JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

280Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsworld is bourgeois—or at least it is expressed only by bourgeois voices—from 1830on. If man is bourgeois, these children have contempt for the bourgeois in themselvesas the definition of mankind. And that contempt, despairing at its lack of support,extending from their class of origin to their race and back again to their class, havingacquired a sufficient degree of mystification to follow the path to the universal, will becalled dissatisfaction by the most realistic. On the one hand it is the verification ofwhat exists and could not be otherwise (In whose name would they contest thisnature, these natural laws, and the society that issues from it?); on the other hand it isthe global and harmless negation they inherited from Romanticism, defeated in advance,without principle or privilege in this real domain. Nothing else is even declared possible—How would they dare to affirm such a thing when they were raised in unbelief, inagnosticism, or in a superficial religion practiced to give the poor a reason to live andsubjected by the lycée student as a matter of major concern to triumphant bourgeoisanalysis? They may even think, like Laplace, that everything had to be this way fromall eternity. In short, they say nothing; they simply live out an impotent denial of thewhole world, whose meaning is: I am not part of it, I do not recognize myself in it.These boys in no way consider themselves fallen gods who remember the heavens;they remember nothing at all. They deny that being, such as it is, represents them (intheir eyes, in the eyes of others); they claim not to be incarnate in it, not to beobjectified in it as bourgeois or as men through work. And this claim, which by itselfwould be consciously futile, assumes in their eyes the substance of an imperativebecause it is contiguous in them with autonomy as the rigorous requirement of literatureand gives it, ultimately, its content.Autonomy, the necessary means of writing in 1850, the arrogant exercise of theprivileged aristocratic gaze in 1830, appears in any case to the new generation as artfor its own sake. This obvious characteristic of literature-to-be-written represents tothem the eternal imperative that their fathers and grandfathers misunderstood andoriginality, since it will be their task to obey it. Yet if art has no end but itself, if itdisappears from the work when asked to serve, if its major imperative condemnsutilitarianism—without even referring to it—and along with it all human ends, thenthis calm and thorough negation, this perfect inhumanity, can be revealed only to thedissatisfied, who exhaust themselves condemning the world but lack the power toleave it. In other words, in this period as in any other, art defines its artist. No one canaccede to it who is not first discontent with everything; indeed, if he has made theslightest accommodation to real society, he will not even think of tearing himself awayand will attempt to make a place for himself in it, to objectify himself through productivework. Conversely, absolute negation as perpetual dissatisfaction will be merely an