When I first read Sartre, it was like I had been an existentialist all my life without knowing it. He described the feeling, not just the reasoning, behind philosophy. Quite honestly, I have a very strong, natural inclination to dissent and whenever I feel as though I am on the conservative side of a debate, I get anxious. That is how I usually felt when trying to defend German idealism in the face of what felt like not only towering truth (ironic) but a superior position of dissention in the works of Sartre. There was a reason, however, or more of a feeling of an unfinished thought, that prevented me from becoming an existentialist outright. I found the words in the work of Slavoj Zizek, a contemporary philosopher who work aims at the revitalization of Marxist politics with an infusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a means of returning to modernism in the face of the postmodern order, existing in “postindustrial” or “postmodern” capitalism, our modern “risk society”. The similarities in Sartre’s dismantlement of universal meaning and Zizek’s analysis of our abandonment of modernity are astounding and I finally find my answer to Sartre’s existentialism.
First, there is the rather uncanny parallel between Sartre’s literary descriptions of the Nausea and Lacan’s Real in psychoanalysis. The Nausea, as described in the novel, is where the protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, experiences a distinct anxiety where he feels that objects and situations around him directly inhibit his ability to define himself.
His perception of these object and situations and ideas becomes one of sheer repulsion, where he is nauseated by some horrifyingly unknowable aspect of these objects. He describes this as he stares at a cherry tree, which I think symbolizes for Sartre the entrenched order of arbitrary meaning. The tree, as he examines it, becomes composed of all manner of vile and conventionally-recognized-as-putrid substances. He describes it with such utter and vehement repugnance it begins to go beyond description, despite Sartre’s wonderful exemplification of his literary talent when he draws this description out. The nature of this horror becomes clearly definable as it being unknowable. There are three distinct reasons why the Nausea is a perfect example of the Lacanian theory of the Real. The first is that Sartre expresses Nausea to be our universal reaction to a similar affliction of arbitrary meaning. Lacan of course describes the Real as a universal participant in our psyche in which our mind constantly grapples with our inability to relate with everything around us. For example, Lacan says that we can never know the chair as anything other than “the chair”. We will never be able to comprehend any real qualities or ever have a complete knowledge of every aspect of the chair. We can only interact with its Symbolic existence. We, the signifier, can never know the signified. This is the traumatic aspect of the Lacanian Real. If we were to describe the Real, as Zizek does in one of his many entertaining metaphors, it would be a pulsating, horrific mass that seeps. The Nausea can now be seen to consciously describe our horror of having no relationship to the Real.
His perception of these object and situations and ideas becomes one of sheer repulsion, where he is nauseated by some horrifyingly unknowable aspect of these objects. He describes this as he stares at a cherry tree, which I think symbolizes for Sartre the entrenched order of arbitrary meaning. The tree, as he examines it, becomes composed of all manner of vile and conventionally-recognized-as-putrid substances. He describes it with such utter and vehement repugnance it begins to go beyond description, despite Sartre’s wonderful exemplification of his literary talent when he draws this description out. The nature of this horror becomes clearly definable as it being unknowable. There are three distinct reasons why the Nausea is a perfect example of the Lacanian theory of the Real. The first is that Sartre expresses Nausea to be our universal reaction to a similar affliction of arbitrary meaning. Lacan of course describes the Real as a universal participant in our psyche in which our mind constantly grapples with our inability to relate with everything around us. For example, Lacan says that we can never know the chair as anything other than “the chair”. We will never be able to comprehend any real qualities or ever have a complete knowledge of every aspect of the chair. We can only interact with its Symbolic existence. We, the signifier, can never know the signified. This is the traumatic aspect of the Lacanian Real. If we were to describe the Real, as Zizek does in one of his many entertaining metaphors, it would be a pulsating, horrific mass that seeps. The Nausea can now be seen to consciously describe our horror of having no relationship to the Real.
Now, Sartre’s remedy for this common symptom was to recognize that there is no meaning, there is no God, and there is no Humanity. Zizek has a term for this “being of meaning”. He calls it the Big Other. The Big Other, or the Master Signifier, is the thing that overall determines the “symbolic order”. For example, the Big Other of the Medieval Ages was God. All things we related to in terms of God. Leaders were legitimized by God, both calamity and miracle was attributed to God, all art and culture was defined by God, and our interactions with all objects were through God. The tree is beautiful; it is a creation of God (yes, the relationship is better described by a semicolon than ‘because’). Sartre contended that we must do away with this Big Other, it has been our oppressor. Zizek, however, has much to say about this absence of meaning. It all begins with his critique of the modern world. We live, he says, not in a modern world but a world of postmodern capitalism. The May 1968 rebellion has been co-opted and we are now entering the “third spirit of capitalism (1)”. The free market of Marx’s era has been replaced. Capitalism is no longer a force of hierarchalizing authority. It is now a force of enabling fluidity. We are encouraged to have fluid identities and encouraged to search for our Self and do what we please in a societal perusal of what becomes jouissance (literally, orgasmic pleasure, pleasurable experience). Our postmodern identity is a perfect model for a consumer. We are encouraged to make “free choices” about what consumer items to buy and what activities to participate in and what clothes to wear, what music to hear. But that is because of the good old Marxist understanding of “commodity fetishizism”, where we attribute fantastic qualities to the products. (Aside, it is amazing the prevalence of Marx’s forecast those many years ago, especially before the idea of advertisement had really been explored). We are convinced that buying Abercrombie and Fitch clothing will turn us into the unbearably sexy image on their paper bags. We are convinced that the kind of music you listen to can describe you, whether you are “gangsta” or “indy”. But it has been taken to the next level as well. Fifty years ago, men bought cologne so as to express their masculinity. Now young men bathe is Axe body spray because that is how a man smells. Not to express themselves, the product is now what describes “masculine” thus the very concept of this idea is what is now owned. Thus is the same with concept of “cool”, you listen to “cool” music, not to express how cool you are, but to be, by definition “cool”. There is, now a ready made list of items and such to consume to define your identity as you please, which constantly growsm constantly in a state of becoming. But of course, this is another subject altogether and I digress.
Zizek goes on to describe another idea, called the “Other of the Other”. Zizek theory is that capitalism has done away with the Big Other. We live in a world without inherent meaning, without Symbolic efficiency, without any relationship to the Real. It is very much in the interest of capitalism to keep us one hundred percent unsure of our identity and our relationship to the Real so that our now “care of the self” or our search for our self simply becomes one enormous, unending, continuously changing and fluid shopping spree. We live IN A WORLD WITHOUT MEANING. This is where the Other of the Other comes in. Tony Myers in Slavoj Zizek (London: Routledge, 2003) composes it well.
“Zizek talks about a belief in an Other of the Other, in someone or something who is really pulling the strings of society and organizing everything, as one of the signs of paranoia. Needless to say that it is commonplace to argue that the dominant pathology today is paranoia: countless books and films [and Tea Parties] refer to some organization which covertly controls governments, news, markets and academia. Zizek proposes that the cause of this paranoia can be located in a reaction to the demise of the big Other:Zizek says we need the Big Other, we need meaning in our lives. This is why we must return to modernists like T.S. Eliot who despair at a world where we live in a meaningless “wasteland.” This is a greater subject as well but it may suffice to say that our lack of meaning, our lack of an Other, is what causes us to have Nausea, it was causes us to despair and become unsecure. This is why it is in the best interest of postmodern capitalism for us to become postmodern subjects. I jump ahead a little so we’ll come back to this.
‘When faced with such a paranoid construction, we must not forget Freud's warning and mistake it for the "illness" itself: the paranoid construction is, on the contrary, an attempt to heal ourselves, to pull ourselves out of the real "illness", the "end of the world", the breakdown of the symbolic universe, by means of this substitute formation.’ Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture)”
Finally, the unifying similarity that shows the Nausea to be a symptom of lack of meaning rather than a symptom of false meaning is the similarity between “existential dread” and the psychoanalytical idea of jouisannce. Existential dread is a term coined by Sartre to describe the feeling people have when they realize that there is no meaning, that there is no Big Other. The dread is because we cannot cope with the complete freedom, the complete responsibility for everything we do. Jouisannce is a term that is predicated of the Freudian ideal of the “pleasure principle” and the “death drive”. The pleasure principle is the fact that humans prefer pleasure over pain and seek pleasure and avoid pain. This is counteracted by the “reality principle” where over time the brain begins to realize that pain must be born sometimes when necessary. Thus, the pleasure principle has a limit on it. But, the subject always attempts to transgress this limit, “go beyond the pleasure principle.” This, however, results in pain since the amount of pleasure a subject can endure is limited. Beyond pleasure is pain, and the subject finds pleasure in this pain. Lacan calls this painful pleasure jouissance because jousissance is suffering. The term expresses the paradoxical satisfaction the subject derives from his symptom or the suffering he derives from his own satisfaction. Couple this with Zizek understanding of postmodern capitalism:
“For Zizek, lacking the prohibitions of the big Other, in these conditions, the subject's inherent reflexivity manifests itself in attachments to forms of subjection, paranoia and narcissism (Tony Myers in Slavoj Zizek, London: Routledge, 2003),”and you begin to see the connection. The lack of a Big Other, leaves us as subjects COMPLETLEY free. Postmodernism grasps this, but their answer to the problem is wrong. Again Zizek:
“In order to ameliorate these pathologies, Zizek proposes the need for a political act or revolution - one that will alter the conditions of possibility of postmodernity (which he identifies as capitalism) and so give birth to a new type of Symbolic Order in which a new breed of subject can exist. (Tony Myers in Slavoj Zizek, London: Routledge, 2003)”Existential dread then seems to describe a symptom of freedom without meaning, freedom without relation to reality. We are free, yes, but we are free in the sense that we are falling through space, in no direction with no relation. At that point, hedonism seems like a perfectly fine idea. Wearing Nike clothes produced in an African sweat shop is fine because you are free without meaning, you are in space, the child means nothing to you. This freedom leaves us without the ethical conviction that “Nazis are bad”. The fact that the African child worked for twelve hours that day and his hands have been bloodied for the 25 cents he received means nothing, because there is no meaning. Jouissance comes back into the picture because what we do in postmodern capitalism is we embrace our meaningless freedom because we find satisfaction our symptom. We find pleasure in this new painful meaninglessness. We then hold on to our symptom because it is all we have left, thus transferring to “fetishism”. Like when a family member dies, we may hold on to a piece of cloth because within the cloth, the person lives on. This applies in a macro sense as well: our collective paranoia, narcissism, and I would contend to add materialism and consumerism to the list. This is your freedom: Starbucks or Dunken Donuts because beyond the taste nothing really matters.
Sartre is still a philosopher that I will cherish. His literary talent and his role as a dissident intellectual place him far beyond most other philosophers. As I have said, I believe the role of the intellectual is to BE what he believes, like Gandhi and to much extent Sartre. But I have come to realize that meaning is all we have. Purpose is all we have. And that is what postmodernism is trying to take from us. Purpose. (Matrix 2?) All of the symptoms Sartre describes are true, that is why I love his work. I feel what he describes often and I know others do as well. But what I feel when I begin to think about the world and who I am and WHY I am, I find that the source of my consternation is how thinks don’t link up, how things don’t relate. How things seem meaningless. Sartre and Zizek have lead me to discover something. I would rather die for revolution, for humanity, than live in any New York City penthouse with all material desires fulfilled as a postmodern subject, a consumer. Because otherwise, we are merely floating in space.
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