the bully and the bullied

 

I was reading Sarah Richmond’s new translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness when it occurred to me: the book can be read as a schoolboy's self-punishment fantasy: 

There I am, bent over the keyhole; suddenly I hear some steps. A shudder runs though me … someone is looking at me

… the anger of the object-Other—as it is manifested through his shouting, his foot stamping , and his threatening gestures … his hand in his pocket where he has a weapon, his finger poised on the electric bell to alert the guardhouse …

… the dark corner, in the corridor, transmitted back to me the possibility of hiding as a simple potential quality of its shadows, like an invitation from its darkness …

… this distraught running across the brambles, or the heavy fall onto the stones of the path …

… that immediate and burning presence of the other’s look … not the feeling of being this or that reprehensible object but, in general, of being an object, i.e., of recognizing myself in that degraded, dependent, and frozen being that I am for the other … shame is the revelation of the Other …

… Fear is nothing but a magical behavior, which aims to eliminate, by incantation, the terrifying objects that we are unable to hold at a distance … I live myself as frozen in the midst of the world, in danger, irremediable …

Sartre’s descriptions sound as if they have been transcribed from an interview with a kid being bullied: being spied upon (while spying upon others), being exposed as a fraud, being excluded, being made to feel incapable, being punished, running away, and accepting all this as normal, as fundamental to life.

Decades later, in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre remains in this paradigm. He describes himself looking out a window at a road repairman and a gardener separated by a wall with broken glass cemented on top of it, a coating that serves to protect the hotel where he is staying from intruders. Here’s how he frames the scene:

“They have no knowledge at all of each other’s presence … [and] neither of them even bothers to wonder whether there is anybody on the other side … I can see them without being seen … I am ‘taking a holiday,’ in a hotel; and in my inertia as witness, I realize myself as a petty bourgeois intellectual … My initial relation to the two workers is negative: I do not belong to their class, I do not know their trades, I would not know how to do what they are doing, and I do not share their worries.”

Sartre's shame freezes him out of their reality, and he cannot conjure how they do what they do or imagine what they worry about. At the same time, his shame pins the workers to their labor – making them stick figures who have no lives outside their work nor any capacity to imagine each other. The world bullies us and, in our acceptance of our shame and our incompetence, we bully the world.

At the end of Being and Nothingness, Sartre offers an aspirational set of questions about the possible actions of free people in the world:

A freedom that wills itself as freedom is effectively a being-that-is-not-what-it-is and that-is-what-it-is-not which chooses, as being’s ideal, to be-what-it-is-not and to not-be-what-it-is. It does not therefore choose to reclaim itself but to flee from itself, not to coincide with itself but always to be at a distance from itself. How should we understand this being, whose wish is to stay at arm’s length, to be at fundamental distance from itself? Is this a case of bad faith, or of some other fundamental attitude? And can this new aspect of being be lived? In particular, will freedom, by taking itself as an end, escape from every situation. Or will it, on the contrary, remain situated? Or will it become situated all the more precisely and individually by virtue of projecting itself more fully into anguish, as freedom’s condition, and by laying greater claim to responsibility, as the existent through whom the world comes to being? All of these questions refer us to pure, and not complicit, reflection.

The problem is, there is no pure reflection. We are all complicit from the moment of our birth. We are both the bully and the bullied. 

We are free to remain complicit. Or we can step into the challenge of trying to break that cycle and to emerge, with others, into something new, more equal and empathetic, non-bullying. If life can be said to have a meaning, that’s probably pretty close to it.