Jean-Paul Sartre: "nefarious and catastrophic"

Today, I am going to stray off my usual philosophico-musicological path and just let off a little intellectual steam that has been building up over about 20 years. I wish to talk about Jean-Paul Sartre. In particular, I really want to bring to your attention something said by Jacques Derrida in the course of an interview published in Points...Interviews 1974-1994:

Q It is then that you began to read Sartre, right? 

J.D. A little earlier. He played a major role for me then. A model that I have since judged to be nefarious and catastrophic, but that I love; no doubt as what I had to love, and I always love what I have loved; it's very simple.  

Q Nefarious and catastrophic! That's a bit strong; you'll have to explain... 

J.D. Do you think we should keep that or cut it? Okay. First of all, I repeat, Sartre no doubt, well, guided me, as he did so many others at the time. ....thanks to him but especially against him, I read Husserl, Heidegger, Blanchot, and others. ...What must a society such as ours be if a man, who, in his own way, rejected or misunderstood so many theoretical and literary events of his time—let's say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille—who accumulated and disseminated incredible misreadings of Heidegger, sometimes of Husserl, could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming a great popular figure? 

Derrida Points...Interviews 1974-1994 p121-122 

I honestly could hardly have put it better than that: nefarious and catastrophic. Dear reader, please note that one more time: nefarious and catastrophic. Encore, once more: nefarious and catastrophic. Especially with regard to his appalling misreadings of Martin Heidegger. It seems that Derrida still retained a certain affection for Sartre for having been the entry point that lead him onto reading other writers in his youth. 

Unfortunately, by the time I came to reading Sartre, I had absorbed plenty of Hegel and Heidegger. When I first read the introduction to Sartre's Being and Nothingness, I was appalled. Totally appalled. If Hegel and Heidegger together dismantle or even destroy ("Destruktion") the edifice of Cartesian dualism, then right from the introduction of Being and Nothingness, Sartre assumes the dualistic edifice is fully intact, undamaged, and starts to build grotesquely Cartesian onto-theological castles in the air, ironically using quasi-Hegelian or quasi-Heideggerian language. It is bizarre that he seems so blissfully unaware that the very grounds he builds his thought on are being undermined—deconstructed, if you will. The words "nefarious and catastrophic" barely begins to capture the utterly base stupidity of Sartre. 

Whenever I even read anyone claiming that Sartre is somehow a post-Heideggerian thinker or that Heidegger even remotely influenced Sartre, I never know whether to laugh or cry. I do know that the person who thinks that is as equally "nefarious and catastrophic" as Sartre. Sartre is at best only a commentary on Descartes. A post-Cartesian thinker, who seems blissfully unaware of the degree to which Hegel and Heidegger has begun the task of the deconstruction of that Cartesian ontology. Arguably, Derrida is a further continuation of that task of deconstruction. To accept that deconstruction is to instantly put a wreaking ball into Sartre's Cartesian edifice. 

The problem is that in place of Descartes positing the dualism of spirit and body, Sartre posits a dualism of being and nothingness. For Sartre, the realm of the body and of the earthy-physical is the realm of being. To this he contrasts the insubstantial world of mind and spirit, which he thinks of as the realm of nothingness. This latter insubstantial realm is bodyless, ethereal, and, like the soul, is supraearthly. The philosopher, according to Sartre focuses on insubstantial and abstract nothingnesses (i.e. on metaphysical entities), while the scientist on the substantial world of being (i.e. on physical entities). Unfortunately, Heidegger's conception of Being encompasses the Being of entities that seem airy or ethereal: these too must be seen as having a Being that is no less a Being than the Being of entities that seem more brick-like. Heidegger permits no duality in Being. He permits no subcategorisation of entities that "are", along the lines of entities that are either incorporeal or corporeal. Even a vacuum or a black hole is something that "is". The being of the vacuum or black hole is characterised by there "being" an absence (Abwesenheit). 

In short, I wanted to say today that Sartre is a complete idiot. A compete and utter idiot. 

The same goes for idiots who follow in his wake and build the edifices of their Cartesian onto-theological castles in the air on top those built by Sartre. Some of these idiots seem to actually think that they are post-Heideggerian in their thinking. That they are somehow phenomenonologists in this grand tradition.  They are not. They are just idiots. 

Chief amongst these idiots, who simply must be named and shamed would have to be Jacques Lacan. I quote this from a book on Jacques Lacan:

These ideas [of Heidegger] were carried over to France by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) after he attended Heidegger's lectures in 1932. 

Sean Homer: Jacques Lacan (Routledge Critical Thinkers) p19.

Nonsense. As Derrida says, the only thing that Sartre took to France were the most "nefarious and catastrophic" misrepresentations of Heidegger imaginable. And upon the edifice of such highly fashionable misrepresentations, idiots like Lacan jumped on the band-wagon to build their systems of thinking. Appalling. I feel like devoting a whole thread to shredding Lacan, but I really don't think he is worth the time or effort. His is the most specious sort of psychobabble imaginable.

In fact, Noam Chomsky summed Lacan up beautifully when he stated that his "fancy words" turn out to mean nothing once "decoded", revealing him to be little more than a charlatan:

Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings everyone once in a while but quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan, just posturing before the television cameras the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential I haven’t the slightest idea I dont see anything that should be influential

From an interview in December, 2012 published at Veterans Unplugged (my emphasis)

Let nobody say, either, that I lack either lack the background requisite to understanding Lacan. On the contrary, I am only too steeped in that background. I must say that by comparison, Derrida seems an oasis, and a paradise in the desert of French modern thought. While I am a aware the Derrida admired Lacan in some ways, we should hardly forget that fact that this admiration was not shared by Foucault. Lacan gives poststructuralism a bad name, and it is time this fact be readily admitted.

Take as an example this next passage from The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience:  

... the term primary narcissism, by which analytic doctrine designates the libidinal investment characteristic of that moment... But it also throws light on the dynamic opposition between this libido and the sexual libido, which the first analysts tried to define when they invoked destructive and, indeed, death instincts, in order to explain the evident connection between the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the I [Id], the aggressivity it releases in any relation to the other...

In fact, they were encountering that existential negativity whose reality is so vigorously proclaimed by the contemporary philosophy of being and nothingness. 

But unfortunately that philosophy grasps negativity only within the limits of a self-sufficiency of consciousness, which, as one of its premises, links to the méconnaissances that constitute the ego, the illusion of autonomy to which it entrusts itself. 

From Écrits: A Selection (Routledge Classics) 

There is little here I could not explain—or decode to use Chomsky's phrase—to those readers who are perplexed by the use of excessively flighty language to cover the paucity of intellectual prowess, however, it fails to form a cohesive system of thought, and is hardly worth the time and effort. It is mostly just psychobabble that throws together a potpourri of intellectually fashionable words to impress the gullible reader. 

Lacan postulated that there was a so-called mirror phase in childhood development from the ages of six to eighteen months old. This occurred in the event of the child seeing itself for the first time in a mirror, and being able to recognise itself. The mirror phase involves a realisation of the alienation of the conscious subject from itself, and the absence of a coherent self that forms a simple and absolute Ego (the "I", or "das Ich"). Lacan refers to the unified simple Ego as the "negativity" of the Ego.  It is a "negativity" in so far as consciousness (the Ego) per se has no substantiality in Lacan's view i.e. it is a Sartrian ethereal nothingness. 

Lacan's notion that the mirror phase occurs in childhood has innumerable problems. For a start this is not, as may be claimed by some, post-Heideggerian. Heidegger dispenses with the term consciousness altogether as being too Cartesian. Secondly, Lacan's theory has failed to be accepted by developmental psychologists, and it seems to be read mostly by people interested in literary or film theory. What, one wonders, happens when a child is blind and unable to look at a mirror? It horrifies me to think that Lacan is suggesting that children who are blind are developmentally disadvantaged. In any case, for millions of years of human existence there were no mirrors, which only fairly recently became more commonplace. 

Worse still, some claim that Hegel influenced Lacan, yet anybody who truly understands Hegel should know that consciousness is a priori self-consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein), and without that self-consciousness, there can be no consciousness. In other words, for Hegel consciousness is always self-referential. Selbstbewusstsein in German also interestingly means "self-awareness" or "confidence". I could talk on but this is getting well beyond the scope of this thread, let alone this blog. In any case, I have wasted enough time explaining "nefarious and catastrophic" post-Sartrian psychobabble misusing Hegelian and Heideggerian anti-Cartesian terminology untimely ripped from their respective systems and inappropriately embedded into a post-Sartrian Cartesian system of thought. It seems that until Derrida came along the French were incapable of escaping the influence of their Descartes, so strong was his influence on their thought. Enough!

Rant over...time to go listen to some more Xenakis.


Further Reading:

For those of you wanting to read about Lacan need go no further than The Absolute Master by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. You may, however, find it a great deal easier to find the book, The Freud Files, which also deals extremely well with Lacan.