thoughts on Sartre's "Why Write:

Some things I didn’t want to say last week, lest I spoiled our amiability towards our readings:

Sartre’s take on inspiration doesn’t sit right with me. Sure, the writer should not artificially affect his reader; but what prompts the reader to be thoughtful, capable of “catching” the text? (We will hold off the on the question of reader’s responsibility, since Sartre’s primary concern is with the author’s attitude.) Sartre defines inspiration, that which prompts the reader’s self-application to create, to lie at a text’s “height of silence”: “It is the absence of words, the indifferentiated and lived silence of inspiration, which the word will then particularize, whereas the silence produced by the reader is an object.” Yet what is this silence if not the white noise predetermining a text—a shared understanding of prose and an expectation of its narrative trajectory? For all his language of writer’s self-abnegation and not writing for oneself, writing for Sartre is an appeal to a spirit of “generosity,” a trust between the reader and the writer to fulfill his respective role--in short, a gift economy of sorts. This is impossible for me to swallow, since 1.everyone’s idea of producing, thus realizing freedom, is different (I think the we had a dilemma about this Kantian take on aesthetic judgment last week as well—p65 “every man, in so far as he is a freedom, feels the same pleasure in reding the same work”) and 2. trust in another is a luxury that is so very easily abandoned when push comes to shove; generosity is a rather flailing concept easily mistaken with self-indulgence. But I wouldn’t want to project my ressentiment onto his vocabulary. I only think that the coherence and power of his writing derives from its abstraction and intangibility (literally, not made concrete and thus not pointing to specific cases but hinting at all).

Hence, in On Violence, Arendt’s (strident but not perhaps unwarranted) critique of Sartre’s “irresponsible” and poor adaptation of Marxism in his discourse on violence (especially in his introduction to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth) does not stem from some middling prudence and social vigilance. Granted Arendt is rather pessimistic about realistic possibilities of rebellion and resistance to begin with (calling out them out as “escapist”), much of what she’s talking about has to do with exercise of interpretation or its unscrupulous applicability. I think we can extend her political critique of Sartre onto “Why Write” and his notion of engaged writing. How susceptible is this “generosity” to overstate itself and to be overconfident in its durability? The promises of freedom (or at least the faith that reader and author are each possible of such) take much for granted, least of all a trust in sharing a similar vision of freedom. And this is why Sartre feels so 'of his time' to me.

In this end, the idealism towards freedom feels downright oppressive (where’s my freedom from commitment?) Idealism—that a work exist in so far as the reader can magnetize it (a kind of a reverse of magnetic chain metaphor presented in Plato’s Ion) and hence entrusting the writer to supply a pure presentation and the reader a responsibility that is more akin to fidelity—in Sartre’s writing trespasses humanism to a kind of man-centeredness. (Hm, at least that’s in line with his atheism. Or not really—it’s just transposed into a literary Passion in the writer’s self-sacrifice and reader’s experience of his freedom in the rapture of reading). Am I missing a link when I think existentialism and engagement are thus at odds with each other—or at least, existentialism can only present an egotistic engagement? This isn’t bad at all—just that engagement can best serve oneself more than others. That is to say, I will accept Sartre’s “freedom” if it has no social dimension.