JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Politics319Being of the Other in so far as an Other is the reason for his being. In a sense, we areback with material exteriority, which should come as no surprise since the series isdetermined by inorganic matter. On the other hand, to the extent that the ordering wasperformed by some practice, and that this practice included reciprocity within it, itcontains a real interiority: for it is in his real being, and as an integral part of a totalitywhich has totalised itself outside, that each is dependent on the Other in his reality. Toput it another way: reciprocity in the milieu of identity becomes a false reciprocity ofrelations: what a is to b (the reason for his being other), b is to c, b and the entire seriesare to a. Through this opposition between the Other and the same in the milieu of theOther, alterity becomes this paradoxical structure: the identity of everyone aseveryone’s action of serial interiority on the Other. In the same way, identity (as thesheer absurdity of meaningless dispersal) becomes synthetic: everyone is identicalwith the Other in so far as the others make him an Other acting on the Others; theformal, universal structure of alterity produces the formula of the series (la Raison dela série ).In the formal, strictly practical, and limited case that we have been examining, theadoption of the serial mode remains a mere convenience, with no special influence onthe individuals. But this simple example has the advantage of showing the emergenceof new pratico-inert characteristics: it reveals two characteristics of the inactive humangathering. The visible unity, in this case, in the time of the gathering (the totalisedreality which they comprise for someone who sees them from a window or from thepavement opposite), is only an appearance; its origin for every observer to whomthis totality is revealed, is integral praxis in so far as it is a perpetual organisation of itsown dialectical field and, in practico-inert objectivity, the general, inert link betweenall the people in a field which is limited by its instrumentality, in so far as it is social—that is to say, in so far as its inert, instrumental materiality ultimately refers back tothe order of historical movement—combined with their true being-outside-themselvesin a particular practical object which, far from being a symbol, is a material being whichproduces their unity within itself and imposes it on them through the inert practicesof the practico-inert field.In short, the visible unity of a gathering is produced partly by accidental factors(accidental at this level of the investigation—their unity will be restored in a broadermovement of totalisation), and partly by the real but transcendent unity of a practicoinertobject, in so far as this unity, in the development of a directed process, producesitself as the real material unity of the individuals in a given multiplicity, which it itselfdefines and limits. I have already said that this unity is not symbolic; it is now possibleto see why. It is because it has nothing to symbolise; it is what unites everything. And