JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

322 Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsevery Other and every Other in me and everyone as Other in all the Others; finally, itis the passive Unity of the multiplicity in so far as it exists in itself; it is thereinteriorisation of exteriority by the human ensemble, it is the being-one of theorganisms in so far as it corresponds to the unity of their being-in-themselves in theobject. But, in so far as everyone’s unity with the Other and with all Others is nevergiven in him and the Other in a true relation based on reciprocity, and in so far as thisinterior unity of all is always and for everyone in all the Others, in so far as they areothers and never in him except for Others, and in so far as he is other than them, thisunity, which is ever present but always elsewhere, again becomes interiority lived inthe milieu of exteriority. It no longer has any connection with molecularity: it isgenuinely a unity, but the unity of a flight.This can best be understood in the light of the fact that in an active, contractual anddifferentiated group, everyone can regard himself both as subordinate to the whole andas essential, as the practical local presence of the whole, in his own particular action.In the case of the bond of alterity, however, the whole is a totalisation of flight; Beingas material reality is the totalised series of not-being; it is what everyone causes theother to become, as his double, out of reach, incapable of acting on him directly, and,simply in its transformation, subject to the action of an Other. Alterity, as the unity ofidentities, must always be elsewhere. Elsewhere there is only an Other, always otherthan self and which seems, from the point of view of idealist thought concerning otherreal beings, to engender them by logical scissiparity, that is to say, to produce theOthers as indefinite moments of its alterity (whereas, in reality, exactly the oppositeoccurs). Ought we to say that this hypostasised serial reason simply refers us back tothe practico-inert object as the unity outside themselves of individuals? On the contrary,for it engenders it as a particular practical interiorisation of being-outside throughmultiplicity. In this case, must we treat it as an Idea, that is to say, an ideal label?Surely not.The Jew (as the internal, serial unity of Jewish multiplicities), or the colonialist, orthe professional soldier, etc., are not ideas, any more than the militant or, as we shallsee, the petty bourgeois, or the manual worker. The theoretical error (it is not apractical one, because praxis really does constitute them in alterity) was to conceiveof these beings as concepts, whereas—as the fundamental basis of extremely complexrelations— they are primarily serial unities. In fact, the being-Jewish of every Jew ina hostile society which persecutes and insults them, and opens itself to them only toreject them again, cannot be the only relation between the individual Jew and the antisemitic,racist society which surrounds him; it is this relation in so far as it is lived byevery Jew in his direct or indirect relations with all the other Jews, and in so far as it