JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

278Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsanalysis, whose self-imposed task must be to reduce it to mechanistic dispersal. Butthis final term of the dissection is not the ultimate theme of the work, though theanalysis cannot be carried further; indeed, through the coexistence of the twoimperatives, neither of which destroys the other, the totality is no sooner atomizedthan it is revived and once again subjected to analytic diastasis. So this double,contradictory autonomy somehow demands of the young bourgeois would-be writerthe literary disclosure of the nothingness of being and the being of nothingness—which reflects, with the hysteresis proper to cultural works, the antagonism of twoclasses, one of which is on the way to its demise. The general theme suggested byliterature-to-be-written is the reduction of the world as totality to nothingness, andthe reestablishment of that totality as appearance. Behind this perpetual movement,however, a third term is concealed, for totality, an optimistic but mortal instrument ofthe aristocracy, is realized on the literary suppression of the bourgeoisie; thustotalization by the master, while devoured by servile negativity, destroys the slaveand his labor by a fixed, total, irreducible negation. No literary works after 1850 arewithout the skeletal structure of this triple antagonism. Revealing it, as I have justdone, we can say that it offers no meaning: the slave denies the master, who doesaway with him, that’s all; or, if you like, the creation is reduced to mechanism, whichis reduced to the absolute void from which the creation is reborn. Meaning cannotcome from these contradictions, which coexist only because their spatial contiguity aspractico-inert determinations has effaced the historical temporalization that producedthem successively. A meaning must emerge from these antagonisms, and the futureauthor is bidden to provide it through his work. He is free to choose it, provided thathe integrates all contradictions in the aesthetic unity of the object produced.The freedom to choose, without ever being entirely suppressed, is nonethelesssingularly reduced by imperatives exterior to the first. Other historical circumstanceshave in effect produced new determinations of the Objective Spirit which, in thetrinity comprised of totality, negativity, and negation, tend to demand the predominanceof absolute negation. For these young bourgeois, the autonomy of literature is thefundamental requirement of that cultural sector and the primary reason for their choiceto write; and yet at the moment when their class triumphs and demands positivebooks, that autonomy seems to them merely a way of gilding its utilitarian moralitywith a little idealism. As a result, these future authors have broken with the readershipof their own class even before they have written, meaning that by 1840, they havebroken with the public pure and simple. Consequently, negativity and the spirit ofanalysis, instruments that were so effective in the previous century, seem suspect to