with the French

Maoists,76 among whom Badiou was quite prominent. In the other direction, Sartre

has had a deep influence on Badiou all his life: The fact that among the many chapters

devoted to specific thinkers in Being and Event and Logics of Worlds there is no

single chapter on Sartre should be seen as a sign of how prevalent Sartre’s thought is

throughout Badiou’s oeuvre. Indeed, Badiou was in the past accused of being too

Sartrean (Badiou, “Commitment” 30), and he refers to him as the “absolute Master”

of his early years of philosophy (LW 555). Badiou tries at times to distance himself

from Sartre, but these attempts (as in “Commitment, Detachment, Fidelity”) are

mostly directed toward the Sartre of Being and Nothingness; Emmanuel Terray reads

Badiou’s project as completely in line with Sartre’s Critique,77 which he and Badiou

read fervently back in the day (LW 555). In The Century, Badiou himself draws a

direct link from Sartre’s nothingness at the center of being to his own idea that a

subject is “of the order of the event” (100). This link passes through the possibility for

75 Like Sartre, Badiou writes not only philosophy but also fiction and drama; and like Sartre’s

Situations, he has a series of collected essays and interviews called Conditions. 76 His later secretary and collaborator, Benny Lévy, was also a Maoist leader. For an account of

Sartre’s involvement and cooperation with the French Maoists, see David Drake’s “Sartre and May

1968: The Intellectual in Crisis,” 51-60; but keep in mind that Sartre himself says, “I am not a Maoist”

(“Maoists” 162). 77 Terray’s reading, however, relies too much on superficial parallelism rather than theoretical analysis;

see his “Badiou et Sartre.”

49

the subject to encounter a pure Outside, which Sartre fails to consider (LW 381)

precisely at the point where he designates the pledged group as the successor to the

fused group (Badiou, Theory 299-300); in fact, these two are qualitatively different,

and the key to prolonging the fusion of the group is not to pledge to one another but to

pledge against the Outside of the Apocalypse. This is the only point of unresolved

theoretical disagreement that I could find between Sartre and Badiou, and it seems

that Badiou deviates from Sartre’s path only to follow it further than Sartre himself

does.78 All in all, Badiou’s conviction that it is an advantage for him to have been

born early enough to be a Sartrean (Tho, et al. xxvi) is manifestly borne out in his

project; the central axis of Sartre’s thought, Badiou says, “continues to organize my

thinking” (“Commitment” 27).79

We have seen that a Sartrean Apocalypse creates meaning in two ways: by

coalescing serialized individuals into a fused group in which the pursuit of a common

project generates a reciprocal economy of meaning, and by actively striving for

freedom so that those affected are better able to enter into this economy. Badiou’s

event has the same two results, and while the second result of “real change” is usually

more emphasized, I will show in this chapter that the first result of bestowal of

meaning is perhaps the more direct and long-lasting structural effect.

We start first with Sartre’s and Badiou’s respective views of metaphysics. Sartre,

with his concept of the transphenomenality of being, does not deal directly with

being; he does not explain the provenance of the for-itself, instead treating the in-itself

78 Brian A. Smith agrees; see his “Badiou and Sartre: Freedom, from Imagination to Chance,” 212-14. 79 For a brief exploration of Badiou’s intellectual relation to Sartre, see Patrice Vermeren’s “Alain

Badiou, Fiel Lector de Sartre 1965/2005 (Collages)”; for an overall account of Badiou’s place in the

French intellectual world before and after May 1968 (including when it was still dominated by Sartre),

see the introduction to the collection Badiou and the Philosophers, trans. and ed. Tzuchien Tho and

Giuseppe Bianco.

50

and the for-itself as mere conceptual categories. Badiou, too, says that “being qua

being does not in any manner let itself be approached” (BE 10); instead, “being is

what presents (itself),” “neither one” “nor multiple” (BE 24)—that is to say, we can

only see being in its presentation. Badiou’s truly original insight is to see the

formalization of this presentation of being in ZFC set theory.80 Thus, an expression

such as {β , γ} ∈ α, which mathematicians would read as “the terms β and γ belong to

the set α,” means for Badiou that “the multiples β and γ are presented in the situation

α.”81 Badiou calls the set the “count-as-one” to emphasize that it creates a one-set out

of multiplicity (BE 24). So, for example, an interesting property of set theory with

ontological implications is that, if α = {β , γ}, it does not follow that α ∈ {β , γ , δ};

rather, α ∈ {{β , γ} , δ}. But it is true that α ⊂ {β , γ , δ}, that is, α is included

(“represented”) in {β , γ , δ}, because representation is defined as the relation in

which all the multiples belonging to one situation belong to the other: β and γ belong

individually both to α = {β , γ} and to {β , γ , δ}; thus α ⊂ {β , γ , δ}. It is therefore

possible for a multiple to be represented in a situation without being presented, and

Badiou makes extensive use of this distinction, as we will see in Chapter Four.

80 Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice; see Meditation Three of Being and Event. 81 Three notes here. First, I will introduce Badiou’s terms by initially equating them with mathematical

terms, after which I will only use Badiou’s. Both follow the convention of giving Greek characters for

sets and Latin characters for numbers.

Secondly, just as in set theory, Badiou posits that every existent is a multiplicity (recall how

Sartre conceives of individuals as always intersubjective) and therefore a situation, all the way down to

the void ∅ represented in every set (BE 86-87), which Badiou construes as the pure multiplicity that

cannot be counted-as-one in a situation (BE 52-57).

The third note here is that, contrary to Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David Nirenberg, who in their

“Badiou’s Number” mistakenly accuse Badiou of being not just a philosophical Platonist but a

mathematical Platonist who believes that numbers are real existents (583-84), Badiou says, “The thesis

that I support does not in any way declare that being is mathematical” (BE 8), that “there is no cause to

posit that being qua being is number” (BE 24), and that mathematics is merely “the inscription of pure

multiplicity,” that is, of presented being (Subject 47, my emphasis; see also BE Appendix 2, esp. 446-

47). This misunderstanding undermines many of their criticisms; nevertheless, their mathematical

account of Badiou’s thought is concise and accessible, and goes some ways to showing that Badiou’s

use of math (mostly) does not fall afoul of the targeted criticisms of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s

Fashionable Nonsense (Sokal and Bricmont mention Badiou in passing on 180-81 regarding the

admittedly abstruse text Theory of the Subject).

51

Before delving further, we must first recognize the basis of Badiou’s theory of

real change; that is, the referent of his formalizations. His basic presupposition is that

real change exists, and this comes from experience; he maintains that his definition of

an event must “correspond . . . to the ‘intuitive’ idea of an event” (BE 179). The

motivating question of Badiou’s project then becomes: Given that real change (i.e. an

event) exists, how does it exist, and what effects does it have (and how might we

respond to these effects)? Being and Event answers the first question; the second is

addressed in the second volume, Logics of Worlds. Let us take them in turn.

What concerns us with respect to the existence of an event is a multiple that is

presented in a situation, but whose own multiples are unpresented; this multiple

Badiou calls an (evental) site (174-75). We might do with an example: If α = {β} and

β = {γ}, then since γ ∉ α (it is {γ} that is presented in α, and γ ≠ {γ}), no multiples of

β are multiples of α, thus making β an evental site in the situation α. An event brings

into presentation the unpresented multiples of a situation that belong to an evental

site.82 If X is the site and x its elements (x ∈ X), then an event ex = {x , ex} (179).83

We immediately notice a circularity in this formulation: ex ∈ ex. From the point of

view of ontology (that is, mathematics), circularity is irrational and must be ruled out;

hence, ZFC set theory has the axiom of foundation, one of whose implications is the

ban on self-belonging. That this is an axiomatic decision and not a logical necessity84

shows merely that “[t]here is no acceptable ontological matrix of the event” (185-

90).85 And yet, ontology can ultimately describe the aftereffects of an event even

82 Notice that there is nothing here about creating new multiples; combined with his tendency to refer

to the set as the “count-as-one” (i.e. to see something as a unified whole), we might say that Badiou

follows Sartre in his perspectivism as well as in his metaphysics. 83 I have paraphrased Badiou’s own, more strictly technical, matheme: ex ={x ∈ X , ex} (179); he later

writes it as ex {x / x ∈ X , ex}, where the slash is explanatory (181). 84 Forms of set theory exist that eschew the axiom of foundation yet consistently maintain the other

parts of the ZFC edifice. 85 My emphasis.

52

without strictly allowing the event to exist. How does it do so?

If we accept of an event that, as Badiou says, “its belonging to the situation of its

site is undecidable from the standpoint of the situation itself” (181),86 then its effects

must also be undecidable. What this means is that the existence of an event depends

on a radical break with the old situation—it cannot be reached by construction.87

Now, if everything that is decidable in a situation can be catalogued under what

Badiou calls an encyclopedia, then the effects of an event necessarily escape this

cataloguing; in other words, they must be indiscernible. What concerns us here is not

individual multiples, but two different ways of grouping them. To escape the

encyclopedic catalogue of knowledge, the grouping that arises from an event must, in

its finite part (what Badiou calls an inquiry), avoid an encyclopedic determinant by

simultaneously incorporating inquiries that respectively correspond to and contradict

that determinant (335). Badiou points to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s definition of the

general will as an example: Rousseau says that the particular will of all “is nothing

but a sum of particular wills; but if, from these same wills, one takes away the pluses

and minuses which cancel each other out, what is left as the sum of differences is the

general will” (qtd. in BE 351). The canceling out of pluses and minuses is what

allows this particular finite inquiry to avoid a given determinant. However, everything

that is presented in a situation falls under an encyclopedic determinant; thus, for the

grouping that arises from an event to be truly indiscernible, it must not be fully

presented in a situation—it must be infinite. The infinite procedure of determination,

of which inquiries form finite parts, Badiou calls a procedure of fidelity, or faithful

procedure (337); its infinite total is called a truth, which Badiou technically defines as

86 Emphasis removed. 87 On the constructible universe in terms of set theory as ontology, see Being and Event, Meditations

28-30.

53

“the infinite positive total . . . of a procedure of fidelity which, for each and every

determinant of the encyclopedia, contains at least one inquiry which avoids it”

(338).88

One might object here that Badiou seems to be saying that real change can never

truly occur in a situation, for situations are finite but change is infinite. This is not

entirely accurate. It is correct to say that Badiou locates the total results of real change

in a “new” situation that “will have been” (398),89 but he also elaborates on how we

get from this situation to that one. This ongoing process of change depends on the

subject and its forcing of knowledge. Having explored at length the genealogy of the

subject in the previous chapter, we must note with care that Badiou explicitly rejects

traditional concepts of the subject in keeping with the poststructuralist theme of the

decentering of the subject: The subject is that which links an event to its effects

through the act of forcing (discussed below); this means that it is “not a substance,”

“not a void point,” not an “organization of a sense of experience” or “transcendental

function,” not guaranteed to exist, nor is it “a result—any more than it is an origin”

(391-92).90 Exactly what a subject is in phenomenological terms is elaborated on in

Logics of Worlds and will be addressed below; for now, suffice it to say that it is that

which forces knowledge. Forcing, briefly put, is the discernible relation between a

multiple of this situation and a subjective statement (we might conceptualize this as

an encyclopedic determinant) of the new situation (401, 403). Forcing a multiple thus

means to establish its place in the (undecidable) new situation. We see that both a

multiple of this situation and the relation of forcing itself are discernible; it is thus the

88 Emphasis removed. 89 The truth of a situation is only realized when it is superseded by a new event (PE 70); for evental

sequences, see below. 90 For a shorter explication of Badiou’s thought more focused on the subject, see his “On a Finally

Objectless Subject” in the collection, Who Comes after the Subject?

54

subjective statement (and therefore the subject itself) that is not entirely discernible.

Specifically, Badiou says that the subject is discernible, but it also “believes that there

is a truth, and this belief occurs in the form of a[n indiscernible] knowledge” for the

subject (397). The subject spans across both situations, from the discernible to the

indiscernible; it is “[t]he absolute singularity, subtracted from sense, of th[e] Two”

(393).

There is in fact another, different subject that appears alongside this “faithful

subject” in Logics of Worlds: the obscure subject. If the matheme of the faithful

subject is ε

¢ ⇒ 𝜋 , where the trace of the event (and not the event itself, since the

event is ephemeral)91 ε and the subject-body92 subordinated to it (placed under the

bar, in the Lacanian sense) that it places sous rapture (for truths are infinite, i.e. never

completely presented) ¢ force the present of a new situation π (LW 51-53), then the

matheme of the obscure subject is 𝐶⇒(﹁𝜀⇒﹁¢)

𝜋, where a transcendent body C pursues

the occlusion (or negation) ﹁ of the evental trace ε and thus the suppression of the

subject-body ¢, all in order to attempt the abolition of the new present π (58-61). But

what then is a transcendent body?

Perhaps a look at Badiou’s Ethics, published between the two volumes of Being

and Event, might help.93 Here, Badiou points out three Evils, or threats to or

subversions of a faithful procedure. One of these is the Evil of disaster, which “is to

want, at all costs and under conditions of a truth, to force” every point of a situation

91 This was pointed out when discussing Sartre’s Apocalypse in Chapter Two; the event’s ephemerality

can be seen when Badiou calls it “a separating evanescence, an atemporal instant” (LW 384), or when

he notes that a site “appears only to disappear” (369). See also Emmanuel Terray’s “Badiou et Sartre,”

135. 92 This foreshadows our discussion below of the subject-body and its relation to points. 93 That there is some form of connection between the Evils of Ethics and the subject forms of Logics of

Worlds is attested to by Badiou in an interview with Bruno Bosteels, “Can Change Be Thought?” 317.

55

(86). This attempt to force all knowledge, to bring everything of the old situation into

the new subjective one, is an Evil because it denies the basic Sartrean conception of

the human, which Badiou accepts entirely: It denies that “[t]he Immortal [i.e. being-

for-itself or transcendence] exists only in and by the mortal animal [i.e. being-in-itself

or facticity]” (84)—a form of bad faith. The will to force every point “is,

fundamentally, the same as the will to eliminate, in the human animal, its very

animality, i.e. its being [in contrast to its nothingness]” (85). It is both the for-itself

and the in-itself together that make the human.94 Thus, we see that what makes an

event (or its effects) is not any specific content, but the form of that content, and when

the content exceeds the limit of its evental form, the faithful procedure falls afoul of

the Evil of disaster. This, I believe, is the source of the transcendent body: a

previously evental content that has exceeded its formal limit. In fact, the obscure

subject itself might conceivably be derived from another Evil, the Evil of simulacrum.

The difference between an event and a simulacrum of an event, Badiou says, is that an

event is drawn from the void, whereas a simulacrum is not:

What allows a genuine event to be at the origin of a truth—which is the

only thing that can be for all, and can be eternally—is precisely the fact that

it relates to the particularity of a situation only from the bias of its void. The

void, the multiple-of-nothing, neither excludes nor constrains anyone. It is

the absolute neutrality of being—[it is generic and indiscernible.] . . .

When a radical break in a situation, under names borrowed from real

truth-processes, convokes not the void but the “full” particularity or

presumed substance of that situation, we are dealing with a simulacrum of

94 Cf. Benny Lévy: In an uprising, “everything is possible. And how can we keep this revelation from

drowning in political hysteria? Perhaps the answer to this must be: by not pushing it to the limit. The

uprising is just one moment in the long enterprise of human unification” (HN 98).

56

truth. (73)95

We see here another feature of a simulacrum of an event: It is formally identical,

using “names borrowed from real faithful procedures.” Thus, the obscure subject is

that which pursues a simulacrum of an event drawn not from the void but from a

transcendent body. What it forces is a known and therefore necessarily discernible

content, and not the indiscernible and thus radically new perspective of a genuine

event.

There is another unique subject form in Logics of Worlds that I would like to

mention: the reactive subject, which denies the present of the faithful procedure even

while accepting and benefiting from changes in the situation, changes that it believes

are not the result of a radical break with the old situation. In other words, regarding

the undecidability of an event, the reactive subject chooses to not recognize its

existence, instead construing the observed changes as a natural96 extension of the old

situation. The matheme of the reactive subject is ﹁𝜀

ε

¢ ⇒𝜋

⇒ 𝜋, where even though the

evental trace ε is denied in order to actualize a new, non-evental present π, the faithful

subject nevertheless constitutes the “unconscious” of the reactive subject, in that the

reactive subject would not even exist without there being a change sustained by the

belief by some that it is real change stemming from an event (55-57).

From these abstract considerations of the subject, we are finally ready to discuss

exactly what the subject is. We must note at the very beginning that the concept of the

subject is pure form; the content of that form is its subject-body, and it is a subject-

95 “Faithful procedure” is renamed “truth-procedure” or “truth-process” in Logics of Worlds; similarly,

“world” is the new term for “situation.” 96 I use this term in its technical sense; for Badiou’s technical definition and discussion of nature in

terms of set theory as ontology, see Meditation 12 of Being and Event.

57

body so long as it “can bear the subjective formalism” (453) and thereby be put sous

rature by the “shearing effect” of a subject form (479). This shearing effect is why the

subject-body is written as ¢. It is, as noted above for the subject of Being and Event,

caught in the middle, and this cleavage is manifested in its treatment of points. A

point is “the reduction of [the] infinite multiplicity [of a world] to the Two,” the Two

being the Kierkegaardian97 either/or, of which only one choice is faithful to the event

(401); a point “enacts a kind of abstract regrouping of the multiplicities that appear in

the world” into “a binary simplification” (404). But a point is not entirely subjective:

A point is not that which a subject-body “freely” decides with regard to the

multiplicities that appear in a world. A point is that which the

transcendental [structure] of a world imposes on a subject-body, as the test

on which depends the continuation in the world of the truth-process that

transits through that body. A subject-body comes to face the point of the

point, in the same sense that we could say it finds itself with its back to the

wall. (400)

Thus, points are a part of the structure of a world; if a world lacks points, it is an

“atonic” world (420). In brief, a subject is the combination of a subject form and the

subject-body that bears it by traversing the points of a world.

What, it then follows, are these bodies? Badiou’s answer falls under his four

“generic procedures” (BE 16), four conditions of philosophy (340), or “four types of

truths: science (mathematics and physics), love, politics and the arts” (LW 71). This is

not to say that all of human experience can be reduced to these four, but that “other

practices . . . do not generate truths” (BE 340). The delimiting of possible evental

97 Badiou directly connects his theory of points with Søren Kierkegaard’s thought; see Logics of

Worlds, VI.2 (Book VI, Section 2).

58

truths in human experience to these four domains is not fixed theoretically: “[T]here

are perhaps an infinity of types of truths but we humans only know four” (LW 71).98

Under these four domains, the subject-bodies are, for politics, the organization; art,

the work; love, the (bi-sexed) couple; and for science, the result (and its subsequent

theorization) (77). Each of these subject-bodies are addressed in detail somewhere in

Badiou’s oeuvre,99 and we will go into more detail in the next chapter; what concerns

us here is that none of these subjects (in either form or body) is an individual person.

This conception of the subject as “a transhuman body” (481) is a direct inheritance

from the Sartre of the Critique, in which the focus of analysis is on supraindividual

groups that nonetheless are not hyper-organisms (CDR I 538). In the same way,

Badiou preserves the role of the individual under the guise of the “militant” (BE 329)

or the “some-one” (Ethics 44-46). Perhaps here it would be illuminating to quote at

length his description of the “some-one”:

“Some-one” can thus be this spectator whose thinking has been set in

motion, who has been seized and bewildered by a burst of theatrical fire,

and who thus enters into the complex configuration of a moment of art. Or

this assiduous student of a mathematical problem, after the thankless and

exhausting confusion of working in the dark, at the precise moment

enlightened by its solution. Or that lover whose vision of reality is

befuddled and displaced since, supported by the other, he remembers the

instant of the declaration of their love. Or this militant who manages, at the

end of a complicated meeting, to find simple words to express the hitherto

98 In response to criticism that this is overly reductionist, I will demonstrate in the next chapter’s

literary analysis how these four domains are in fact sufficient. 99 For the organization of politics, see The Rebirth of History, chapter seven; for art, see Handbook of

Inaesthetics, chapter one; for love, see In Praise of Love; for science, see Number and Numbers; and

for all four, see Philosophy and the Event.

59

elusive statement which, everyone agrees, declares what must be pursued in

the situation. (45)

So we see that the individual is more akin to a participant in a truth-procedure who is

passively drawn into it. This dialectical relationship of activity and passivity, which

also exists in the theory of points, is another bequest from Sartre.

We saw in the previous chapter (Refutation 4) how both activity and passivity

coexist dialectically in Sartre’s Apocalypse; indeed, if we equate Sartre’s Apocalypse

with Badiou’s event, then Badiou’s contribution here is in fact a detailed elaboration

of the process of an Apocalypse’s development and aftereffects. That is: If we follow

Badiou’s revision and, from the fused group, pledge not to ourselves as a group but

against the denials, suppressions, and negations of obscure and reactive subjects in

the old situation, then we re-open, as it were, Sartre’s conceptual “cycle” of history

that leads back to seriality, redirecting it into a tangent that slowly peters out100 until

the content of a truth-procedure is no longer generic and devolves into a transcendent

body. This also corroborates my assertion in Chapter Two, Refutation 8 that the

center of an Apocalypse is not a specific group but a structural position. But how

should we understand this petering out in light of Badiou’s claim that truths are

infinite, or “eternal” (LW 33)? Badiou’s answer is to divorce the subject and its truth-

procedure from any one event, body, or world, instead enabling the “resurrection” of

a faithful subject (LW 65) by attaching it to a (Platonic) Idea,101 that which

“uphold[s] that there is something universal” (Second 107).102 Note that since

100 “The possibilities opened up by an event are still present within a situation throughout an entire

sequential period. Little by little, they peter out but they are present” (PE 12). 101 A more precise definition is that which “both manifests itself in the world—what sets forth the

being-there of a body—and is an exception to its transcendental [structural] logic” (LW 510). Note that

this usage differs from its usage in Being and Event, where it is mostly used as the ontological term for

mathematical axioms. 102 The Idea enacts two more functions: It attracts an individual to become a faithful some-one and

60

universality does not entail transcendentality (see Refutation 3, previous chapter), the

Idea is able to reorient and change with each new event in a sequence (PE 15) while

still maintaining its universality; it is that of which the subject is the real (74). And

even the eternal truths are not eternally existent:

That it belongs to the essence of a truth to be eternal does not dispense it in

the least from having to appear in a world and to be inexistent prior to this

appearance. Descartes proposes a truly remarkable formula with regard to

this point:

Even if God has willed that some truths should be necessary, this

does not mean that he willed them necessarily.

Eternal necessity pertains to a truth . . . [b]ut [not to] its process of

creation[.] (LW 512-13)

What universal form of real change the faithful subject brings to the table in each

domain is laid out in Logics of Worlds as follows: for politics, a new egalitarian

maxim;103 for art, a new perceptual intensity; for love, a new existential intensity; and

for science, a new enlightenment (77). The notion that events initiate sequences that

gradually supersede one another allows us to reconcile the evident affirmation of

events with the statement that “[n]o-one would wish this [evental] adventure to be

permanent” (BE 294). Like Nietzsche’s will to power,104 the power of events waxes

colors her worldview (Second 105); for the latter, see also Philosophy and the Event, 14. 103 Badiou seems to deviate from this point in a later interview, where he states that the sequence

following the French Revolution (which is the sequence immediately prior to ours today) is focused on

liberty; but even here, the conception of liberty has ramifications for equality as well; see Philosophy

and the Event, 15. In any case, egalitarianism seems to be the more consistent theoretical choice. 104 Beyond Good and Evil, section 212:

Today the taste of the time and the virtue of the time weakens and thins down the will;

nothing is as timely as weakness of the will. In the philosopher’s ideal, therefore, precisely

strength of the will, hardness, and the capacity for long-range decisions must belong to the

concept of “greatness”—with as much justification as the opposite doctrine and the ideal of

61

and wanes with time.

This brings us to the last question of the chapter: How does Badiou conceive of

ethics? And how does it relate to Sartre’s conception? We see in Badiou’s Ethics that

his conception of ethics is entirely oriented toward truth-procedures: “The only

genuine ethics is of truths in the plural . . . Ethics does not exist. There is only the

ethic-of (of politics, of love, of science, of art)” (28). Fidelity to a truth-procedure is

what makes an Immortal out of the mortal human animal (12); it is that which affirms

one’s transcendence in the face of a zeitgeist of facticity—which is to say that “there

are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths” (LW 4).105 Note that

Badiou is not affirming transcendence over facticity, which would be bad faith. He

recognizes that “[a] body is the materiality that life requires” (508), and that

participating in a universal Idea exacts costs from the particular individual (Second

115-16); but the ability to pursue fidelity to events, even in different domains,106 is

precisely what it is to be human: “The grace of living for an Idea, that is of living as

such, is accorded to everyone and for several types of procedure” (514). We have seen

in Chapter Two, Refutation 5 that Sartre’s view of ethics is the pursuit of a fully

human life of future possibility for humans in general, so that we are opened up to the

economy of meaning; and that an Apocalypse, in the midst of this pursuit, also creates

meaning ex nihilo as the motor of this entire economy. With Badiou, we see how the

political is but one of four domains in which an event may occur, so that even though

pursuing freedom is still a key goal,107 the bestowal of meaning via all four types of

a dumb, renunciatory, humble, selfless humanity was suitable for an opposite age, one that

suffered, like the sixteenth century, from its accumulated energy of will and from the most

savage floods and tidal waves of selfishness. (137-38) 105 Emphasis removed from first half. 106 But the frequency of each type of event varies; Badiou notes that political events are “rare” while

amorous ones are “quasi-omnipresen[t]” (PE 66). 107 “In what I call today the four generic procedures . . . , there was at bottom only politics”

(“Commitment” 30).

62

event is a more direct consequence and has a wider significance overall. And yet, the

two thinkers differ merely in emphasis. In the end, I am positive that Sartre would

agree with Badiou’s conclusion: “We are open to the infinity of worlds. To live is

possible. Therefore, to (re)commence to live is the only thing that matters” (LW 514).

63

Chapter Four

A Meaningful Life: Reading John Williams’s Stoner

In his New York Times review essay, Morris Dickstein says that “John Williams’s

‘Stoner’ is something rarer than a great novel—it is a perfect novel” that “invokes the

life of learning as a rebuke to the wasteful wars and cheap compromises of the wider

world.” The author jointly won the National Book Award in 1973 for his next work,

Augustus. And yet neither Stoner nor John Williams are considered canonical for

literary study. If it were not for the passionate effort of a few key individuals, the

work would have been more or less lost to literary oblivion.108 A look through the

literature reveals little scholarship: Three studies speak of Stoner as a member of the

academic novel subgenre of campus fiction,109 two studies mention it in connection

with trauma,110 it is touched on in two studies on education,111 it is brought up as an

anecdote regarding Medieval studies (protagonist William Stoner is a medievalist),112

it is cited in a study on experimental fiction (odd, given how Stoner could be seen as a

paragon of realism),113 and it serves as an example in a study on philosophical

realism114—most of these mentions take up less than a line or two of text.

The most relevant study is an MA thesis by Michael G. Cole, “Existentialism and

108 For an account of how Stoner maintained a core following throughout the 20th century to finally

reclaim the light of day in the 21st, see Claire Cameron’s “A Forgotten Bestseller: The Saga of John

Williams’s Stoner.” 109 Michael V. Belok and Malcolm S. Enger’s “Alienated: The College Professor”; Eric Leuschner’s

“Body Damage: Dis-Figuring the Academic in Academic Fiction”; and Péter Székely’s dissertation,

“The Academic Novel in the Age of Postmodernity: The Anglo-American Metafictional Academic

Novel.” 110 Lee D. Scheingold’s One Silken Thread: Poetry’s Presence in Grief; and Colleen Hill Patton’s

dissertation, “Images of Experience: Decolonizing Medicine.” 111 Liz Marr’s journal editorial, “Widening Participation, Lifelong Learning and MOOCs: Challenging

the ‘true nature’ of the university”; and Jeffrey J. Williams’s “Teach the University.” 112 Bruce Holsinger’s “Medievalization Theory: From Tocqueville to the Cold War.” 113 Ivan Callus’s “Exhausted Replenishment: Experimental Fiction and the Decomposition of

Literature.” 114 Jamie Morgan’s “What Is Progress in Realism? An Issue Illustrated Using Norm Circles.”

64

Selected Contemporary Novels in English,” in which two paragraphs are devoted to

reading Stoner as a novel of “subjective inability” (20). On the face of it, this

evaluation is accurate: Stoner’s life is not a successful one, in the sense that his

marriage is a failure and his career is middling, at best. But if we read the novel from

the perspective of what meaning Stoner gleans from his life, then a whole different

vista of analysis is opened up to us,115 the same broad vista that has garnered this

novel such praise and acclaim over the years, even if for most of its life it has not sold

well. William Stoner is a subsistence farmer’s son born in Missouri in 1891 who

discovers a love of literature and becomes a small-time professor. He experiences

major setbacks and minor successes in his career and in his personal life before dying

in 1956 in seeming obscurity (S 3). This is the bare bones of the plot; it is how this

plot is fleshed out that is of particular interest. As Mel Livatino writes, “Stoner

prevails in his integrity as a man, a teacher, a scholar, a husband, and finally as a

human being of noble dimensions” (421). And it is Alain Badiou’s existential ethics,

as delineated in the previous chapter, that will be our guiding thread.

From the very outset, Stoner’s world is one of scarcity and hard labor: His

household is “bound together by the necessity of its toil” (4). An image of what his

life would be like if nothing changes can be seen in his father’s hands, with its “thick,

callused fingers, into the cracks of which soil had penetrated so deeply that it could

not be washed away” (6).116 And when later in life Stoner returns to bury his father,

he looks on his old home and thinks “of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil;

and it remained as it had been—a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of

115 As Williams himself says of the person who served as inspiration for his protagonist, “although that

man may not have been one of the great teachers of all time he had dedicated himself to something that

I thought was extremely important and it didn’t matter whether he was a ‘success’ or whatever, and I

found some kind of heroism involved there” (qtd. in Wakefield 20). 116 For quotations from the novel, I keep the narrative past tense.

65

increase. Nothing had changed. [His parents’] lives had been expended in cheerless

labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed” (108). Fortunately, a subjective

point arises in this seemingly atonic world, and Stoner is urged to study agriculture at

“the University in Columbia” (5), i.e. the University of Missouri. An only child, he is

reluctant to leave his parents behind, but he goes (6). University life itself is nothing

special; Stoner’s good friend David Masters illustrates this well when, during a saloon

chat with Stoner and their third good friend, Gordon Finch, he makes the University

out to be a refuge for those who would never survive in the world: Masters because he

is too bright, Finch because he is just short of bright enough, and Stoner because he is

too idealistic (29-32). Again, just like the short biographical summary on page three

(paraphrased above), this is a fairly accurate description of the university life of these

three friends: Finch later proves to be, time and again, the advocate of practicality and

the bigger picture, being just short of bright enough to take the mental leap that is

required in order to go beyond “only bodies and languages” and see what the

idealistic Stoner sees, “that there are [also] truths” (LW 4);117 and as for Masters, he

enlists in WWI and dies on the front (39). This brings us to another eventless aspect

of Stoner’s world: war. The First World War breaks his professor and mentor, Archer

Sloane, in the face of the incalculable “sense of waste” (220). When Stoner asks his

advice on whether to enlist with Masters and Finch (the latter survives), Sloane speaks

eloquently of how war, regardless of victory or defeat, is a rejection of the Immortal

in favor of the human animal and its barbarity:

“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand

young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought

back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is

117 Emphasis removed.

66

the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought

up from the slime. . . . The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he

has aimed his life to build.” (36)

Thus, the irony of military “victory” is all the harder for Sloane to bear, and Stoner

catches a glimpse of him from amidst an impromptu student victory celebration,

“sitting in his chair before his desk, his face uncovered and twisted, weeping bitterly,

the tears streaming down the deep lines of the flesh.” From then on, “Sloane was a

broken man and would never again be what he had been” (43-44). WWII has a similar

effect on Stoner himself, by then an assistant professor: In the face of the “all-

pervasive” “public tragedy” (243), “he realized the futility and waste of committing

oneself wholly to the irrational and dark forces that impelled the world toward its

unknown end,” but unlike Sloane, he “withdrew a little distance to pity and love” to

avoid being caught up in the despair (220-21). By his late fifties, Stoner’s emotional

reaction to McCarthyism and the Korean War is less acute, “[a]nd the pity and

sadness he felt were so old, so much a part of his age, that he seemed to himself

nearly untouched” (251).

In the midst of these macrohistorical operations of the contradictions of alienated

praxis, Stoner is, at various points throughout his life, a some-one to all four types of

truth procedures. The first truth procedure is that of science, in the guise of

agriculture. Badiou recognizes only two disciplines open to scientific truths:

mathematics, as the inscription of being (as noted in the previous chapter); and

physics, as an application of mathematics that “theorizes particular worlds” (PE 96).

But from physics, we may derive chemistry; from chemistry, biology; and from the

combination of the two, agriculture. This, though, is at most a reactive subject, one

that adheres to the content of a past event that makes possible these material advances

67

and does not consider the eternal and changing aspect of a scientific Idea. Thus,

Stoner studies not with the affect of joy that is the sign of a scientific event (LW 77),

but unperturbedly, “with neither pleasure nor distress. . . . He was aware that he had

learned things that he had not known before, but this meant to him only that he might

do as well in his second year as he had done in his first” (9). The discipline “caught

his interest in a general way” (10).

This all ends when he begins his sophomore survey course of English literature

under Sloane. Sloane, embodying some-one who is touched by an artistic event, and

foreshadowing the later Stoner, “came to his task of teaching with a seeming disdain

and contempt, as if he perceived between his knowledge and what he could say a gulf

so profound that he would make no effort to close it” (10). Indeed, it is not merely a

perception; Badiou notes in his Handbook of Inaesthetics that an artistic truth is both

immanent and singular—“rigorously coextensive with[,]” and “given nowhere else

than in[,] art” (9). Whatever Sloane or Stoner say in attempting to impart artistic truth,

it will always fall short. This allure of truth quickly affects Stoner when Sloane asks

him what the meaning is of Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXXIII: “‘It means,’ he said, and

with a small movement raised his hands up toward the air; he felt his eyes glaze over

as they sought the figure of Archer Sloane. ‘It means,’ he said again, and could not

finish what he had begun to say” (13). His next period of soil chemistry is suddenly “a

process of drudgery that even now was becoming unfamiliar to him,” and he soon

changes his course sequence to one favoring the humanities (14). He has become a

some-one to an artistic subject. This may seem odd, given that an artistic event is

supposed to find new forms (LW 77), and that the course Stoner is taking is a survey

course and his later specialty is Classical and Medieval poetry; but with regard to

evolving evental sequences (and referring to an artistic example), Badiou notes that

68

“the evental mutation renders the truth of the sequence that precedes it” (PE 70)—we

only truly know what an art form is when it is no longer a new form but is settled and

more or less defined. Thus for an artist, the artistic event ought to be that of the new

art form; but for the scholar of art, it is the artistic truth in old forms that is alluring.

When teaching for the first time, Stoner tries to make his language convey artistic

truth, but, as we might expect, “he heard his own flat voice reciting the materials he

had prepared, and nothing of his own excitement came through that recitation” (27). It

is only later, letting himself be “so lost in his subject that he became forgetful of his

inadequacy, of himself, and even of the students before him,” that he slowly starts to

convey that excitement precisely by not trying to (112-13). This is a good

demonstration of the performativity of an event; once we actively try to maintain the

evental quality while disregarding that against which an event is defined, the fused

group becomes the pledged group, and we fall from “[t]he grace of living for an Idea”

(LW 514) to return to seriality and scarcity. Still later in his teaching career, Stoner’s

participation in the artistic Idea is so intense that, absorbed in an extemporaneous

translation from Latin, he says to the legitimately interrupting president of the

university, “Begone, begone, you bloody whoreson Gauls!” (230-31). He sees the

teaching of literature as his vocation, and “he concentrated all the energies of which

he was capable upon the moment of his work” of forcing that artistic truth into new

encyclopedic knowledge (249),118 even seeing the mortality of his human animal as

just a minor annoying obstacle to the Immortality of truth (258). The art of literature

is the first and last love of his life, forming his bedrock and safe harbor.

118 The newness of this knowledge is defined by the specific situation, and the situation (or world) is

inexplicably caught up with its inhabitant (BE 360-61)—in this case, of course, Stoner’s students.

Badiou, in his decentering of the subject, would hasten to add that an individual is located in a situation

but does not define it; nevertheless, given that individual and situation remain inseparable, I maintain

that Badiou’s thought is a form of perspectivism.

69

But it is not the only love of his life. In the same series of incidents that lead to

his political struggles (discussed below), he meets his greatest romantic love and is

subjectivized by an amorous truth procedure. Before analyzing this aspect of Stoner’s

life, however, we must first discuss Stoner’s wife, Edith. He first meets her at a dinner

party; he finds her fascinating, and fascination, says Jean-Paul Sartre, is the state of

“the non-thetic consciousness of being nothing in the presence of being” (BN 484),

the feeling that one is nothing in comparison with the Other. Moments later, Stoner is

pierced by her look, reacting to which “[i]n some confusion he backed from the

doorway and turned into the sitting room; he found an empty chair in a space by the

wall, and he sat there looking at the carpet beneath his feet” (47). Having read our

Sartre, we know that this form of “love” is inauthentic, and in this form can only lead

to the inescapable seesaw of the Hegelian master-slave circularity, in which each of

the two objectifies, and is objectified by, the other in turn (BE III.iii.1-2). Indeed,

given his fascination with Edith, and how “he knew that he was in love” upon feeling

“that they were strangers” (53), it would be safe to say that Stoner is pursuing the

foundational meaning of his being in the doomed project of “recovering” himself,

which “is fundamentally a project of absorbing the Other” (BN 475). And although

the reader does not yet know it at this point in the plot, Edith is also viewing Stoner’s

courtship as a means to an end, foreshadowed, when she is deciding whether to allow

him to call on her the next day, in her “speculative, almost bold” eyes (49); in this

case, however, it is “a plea for help” (54).119 It transpires that Edith leads a cloistered

life, raised and cultivated to be a trophy wife with no concern for her own passions,

talents, identity, or even sexuated body (54-55). It is in this atonic world that Edith

119 It is curious that, during their short courtship, the foreshadowing hints of this not quite being love

are mentioned by the narrator, who is focalized on Stoner throughout most of the book; or perhaps it is

not so curious, as “love” (i.e. fascination) often blinds us to these unimposing hints.

70

perceives a new subjective point—the appearance of Stoner as a possible escape from

a suffocating patriarchy. Thus, when Stoner proposes and she puts on an “unreal”

expression of surprise (56), we are not taken aback at Badiou’s calling

“conjugality”120 the reactive amorous subject, for this description perfectly befits

Edith; nor are we surprised when Badiou says that the obscure amorous subject,

“fusion”121 of the Two into One, often goes “[b]eyond conjugality, which it

instrumentalizes,” for this is precisely Stoner’s mentality in pursuing the foundation

of his being through marriage with Edith. But the faithful amorous subject, which will

appear in Stoner’s middle years, is in fact the “bi-sexed” “couple,”122 the “enchanted

existence”123 of an irreducible Two (LW 74). This interpretation explains why the

newlyweds enjoy the diurnal freedom of their honeymoon, with Edith exuding “what

he thought were gratitude and love” (68), but at night suffer through the

consummating act of marriage (70-71). It also explains Edith’s long-lasting

antagonism toward Stoner, for she marries to escape the patriarchy, only to perceive

in her husband another one of its ubiquitous guises. Thus, when he tries to assist her

in the housekeeping, she “think[s] herself to be humiliated”; when he tries to cheer

her up, “she accepted what he said as a reflection upon her adequacy and her self”;

and when he engages her in pleasant activities, her response is “perfunctory and

indulgent” (74-75). Faced with this Althusserian méconnaissance,124 in which actions

are intended in one way but are perceived in another, Stoner has but one recourse:

“He learned silence and did not insist upon his love” (74). The Stoners later have a

120 Emphasis removed. 121 Emphasis removed. 122 Emphasis removed. 123 Emphasis removed. 124 For Louis Althusser’s explanation of this term, see his Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,

1350-51; he first employs the term on 1355 and later pithily states that

“ideology=misrecognition/ignorance” (1360). In the Works Cited, I also provide an online version of

the text, citations for which the corresponding page numbers are 162-63, 172, and 183, respectively.

71

child, Grace, who, as the incarnation of an unreciprocated love, is loved dearly by

William but is viewed by Edith “as if the child belonged to someone else who was a

stranger” (87). But Grace, too, will be caught in the ideological crossfire.

After the death of her patriarchal father, Edith decides to assert her own identity

against that imposed on her via patriarchal interpellation: She burns every one of her

possessions connected to her father (117) and remakes her image to distance herself

from her past (118). All of these, according to the narrator, are outward manifestations

of “another change secret and potential within her”—a change of identity.

Admittedly, to be elided over by a dominating ideology is regrettable, but the answer

is not to “shrink the circle,” as it were, around a focal point of identity; rather, it is to

“expand” it to include those who are currently excluded. This is the main political

claim behind Badiou’s employment of the generic or indiscernible within a situation,

and it can be prominently seen in his Ethics, for instance, when he says that “since

differences are what there is, and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that which is

not yet, so differences are then precisely what truths depose, or render

insignificant. . . . Only a truth is, as such, indifferent to differences” (27); or in his

Rebirth of History, in which he says that “by ‘justice’ today is also, or even primarily,

to be understood the eradication of separating words. We must affirm the generic,

universal and never identitarian character of any political truth” (77). Edith’s

newfound self-identity makes life in the Stoner home not stable but metastable,125

and this “delicate balance” (S 120) is soon disrupted. When Edith changes from being

socially active to staying mostly at home, Stoner asks her if something is wrong; he is

met by a “quizzical and calculating” look (121). It soon becomes apparent that Edith

perceives in this overture of concern a renewed attempt at patriarchal capture on

125 “[S]ubject to sudden changes or transitions” (BN 90n2).

72

Stoner’s part, and she strikes preemptively by separating him from their daughter

(122). This is the beginning of a lifelong distance between father and daughter, a

distance intentionally brought about and maintained by Edith.

A conversation between Stoner and Edith is especially revealing with regard to

the ideological distortion at work (125-26): He expresses concern over the forcibly

social and active lifestyle she imposes on Grace that causes her to become sullen yet

hysterical, to laugh often but seldom smile (124), and she replies with genuine belief

that “Grace has never been happier”; he suggests to her, “[Y]ou really do hate me,

don’t you, Edith?” to which she responds sincerely, “Of course not. You’re my

husband.” And although she does not deny that she is “using Grace,” she adds, “I

wouldn’t hurt Grace. You ought to know that. I love her. She’s my very own

daughter.” Focalized on Stoner, the narrator goes on: “And he knew that it was true;

she did love her.”

How should we unpack this dense passage? First we note that, with Edith’s

intervention, Grace is acquiring personality traits that, when observed in her mother’s

own youth, are symptomatic of patriarchal oppression—and that this is despite Edith’s

best efforts at countering the patriarchy.126 Edith apprehends this as happiness

because it is a direct contrast to the Grace under Stoner’s care, which she perceives as

patriarchal. Next, even with all of her antagonism, Edith denies that she hates Stoner;

but note that there are two possible semantic connections between “Of course not”

(i.e. I don’t hate you) and “You’re my husband”: (a) The reason that I don’t hate you

is because you are my husband; (b) I don’t hate you personally, but I do demonstrate

126 This opens up questions of how the practico-inert, here the facticity of Grace’s personality, subverts

Edith’s praxis to result in class reproduction—but a theoretical explication of this process is outside the

scope of this study. Suffice it to say here that the real problem is not patriarchal oppression, but

oppression as such. It is also curious to note that Grace later escapes this oppression in the same way

that Edith does hers: through marriage (247-48).

73

hatred toward you because you are my husband. In other words, the negation could be

directed at either (a) the hate itself or (b) Stoner personally; if it is the latter, then the

hatred would still exist. All of her actions tend to support the second interpretation,

which in turn supports my assertion that her actions are motivated by ideological

méconnaissance. Finally, based on her own childhood, she believes that what she is

doing (i.e. the opposite of her own upbringing) is best for Grace, and the corollary

assertion that doing what is best for Grace is at the same time using her against Stoner

serves to rationalize her view of Stoner as a patriarchal oppressor; otherwise, the

thinking goes, why would he object to doing what is best for Grace?

Edith’s separation of Stoner from his daughter, along with her marginalization of

Stoner’s space at home, drives him to longer hours in his office and full-scale

capitulation on the home front; and it is this capitulation that finally allows Edith to

treat Grace as less of a chess piece and more of a daughter (128). By the distorted

logic of ideology, the less Stoner is concerned for his home and wife, the better his

relations with Edith become: The high point of these relations is during his love affair

(199-200); and when Stoner starts spending more time at home after his affair ends,

Edith at first reacts with renewed antagonism, but it subsides again as it becomes clear

to her that he is there not to “control” her (i.e. to express his caring) but out of

indifference (232).

The affair in question is the amorous event of Stoner’s life, and it takes place

interspersed with his gradual involvement in departmental politics, which we will

discuss later. Badiou points out that the subject of an amorous event is a

“disjuncture,” a “Two” (In 28), that shares a single common point called an

“encounter” (PE 46) and thus “assume[s] a risky or contingent form” (In 28). From

the initial contingency, the subject “embark[s] on a construction of [amorous] truth”

74

with “a declaration of love” (42) that “isn’t necessarily a one-off; it can be protracted,

diffuse, confused, entangled, stated and re-stated, and even destined to be re-stated

again” (43). This construction is the faithful procedure that makes the contingent

event appear “almost a necessity.” Stoner’s encounter with Katherine Driscoll, “a

dark-haired young woman, a new instructor in the department, who had taken a job

for two years while she completed [her] dissertation” (133), takes place in his

graduate seminar on the Latin Tradition and Renaissance Literature, which she is

auditing, and it revolves around the shared point of love of literature and scholarship.

Stoner praises her after class on her presented paper (“the best discussion I know of

the subject”) and is suddenly caught by “a wave of awkwardness and self-

consciousness”; the attraction is mutual: “[S]omething fierce glinted behind her eyes,”

and “she blushed furiously and ducked her head” (139). (As Driscoll later says to him,

“My God, how I used to lust after you” (196)). The disjunction between them is not

merely sexual; Stoner at this point in his career is an established and respected

presence in the department (this is before he is sidelined by departmental politics),

whereas Driscoll has barely just arrived. But the evental encounter is real, and is

reconfirmed the following week when Stoner, apologizing for another student’s

malicious presentation, perceives her smile as only an amorously subjectivized some-

one can: “It was a slow smile that started in her eyes and pulled at her lips until her

face was wreathed in radiant, secret, and intimate delight. Stoner almost pulled back

from the sudden and involuntary warmth” (144). Three semesters later, Driscoll

comes to him for advice on her dissertation (182). Gradually, Stoner becomes aware

of his feelings for her, and under guise of aiding her dissertation, he starts frequenting

her apartment; but when it seems that she will not reciprocate, he “comes to his

senses,” as it were, and gradually decreases his visits and avoids her in the hallways

(189-90). Yet upon hearing that she has taken ill, he frantically grabs a book as

75

pretext and rushes over to her home (191), and after a tense and reserved tête-à-tête,

they both declare their feelings for each other, he in his professorial rambling, she by

interrupting his spiel (193). The narrator’s choice of words to describe the ineffable

existence of their love strikingly matches Badiou’s terminology: Their encounter is a

“strange and terrible thing that they held between them in a single grasp” (193); and

Stoner discovers that “love is not an end [i.e. fusional] but a process [i.e. a

construction]” (194), “a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and

modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the

heart” (195).127 The “[n]ew existential intensity” that Badiou proffers as the

manifestation of an amorous event (LW 77) is also echoed in Stoner’s realization that

“he had started to think of themselves as never really having existed before they came

together” (197), and in the narrator’s statement that “[t]he life they had together was

one that neither of them had really imagined [before]” (198); and that the amorous

truth procedure is indeed indiscernible within an encyclopedia of knowledge can be

seen in the two “given opinions” that their love affair debunks: They find, in the case

of studying at Driscoll’s home, that use of the mind and use of the body are mutually

intensifying rather than inimical (199), and that (as mentioned above) having an affair

is beneficial rather than detrimental to one’s marriage. But, as with all events, the

affair is not perpetual, and in the face of its impending closure, just as Sartre says of a

fused group facing external threats, their bond grows ever stronger:

With a strategy that they would not have been able to manage a year earlier,

with a strength they would not have known they had, they practiced

evasions and withdrawals, deploying their powers like skillful generals who

must survive with meager forces. . . . They told themselves and each other

127 Recall that Badiou also calls his truth procedures “conditions” of philosophy.

76

that they were closer than they ever had been; and to their surprise, they

realized that it was true, that the words they spoke to comfort themselves

were more than consolatory. They made a closeness possible and a

commitment inevitable. (S 210)

The sequence of this amorous event ultimately ends, with a final, wistful trace in the

form of Driscoll’s dedication in her published dissertation: “To W.S.” (249). But

Stoner keeps his faith in the new possibilities of existence that this event reveals to

him, and it is this inspiration that opens up the path to resolving his political

difficulties.

We have an intimation of these difficulties when Charles Walker, a prospective

Ph.D. candidate, tries to enter Stoner’s graduate seminar, the same one that Driscoll is

auditing, even though it is full and it is already the second week of classes. Walker

needs the academic credits and is willing to give whatever answers Stoner wants to

hear in order to get in: Yes, he has “a particular interest” in the Latin tradition; yes, he

knows Latin, French, and German “very well,” although he has yet to take the

corresponding exams. Stoner reluctantly lets him in (132). At the next class, Walker

arrives late and asks a question critical of the entire basis of the seminar, mixing up

Samuel Johnson and Ben Jonson in the process (134-36); and his performance

throughout the semester does not improve, to the amusement and derision of his

classmates (137-38). He continually postpones his paper presentation until the final

week, and instead of presenting painstaking, time-consuming research, he embarks on

a nearly hour-long impromptu harangue (the aforementioned malicious presentation).

The gem of a speech that author John Williams concocts starts thusly: “Confronted as

we are by the mystery of literature, and by its inenarrable power, we are behooved to

discover the source of the power and the mystery”; and it includes lines such as this

77

one: “The work of literature throws before us a profound veil which we cannot

plumb” (140). It is truly “a bluff so colossal and bold that [Stoner] had no ready

means of dealing with it” (143). Afterward, Walker denies any impropriety, declines

to give another presentation at a later date, and refuses to hand in his “manuscript,”

and Stoner is forced to fail him (145-48). Walker, maintaining the bluff, takes it

personally.

This would merely be an isolated incident, if not for two related developments.

The first is that Walker is the beloved student of accomplished Professor Hollis

Lomax, recently transferred to Stoner’s department. Lomax is not blind to Walker’s

shortcomings—he admits that Walker’s dissertation “will not be what some would

call . . . sound” (137)—but he is nevertheless insistent on Walker’s imminent success.

This persistence, which later leads him to cross ethical lines, stems from the fact that

they are both, as Lomax himself says, “cripple[s],” and Lomax uses this fact to

explain why Walker is “rather awkwardly shy and therefore at times defensive and

rather too assertive.” We have here a case of bad faith, in which Lomax (and Walker,

presumably) uses the facticity of his physical infirmity as a rationale to expect special

treatment, thereby eliding over the transcendence within himself to overcome the

particular obstacles of his situation: At a dinner party, Lomax speaks “of the isolation

that his deformity had forced upon him, of the early shame which had no source that

he could understand and no defense that he could muster,” drawing a causal link

between his deformity and his aptitude for literature as his escape from isolation (98).

This is a form of bad faith that unites Lomax and Walker against the world, resulting

in the same ideological distortions based on difference as those affecting Edith. When

Stoner inquires of Lomax about Walker after Walker’s first day in class, Lomax takes

it personally, emphatically proclaiming to Stoner, “You will find him to be a superior

78

student. I assure you, you will find him to be an excellent student.” And it is not

merely a matter of a single graduate seminar; due to department regulations, Stoner

must sit on the three-person committee overseeing Walker’s preliminary oral

comprehensive examination to “judge the candidate’s general fitness” (153). Here is

revealed the lengths to which Lomax is willing to go to ensure Walker’s

advancement: Throughout the exam, Walker gives prepared answers in response to

Lomax’s questions, and when the second member of the committee asks something of

which Walker has no idea, Lomax unerringly steps in to redirect the question to

within Walker’s area of competence. “It was, Stoner admitted, a masterful

performance” (156). Stoner is driven on principle to expose Walker, and he does so

by asking questions “that should have been asked a fair undergraduate”; Walker is

“unable to answer a single one of them satisfactorily” (162). Thus, Stoner says, “I

must vote for failure” (163). Lomax again takes it personally, blaming Stoner’s

decision on prejudice toward “an unfortunate physical affliction that would have

called forth sympathy in a normal human being” (176).

The second related development is Lomax’s appointment as department

chairman (172); in retaliation for Walker, he gives Stoner the worst teaching schedule

he can arrange: Stoner is to teach only freshman composition and a sophomore survey

course, scheduled “at odd, widely separated hours, six days a week” (173). Similar

teaching schedules come down year after year (221), “[a]nd for more than twenty

years neither man was to speak again directly to the other” (177). Lomax’s

interference is also what ends Stoner’s affair with Driscoll; as Gordon Finch, now

college dean, says to Stoner, “He’ll crucify the girl” if Stoner continues (212). This,

along with a “particularly bad” teaching schedule a couple of years later, finally

pushes Stoner to fight back by “teaching what amounted to his senior course in

79

Middle English to his freshman [composition] class” (228), with the threat of

replacing it next semester with his old graduate seminar on the Latin tradition (227).

Lomax cannot interfere with a tenured professor’s teaching methods, and Dean Finch

is unwilling to interfere in departmental affairs, especially not against his old friend.

Lomax has no choice but to back down, and Stoner thus regains the following

semester his old teaching schedule from years back (228).

We can observe from two aspects that this series of incidents does indeed

exemplify a political event. First, Stoner’s position in the department under Lomax is

represented but not presented. Recall the difference between these two concepts from

the previous chapter: Stoner is accounted for in the department and he does teach

classes, but his own existence as professor and scholar is not—he inexists (LW 209),

and the effects of an event are precisely to make the inexistent of a world exist (LW

377).128 Second is in how Stoner apprehends his success: “It was a triumph in a way,

but one of which he always remained amusedly contemptuous, as if it were a victory

won by boredom and indifference” (228). This “boredom and indifference” stems

from the connection of a truth procedure to the possibility of being an Immortal: “A

truth is thus undoubtedly an experience of the inhuman” (LW 71). The third aspect is

a bit more theoretical. Badiou presents “[o]rganization” as the body of a political

subject (LW 77), and in The Rebirth of History, he notes that “political organization

is . . . the constant guardianship of an exception,” of a truth procedure (66), and is

composed of three elements: localization, intensification, and contraction.

Localization is when, in terms of the new political reality, an “occupied space” carries

“the promise of a new, long-term temporality” (35); intensification is when

128 I have decided not to present Badiou’s formal expression of this idea; see the following footnote.

80

“enthusiasm and passion are everywhere” (58);129 and contraction is when “a small

minority [itself] is the genuine existence of the whole” and not merely representative

of it (64). For Stoner and his struggle against Lomax’s oppression, the “occupied

space” of localization is the classroom which Lomax assigns him and which he

“occupies” with a radically different course than that set out in the uniform syllabus of

the department; intensification, although not shown in the novel, is seen in Stoner’s

“enthusiasm and passion” for teaching literature, so long denied him, which

presumably fills the classroom throughout the semester; and contraction manifests

itself when his class scores highest on the standardized junior English exams (230),

thus demonstrating out of the “whole” of junior year the highest degree of existence in

terms of junior student English and composition ability. It is fidelity to a political

event that liberates Stoner from Lomax’s oppression.

We have seen how William Stoner, although leading a seemingly ordinary life,

one of stoicism and solitude, in fact takes part in and experiences aspects of all four of

Badiou’s truth procedures: the entry into university in pursuit of science, the lifelong

fidelity to art, the brief but brilliant flame of love, and ultimate political triumph. On

his deathbed, Stoner’s evaluation of his own life starts off despairingly:

[H]e contemplated the failure that his life must seem to be. He had wanted

friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of

mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before

he was known, the other of whom had withdrawn so distantly into the ranks

of the living that . . . [he could not bear to accompany Stoner to the end.] He

129 The technical definition of intensification is when the degree of self-identity (i.e. existence) of a

situated multiple is maximal, the formal expression of which is Id (A, A) = EA = M (LW 392). I have

chosen not to present Badiou’s use of logic to formalize the structure of worlds in Logics of Worlds

because it has little to do with the ontological aspect of Sartrean-Badiouian existentialism, which is the

main focus of this study.

81

had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he

had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died.

He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it

go into the chaos of potentiality. [. . .]

And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one; yet he

knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an

indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity

that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of

triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had

found ignorance. (274-75)

But then he understands that “thinking of failure . . . [was] mean, unworthy of what

his life had been” (277). For the true meaning of his life, what makes it meaningful, is

“a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that

comprehended them both”—“it said simply: Look! I am alive” (250). It is a passion

and affirmation that he has given “to every moment of his life, and had perhaps

given . . . most fully when he was unaware of his giving.” In the face of lifelong

hardship and suffering, William Stoner never ceases “to (re)commence to live” (LW

514). That, in the end, is what gives his life meaning.

82

Chapter Five

Conclusion: Summary and Response to Criticism

In this study, I aimed to develop the idea of ethics as leading a meaningful life.

Such an ethics is, as we have seen in Chapter One, normative yet non-binding, save

for the one precept that any formulation of such an ethics itself must be non-binding;

and this is made possible by the reverse traversal of the ethical chain. Under this

formulation, even a refusal to be ethical (if that is at all possible) is a value-laden act

and consequently ethical, if not sustainable. We have seen that it is impossible to give

one’s own life meaning without recourse to others, be it to their affirmations of our

projects or to their sharing with us of a common meaning, by which we might enter

into what I call an economy of meaning. We have seen that, given how life is

necessarily temporal, we have an intrinsic interest in pursuing meaning in the long

term; and that given the advent of globalization, we also have an intrinsic interest in

extending the economy of meaning as far and widely as possible.

Chapter Two employed Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism to elaborate upon how

the above might be realized. We have seen that avoiding the bad faith of elevating

one’s transcendence over one’s facticity, or vice versa, necessarily makes the pursuit

of meaning a performative pursuit; that the advent of a Sartrean Apocalypse, which

we might view as the motor of the economy of meaning, deposes the subject from the

structural center in favor of a collective formed in response to external threat; and that

this collective is based on structural fluidity, thereby de-emphasizing difference.

These three points—performativity, decentered subject, and in-difference—are the

three legs of the poststructuralist discourse that is prevalent in postmodern thought,

and the fact that they might all be realized via Sartrean existentialism demonstrates its

83

continuing significance.

However, the Sartrean framework seems to inevitably turn back toward

serialization and objectification; Chapter Three enlisted the work of Alain Badiou to

modify this framework and prolong the Apocalypse, which Badiou calls an event.

Badiou’s key alteration is to shift the fused group from pledging to itself to pledging

against the external threat, or the Outside. Thus, so long as we are a some-one to a

subject of a procedure faithful to an event, the aftereffects of that ephemeral event will

continue. We have seen that Badiou grounds his framework in terms of mathematical

set theory, and that its elucidation ultimately leads to the idea that the new situation

resulting from a truth procedure is in fact constituted by the same elements as the old

situation; they are simply reorganized in such a way that the knowledge of the old

situation cannot categorize them—here, Badiou demonstrates his Sartrean inheritance

of perspectivism. Another Sartrean influence is his dual emphasis on both

transcendence and facticity: Although most of his work deals with the former, what he

calls the Immortal, he is careful to posit that an evental truth procedure does not

attempt to force every point of a situation, and that a truth procedure that does is a

simulacrum whose subject is an obscure subject.

Badiou’s four conditions of philosophy, the generic truths of science, art, love,

and politics, were concretely exemplified in my reading of John Williams’s novel,

Stoner, in Chapter Four. Protagonist William Stoner seems to lead a life of stoical

hardship and ultimate failure, but when we examined his life while paying particular

attention to the four truth procedures, we found that he participates in all four. His

marginal interest in science is what draws him away from his original atonic world of

the family farm; his love of literary art gives his life a guiding direction and serves as

his citadel and safe haven during his life’s hardships; despite his disastrous marriage,

84

he is able to experience love in his middle years through an encounter with a fellow

scholar; and it is a performative understanding of political organization that allows

him to regain that of which a departmental feud deprives him. Stoner’s life is

meaningful not for any results that he achieves, but for his passion for and affirmation

of life itself, on full display in all of his endeavors. Thus have we seen that even the

quietest life can be revealed to be meaningful.

Regarding methodology, I have tried to show how Badiou’s thought is a direct

extension of Sartre’s. Not only do they share biographical and political links and

similarities, which have been noted in the literature, they also in fact work within the

same overall framework. They both conceive of metaphysical being as something that

cannot be known—Sartre’s transphenomenality of being and Badiou’s claim that

being is neither one nor multiple—and thus, both view ontology as necessarily

perspectivist: Sartre in his discussion of the coefficient of adversity in Being and

Nothingness and of moralities in his 1964 Rome lecture, Badiou in his concepts of the

“count-as-one” and of the multiplicity of worlds. They also share the same conception

of the human as both transcendence and facticity (Sartre), Immortal and human

animal (Badiou), that informs their ethics: Both warn against the bad faith of elevating

one half at the expense of the other, and both pursue as their ultimate end a world in

which people may lead meaningful lives. I have also noted that Badiou advances

Sartre’s thought, most importantly in exposing it to the Outside, as noted above, but

also in formalizing the structure of situations, following Sartre’s remark that he would

accept as valid any structuralism that accounts for the workings of human praxis.

Alain Badiou truly is a devoted disciple of Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the rest of this conclusion, I would like to consider and respond to some

possible criticisms of Badiou’s thought. First might be the charge that his thought is

85

too abstract to have any real efficacy. Badiou himself has published numerous works

to give concrete contexts to his abstract philosophical works,130 and I hope that my

own reading of Stoner can also serve as counterexample.131

Second might be a lingering doubt over whether perspectivist change actually

constitutes real change, and is not just “seeing things from a different angle.” The

presupposition that things can “actually” be changed runs into the age-old

philosophical question of how we are to recognize that something has changed if it is

indeed radically different and not merely a case of being two different things. One

way of answering this question is precisely through perspectivism. As we have seen,

Sartre says of being-in-itself that it “is itself. This means that it is neither passivity nor

activity. . . . Being[-in-itself] is equally beyond negation as beyond affirmation. . . . It

is an immanence which can not realize itself, an affirmation which can not affirm

itself, an activity which can not act, because it is glued to itself” (BN 27); the other

half, being-for-itself, “is nothing . . . . The for-itself is the foundation of all negativity

and of all relation” (472). These two halves correspond directly to the two halves of

Badiou’s statement that “there are only bodies and languages, except that there are

truths” (LW 4). What both are saying is that being-for-itself, or truths, is what brings

change to inert in-itselfs, or mere bodies and languages, and what links them and

makes them recognizable when they are disparate. That the for-itself brings change to

inertia is another way of saying that events are the motor of the economy of meaning;

as for linking radical difference, Sartre puts it very clearly: “The for-itself is relation”

(BN 472). From a philosophical viewpoint, there can be no change without

perspectivism. And from a phenomenological viewpoint, we have seen how Sartre

130 See note 99 for some of these works. 131 Badiou himself offers a concrete elaboration in his Saint Paul; another such employment of

Badiou’s thought, this time in a reading of the Socratic dialogues, is A.J. Bartlett’s Badiou and Plato:

An Education by Truths.

86

accurately notes that there is no “objective” situation from which to make

judgments—we are all situated, and we each must view our own world from a certain

perspective. “It is not possible for me not to have a place” (BN 629).132

A third possible objection is the charge of messianism, given how an Apocalypse

and an event are both completely contingent and ephemeral occurrences. Can we do

nothing but sit and wait? Is this not a form of quietism? It is not, and we can do more.

On the individual level, even in what Badiou calls an “intervallic period,” when the

eternal Idea lies “dormant” awaiting “a new sequence” (Rebirth 39), we may still gain

entry into the economy of meaning, as we have seen, via actions of non-binding

reciprocity as delineated in the Notebooks for an Ethics. And on the collective level,

Badiou provides an explanation of how we can prepare ourselves for a new event:

Being prepared for an event consists in being in a state of mind where one is

aware that the order of the world or the prevailing powers don’t have

absolute control of the possibilities. . . . First, by remaining faithful to a past

event, to the lessons given to the world by that event. . . . The other way of

being prepared . . . is criticism of the established order. . . . [I]t’s a matter of

showing that . . . this system does not propose to the social collectivity, to

living humanity, possibilities that do justice to that of which it is

capable. . . . [It] is not an intellectual exercise. It’s in practical procedures

and organizations, in the taking-up of positions and in an activism that

conserves the memory of things, that fidelity to past events is often found.

132 Even Jacques Derrida acknowledges this when he says in a late interview, “I try where I can to act

politically while recognizing that such action remains incommensurate with my intellectual project of

deconstruction” (qtd. in Jenkins 72n5). Although a work of epistemology of history, Jenkin’s

Refiguring History is worth a read since it also engages with postmodern thinkers such as Derrida and

Badiou.

87

(PE 13-14)

In short, we can prepare ourselves for a new event by being open to new possibilities

and by taking action that can aid others in doing the same. This point is in fact related

to the previous point of perspectivism, for as we have seen, the view that possibilities

are fixed constitutes the core of what Sartre calls the “spirit of seriousness,” or the

denial of perspectivism.

Finally, I would like to consider two alternative ethical approaches that claim to

be postmodern and compare them with what I have attempted to delineate above. My

aim here is less a critique of these theories than a juxtaposition in order to illustrate

how a Sartrean-Badiouian ethics can be a powerful account of people’s lived ethical

experience—the issues, challenges, and possibilities for existential growth, both

personal and collective. The first is the vision presented in Richard Rorty’s

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Rorty’s approach in fact bears many resemblances

to the underpinnings of Sartrean-Badiouian existentialism. For instance, he too

believes that humans can only “derive the meanings of their lives from . . . other

finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings” (45); and he is against “common

sense,” his version of the spirit of seriousness, in favor of “ironism,” or being open to

new worldviews (73-74), so that truly meaningful philosophical arguments are based

on not the “inference” of “logic” but the “redescription” of “dialectic” (78). Rorty is

one of the few Anglo-American analytic philosophers to fully embrace contemporary

poststructuralism in the Continental tradition, situating himself in the company of

Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault against Plato, Kant, and

Habermas (79, 83); and he would agree with Sartre and Badiou that a “sense of

88

human solidarity is based on a sense of a common danger” (91).133 Moreover, he

advocates a “liberal ironist” philosophy of “know-how” and praxis rather than one of

“liberal metaphysical” “theory,” and to that end he supports the practical work of the

“novelist, poet, [and] journalist” (93-94)—much as how Badiou says that philosophy

has no truth itself but aids in truth procedures that are its conditions (BE 340-41). But

here the similarities end. The major difference between Sartre-Badiou and Rorty is

that Rorty takes a specifically linguistic approach, so that he contrasts the

metaphysician’s “proposition” with the ironist’s “vocabulary” (78) and speaks of a

person’s deeply held beliefs as her “final vocabulary,” with respect to which a liberal

ironist is always open to change (73). This linguistic reduction reaches its zenith (or

nadir) when he states that “the difference between ‘analytic’ and ‘Continental’

philosophy is . . . that the former sort trades in propositions and the latter in proper

names” (81n3). We note that this linguistic reduction is also a reduction of language,

for Sartre is correct in holistically saying that “by language we mean all the

phenomena of expression and not [just] the articulated word, which is a derived and

secondary mode” (BN 486); but even if we make the generous assumption that Rorty

treats language in this way, it is still an insufficient view of ethics, for “[t]he problem

of language is exactly parallel to the problem of bodies, and the description which is

valid in one case is valid in the other” (487)—in other words, language is a part of

one’s facticity. At most, language as such is a structural system, which for Sartre

means, as we have seen, that it embodies a dialectical interplay of praxis and exis

(qtd. in Caws, “Sartrean” 303). To say that thought and relations can be reduced to

language is thus bad faith; it is to ignore transcendence and the very commonality of

133 One could object here to the psychologism apparent in his usage of the word “sense,” and recall, as

mentioned in Chapter Two, Sartre’s criticism in Being and Nothingness of such mere psychological

illusions, but this would be mere hairsplitting compared to the greater differences between the two

systems of thought elaborated upon below.

89

praxis that fuses serialized people under external threat into a fused group. This

neglect of transcendence is also apparent in Rorty’s conception of that solidarity-

forming “common danger,” for what he has in mind is the “common susceptibility to

humiliation” (91), a harm to mental facticity that takes no account of serialization,

objectification, or alienation, which are forms of dehumanization that, as we have

seen Sartre illuminate, afflicts the wealthy as well as the poor. Rorty’s solidarity itself

is based entirely on facticity: He asserts that “human solidarity is not a matter of

sharing a common truth or a common goal but of sharing a common selfish hope, the

hope that one’s world—the little things around which one has woven into [sic] one’s

final vocabulary—will not be destroyed” (92)—which is a direct reversal of Badiou’s

mantra that “there are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths” (LW

4). Finally, Rorty’s view would benefit greatly from an account of mutual interference

in the dialectical relationship between praxis and the practico-inert, interference that

inherently undermines his call for liberal institutions (i.e. structural systems) that

protect both distributive justice (i.e. facticity) and equal opportunity (i.e.

transcendence) (84-85). We might therefore say that Rorty’s view of a “liberal

ironist” ethics is the epitome of what Badiou calls “capitalo-parliamentarism” (BE

xii), the truth-denying worldview.

The second postmodern ethical alternative that I would like to consider is the

Levinasian-Derridean ethics of the Other. Emmanuel Levinas defines ethics in his

Totality and Infinity as “the calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of

the Other,” by his “strangeness” and “his irreducibility to the I” (43); similarly, his

idea of “justice . . . involves obligations with regard to an existent that refuses to give

itself, the Other” (45). He further says that “[t]he Other remains infinitely

transcendent, infinitely foreign” (194), so that our obligations to her can never be

90

fulfilled. The Other is the Infinity that always transcends Totality. When this

paradigm is taken up by Derrida in his Gift of Death, “the concepts of responsibility,

of decision, or of duty, are condemned a priori to paradox, scandal, and aporia”; for “I

am responsible to the other as other,” but “[t]here are also others, an infinite number

of them, the innumerable generality of others to whom I should be bound by the same

responsibility” (68). Thus, the ethics of the Other proposes an impossible but

necessary ethical responsibility.134 We notice an apparent similarity here with

Sartre’s thought: The elevation of the Other’s transcendence over one’s own facticity

recalls Sartre’s “fascination,” as we have discussed in the previous chapter; however,

let us recall that fascination opens up to the closed circularity of relations of bad faith

with others—mutual reciprocity in which case leads not to the economy of meaning, à

la Notebooks for an Ethics, but to a mere reversal of appropriator and appropriated,

and thus to continued bad faith. Another similarity is what Levinas names the

impossibility of “plac[ing] oneself outside the cor[-]relation between the same and the

other” (36),135 which can also be construed, as Derrida performatively demonstrates

in “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” as the impossibility of not responding (18-

22);136 this recalls the Sartrean dictum that not to choose is to choose not to choose,

or the Sartrean-Badiouian observation that one can never be outside a situation. But

whereas Sartre and Badiou go on to incite us to assume our own perspectives and

values and to act on them, Levinas and Derrida transfix us with the impossible ethical

precept of responsibility to a transcendent Other. Nevertheless, the major difference

between the two pair of thinkers is in what they ultimately appeal to. Levinas and

Derrida elevate the transcendence of the Other to its ultimate logical conclusion: “the

134 See Adam Thurschwell’s “Specters of Nietzsche,” 1199-1202. 135 I add the hyphen in brackets to highlight the fact that Levinas is talking about not a correspondence

but a mutual relation between same and other. 136 See also Shyh-jen Fuh’s “Derrida and the Problem of Ethics.”

91

Most-High” (Levinas 34) or “God [a]s the name of the absolute other as other and as

unique” (Derrida, Gift 68); in fact, Derrida’s ethical convergence with Levinas is

drawn out in a lengthy reading (55-69) of Søren Kierkegaard’s interpretation in Fear

and Trembling of the story of Abraham and Isaac. In other words, given that the

source of the impossible responsibility to the Other stems from God, it is not a

properly human ethics; in opposition to Sartre’s proclamation that existence precedes

essence, Levinas and Derrida define the human essence as impossible responsibility.

As for Sartre and Badiou, we have seen that their ethics rests on a properly human

economy of meaning, and that the motor of this economy is fidelity to an event, which

depends on the subjective decision to traverse points in one’s own perspectival world.

The arrival of an event may be contingent and unpredictable, but whether it is

preparing for an event or forcing its truth, the locus of the ethics of Sartrean-

Badiouian existentialism lies squarely in the human realm.

One cannot be forced to pursue an ethical life; but if you so choose, and when

the weight of truth drags you down, when it seems as if the pursuit is in vain—keep

hope, and remember these lines: “‘Keep going!’ Keep going even when you have lost

the thread, when you no longer feel ‘caught up’ in the process, when the event itself

has become obscure, when its name is lost, or when it seems that it may have named a

mistake” (Ethics 79)! For there is but one call to Immortality: “Love what you will

never believe twice” (Badiou, Theory 331; Ethics 52).

92

Works Cited

Abrams, M.H. and Geoffrey Harpham. “Poststructuralism.” A Glossary of Literary

Terms. 8th ed. Boston: Wadsworth-Thomson, 2005. Print.

Althusser, Louis. “From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards

an Investigation).” 1970. Trans. Ben Brewster. Leitch, et al. 1335-61.

<http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/LPOE70ii.html>.137

Anderson, Thomas C. Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity.

Chicago: Open Court, 1993. Print.

Aronson, Ronald. “Celebrating the Critique’s Fiftieth Anniversary.” Sartre Studies

International 16.2 (2010): 1-16. JSTOR. Web. 20 November 2014.

Austin, J.L. “Performative Utterances.” 1955.138 Leitch, et al. 1289-1301.

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. 1988. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum,

2005. Print.

---. “Can Change Be Thought?” Interview by Bruno Bosteels. 1999. Trans. Bruno

Bosteels. Badiou and Politics. By Bruno Bosteels. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.

289-317. Print.

---. The Century. 2005. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Print.

---. “Commitment, Detachment, Fidelity.” 1990. The Adventure of French

Philosophy. London: Verso, 2012. Print.

---. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. 1993. Trans. Peter Hallward.

London: Verso, 2001. Print.

---. Handbook of Inaesthetics. 1998. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford: Stanford UP,

2005. Print.

137 The online version is the complete text. 138 This is when Austin first presented this material as a lecture; the text was published in 1962.

93

---. In Praise of Love. Interview by Nicolas Truong. 2009. Trans. Peter Bush. London:

Serpent’s Tail-Profile, 2012. Print.

---. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. 2006. Trans. Alberto Toscano. London:

Continuum, 2009. Print.

---. Number and Numbers. 1990. Trans. Robin Mackay. Cambridge: Polity, 2008.

Print.

---. “On a Finally Objectless Subject.” Cadava 24-32.

---. Peut-on penser la politique? Paris: Seuil, 1985. Print.

---. Philosophy and the Event. Interview by Fabien Tarby. 2010. Trans. Louise

Burchill. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Print.

---. The Rebirth of History. 2011. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2012. Print.

---. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. 1997. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford:

Stanford UP, 2003. Print.

---. Second Manifesto for Philosophy. 2009. Trans. Louise Burchill. Cambridge:

Polity, 2011. Print.

---. The Subject of Change: Lessons from the European Graduate School, 2012. Ed.

Duane Rousselle. New York: Atropos, 2013. Print.139

---. Theory of the Subject. 1982. Trans. Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum, 2009.

Print.

Barnes, Hazel E. Existentialist Ethics. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Print.

139 An author’s note appears before the editor’s preface, underneath the French original (translated by

Isabelle Vodoz):

This text is based on notes taken by Duane Rousselle during the seminar I presented at the

European Graduate School in the summer of 2012. It, then, reflects an oral contribution,

with some degree of improvisation, and does not correspond to any written text. I did not

re-read those notes as this would have led me to a complete rewriting, which would not

have been consistent with the initial spirit of this seminar. Consequently, any use or

quotation of this text will have to be accompanied with a precise indication of its origin, so

that nobody could think that I have either written or proof-read it.

Thus, I have provided corroborating textual evidence to support the citation from this text.

94

Barrett, William. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. New York:

Anchor-Doubleday, 1962. Print.

Bartlett, A.J. Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,

2011. Print.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. 1947. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New

York: Citadel, 1948. Print.

Bell, Linda A. Sartre’s Ethics of Authenticity. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1989.

Print.

Belok, Michael V. and Malcolm S. Enger. “Alienated: The College Professor.” Journal

of Thought 7.4 (1972): 280-88. JSTOR. Web. 10 December 2014.

Bowman, Elizabeth A. “Thanks to BHL, France Rediscovers Her Hated Sartre.” Sartre

Studies International 8.2 (2002): 68-93. JSTOR. Web. 6 Sept 2014.

Braddock, Glenn. “Sartre on Atheism, Freedom, and Morality in The Humanism of

Existentialism.” Daigle, Existentialist 102-17.

Cadava, Eduardo, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds. Who Comes after the

Subject? New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.

Callus, Ivan. “Exhausted Replenishment: Experimental Fiction and the

Decomposition of Literature.” Word and Text: a Journal of Literary Studies and

Linguistics 4.1 (2014): 116-35. Central and Eastern European Online Library.

Web. 10 December 2014.

Cameron, Claire. “A Forgotten Bestseller: The Saga of John Williams’s Stoner.” The

Millions. 6 June 2013. Web. 10 December 2014.

Caws, Peter. “The Curve of the Epoch: Sartre at the End of the Twentieth Century.”

Sartre Studies International 5.2 (1999): 15-29. JSTOR. Web. 10 December 2014.

---. “Sartrean Structuralism?” 1992. Sartre’s French Contemporaries and Enduring

Influences. Ed. William L. McBride. New York: Garland, 1997. 297-321. Print.

95

Cole, Michael G. “Existentialism and Selected Contemporary Novels in English.” MA

thesis. McMaster U, 1975. PDF file.

Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge: MIT

Press, 2002. Print.

Copleston, Frederick. 19th and 20th Century French Philosophy. London: Continuum,

2003. Print. Vol. 9 of A History of Philosophy.

Cox, Cristoph. Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation. Berkeley: U of California P,

1999. Print. <http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=

ft5x0nb3sz&brand=ucpress>.

Cox, Gary. Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum, 2006. Print.

Daigle, Christine. “The Ambiguous Ethics of Beauvoir.” Daigle, Existentialist 131-

52.

---, ed. Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006. Print.

De Lacoste, Guillermine. “A Lacanian Elucidation of Sartre.” Sartre Studies

International 8.1 (2002): 18-44. JSTOR. 8 December 2014. Web.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. 1968. Trans. Paul Patton. 1994. London:

Continuum, 2004. Print.

---. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. 2002. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. London:

Continuum, 2003. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “Afterword.” Trans. Samuel Weber. Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff.

Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. 111-60. Print.

---. “Différance.” 1967. Derrida, Margins 1-27.

---. “The Ends of Man.” Derrida, Margins 109-36.

---. The Gift of Death. 1992 Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Print.

---. Margins of Philosophy. 1972. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.

96

Print.

---. “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering.’” 1993. Trans. David Wood. On the Name. Ed.

Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 3-31. Print.

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. 3rd ed.

Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. Print.

Dickstein, Morris. “The Inner Lives of Men.” New York Times Sunday Book Review.

New York Times, 17 June 2007. Web. 10 December 2014.

Drake, David. “Sartre and May 1968: The Intellectual in Crisis.” Sartre Studies

International 3.1 (1997): 43-65. JSTOR. 5 November 2014. Web.

Foucault, Michel. “An Aesthetics of Existence.” Trans. Alan Sheridan. Politics,

Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984. Ed. Lawrence D.

Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

---. “What Is an Author?” Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Leitch, et al.

1475-89.

Fuh, Shyh-jen. “Derrida and the Problem of Ethics.” Concentric: Studies in English

Literature and Linguistics 29.1 (2003): 1-22. Web. 24 December 2014.

Habermas, Jürgen. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical

Justification.” Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. 1983. Trans.

Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

Print.

Holsinger, Bruce. “Medievalization Theory: From Tocqueville to the Cold War.”

American Literary History 22.4 (2010): 893-912. Oxford UP Journals. 18

November 2010. Web. 10 December 2014.

Jameson, Frederic [sic]. “The Sartrean Origin.” Sartre Studies International 1.1/2

(1995): 1-20. Web. JSTOR. 16 July 2014.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.

97

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Print.

---. “Sartre’s Critique, Volume 1: An Introduction.” 2004. Jameson, Valences 223-40.

---. “Sartre’s Critique, Volume 2: An Introduction.” 2006. Jameson, Valences 241-53.

---. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 2009. Print.

Jenkins, Keith. Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline. London:

Routledge, 2003. Print.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. 2nd ed.

Hampshire: Palgrave, 2007. Print.

Keefe, Terry. “The Other in Sartre’s Early Concept of ‘Situation.’” Sartre Studies

International 1.1/2 (1995): 95-113. JSTOR. Web. 27 August 2014.

Kofman, Sarah. “Descartes Entrapped.” Trans. Kathryn Aschheim. Cadava 178-97.

Kohn, Alfie. “Existentialism Here and Now.” The Georgia Review 38.2 (1984): 381-

97. JSTOR. Web. 28 August 2014. <http://www.alfiekohn.org/miscellaneous/

existentialism.htm>.140

Leitch, Vincent B., et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed.

New York: Norton, 2010. Print.

Leuschner, Eric. “Body Damage: Dis-Figuring the Academic in Academic Fiction.”

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 28.3-4 (2006): 339-54.

Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 10 December 2014.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. 1961. Trans.

Alphonso Lingis. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. Print.

Livatino, Mel. “Revaluation: A Sadness unto the Bone John Williams’s Stoner.”

Sewanee Review 118.3 (2010): 417-22. EBSCOhost. Web. 10 December 2014.

Lucy, Niall. A Derrida Dictionary. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Print.

140 The website version differs slightly.

98

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979.

Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP,

1986. Print.

Marr, Liz. “Widening Participation, Lifelong Learning and MOOCs: Challenging the

‘true nature’ of the university.” Editorial. Widening Participation and Lifelong

Learning 15.3 (20013): 1-5. Open University. 11 September 2013. Web. 10

December 2014.

Martinot, Steve. “The Site of Postmodernity in Sartre.” Sartre Studies International

5.2 (1999): 45-60. JSTOR. Web. 10 December 2014.

McCulloch, Gregory. Using Sartre: An Analytical Introduction to Early Sartrean

Themes. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Morgan, Jamie. “What Is Progress in Realism? An Issue Illustrated Using Norm

Circles.” Journal of Critical Realism 13.2 (2014): 115-38. Metapress Essential.

24 March 2014. Web. 10 December 2014.

Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature.

Ed. Peter Conradi. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997. Print.

---. “Metaphysics and Ethics.” Murdoch, Existentialists 59-75.

---. “Vision and Choice in Morality.” Murdoch, Existentialists 76-98.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. 1986. Ed. Peter Connor. Trans. Peter

Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: U of

Minnesota P, 1991. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.

1886. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage-Random, 1966. Print.

---. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1891. The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Walter

Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1968. 103-439. Print.

Nirenberg, Ricardo L. and David Nirenberg. “Badiou’s Number: A Critique of

99

Mathematics as Ontology.” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 583-614. 10 September

2014. Web.

Palmer, Jeremy N.J. “Les Séquestrés d’Altona: Sartre’s Black Tragedy.” French

Studies 24.2 (1970): 150-62. Print.

Patton, Colleen Hill. “Images of Experience: Decolonizing Medicine.” Diss. Georgia

Southern U, 2011. Digital Commons @ Georgia Southern. Georgia Southern

University. Web 10 December 2014.

Plato. The Dialogues of Plato. Vol 1. Trans. and ed. R.E. Allen. New Haven: Yale

UP, 1984. Print.

---. The Republic. Trans. R.E. Allen. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006. Print.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Print.

Santoni, Ronald E. “In Defense of Lévy and Hope Now: A Minority View.” Sartre

Studies International 4.2 (1998): 61-68. JSTOR. 5 November 2014. Web.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. 1946.

Trans. George J. Becker. New York: Schocken, 1948. Print.

---. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. 1943. Trans.

Hazel E. Barnes. 1956. New York: Washington Square, 1992. Print.

---. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume I: Theory of Practical Ensembles. 1960,

1985 revised. Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith. Ed. Jonathan Rée. 1976, 1991

corrected. London: Verso, 1991. Print.

---. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume II (Unfinished): The Intelligibility of

History. Ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre. 1985. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: Verso,

1991. Print.

---. “Elections: A Trap for Fools.” 1973. Sartre, Life/Situations 198-210.

100

---. “Existentialism.” 1945.141 Trans. Bernard Frechtman. 1957. Basic Writings of

Existentialism. Ed. Gordon Marino. New York: Modern, 2004. 341-67. Print.

---. “The Itinerary of a Thought.” 1972. Between Existentialism and Marxism. Trans.

John Matthews from Situations VIII and IX. 1974. London: Verso, 2008. 33-64.

Print.

---. Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken. Trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Davis

of Situations X. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Print.

---. “A Long, Bitter, Sweet Madness.” Interview. 1964. Trans. Anthony Hartley.

Encounter 22.6 (1964): 61-63. Print.

---. “The Maoists in France.” 1972. Sartre, Life/Situations 162-71.

---. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. 1952. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York:

Pantheon, 1963. Print.

---. Search for a Method. 1960. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Knopf, 1963.

Print.

---. War Diaries: Notes from a Phoney War 1939-40. 1983. Trans. Quintin Hoare.

1984. London: Verso, 1999. Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul and Benny Lévy. Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews. Trans. Adrian

van den Hoven. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.

Scheingold, Lee D. One Silken Thread: Poetry’s Presence in Grief. New Orleans:

Quid Pro, 2013. Google Books. Google. Web. 10 December 2014.

Schrift, Alan D. Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism. New

York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

Schuster, Shlomit C. “Revisiting Hope Now with Benny Lévy: A Note on the 1996

English Edition of Hope Now.” Sartre Studies International 4.1 (1998): 63-75.

141 This is when Sartre first presented this material as a lecture; the text was published in French the

following year.

101

JSTOR. 5 November 2014. Web.

Smith, Brian A. “Badiou and Sartre: Freedom, from Imagination to Chance.” Badiou

and Philosophy. Ed. Sean Bowden and Simon Duffy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,

2012. 203-24. Print.

Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’

Abuse of Science. New York: Picador, 1998. Print.

Stone, Robert V. and Elizabeth A. Bowman. “Dialectical Ethics: A First Look at

Sartre’s Unpublished 1964 Rome Lecture Notes.” Social Text 13/14 (1986): 195-

215. JSTOR. Web. 7 August 2014.

---. “Sartre’s Morality and History.” Sartre Alive. Eds. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van

den Hoven. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. 53-82. Print.

Székely, Péter. “The Academic Novel in the Age of Postmodernity: The Anglo-

American Metafictional Academic Novel.” Diss. Eötvös Loránd U, 2009. PDF

file.

Terray, Emmanuel. “Badiou et Sartre.” Autour d’Alain Badiou. Ed. Isabelle Vodoz

and Fabien Tarby. Meaux: Germina, 2011. 127-44. Print.

“Thinking with Sartre Today: New Approaches to Sartre Studies? | Penser avec Sartre

aujourd’hui. De nouvelles approches pour les études sartriennes?” Call for

papers. Maison Française d’Oxford. The Oxford Research Centre in the

Humanities (TORCH). N. d. Web. 15 October 2014. <http://torch.ox.ac.uk/

sartretoday>.

Tho, Tzuchien and Giuseppe Bianco, trans. and eds. Badiou and the Philosophers:

Interrogating 1960s French Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

Thurschwell, Adam. “Specters of Nietzsche: Potential Futures for the Concept of the

Political in Agamben and Derrida.” Cardozo Law Review 24.3 (2003): 1193-

1259. HeinOnline. Web. 24 December 2014.

102

Toth, Josh. “A Différance of Nothing: Sartre, Derrida and the Problem of Negative

Theology.” Sartre Studies International 13.1 (2007): 16-34. JSTOR. Web. 21

April 2014.

Vermeren, Patrice. “Alain Badiou, Fiel Lector de Sartre 1965/2005 (Collages).” Jean-

Paul Sartre, Actualidad de Un Pensamiento. Horacio Gonzalez, et al. Buenos

Aires: Ediciones Colihue, 2005. 109-22. Print.

Wakefield, Dan. “John Williams, Plain Writer.” Ploughshares 7.3/4: 9-22. JSTOR.

Web. 12 December 2014.

Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. 1985. London: Routledge,

2006. Print.

Williams, Jeffrey J. “Teach the University.” Pedagogy 8.1 (2008): 25-42. Duke

University Press. Web. 10 December 2014.

Williams, John. Stoner. 1965. New York: NYRB, 2003. Print.

Wood, Philip R. “‘Democracy’ and ‘Totalitarianism’ in Contemporary French

Thought: Neoliberalism, the Heidegger Scandal, and Ethics in Post-

Structuralism.” Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought. Eds. Jean-

Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. 75-103. Print.

---. “A Revisionary Account of the Apotheosis and Demise of the Philosophy of the

Subject: Hegel, Sartre, Heidegger, Structuralism, and Poststructuralism.”

Situating Sartre in Twentieth-Century Thought and Culture. Eds. Jean-François

Fourny and Charles D. Minahen. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. 165-95. Print.

Wood, Philip. “Philip Wood on Life ‘After the Subject’—the Example of Aesthetic

Ecstasy.” Interview by Izabel Gass. Manifold 3 (2009): 56-69. PDF file.

Zheng, Yiwei. Ontology and Ethics in Sartre’s Early Philosophy. Lanham: Lexington,

2005. Print.