Phil Today Renewing The Inf Conserv

ya A ZL, WA hy Uf ZA YAY / (Z oe, xseparated from esthetic and ethical existence-inwardness” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 288), By now it should be clear that this image is not exclusive to Christianity, and it actually begins with Religiousness A. See Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's way: Studies by Various Persons, 444, 44, Micheal Olesen denies that faith exists in Religious- ness A: “the problem of faith in religiousness A has to do with the latter aspect, namely, a hope and trust in God’s love and salvation. The aspect is simply lacking in Religiousness A, and therefore one cannot, speak of faith in the sphere of A” (“The Climacean Alphabet” 282-83). If by “faith” Olesen means hope and trust that the God of Religiousness B, or the absolute paradox—the God-man—will intervene in the world to save me, then he is right that faith does, not exist in Religiousness A. 45. Climacus writes: “Whereas up to now faith has had a beneficial taskmaster in uncertainty, it would have its ‘worst enemy in his certainty” (Concluding Unscien- tific Postscript, 29). This line of thinking is also thor- oughly Pascalian: “If I cannot have objective certainty, which it is certain that I cannot, then I must risk, but I cannot refrain from choosing,” See Blaise Pascal, Pensees, trans. W.F, Trotter (New York: Modern Library, 1941), 81. 46. Climacus continues: “Those sagacious and experi- enced people who know everything, who have arem- edy for everything and advice for everyone—are they obtuse? And wherein lies the obtusity? Their obtusity is that, after they have lost the poetic illusion, they do not have enough imagination and imag- 47. 48. 49, ination-passion to penetrate the mirage of probabil- ity and the reliability of a finite theology, all of which breaks up as soon as the infinite stirs” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 457) This idea is reminiscent of Pascal’s wager, though not conceived as hedging one’s bets, but rather conceived as choosing the life that will be the most fulfilling, when an answer cannot be gained objectively. See Pascal, Pensees: 79-84, The danger of Religiousness B is that God trumps ethics, and the result is a messy conflict if followers believe God is asking them to do something unethi cal (as is the case in Fear and Trembling). Religious- ness A does not pose this threat to ethics because there is no outside God who might whisper something incommunicable and unintelligible in my ear. Tam suspicious of Climacus—the more he denies being religious, the moreI become convinced that hes. How many times does he tell us that he is not religious, and how many times does he tell us that the religious person always goes about incognito? How would we expect a religious person to act? For example, he writes: “This is what makes life so extremely strenuous; and this is what makes it possible that perhaps all human beings may in truth be truly religious, because hidden inwardness is true religiousness, the hidden inwardness in the religious person who even uses all his skill in order that no one will detect anything in him, True religiousness, just as God's omni- presence is distinguishable by invisibility, is distinguishable by invisibility, that is, is not to be seen” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 475). University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, TX 78539 PHILOSOPHY TODAY RENEWING THE INFINITE CONVERSATION SYSTEM AND METHOD IN BLANCHOT Blanchot’s thought is to some extent an attempt to grasp the absolute, or at least to open a conversation with the infinite. My question here is how he sets out to do that, and if I’m asking this question today with renewed emphasis it is in part because of the work of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, both of whom overcome— orclaim to overcome—the constraints of finitude and renew the speculative project. As one would expect, this overcoming of finitude carries with it at least an implicit, if not an explicit, critique of those who have come before. Meillassoux has gone further in this direction than Badiou, con- structing an entire typology of methodological failures which fall under the name “correlationism.”' Blanchot, however, provides a difaferent and historically richer approach to these questions. To make this point, in this essay I ask two related questions: what is the meaning of being according to Blanchot, and how does he know that; in other words, what is his system and what is his method? It’s this insistence on system that distinguishes my Blanchot from that of his many excellent readers. Gerald Bruns’ description of his approach to Blanchot is a good description of the dominant tendency in much of the secondary literature. Because Blanchot’s texts are so difficult and often themselves fragmentary, Bruns practices what he calls “philological” reading. By philology he does not mean the close attention to specific words, their conventional and historical usage, and the ways in which that history speaks in the present. He means the close attention to moments of Blanchot’s texts: “Philology works from the bottom up. Since ancient times, it has meant a concentration on the bits and pieces of texts, moving from one fragment to another as best one can.”? My approach, while heavily indebted to Bruns, is exactly the opposite, Instead PHILOSOPHY TODAY Joe Hughes of thinking the fragment, I want search for—and construct—the whole. This search is warranted for two reasons, one external to Blanchot’s work, one internal. Read- ing from the outside, we can’t help but notice that there is an unmistakable monotony in Blanchot. His essays, whether on Kafka, Rilke, or Weil, continually tend toward a broad but finite set of themes—death, writing, worklessness, and time, to name only four. Some of these are clearly more fundamental than others—worklessness, for example—and while we could remain content to say that his thought simply tends toward these fuzzy concepts, there must also come a time when we begin to push for more specificity with regard to the relations between concepts. This is- n’t just a requirement of a naive reading from the outside, however. Blanchot’s thought, I will argue at the end of this essay, requires the construction of a whole—even if it is ultimately inauthentic. The fragmentary impulse is fundamentally tied to a totalizing impulse. ‘The first part of this essay is simply a broad sketch of the outlines of this system. I should say at the start that I do not expect this system to eventually achieve the kind of self-referential totality of the rationalists’ God. Rather it is the kind of totality that Blanchot thinks Nietzsche teaches us to see: “The incomparably instructive force of Nietzsche’s thought is precisely in alerting us toa non-systematic coherence, such that all that re- lates to it seems to press in from all sides in order to resemble a coherent system, all the while differing from one.” After sketching the outlines of this non-coherent system, I will raise the question of method. System Alain Badiou has claimed that Gilles Deleuze’s work, far from constituting a series of WINTER 2012“monstrous productions,” as Deleuze himself claimed,' was actually only a series of monoto- nous productions. While Deleuze begins by speaking about the most diverse topics, Badiou claims, he always “arrives at conceptual productions that one could unhesitatingly quality as mo- notonous, composing a very particular regime of emphasis or almost infinite repetition of a limited repertoire of concepts.”* I have argued elsewhere that Badiou’s description of Deleuze is basically sound.° What I want to suggest in what follows is that his description of Deleuze works equally well as a description of Blanchot, but with one initial qualification. The themes and structures to which Blanchot returns again and again don’t simply recur because Blanchot was stuck in a conceptual rut and just couldn’t do anything else. In fact to dismiss this mode of writing as monotony risks missing the point, because these repeti- tions, as they appear across Blanchot’s work, begin to take on a series of characteristic relations which begin to look something like a system. The heart of this system is structured around what Blanchot calls in The Infinite Conversation an analysis of “man” or of “human reality”—an expression which he no doubt intends to echo Henry Corbin’s early translation of “Dasein” as “la réalité humaine.” As different as Blanchot’s “man” may be from Heidegger’s Dasein, it at least shares this fundamental methodological characteristic: it is only through its analysis that we can get to the ground of reality. Why, Blanchot asks, should not man “reveal the ground of things—to which he must surely in some way belong?” This revelation takes place in three distinct stages. The first is the level of everyday thought or “everyday speech.”” In The Space of Literature, Blanchot describes it as ordinary, habitual, and useful: “We are used to it, it is usual, useful. Through it we are in the world: itrefers us back to the life of the world where goals speak and the concern to achieve them once and for all is the rule.”"” Not only is it habitual, ordinary and useful. Itis the initial way in which we imagine ourselves in the world, and it carries the promise of a generality which tends toward universality: we imagine we can achieve our ends once and for all. PHILOSOPHY TODAY As useful as it is, however, everyday language is also dubious. It creates the “illusion of immedi- acy when in fact it gives us only the habitual." And this leads to the further illusion that we already grasp what we are talking about when in fact we only grasp popular opinion. The “imper- sonal murmur of daily life, the understanding that runs through the streets of the world and that allows for everyone to always know everything in advance:”"? We could call this first and most superficial level of human reality the level of everyday, communicative language. In it, we look right through language to the thing we talk about, losing sight of the medium in which we think and live. From his earliest works, in order to gain distance from this language, Blanchot employed the formalist distinction between practical or communicative language and poetic language, or language which draws attention to itself and thereby grounds “literariness.”!* Blanchot puts an interesting twist on this distinction, however. He doesn’t seem at all interested in this use of language as a ground of literariness—literature for him is always the ceaseless questioning of the possibility of literature, not a particular use of language." What poetic language makes possible is not literature, but a comprehension of the movement of sense. This poetic language—or what he calls plural language—is the second level of human reality I want to describe. If the level of communicative language is grounded on our habitual relations to the world of things, plural language is the disruption of habit, In poetic language words lose their referential and signifying capacity. What appears, in this situation, however, is strange. It is not, as in Deleuze, a schizophrenic experience of the word’s materiality; nor is it, as in Levinas, a mo- mentary encounter with the il y a. And itis not, as in formalist poetics, a hyper-attention to the sounds of language or to the words themselves. Poetic language calls forth not words, but “the moving space of their appearance and disappearance.”"* This space in which words give way to the movement between words is what Blanchot called, in The Book to Come, Mallarmé’s “new understanding of literary space.”'® Literary creation is possible only by a preliminary approach to the place of extreme vacancy where, before becoming determined and denotative words, language is the silent movement of relationships, that is to say the “thythmic scansion of being.” Words are there only to designate the extent of their connections: the space where they are projected, and which, scarcely designated, is folded and bent, not actually existing anywhere it is.” Putting aside for a moment Blanchot’s sug- gestion that this literary space is genetically prior to referential, communicative language—that the words of poetic language will eventually become the words of communicative language—I want to emphasize this point: in poetic language words mean very little, if anything. They are there not to designate something or mean something else. They form a silent, moving network of relations: A sentence is not content with unfolding ina linear ‘way; it opens up. This opening allows to be ar- ranged, extricated, spaced, and compressed, at depths on different levels, other movements of phrases, other rhythms of words, which are related to each other according to firm considerations of structure,” This emphasis on the connections between words is crucial, and it is a point on which Blanchot will distinguish himself from Heideg- ger. Heidegger pays too much attention to words at the expense of their movements within this mobile “structure.” He treats words as individuals, “concentrated in themselves,” with histories that need to be understood if we ever want to grasp them. What he fails to see, though, are “the connections of words, and even less . . . the anterior space that these connections suppose, and whose original movement alone makes language possible.”"” It is this anterior space that Blanchot’ s Mallarmé attends to and affirms: “For Mallarmé, language is not made even of pure words: it is what words have always already dis- appeared into, the oscillating movement of appearance and disappearance.” This mobile network revealed in poetic language is not the final destination of Blanchot’s thought. Across the quotations above Blanchot makes two important statements regarding the logical priority of these levels to one another. I have already pointed to the first: “Before becoming determined and denotative words, language is the silent movement of relationships.” Here, what I am calling everyday speech clearly requires, in some undefined way, poetic or plural language. But this silent movement itself refers to an even more primordial level: “the anterior space that these connections suppose.” This obscure “place” is the third level of human reality that I am sketching here. It is denoted by an astonishing number of expressions across Blanchot’s oeuvre: worklessness, the neutral, the obscure, the unique event, the profound call, universal corruption, the God that hides, Difference, the incomprehensible unity, the pure point of inspiration, the mysterious point, and so on. It is “that point,” as Deleuze puts it, “of which Maurice Blanchot speaks endlessly: that blind acephalic, aphasic and aleatory original point which designates the ‘impossibility of thinking that is thought, that point at which ‘powerlessness’ is transmuted into power.””! Although this has certain immediate affinities with the Heideggarian event—it is that place at which Dasein simultaneously touches Being, but also loses its touch with being*W—in what follows I’m going to use Deleuze’s expression to refer to it: the aleatory point. This point is the ground of human reality. If everydayness is what comes after the connections of poetic language, this point is what makes poetic language possible. It is what opens up the place of extreme vacancy in which it animates the connections between words and ultimately hands them over to everyday comprehension. Blanchot never fails to emphasize that this is an odd ground, and that from one point of view you could see it as a universal un-grounding and even corruption. But rather than elaborating the para- doxes of this point—which has been exhaust- ively described in the secondary literature—I want turn my attention to the unity of these three levels. SYSTEM AND METHOD IN BLANCHOTIt seems that one can move up and down, across all three of them. One can move regressively from everyday language back to plural language back to the aleatory point. This is what happens in “literary reading.” If we call the text we read communicatively “the book” and the one we read poetically “the work,” in literary reading we “welcome” this third level by affirming it across the distance of the other two: literary reading “lifts the book to the work which itis; and this transport is the same as the one which lifts the work to being.””* Here we move from the “book” to the “work” to “being” or the aleatory point. But, just as we can move regressively from the book back to the work to “being,” it is possible to move progressively. One can treat the aleatory point as an “event” which marks the origin of the “work” and ultimately of the “book.” “That the work is marks the explosive brilliance of a unique event which comprehension can then take over’! The aleatory point thus appears as a unique event which grants the work its being and thus grounds the possibility of comprehending the “book” in a habitual reading at the level of everyday language. Indeed, Blanchot frequently tells us that even in our most banal everyday conversation this unique event is operative. This ale~ atory point therefore seems to form a genuinely “genetic principle” from which we can think the totality of human reality.* Blanchot will often characterize this genesis in Heideggarian terms—as a falling or as a flight of man from himself—for this moment of the origin is also the moment of our absolute passivity in which we come face to face with our finitude, or the eventuality of our own death.”° Heidegger's thesis is well known: “Dasein is in constant flight in the face of death:?”*” What I want to emphasize here, however, is that this flight or falling away is, for Heidegger, constitutive of the upper, inauthentic levels of Dasein: “falling away,” Heidegger says, “is a kind of falling constitutive of Dasein itself”’* What we discover at the end of the analytic of Dasein is that the entire structure of understanding—from discovered- ness or disclosedness to ambiguity to idle talk— can be read as a flight from death.” Similarly, Blanchot will say that we necessarily refuse PHILOSOPHY TODAY death, and that the instrument of this refusal is language itself. “The concept (therefore all language) is the instrument in this enterprise of es- tablishing asecure reign. We untiringly construct the world in order that the hidden dissolution, the universal corruption that governs what ‘is’ should be forgotten in favor of aclear and defined coherence of notions and objects, relations and forms—the work of tranquil man.”*” Nobody is immune from this flight, but nobody is more vocal about it than Paul Claudel (though Lautréamont has a suspiciously similar tendency). In an early essay, “Claudel and the Infinite,’ Blanchot shapes Claudel’s entire career around this sketch I have briefly drawn. Claudel is torn, Blanchot says, by his simultaneous pro- clivity for both poles, the aleatory point and everyday language. Claudel cannot help but hear that “profound, eternal call, in the depths of Hell, from Eurydice to Orpheus.” But it isn’t until much later in his career that he begins to give himself over to the “silent presence from below” and begins to write in that “other language.” For most of his career he flees from this aleatory point. He “turns away from himself with resolute aversion. He does not watch himself suffer, and he does not want others to look at him.” He does this primarily though his language. In- stead of affirming his essence in a language which always runs the risk of meaning nothing, he writes like a “bureaucrat,” in “a full, solid, and actual language” which only accelerates the flight from Burydice’s call.°° My claim thus far is that there is a more or less coherent system which articulates the most general structures of human reality. The question I want to ask next is by what method Blanchot se- cures these claims. 1am, however, going to leave what is at this point the most obvious method aside: Heideggarian phenomenology. This is in part because it has already been overed in the secondary literature. But it is also because what I want to emphasize below is that Blanchot adopts a plurality of methods. Method Ofcourse Blanchot rarely talks about method, and as a result, much of this is reconstructive or even blatantly constructive. He does however develop a consistent concept or “research” or of “searching” (chercher), and to some extent, what follows is a development and determination of this concept. Blanchot makes two basic claims about research: (1) it is, in principle, formless; but (2) itis often, in fact, caught up in a historical tradition, Thus at the beginning of The Infinite Conversation, he writes, “Poetry has a form, the novel has a form; research, the research in which the movement of all research is in play, seems unaware that it does not have a form or, worse still, refuses to question the form that it borrows from the tradition.” Blanchot develops this second claim even further in the lines that follow: itis not simply that thinking remains unknowingly en- tangled in the tradition, but in so doing it loses its orientation and its capacity to think. It is not simply an illegitimate borrowing, itis like not know- ing what language you're speaking. Blanchot, perhaps for this reason, continually mobilizes— knowingly—various methods from across the history of philosophy. In what follows am going to develop only four: the Kantian method, dialectical method, (Levinas’) phenomenological method, and, finally, what I will call, following Schelling, the experimental ot constructive method.* Kant and Phenomenology I said above that my account of Blanchot’s human reality seemed obviously Heideggarian, But this double movement by which we regress back to the aleatory point, and then take that point as a genetic principle which could, in turn, ground a progressive movement back up to everyday language is perhaps even more obviously Kantian. In fact Blanchot’s double movement seems to follow what Kant called, in the Prolegomena, the “progressive” and “regressive” methods.*” Kant was renaming Leibniz’s earlier distinction between analytic and synthetic methods. Leibniz described the two this way: in the synthetic method, we “begin from principles and run through truths in good order.” Analysis, on the other hand, “goes back to the principles... just as if neither we nor others had discovered anything before. In the analytic method we move from something already well-established back to its OO ,,|_|_—_— C ,_yyxxxxXyCXKy, _ _ _ _ _ §« rr conditions. In the synthetic method we rise from conditions to the conditioned. It is according to these two methods, as Mar- tial Guéroult points out, that Kant structured his “popular works,” the Groundwork and the Prole- gomena (whereas in the critiques, Kant pro- ceeded entirely synthetically).' Thus, the Prole- gomena takes the well-established facts of mathematics and natural science and hunts for their conditions. And in the preface to the Groundwork, Kant writes, ‘The method I have adopted in this book is, I believe, one which will work best if we proceed ana- lytically from common knowledge to the formula- tion of a supreme principle and then back again synthetically from an examination of this principle and its origins to the common knowledge in which we find its application.” The Groundwork claims thus to move from “ordinary rational knowledge of morality” to a philosophical knowledge, and finally back to a principle which will ground a critique of practical reason. Is this not the method I used above in Blan- chot’s analysis of human reality? There we move, regressively, first from everyday language back to plural speech, and then back to the aleatory point, the supreme principle or the unconditioned behind which we can find no other proposition But, we could equally move progressively. We could take the point as ground and proceed through plural to everyday language. And this progressive movement wouldn’t be the flight of Paul Claudel. It would be a measured, methodi- cal gait. There certainly seems to be a prima facie truth to this, but any assertion that this regressive/progressive couplet is Kantian would have to be qualified in a fundamental way. Unlike Kantian “deduction,” the regressive movement from a Proposition to its condition was, at least in principle, a logical movement for Leibniz and Kant. Blanchot’s movement from everyday speech back to plural speech, however, is not at all logical. He often simply says that everyday language “seems” to “be associated with” the lower lee els.** In fact, far from being included in the con- SYSTEM AND METHOD IN BLANCHOTcept of another stage, “Each stage,” Blanchot says, “denies all the others? And it is by no means clear that poetic language could be con- sidered as a logical condition of communicative language or that an analysis of the concept could get ever you there. This failure of the synthetic/analytic method to reliably approach human reality is one of the early Levinas’s most persistent claims. For Levinas, phenomenology is not simply an alter- native method that one might turn to on the basis of a “metaphysical decision,” as Paul Ricoeur puts it. Rather the discoveries of phenomenology represent the ruin of the Kantian method. In “Reflections on Phenomenological “Tech- nique,” Levinas puts his argument in terms roughly analogous to the project of the Prole- gomena: phenomenology’s project is to ground mathematical science. Its central discovery, however, is that the ground of “scientific reality” (or what he calls “naturalism” in the Theory of Intu- ition) is “neither analytic, synthetic, nor dialectic, but intentional’ If intentionality is the ruin of the analytic, synthetic and dialectical methods, it is because it enters into all kinds of non-logical relations. It forms “weaves” which are incapable of relating to one another as either analytic or synthetic a priori propositions. This doesn’t mean that as one moves down through the lower levels of the subject, the regression would be dis- continuous; it just means that that continuity is not logical and that each step along the way can not be deduced from a previous or later stage.” Levinas is explicit about this: in “Sphenomenol- ogy, one no longer deduces in the mathematical, or logical sense of the word?"* Rather the only method left is that of philosophical intuition. “The experience of the facts of consciousness is the origin of the all the notions that can be legitimately employed.”” “Description,” Levinas claims, finally receives here its full philosophical “dignity.” When Blanchot says, then, that plural language “supposes” the place of extreme vacancy opened up by the aleatory point and that this place “makes possible” poetic language, he seems to be speaking not in a Kantian but in a Levinasian vein. We discover poetic language PHILOSOPHY TODAY not through a deduction, but through our “experience” of it. Indeed, Blanchot seems to have something like a weak theory of description,” and he occasionally gestures toward a theory of intentionality. At one point he even goes so far as to “quickly note that without the phenomenology of Husserl it is very unlikely that knowledge would have been so directly able to grasp the space that is proper to it” Thus, the progression and regression which so many of his authors from Claudel to Lautréamont live seems indeed to be a descriptive rather than a logical progression. There is, however, a crucial difference between Blanchot and Levinas (or phenomenology more generally) here which compromises any easy claim that Blanchot is mobilizing a specifically phenomenological form of experience and description. For Levinas, the “fundamental intuition of Husserlian philosophy consists of attrib- uting absolute existence to concrete conscious life? It is exactly this that gives intuition its au- thority and description its dignity. But Blanchot is not at all ready to concede the primacy of consciousness. This is in part because he is unwilling to accept the subjectivist orientations of phenomenology. His approach to the absolute through language rather than kinesthetics and temporal synthesis forbids this. The consequence of this is that phenomenological description and experience, while necessary, remain fundamentally un- certain for Blanchot. For this reason, we have to return to Kant. Rather than saying Blanchot practices a kind of phenomenological description, we could venture that Blanchot seems to practice what Kant called “observation.” Kant describes this in “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy.” The “famous man” in the following passage is the sometime travel writer Georg Foster: To be sure the famous man right away finds it awk- ‘ward to establish a principle in advance which is supposed to guide the investigator of nature even in searching and observing. . . . [However] it is un- doubtedly certain that nothing of a purposive nature could ever be found through mere empirical groping without a guiding principle of what to search for; for only methodically conducted experience can be called observing. Ido not care for the mere empirical traveler and his narrative, espe- cially if what is at issue is a coherent cognition which reason is supposed to turn into something for the purpose of a theory.” ‘There are three points we should take from this. The first is that Kant discounts pure description from the start as a kind of empirical groping characteristic of empirical travelers. There is no “observation” without a guiding principle or a hy- pothesis. It is precisely this principle which turns groping into searching, or methodically conducted experience. (What I am implying here is that with phenomenology, taken as a pure description of the facts of concrete consciousness, this empirical groping affects the transcendental traveler as well). The second point is that observation involves a close coordination of principle and experience. The two provide mutual support. Without experience, principles are empty; without principles, experience is blind. Third, these principles are merely regulative. They aren’t given in themselves, but they give order to experience. Blanchot regularly describes his project in just these terms. Often, the value of the system sketched above seems to be heuristic rather than representational, and this means that in contrast to phenomenological description, observation comes laden with a fundamental lack of certainty. ‘When the power of speech is interrupted, one does not know, one can never know with certainty, what is at work... . When, for example, interruption arises out of fatigue, out of pain or affliction (all forms of the neutral), do we know to which experience it belongs? Can we be sure, even though it may be sterilizing, that it isn’t simply barren? No, ‘we are not sure (and this moreover adds to the fatigue and the affliction).”” Although Blanchot is dealing with essentially phenomenological experiences—many of which Levinas himself described in Existence and Exis- tents, Blanchot revokes any attribution of apodicity to them. His directness is surprising on this point. These experiences bring us across the structure of human reality all the way to an experience of the neutral, but once we give ourselves Fr Ee Ee EEE EEC EE EE EEE EEE EE EE EE 1 EE EE EE EE EEE EE EE EE EE EEE TE EEE EEE ET ETE EES UE TUT er EEE eee eee eee ee ee ee eeeere™ over to affliction, we find out that we have no idea whether this experience is ontological, or merely a biological disturbance. And, as he points out, this uncertainty only adds to the fatigue and affliction. Indeed, his works are filled with crucial disclaimers: “I say this in passing, and these things can only be said in passing.”™ “We will understand that such a question can be posed only because its very amplitude spares us, ina simple note, from any ambitious answer.” And when, at the very moment of his own death, he tells us he attained a kind of beatitude, he qual- ifies it this way: “T know—do I know it?” Generalizing this passage in relation to others like it in Blanchot'’s fiction, Derrida writes that in Blanchot there is always a “principle of uncertainty, a perhaps that modalizes, ‘epochalizes, and suspends all assertions of the narrator-wit- ness. He never affirms anything, never commits himself to any assertion.”*' What I am arguing here is that this “epochalization” is not phenomenological. Blanchot is clear about th the aleatory point performs a kind of “ironic out- bidding of the époché;”” by raising the stakes, as Tread it, beyond the limits of the subject to a genuinely absolute genetic principle. My claim here is that thismethodological uncertainty belies a fundamental Kantianism: the absolute is always only a regulative idea which structures an observation which will always be inadequate to the observed. The Dialectic Perhaps I’ve misread Blanchot’s statement that each stage “denies (nie)” the others as a discovery indebted to phenomenological methods. If we read that claim loosely within its context— which is an essay on Hegel—perhaps it would be better to say that each stage “negates” the others. The method of negation is not one of the most persistent in Blanchot’s oeuvre, but it does appear in some of his most important essays. One particularly interesting manifestation of it is in “Sade’s Reason.” This essay is ostensibly a review of Klossowski’s Sade, My Neighbor, and indeed, Blanchot’s adoption of dialectics here could be read as a mere aping of Klossowski. Klossowski reads Sade as performing a series of negations on the terminal concepts of metaphys- SYSTEM AND METHOD IN BLANCHOTica specialis—self, world and God—in order open up the route to general metaphysics. The order of these negations in Klossowski is as follows: first the Sadean “libertine” (the inverse of the Hegelian “philosopher”) negates God and affirms a “materialist atheism.”® But for complicated reasons the libertine is not content with nature so he negates it as well: “We then look on the strange spectacle of Sade insulting Nature as he had insulted God. For reasons which are again complicated the libertine negates nature and dis- covers the “Sadean mind.” But the libertine cannot stop here either: in a Nietzschean vein, this mind is sick and pathological, merely the cover- up of the intensive life of the body, and so it too has to be negated so that we can discover our im- personal field of intensive flux (something Klossowski returns to in most of his other works). We thus have a progressive negation of God, of the world, and finally of the self which culminates in the revelation of reality as an intensive field. Now, Blanchot does almost the same thing in “Sade’s Reason,” but he makes a minor change in Klossowski’s program. Sade’s “superman” progressively negates the various terms of special metaphysics. Summarizing the whole process, Blanchot writes, “it is obvious that this concep- tion of an infernal God is only amomentin the dialectic wherein Sade’s superman, after repudiat- ing man in the name of God, finally meets God and then, in turn, rejects him in the name of nature, only to, in the end, renounce nature, equat- ing it with the spirit of negation.” What's interesting here is that Blanchot has reversed Klossowski’s order. Where as Klossowski had God-World-Self, Blanchot has Self-God-World. The argument he gives for this is this. Sade is fully aware [unlike Klossowski] that anni- hilating all things is not the same thing as annihilat- ing the world, because the world is not only a universal affirmation, but universal destruction as well, In other words, the entirety of being and the entirety of nothingness reveal it equally. This is why man’s struggle with nature is engendered, within the history of man, at a higher dialectical PHILOSOPHY TODAY stage truly superior to that of his struggle with God.“ Whereas Klossowski’s Sade ended up sounding like Klossowski, the consequence of this argument is that Sade ends up sounding a lot like Blanchot. On Blanchot’s reading, Sade’s super man (Klossowski’s libertine; Hegel’s philosopher) has no serious trouble getting past God and Man: they die a common death. But when, through this act of negation nature is revealed as the spirit of negation, it turns out that the superman is in an awkward position because, across this entire process, he himself has been revealed as alocus of negation: to negate negation thus becomes equivalent to suicide. But this act of suicide also reveals an identity in what Blanchot calls here, probably thinking of Mallarmé, “en- ergy,” afield of evanescent relations animated by the aleatory point. Thus the method of negation gets us to the point of which Blanchot speaks endlessly. Given that some of Blanchot’s most significant essays are deeply Hegelian, it might be tempting to treat this dialectical method as the key to Blanchot’s ontology whereas his flirtations with phenomenology would be a mere free-indirect hat tip to Levinas or Bonnefoy. This would have the virtue of explaining the non-logical progression through human reality; it would explain why the aleatory point remains simultaneously regulative and constitutive, and it would bring together sev- eral diverse strands of his thought. The problem with such a reading is that Blanchot consistently criticizes the very concept of the dialectic. This criticism has two general prongs. The first is that the aleatory point again “outbids” the dialectic in its even more supreme restlessness. It represents the “endless recommencement which ruins every dialectic.”*” But it is not simply that the aleatory point one-ups the dialectic. It represents an entirely different kind of movement, which he describes in another essay on Klossowski as “arbitrary in the highest degree.” In other words, this movement is not the movement of balanced contradiction, but of a “diverg- ing of difference” which Blanchot names “dispersal.” The aleatory point is “an infinite shifting of dispersal, a non-dialectical movement which has nothing to do with opposition or with recon- ciliation?”” Without the balance of contradiction the dialectic would just spin, wandering aim- lessly in a state of permanent error. ‘The Constructive Method My claim that there’s no strong account of method might seem particularly misplaced with Blanchot. After all, is it not obvious that he has a well-constructed theory of literary technique, and of art more generally, in which the absolute is approached and perhaps even basked in through the work? Blanchot regularly suggests as much. The work, he says, should act as a “springboard for a_vertiginous movement toward the absolute.” The book “must try to be the absolute that it covets.” We “dream” of a novelist to match Mallarmé; we “imagine” “the work that he would desire to make equal to the absolute.” Two things are striking in these passages, however. The first is Blanchot’s timidity. He does not claim that the work “lets us glimpse being in all its brilliance,” as Kevin Hart puts it.” If this were possible, we would all be mystics by now. Rather, he says the work should be a “springboard.” It should “try” or “desire” to make itself equal to the absolute. We can “imagine” this project, but we haven’t come close to realizing it. In- deed, in “How to Discover the Obscure,” the method by which we discover the obscure is, an- noyingly, “hope.” The work never gives us the absolute. It is (always?) yet to come. The work falls short of attaining the absolute for two reasons we should keep separate. The first is simply that it is not the most fundamental moment of the system I sketched above. The work belongs to the second level of human reality. It is throws us into the shifting relations between words. It does not, however, give us the principle of these relations—the aleatory point. Thus we regularly encounter statements like the following: Only the work matters, but finally the work is there only to lead to the quest for the work; the work is the impulse that carries us toward the pure point of inspiration from which it comes and which it seems it can reach only by disappearing.” fee eae eee gece a eee ee eee eee ae ee eee aac ae aaa eee eae eran ene If the work is transcended here, it is less because it is inadequate to the absolute, but because we have grasped it without grasping its principle, ‘The second, and more important reason the work is not sufficient is that even when we see that itis animated by this aleatory point, it still remains only a work. The poem, understood as an independent object sufficing (0 itself—an object made out of language and created for itself alone, a monad of words where nothing is reflected but the nature of words—is perhaps in this respect a reality, a partic ular being, having exceptional dignity and importance; but itis a being, and for this reason itis by no means close to being.” ‘The work here is capable of remarkable things: it condenses the totality of language; it becomes a self-referential whole; it marks the highest inten- sification of consciousness in a creative act; and by virtue of this act, it becomes a kind of crystal ball in which we can approximate divine work- ings. But despite all of this, it seems incapable of expressing being. It remains only a particular being. What is missing is a sense of the whole. Martial Guéroult makes this point well. “Sup- pose,” he writes, “that we were in possession of the most absolutely simple natures, even then we would have only reached an understanding of that which exists, not of that by which it exists.""” Guéroult’s “that by which,” of course, assumes that the principle or the Idea of the whole is going to be that of sufficient reason and thatit’s going to be singular or monistic (he writes this in a passing discussion of Descartes). We need not share cither of those assumptions, however (indeed, Blanchot will replace the principle of sufficient reason, though not with a principle of unreason (as in Meillassoux) but with an aleatory oscillation between reason and unreason).” But Blanchot is clear that a being is not yet being. In the same way that “all questions are directed toward one question alone—the central question or the question of the whole,” literature needs to learn how to lay claim not only to the sky, the earth, to the past, the future, to physics and philosophy—this would SYSTEM AND METHOD IN BLANCHOTbe little—but to everything, to the whole that acts in every instant and every phenomenon (Novalis). Yes, everything. But let's read carefully: not every instant such as it occurs, nor every phenomenon such as it produces itself, only the whole that acts mysteriously and invisibly in everything.” ‘The question, however, is how one might discover this whole, and as the reference to Novalis indicates, itis here that Blanchot is at his most romantic. He often speaks as though his project is not an attempt to represent or intuit the absolute, but to create it. This is yet another turn in Blanchot's methodological pluralism, and it re- pudiates the others. For we can’t get to this whole through a regressive analysis. The poet’s work “does not consist in ensuring this point’s approach by descending into the depths. His workis to bring it back to the light of day and to give it form, shape, and reality in the day.”™' The point needs to be created; or it is known only indirectly though its creations. This is the “ambition of the total book” handed down to us by the romantics: the total book wants to become “a kind of Bible, perpetually growing, that will not represent the real but replace it, for the whole can only be af- firmed in the non-objective sphere of the work? Blanchot is equally clear, though, that there is no need for this whole to be “substantial.”** It is sufficient for it to be a fiction. There are two important sources for Blanchot here. The first and most obvious is Novalis— whom Blanchot regularly cites in these contexts, Blanchot is alluding, I think, to Novalis’s claims that ultimate philosophical concepts are “necessary fictions.”** “The highest principle must be absolutely nothing given, but rather must be freely made, something composed, devised in order to ground a universal metaphysical system.”*° ‘Thus the importance of poetry to philosophy in Novalis’ thought: “To ground is to philosophize. To think up [something] [erdenken] is to poeticize. Since the highest principle is something that must be “devised” or “thought up,” we have to keep these two terms constantly at one another’s side: “one grounds, one invents." The second and less obvious source is Schelling. I want to turn briefly to him here be- PHILOSOPHY TODAY cause he brings a specificity to these fictions. Schelling’s method of experimental construction is to some extent the consequence of combining two distinct definitions of knowledge. The first is that “we can be said to know objects only when they are such that we see the principles of their possibility:"** We only know something insofar as we grasp its principle or the whole of which it isa part. Butat the same time, “We know only the self-produced.”® If we accept both of these definitions of knowledge, it amounts to the following principle: we know something only insofar as we produce the principle of that thing. This leads toa curious problem, however. Because our fabri- cated principles do not yet exist as a natural phe- nomena, “we must either give up all attempt ever to arrive at a knowledge of them, or else we must altogether put them into Nature, endow Nature with them.” The only situation in which this would not be illegitimate, Schelling says, is when we are compelled to posit our principle by a logical necessity which we arrive at only by an ex- haustive testing and contesting of Nature through “experimentation” —as Novalis puts it, they need to be necessary fictions.”' Is it possible to read the aleatory point as a necessary fiction? I think it is. What Blanchot usually emphasizes is its inaccessibility (which is what creates the impression that he is a negative theologian)..? But there is another reading possible of these passages, and it’s that rather than emphasizing the absence or inaccessibility of the point, they describe the necessity of its fictional presence. There is a strange circularity in the pos iting of this fiction. We say that the aleatory point isa genetic principle, but that we can only posit it hypothetically. But in positing it hypothetically we draw on its constitutive power and thus make it actual. Put differently, it is always on the other side of my positing, but it is there as grounding that positing. But because what we are positing is nothing other than this principle, it becomes a self-designating “sign.” It is this sign that lets us get past the endless oscillation of revelation and concealment, of night and day, of dark and light, of presences and absence and so on. We can then say with Blanchot’s Heraclitus that the aleatory point “neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign. And it would only be when we grasp it as a sign—that is as a relation between the fictional cause and its actual effects—that we approach the absolute: ‘The sign, the strangest one, signifies only itself. A sign that one could call arbitrary, mysterious, secret (without secret), ike a living point that would express and affirm the energetic life of thought re- duced to the unity of this point. A sort of intense coherence, in relation to which everyday life, the one that is content with the everyday system of signs becomes, both within and without, the place of an intolerable incoherence.“ Once we have done this, we can then descend down the chute of the system described above. ‘There are two things that are essential in this process. First, this circularity seems to be a kind of methodological necessity. In order to posit Ihave to posit the aleatory point. But, at the same time, this positing ultimately takes the form of a kind of unique sign, and for that reason the approach to the absolute has to be made in and through language. Not because language structures our cognition of reality in advance—this thesis has nothing to do with the structure of language, and, indeed, by the time we get to plural language we have already left the language described by lin- guistics—but because being’ s self-designation is a sign. By way of wrapping up this discussion, let me return to the theme of the search, and in particular to its relation to criticism. It is here that questions of method and research come full circle. I quoted Blanchot above to the effect that research has no form. It does, however, have a direction, in that it is essentially creative. When we research, we are “fabricators of analysis.” This necessity of creation is at the core of Blanchot’s definition of criticism “Criticism,” in the sense intended here, may, even now, be closer (but the similarity remains decep- tive) to the Kantian meaning of the word. Kant’s critical reasoning interrogates the conditions for the possibility of scientific experience, justas criticism is connected to the search for the possibility of literary experience, but this search is not only a theoretical pursuit, itis the very process constituting the literary experience, and its possibility is constituted through testing and contesting, through creation. “Search” is a word that should not be understood in an intellectual sense, butas an action taken within and in light of creative space.” There are three implicated claims here. First, criticism is the search for the very conditions of possibility of literary experience. But, second, this search must constitute, in the process, the very thing it is searching for. This construction, finally, is inseparable from attesting or contesting—what Schelling would call experimentation. Conclusion Before concluding, I want to be clear that ] am not arguing here that Blanchot is an untimely early romantic before he is a Kantian, a phenomenologist or a dialectician. I am tempted to, but that would require ignoring his mobiliza- tions of all the other methods—and I haven’t directly addressed many of the others, from “mystical fusion” to a specifically Heideggerian questioning. What I suspect is going on behind this plurality is two-fold. First, we could read this pluralism as a response the historical situation of philosophy in the first half of the twentieth cen- tury, which could be described as a moment of systemic methodological failure (or, if failure is too strong of a word, conflict): Hegelianism, neo- Kantianism, phenomenology, and Carnapian positivism all were facing serious methodological limits, often pointed out by one or another of the parallel schools. A second, more radical possibility, is that this plurality of methods is re- quired by the project Blanchot has set himself: to think the absolute as difference or discontinuity. System and method reinforce one another here: the dispersal at the ground of the system calls for a plurality of methods which reinforce the non- coherence of the system. Iclaimed at the beginning of this essay that I would eventually put these questions in some kind of relation to Meillassoux’s recent challenge to get outside of correlationism. Some readers, I imagine, will think the possibility of fulfilling this promise went off the rails from the moment I began speaking of “human reality.” For the en- lirety of this essay I’ve been thinking from within SYSTEM AND METHOD IN BLANCHOTthe correlationist circle, describing a theory of, the subject which approaches the absolute only as a fiction. Is this not exactly what Meillassoux, in his critique of correlationism, gets us away from? I would argue in turn that it’s only a bad reading of Meillassoux which claims that he does away at once with the subject. Meillassoux knows that the exit from the correlationist circle isn’t accomplished by ignoring that it exists or by emptily claiming from the start to have surpassed it. Rather, thought “exits itself” only by passing through “a narrow passage.””” Once this point is conceded the similari- ties between the two thinkers become consider- ably more interesting. Both approach this exit by absolutizing the radical contingency of the ground of the subject-object relation. Both do away with the principle of sufficient reason. Both play with a theory of intellectual intuition to guarantee our access to this relation. Most interestingly (despite Adrian Johnston’s recent pro- testations),”* both charge themselves with the task of inventing a God to come. At the same time, however, there are subtle differences with respect to each of these points. Where Meillassoux finds a “principle of unreason” ina “hyper chaos” Blanchot only conceives of a pure hesitation between reason and unreason.”” Whereas Meillassoux develops a theory of intellectual intuition, Blanchot (again following Heidegger) develops a theory of intellectual au- dition.'”° All of these differences, I suspect, could come down to a single question. Meillassoux’s project is very much the one Kant set out in the prolegomena and the one which Levinas adopted for phenomenology: how can philosophy ground the claims of mathematical science? But what would happen if the task were not to think the conditions of possibility for science, but rather of literature? If we took Blanchot’s question seriously, “How is Literature Possible?,” would we not speculate differently?!" NOTES 1, Fora lucid discussion of this see Ray Brassier, Néhil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basing- stoke: Palgrave, 2007), chapter 3. See also Peter Gratton, “After the Subject: Meillassoux’s Ontology of ‘What may Be’ Pli 20 (2009): 60, and see 62— 64 for a good summary of correlationism. 2. Gerald Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xii. 3. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. ‘Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minne- sota Press, 1993), 140. Though he says Nietzsche is incomparable in this, Sade and Lautréamont also have this instructive force. Cf. Blanchot Sade and Lautréamont, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 9 and 14. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughlin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 6. 5. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minne- sota Press, 2000), 14, 6. Joe Hughes, Deleuze and the Genesis of Representa- tion (New York: Continuum, 2008), 155-58. 7. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 9, 14. PHILOSOPHY TODAY 8. Ibid., 9; original emphasis. 9. Ibid., 238-45. The debt to Heidegger is readily ap- parent, but, as I will point out below, Blanchot is most indebted to Heidegger only on these superficial levels of human reality. He very quickly departs from Heidegger as he moves down the scale. Leslie Hill has argued persuasively that this is because Blanchot takes Heidegger more seriously than Heidegger takes himself. Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contempo- rary (London: Routledge, 1997), 77-91. 10. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. ‘Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 40. 11. Ibid., 41. 12. Blanchot, Sade and Lautréamont, 3. 13. See, for example, “How is Literature Possible?” and “Studies on Language,” both in Blanchot, Faux Pas, trans, Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford Univer- sity Press, 2001). 14, Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 301-02; Cf. “How is Literature Possible?” 15. Ibid., 360. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20, 21 22. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28, 29. 37. 38. Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Char- lotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 235. Ibid., 235. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 265-66n9; my emphasis. Cf. Infinite Conversa- tion 360; for an extended discussion of this, see “Lit- erature and the Right to Death,” 326. Ibid., 266. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 199, Blanchot's explanation of the necessity for this for- getting is different, however, from Heidegger's, and is largely a development of Hélderlin and Novalis See Infinite Conversation, 38 and 105. - Blanchot, Space of Literature, 196; cf. Infinite Con- versation, 259. Blanchot, Space of Literature, 222; cf. 205. See Martial Guéroult, L’Evolution et la structure de Ja doctrine de la science chez Fichte (Paris: Société d’Edition 1930), 3-18, 68ff. See, for example, Infinite Conversation, 19, and “The Great Refusal.” Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1992), 316; original emphasis. Ibid., 282; my emphasis. I’m emphasizing falling here, but Blanchot, 100, has a theory of “resoluteness:” he calls it “attention” to affliction (Infinite Conversation, 122). Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 33. « See Blanchot, Sade and Lautréamont, 151-57. Blanchot, The Book to Come, 78. . Ibid., 77. Ibid., 69; much later, in The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot will develop this dialectic of affliction and the other's gaze into a complex theory of reflection. See Infinite Conversation, 122-34. . Blanchot, The Book to Come, 75. See Gerald Bruns, Leslie Hill, Ullrich Haase, and William Large, Maurice Blanchot (New York: Routledge, 2001). Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 3. In addition to not covering Heidegger—for reasons mentioned above—I am also not going to address Blanchot's interesting renewal of intellectual intuition, or what he calls the “mystical method,” here because Kevin Hart has devoted a lucid book to the ee topic. Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 39. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Meta- physics, trans. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2004), 82; See Manfred Frank, Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, wans, Elizabeth Millin-Zeibert (Al- bany: SUNY Press, 2004), 49; Richard Fincham gives an excellent account of these methodological problems in “Refuting Fichte with ‘Common Sense’: Friedrich Immanuel Neithammer’s Recep- tion of the Wissenschafislehre 1794/5, Journal of the History of Philosophy 43 (July 2005): 301-24. One of the most interesting accounts, however, can be found in Gilles Deleuze’s early lecture Qu’est-ce que fonder? in which he traces Leibniz’s comments on ‘method in Discours touchant la méthode de la certi- mde et de Vart d'inventer through Kant to Novalis’ theory of the imagination, 40. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Lerters, trans. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht Kluwer, 1989), 232, 41. Guéroult, L’Evolution, 69-70. 42. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Patton (London: Routledge, 2000), xiv. }. Blanchot, Faux Pas, 138, Blanchot, Work of Fire, 312. Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomen- ology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester B. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 9. 46. Levinas, Discovering Existence with Hussert, trans Richard Cohen and Michael Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 102. 47, Ibid., 98. 48. Ibid., 92 49. Ibid., 93. 50. Ibid., 93. 51. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 98 and 413. 52. Consciousness is “that empty power of the mind to exchange itself for everything” (The Space of Litera- mre, 88); ct. Infinite Conversation, 250-51. 53. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 250. 54, Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans, André Orianne (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1995), 25 55. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 251. SYSTEM AND METHOD IN BLANCHOT BESFEE EE ee ee EE EEE EE EE EE gE gE EE ETE EEE ENN ETE EEE EE EEE EEE EEE UE EET EEE eee Teer eee eee ee ee oo oo ee 56. 57. 58. 59. 61. 62. 63. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. n. 7a B. 14. 75. 16. 71 7B. 19. 80. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History and Educa- tion, ed Giinther Zéller and Robert B. Louden (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 196-97; original emphases. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 78; cf. 12. Ibid., 42, Blanchot, Faux Pas, 167. Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demure, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 5. Ibid., 63-64. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 304. Pierre Klossowski, Sade, My Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern Univer- sity Press, 1991), 80. Ibid., 82. Blanchot, Sade and Lautréamont, 30. Ibid, 33. Ibid., 5 Maurice Blanchot, Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 173. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 46; cf. and Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 1983), 72: Blanchot “con- siders the dialectic of subject and object, the progressive temporality of a historical growth, as inauthentic, experiences, misleading reflections of a more fundamental movement that resides in the realm of being.” Blanchot, Faux Pas, 150. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 186. Hart, Dark Gaze, 23 Blanchot, infinite Conversation, 40-41. Blanchot, Book to Come, 200. Blanchot, Space of Literature, 42; original emphasis. Guéroult, L’Evolution, 164. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 413, 424, Ibid., 12 Ibid., 355; original emphasis. Blanchot is alluding to Novalis, Fichte Studies, trans. Jane Kneller (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 147462. 81. Blanchot, Space of Literature, 170. 82. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 358; original emphasis. 83. Blanchot, Book to Come, 229-30. 84. Novalis, Fichte, 770234; See Frank, Foundations, SI, and Frederick Beiser, German Idealism (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 417. 85. Novalis, Fichte, 171n567; original emphasis. 86. Ibid., 1690567. 87. Ibid., 1690567. 88. Friedrich W. J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Peterson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 196; original emphasis. I am heavily indebted here to Keith Peterson's excellent discussion of Schelling’s experimental method in his introduction, xxiv; and lain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature Afier Schelling (New York: Continuum, 2008), 160-62. 89. Schelling, First Outline, 197. 90. Ibid., 197. 91. Beiser’s reading of Novalis draws close links with Schelling on these points (423). 92, See, for example, Mikel Dufrenne, Le Poétique (Paris: PUR, 1973). 93. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 92. See 169-70 for a more developed discussion of this. 94, Blanchot, Friendship, 173. 95. Blanchot, Sade and Lautréamont, 70; my emphasis. 96. Blanchot, Sade and Lautréamont, 5. 97. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 62. 98. Adrian Johnston, “Hume’s Revenge: A Diew Meillassoux?” in Levi Bryant Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn (Mel- bourne: re.press, 2011), 92-113. 99. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 413 and 424, 100. Ibid., 162-63, 329-30. 101. Many thanks to Andrew Marzoni for commenting on a draft of this essay. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55414 PHILOSOPHY TODAY SARTRE’S ABSOLUTE FREEDOM IN BEING AND In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between two types of freedom. One is the freedom “to obtain what one has wished,” which is the “empirical and popular concept of ‘freedom.””! The other is the freedom “by oneself to determine oneself to wish,” which is the “philosophical concept of freedom . . . [that] means only the autonomy of choice” (483/563), The former can be termed “freedom to obtain” and the latter “freedom to choose.” “Freedom to obtain” refers to our ability to act in certain ways in the practical world. “Freedom to choose” refers to the fundamental projects that we set for ourselves and, accordingly, the meanings we confer on the situations in which we find ourselves, Sartre is unequivocal that, for example, a person with no legs is not free to walk. Nevertheless, he is free to confer meanings on his situation ina variety of ways, according to his fundamental projects in life. We are a choice, and for us, to be is to choose ourselves. Even this disability from which I suffer I have assumed by the very fact that I live; I surpass it toward my own projects, I make of it the necessary obstacle for my being, and I cannot be crippled without choosing myself as crippled. This means that I choose the way I constitute my disability (as “unbearable,” “humiliating,” “to be hidden,” “to be revealed to all,” “an object of pride,” “the justification of my failures,” etc.). (328/393) The term “freedom to choose” could be confusing, since many of our choices lie within the sphere of “freedom to obtain.” Sartre offers an example of a person who has a flat tire, under- stands that he will not arrive in time to close a deal with a prospective client, and, hence, chooses to sign a contract with a different client PHILOSOPHY TODAY NOTHINGNESS THE PROBLEMS PERSIST Iddo Landau or even give up the entire endeavor (505/586— 87). But such a choice would fall in the sphere of what Sartre calls freedom to obtain, not freedom tochoose, since it does not have to do witha sufficiently fundamental project in life and the basic meanings a person attributes to himself and his situations, but, rather, with instrumental deci- sions about specific courses of action. Freedom to choose, then, is a technical term relating to a certain set of general choices about one’s basic projects. Freedom to choose and freedom to obtain are interrelated, since the specific projects we undertake assign particular meanings to the situations in which we find ourselves, and it is only within these spheres of meaning that we obtain, or fail to obtain, certain specific ends. Sartre presents the example of a mountain (488-89/569). If I take on the project of being a mountain climber, the mountain acquires the meaning of obstacle or challenge. But if my project is that of a lawyer, real estate developer, or environmental activist (to add more options to Sartre’s original example), the mountain has different meanings. Once projects are chosen and meanings conferred, we could find ourselves, in those spheres of meaning, succeeding or failing to obtain what we want. The mountain climber could, for example, fail to reach the mountain top; the real estate developer could fail to build hotels on the mountain; and the environmental activist might fail to preserve the natural habitat there. But the success or failure to obtain what they seek acquires its identity only because these individuals chose the projects of a mountain climber, real estate developer, or environmentalist. Sartre uses this distinction to respond to anticipated criticism of one of his famous claims WINTER 2012about freedom: that it is absolute. He writes, for example, “Iam absolutely free and absolutely responsible for my situation” (509/591); “man cannot be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all” (441/485); and “existence precedes and determines essence” (438/513). Likewise, he asserts that we are “totally free” (555/641) and that there is no obstacle in the absolute sense, but the obstacle reveals its coefficient of adversity across freely invented and freely acquired techniques. ... The rock will not be an obstacle if wish at any cost to arrive at the top of the mountain. On the other hand, it will discourage me if I have freely fixed limits to my desire of making the projected climb. (488/569) Similarly, Our freedom creates the obstacles from which we suffer. Itis freedom itself which by positing its end and by choosing this end as inaccessible or acces- sible with difficulty, causes our placing to appear to our projects as an insurmountable resistance or a resistance to be surmounted with difficulty. (495/ 576) And since, according to Sartre, all people are absolutely free, they are all equal in being so; hence “the slave in chains is as free as his master”(550/ 594), Such claims are problematic, however. First, they fly against empirical evidence and common experience. As is commonly known, people are not absolutely free. Rather, they enjoy only vary- ing degrees of limited freedom. Second, such claims conflict with others made in Sartre's system. As noted above, he is quite unequivocal in his claim that a person with no legs is not free to walk. More generally, he asserts that “freedom can exist only as restricted since freedom is choice. Every choice . . . supposes elimination and selection; every choice is a choice of finitude. Thus freedom can be truly free only by constituting facticity as its own restriction” (495/576). Sartre also refers to what he calls “the paradox of freedom”: “there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom. Human-reality everywhere encounters resis- PHILOSOPHY TODAY tance and obstacles which it has not created, but these resistances and obstacles have meaning only in and through the free choice which human-reality is” (489/569-70). But such claims about restrictions on our freedom appear to run counter to his assertions that our freedom is absolute. Sartre is aware of this seeming inconsistency. He points out that the decisive argument which is employed by com- ‘mon sense against freedom consists in reminding, us of ourimpotence, Far from being able to modify our situation at our whim, we seem to be unable to change ourselves. I am not “free” either to escape the lot of my class, of my nation, of my family, or even to build up my own power or my fortune or to conquer my most insignificant appetites or habits. (481/561) However, he takes the distinction between what he calls freedom to obtain and freedom to choose to resolve the difficulties. When discussing the example of a flat tire preventing a deal from being closed, Sartre explains, “is this not explicit recognition of my powerlessness the clearest ad- mission of the limits of my freedom? Of course my freedom to choose, as we have seen, must not be confused with my freedom to obtain” (505/ 586-87). True, one does not have absolute freedom to reach the mountain top. But one does have absolute freedom to choose the project that would render the mountain something to climb: “it is only in and through the free upsurge of a freedom that the world develops and reveals the resistance which can render the projected end unrealizable. Man encounters an obstacle only within the field of his freedom” (488/569). Like- wise, although the person who has no legs is not free to walk, he is free to choose himself to be, for example, “crippled” or not “crippled” (328/393). And when Sartre says that the slave in chains is as free as his master, he does not mean that they both have equal freedom to obtain, which is obviously false, as the one is in chains and enslaved and the other is not. Rather, Sartre is making this claim solely in relation to the freedom to choose. “Of course the slave will not be able to obtain the wealth and the standard of living of his master; but these are not the objects of his projects” (550/ 634), Thus, Sartre’s claims about universal absolute freedom do not collide with common experience, since they refer only to freedom to choose and not freedom to obtain. Nor do his assertions about absolute freedom conflict with his other claims about the way freedom is limited since, again, the claims concerning absolute freedom refer only to freedom to choose, while claims about the way situatedness limits freedom refer only to freedom to obtain. Or so it seems. eee Some of the secondary literature on Sartre re- iterates the criticism he anticipated. For example, Albert Camus criticizes Sartre’s theory of freedom for, among other things, the “impossibility of total freedom.”* Walter Kaufmann writes that “Sartre’s extravagant emphasis on man’s com- plete freedom . . . was at odds ... with the facts of life?* Reinhold Grossmann describes Sartre’s understanding of freedom as “the ostrich view of the human condition.”* Wilfrid Desan asserts that “choice is never unlimited, but rather it happens to be between A or B or C.** And Herbert Marcuse argues that acts of persecution are the brute reality of unfreedom, To the existen- tialist philosopher, however, they appear as examples of the existence of human freedom. . .. If philosophy, by virtue of its existential-ontological concepts of man and freedom, is capable of dem- onstrating that the persecuted Jew and the victim of. the executioner are and remain absolutely free and masters of a self-responsible choice, then these philosophical concepts have declined to the level of a mere ideology.” Other scholars, however, following Sartre, have used the distinction between freedom to obtain and freedom to choose (sometimes by other names) to counter such critics. Margaret Whitford offers one typical response: Sartre's doctrine of freedom has given rise to perhaps more misunderstanding than any other aspect of his philosophy. ... The majority of his early critics were unanimous in condemning the doctrine as self-contradictory and self-defeating, ... It is argued, on the one hand, that it is patently not true that man is totally free, and, on the other hand, that if, as Sartre admits, there are limits to our freedom, then this freedom is not absolute and Sartre contradicts himself. It has not always been sufficiently recognized that... freedom has more than one sense in Sartre, and he slips from one to another without necessarily indicating the transition to the reader.” Whitford proceeds to present the distinction between Sartre’s two types of freedom, employing the terms ontological freedom and freedom in a situation,’ and adds that “this condemnation has subsequently been modified by later critics who have offered a more sympathetic assessment of Sartre’s aims.”"" Likewise, David Detmer, using the terms ontological freedom and practical freedom, writes that “the slave . . . and the prisoner are free in one sense of the word, that designated by such expressions as ‘freedom to choose’ and ‘ontological freedom,” but relatively unfree in another sense, that designated by ‘freedom of ob- taining’ and ‘practical freedom.’”"' Such replies to Sartre’ critics continue in recent works on his theory of freedom. Ronald Santoni, for example, argues that “Camus, among many critics of Sartre, has misinterpreted and misrepresented Sartre’s early and controversial view of freedom.”"” According to Santoni, if we distinguish between “absolute ontological freedom” and “practical or existential freedom,” itemerges that “itis not at all contradictory to speak of the ‘absolute’ freedom of consciousness and autonomy of choice at the ontological level, and freedom within limits at the practical/existential level.”" Similarly, William Wilkerson claims that many of Sartre's most striking and famously egre- gious claims about freedom, such as his claim that we are wholly and forever free or not free at all, or his claim that the slave is as free as the master, in fact refer to ontological freedom, and recognition of this makes these claims seem much less trouble- some. Slaves are free to the extent that they can choose to accept their condition as natural, can choose to rebel against it in their mind, or even attempt to escape.* As already pointed out by Santoni, there are some differences in how the authors cited above SARTRE’S ABSOLUTE FREEDOM.understand the precise nature of Sartre’s two types of freedom." But for the purposes of this paper, these variations on the common theme are immaterial and need not be lingered on. For all distinguish between our freedom to act and obtain in the practical world and our freedom to choose fundamental projects and attribute meanings to situations. Authors like the above cited apply this distinction also in addressing various other criticisms of Sartre’s theory of freedom.'* In this paper, however, I focus only on the criticism that argues that Sartre’s claim that all people have absolute freedom and, thus, are equally free, contradicts both many other claims in his system and common experience. I will propose that— early and recent replies notwithstanding—this criticism of Sartre’s theory holds, and that his and others’ distinction between the two types of freedom does not sufficiently contend with the criticism. Perhaps Camus, Marcuse, etc. did not notice this distinction between freedom to obtain and freedom to choose; noticing the distinction, however, need not have led them to withdraw this criticism, for Sartre’s claim that all people have absolute and equal freedom is problematic even if in reference to only ontological freedom. eae There is considerable empirical evidence to suggest that we lack not only absolute freedom to obtain but also absolute freedom to choose—that is, the freedom to decide on our projects and to ign meanings to the situations in which we find ourselves. Take Sartre’s example of the torturer’s “red hot pincers.” Sartre writes that even they “do not exempt us from being free. This does not mean that it is always possible to get around the difficulty, to repair the damage, but simply that the very impossibility of continuing in a certain direction must be freely constituted” (506/587). He similarly claims that “even torture does not dispossess us of our freedom; when we give in, we do so freely” (524/607). But this seems to fly in face of reality. Staying with Sartre’s (somewhat gory) example, almost all people will not have the freedom to choose among projects if a torturer applies red hot pincers to their flesh. The only project available to PHILOSOPHY TODAY them will have to do with the effort to stop or lessen their very sharp pain. They will not, in that situation, have the freedom to choose between the projects of minimizing or not minimizing the pain, or between the projects of minimizing the pain or becoming a mountain-climber, a real-estate developer, or environmental activist. The pain is not an obstacle because these individuals freely choose a certain project, but rather the project and meaning are imposed on them by the ter- rible pain they experience. The obstacle is not constituted by the project, but the project is constituted by the obstacle. The distinction between ontological and practical freedom is of no consequence here since there is no absolute freedom in either sphere. Similarly, take Sartre’s example of a slave in chains. Suppose this refers to a slave working in an Alabama quarry in 1840. The slave is not absolutely free to choose from among many of the projects Sartre mentions. Although the mine may be located in a mountain, the slave cannot select the projects of a mountain-climber or a real-estate agent. Nor can he bona fide choose, in his circumstances, the project of becoming governor of Alabama, president of the United States, a professional botanist, classics scholar, or violinist. ‘The slave does have some freedom in his projects (he can choose, for example, between the project of being an inwardly submissive slave and of being a resentful one), but he does not have absolute freedom to choose projects and confer meanings on his situation. He is thus limited not only in his practical freedom, but also in his ontological freedom. Whereas the slave is not free to choose such projects as becoming governor of Alabama or a real-estate agent, his master, in contrast, is free to select them for himself. Sartre is correct in stating that both the slave and his master always have some freedom to choose projects and thus confer meanings on the situations in which they find themselves. But because the situations in which they find themselves in 1840 Alabama diverge significantly, the projects they can choose and, accordingly, the meanings they can assign to their situations are similarly divergent. Thus, it is untrue that the slave in chains is as free as his master even in regard to ontological freedom. The slave differs from his master both in practical freedom to obtain and in ontological freedom to choose. Moreover, although the master wields more practical and ontological freedom than his slave, the former’s freedom is not absolute either. Per- haps the master can choose the project of becoming a violinist, zoologist, or governor of Ala- bama. But—if he is tall and in his sixties—he cannot choose the project of becoming a professional jockey. Likewise, a man who has no legs cannot adopt the project of becoming a marathon runner, A deaf person cannot select the project of becoming a music critic. Similar examples abound; people’s situations limit to a significant extent the projects they can choose.'” It might be objected, however, that when Sartre talks about choosing projects, he should be understood as referring only to general intentions or attitudes, unrelated to situated actions. And in that sphere of general intentions or attitudes, it could be argued, people do have absolute freedom and are equally free, so that slaves are, indeed, just as free as their masters. However, Sartre is unequivocal that ontological freedom does not relate to mere intentions or attitudes but, rather, has to do also with actions: Itis necessary, however, to note that the choice, being identical with acting, supposes a commence- ment of the realization in order that the choice may be distinguished from the dream and the wish. Thus we shall not say that a prisoners always free to go out of prison, which would be absurd, nor that he is always free to long for release, which, would be an irrelevant truism, but that he is always free to try to escape (or get himself liberated); that is, that whatever his condition may be, he can project his escape and learn the value of his project by undertaking some action. Our description of freedom, since it does not distinguish between choosing and doing, compels us to abandon at once the distinction between the intention and the act (483-84/563-64; emphases added) Since projects, too, have to do with situated actions, then, a person who is not in prison cannot choose the project of escaping from prison; and a person who is in prison is not free to choose from the many projects open to people who are not im- prisoned, for he is significantly more restricted in his choices. Moreover, ontological freedom would not have been absolutely free even if ithad to do only with intentions or attitudes. Our intentions and attitudes are limited by—among other things— our knowledge: the Alabama quarry slave could neither intend to be a poet, classical scholar, ot professional botanist nor have an attitude of ap- preciation for these vocations if he had never heard of these options. People who have never heard of Buddhism can neither intend to become Buddhist monks nor have a favorable or unfavor- able attitude toward Buddhism. Psychological inclinations, too, limit people’s intentions and attitudes: some people may not be psychologically able to bring themselves to intend to emulate or to appreciate Jack the Ripper or Mother Teresa. One’s situatedness, then, limits even one’s intentions and attitudes. What has been said here of intentions and attitudes is true also of mere wishes and fantasies. It might be suggested that the Alabama slave in 1840 was absolutely free, and as free as his master, to fantasize about becoming a mountain- climber or president of the United States. But Sartre is very clear that we should also distinguish between, on the one hand, choosing projects and conferring meanings (which he terms, somewhat confusingly, “determining oneself to wish” [483/563]) and, on the other hand, simply wishing, daydreaming, or fantasizing: If conceiving is enough for realizing, then I am plunged in a world like that of a dream in which the possible is no longer in any way distinguished from the real, I am condemned henceforth to see the world modified at the whim of the changes of my consciousness; I can not practice... the sus- pension of judgment which will distinguish a simple fiction from areal choice. If the object appears as soon as itis simply conceived, it will no longer be chosen or merely wished for. Once the distine- tion between the simple wish, the representation which I could choose, and the choice is abolished, freedom disappears too. (482-83/562-63) SARTRE’S ABSOLUTE FREEDOM.Thus, although the slave has the freedom to dream or fantasize that he is a mountain-climber orreal-estate agent, he does not have the freedom to choose these projects as his own. And as with attitudes and intentions, people are not absolutely free even in their fantasies and dreams. Knowledge—alongside other factors—limits people’s freedom to fantasize and wish, as they cannot wish for or fantasize about what they have never heard of. Likewise, people’s fantasies are limited by their psychological tendencies. Sartre seems to acknowledge that situatedness can restrict and impact projects. His response to this is that even when a project is thus affected, there is always a more primordial project in the background that remains unaffected: If the changes which occur in my environment can involve modifications of my projects, they ... can not by themselves effect the abandoning of my principal project which . .. serves to measure theit importance. In fact, if they are grasped as the causes of my abandoning this or that project, itcan be only in the light of a more fundamental project ... since the cause is apprehended by the motivating, consciousness which is itself a free choice of an end. (505-06/587) To elucidate this principle, Sartre offers the following example: If the clouds which cover the sky can move me to give up my project of an outing, this is because they are grasped in a free projection in which the value of the outing is bound to a certain state of the sky, which step by step refers back to the value of an outing in general, to my relation to nature, and to the place which this relation occupies in the en- semble of relations which I sustain with the world. (506/587) Sartre argues here, then, that projects have different degrees of fundamentality, and that whenever some projects are affected by the environment, there are other, more primary ones, that are not. Yet this is aconcession that at least some projects are affected by one’s environment, implying that our ontological freedom to choose projects is not absolute. True, Sartre claims that there is always amore fundamental project that is not restricted even when a less fundamental one is. But itis not PHILOSOPHY TODAY atall clear that this is the case. In Sartre’s own example, the most fundamental project has to do with our overall relation to the world; but people’s interactions with their environment, whether abrasive or pleasant, may well impact this project as well, making our overall relation to the world more trustful or apprehensive, optimis- tic or pessimistic, jovial or somber. Sartre’s discussion of the differing levels of fundamentality of projects does not show, then, that we have absolute ontological freedom.” Thus, Sartre’s claims about absolute freedom clash with reality even if we take them as referring only to our ontological freedom to choose projects, to choose ourselves, and to assign meanings to the situations in which we find ourselves. The distinction between this type of freedom and practical freedom does not collapse the criticism of Sartre’s theory of freedom for being incompatible with reality. Sartre’s claims about absolute freedom conflict also with other claims in his system that suggest that freedom—even ontological freedom— is limited, thus rendering the theory inconsistent. Sartre asserts, for example, that “far from being able to modify our situation at our whim, we seem to be unable to change ourselves” (481/ 561). Likewise, The slave's facticity is such that the world appears to him with another countenance and that he has to posit and to resolve different problems; in particular itis necessary fundamentally to choose himself on the ground of slavery and thereby to give meaning to this obscure constraint (550/634). Similarly, through a conceptual analysis, Sartre reaches the conclusion that freedom must, in principle, always be somehow limited, for other- wise, it would not be freedom. He writes that “freedom can exist only as restricted since fi dom is choice. Every choice . . . supposes elimi nation and selection; every choice is a choice of finitude. Thus freedom can be truly free only by constituting facticity as its own restriction” (495/ 576).”’ But this analysis, if valid, is applicable to any type of freedom, that is, not only to practical freedom but also to ontological freedom, It is not clear that Sartre is correct in claiming that freedom is inherently restricted. Under the tradi- tional understanding, God is absolutely free: there is nothing whatsoever that He cannot do or that He even has any difficulty doing. Some people, of course, do not believe in God and do not hold such freedom to exist. Yet the notion itself seems completely coherent. Sartre might reply here that in order to grasp what absolute freedom might be, we need to understand what limited freedom is. However, this too does not show that the notion of an agent who is absolutely free is not incoherent in itself, and it is thus incorrect that freedom is by nature inevitably limited Sartre’s own view, however, is that any type of freedom must be somehow limited, which conflicts with his claim that all people enjoy absolute freedom. Thus, Sartre’s distinction between the two types of freedom fails also to rebuff the criticism that his theory of freedom is inconsistent." Sartre’s defenders might suggest at this point that the breadth of people’s range of options is irrelevant; people have absolute freedom because they can always choose between some alternatives, even if very few in number. This response seems problematic, however, since the extent of one’s options is quite material to one’s freedom to choose: if Philip can choose to go anywhere in the world, while Jill can choose only between staying in her village and visiting a neighboring one, then Philip is freer than Jill in that measure. If Diane can choose from among the projects of becoming a scholar, hunter, jockey, artist, tour guide, or a hundred other projects while only two of these projects are options for Bob, then Diane is freer than Bob in this sphere. We hold prisoners to have less freedom than people who are not in prison because fewer alternatives are usually available to the former. This is also why hand- cuffs, for example, are seen to limit a person's freedom. Limitations on our set of alternatives, then, constitute limitations on freedom, Perhaps it is true that people can always choose between some alternatives, and thus they are always somewhat free. But this in itself does not entail that they are absolutely or equally free. It might still be claimed in Sartre’s defense that we have absolute freedom of choice within our range of available options. True, a slave whose very limited range of options consists of, say, only alternatives A and B, is free to choose only between them. However, he is absolutely free to choose between those options. The master’s range of options, albeit wider than the slave’s (the master can choose from options C, D, E, ...Z), is also limited, but he, too, is absolutely free to choose from among his available options. In this sense, then, both slave and master enjoy absolute freedom and, hence, are equally free, Since, as argued above, the extent of freedom depends on the extensiveness of the range of available options, this argument would be problematic even if people were to have absolute freedom of choice within their range of options. But itis untrue that people are absolutely and equally free to choose even within that sphere. Consider the case of a person who suffers from acute agoraphobia. The option of becoming a tour guide is not open to him. Now consider instead a person who is afflicted with a somewhat lesser, though still considerable, degree of agoraphobia, so that despite entailing extreme difficulty, becoming a tour guide is an option for her. Yet although being a tour guide lies within the range of options for the latter agoraphobic, it would be incorrect to suggest that she is as free to become a tour guide as a nonagoraphobic person is. Likewise, it would be odd to suggest that the poor are as free as the rich, or are absolutely free, to get an excellent education, although this often exists as an option within their range of alternatives. Since there are divergences in people’s freedom to choose even among their available options, it is incorrect that all enjoy absolute freedom to select any option included within that range. ‘What has been argued here is applicable as re- gards both the practical freedom to obtain and the ontological freedom to choose. The agoraphobic is not only less free to become a tour guide, but also less free to undertake this as a project. She can choose this project, but the intense fear and anxiety that this profession generates for her would make it a difficult choice: it would thus be implausible to propose that she has total freedom or as much freedom as anyone else to select this project. Generally, people tend to refrain from se- lecting projects they have failed at repeatedly in the past and believe they are likely to fail at in the future. Recurring failure diminishes motivation, SARTRE’S ABSOLUTE FREEDOM.increases fears, produces tension, and decreases possible enjoyment from the project. Other aspects of situatedness, such as our psychological makeup, interests, and inclinations, also affect our freedom to choose a certain project. Thus, even if a certain project is included within our range of options, we may well not be as free as others to adopt that project and certainly not absolutely free to do so. Some might suggest that the notion of “absolute freedom” could refer to certain enlightened states of mind. For example, a prisoner could, after years of meditation or religious practice, reach a blissful state in which he can be said to have attained freedom from his worries, tensions, fears, frustrations, and, perhaps, old self and now feels happy, serene, and liberated. However, although this is a possible application of the term “absolute freedom,” many people are not free also in this sense of the term, and it is clearly not what Sartre has in mind when he discusses people’s freedom to choose projects. Sartre’s defenders might nonetheless main- tain that when Sartre discusses absolute freedom, he is not referring to the range of options we have or to our freedom to opt for one or other of those options. Rather, Sartre is merely claiming that, qua free, our choices lack, in final analysis, any foundation and, thus, are absolutely free (38/76). Under this approach, the situations in which we find ourselves limit our freedom to choose in a variety of ways. However, to the extent that freedom transcends or surpasses the situation in which itis positioned, it does not rely on anything and is thus absolutely free. In this sense, it could be argued, all people are always totally free, and, hence, the master and slave are equally free. Such an interpretation of total freedom, however, is rather empty. It suggests that insofar as what limits freedom is not taken into account, freedom is unlimited or that, to the extent that we are free, we are indeed solely and completely free (which, of course, is consistent with the claim that we are hardly free at all in almost all aspects of our life). tO If what has been argued thus far is correct, itis somewhat confusing to refer, as some scholars PHILOSOPHY TODAY do, to what Sartre calls “freedom to obtain” as “freedom in a situation” or “situated freedom,” since this implies that Sartre’s “freedom to choose” is not situated.” However, as shown above, both types of freedom are somewhat situated, even if to differing degrees. Likewise, if what has been argued here is correct, it is wrong toclaim, as Sartre does, that “there is no obstacle in the absolute sense” (488/569) and that “our freedom itself creates the obstacles from which we suffer” (495/576). For as shown above, there are some obstacles even in the absolute sense, and not all obstacles are the product of freedom. It is also incorrect to describe people, as Sartre does, as “totally free” (555/641), “absolutely free” (509/591), or “wholly free” (441/485). Itis more accurate to describe them as partially free, or somewhat free, or free in some ways and to some degrees but not in others. It further emerges from the above discussion that Sartre has erred in stating that whereas freedom to obtain has to do with success, freedom to choose does not (483-84/563-64). A person who has no legs cannot select the project of becoming a marathon runner because he has no chance of succeeding at this project, and the slave in 1840 Alabama could not opt for the project of becoming president of the United States because he did not have even the remotest chance of succeeding at this. When there is no chance whatsoever of successfully achieving a particular end, the project related to that end is in fact a dream, fantasy, or mere intention, Success is also relevant when projects do lie within one’s range of options, but repeated past and anticipated future failures create tension and fear that diminish one’s freedom to select particular project. Thus, success is relevant both to freedom to obtain and freedom to choose, even if to differing degrees. Similarly, the discussion above suggests that Sartre’s claims that “freedom precedes essence”” (25/61) and “existence precedes and commands essence” (438/513) are incorrect. Essence is related, for Sartre, to situatedness, and although to acertain extent freedom does, indeed, determine situatedness or essence and gives it meaning, situatedness or essence also determines freedom, limiting the meanings people can attribute to the situations in which they find themselves, restrict- ing the range of projects they can choose from, and setting the context in which freedom oper- ates. Being born “an hereditary syphilitic or a tu- bercular” (481/561) does determine, even if not completely, one’s freedom or existence. It would have been more accurate to say, then, that existence and essence mutually determine one another, and the former does not precede the latter. The discussion in this paper also leads to the conclusion that Sartre’s claim that “I am without excuse . .. [carry the weight of the world by myself alone without anything or any person being able to lighten it” (555/641) is incorrect. There are some circumstances that can excuse our choice of projects, a fortiori our actions and our failure to achieve particular ends. The slave should certainly be excused for not opting for the project of becoming president of the United States, a Zen master, or a botanist if he had never heard of these options or had heard of them but did not choose them as they were completely un- feasible for him. A man who has no legs may have no excuse, or insufficient excuse, concerning some projects (such as treating himself as “crippled”), but he does have a good excuse for not opting for projects such as becoming a marathon runner. Hence, Sartre’s specific illustration of his general principle, in claiming that “we have the war we deserve,” raises difficulties too. Some people are innocent victims who do not deserve the war they endure even if we acknowledge their ontological freedom This essay has suggested that Sartre's critics, such as the authors cited above, are largely correct in arguing that his claims about people’s absolute and equal freedom conflict both with empirical reality with other claims he makes, and that replies to these criticisms, both old and recent, are insufficient. Perhaps some or all of his critics were unaware of his distinction between the freedom to choose and the freedom to obtain. But this distinction is immaterial to their criticism, since Sartre’s claims regarding people’s absolute and equal freedom clash with empirical evidence and with other claims he makes, even if understood as referring only to freedom to choose. Critics’ failure to recognize this distinction, then, is inconsequential in this context. Of course, it could also be argued that Sartre’s assertions of absolute freedom should be read as claiming not that we have absolute freedom but, rather, only limited freedom. This interpretation would render Sartre’s theory both realistic and noncontradictory. Detmer, for example, argues, “I am absolutely free because no situation can completely determine how I will interpret that situation, what project I will form with respect to that interpretation, or how I will act in attempting tocarry out that project.” But this interpretation is problematic: if no situation can completely determine my choices I am somewhat free, not absolutely free, I would be absolutely free only ifno situation could determine my choices in any way. Detmer adds that “Sartre’s ‘absolute freedom’ must not be confused with ‘omnipotence,”” suggesting that when Sartre refers to our absolute freedom to choose projects he in fact means that we have only nonabsolute freedom, or limited freedom, to choose projects. This understanding, however, attributes to Sartre a very odd ter- minological choice and, thus, seems implausi ble.** Such a reading seems more of a reconstruc- tion than an interpretation of Sartre’s theory of freedom: it offers a new, amended Sartre. The reconstructed version is, indeed, stronger than the original theory, since it eschews the latter’s con- ception of absolute freedom that renders the theory unrealistic and inconsistent. But as interpret- ers and historians of philosophy, we should explicitly acknowledge that a theory is inconsistent and conflicts with reality when this is the case, as well as distinguish between the theory and its reconstructed variations. There seems to be no reasonable way to disregard or interpret away Sartre’s problematic assertions about our absolute freedom,”* SARTRE’S ABSOLUTE FREEDOM10. Mu. 2, 13. 14. 15. 16. NOTES Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 483; L’Erre et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénomén- ologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 563. See also Being and Nothingness, 581; L'Btre et Unéant, 670. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Knopf, 1961), 284. Camus does not specifically mention Sartre’s name in his polemic against total freedom, but as Ronald Santoni con- vincingly argues, itis quite clear that his many points of criticism of absolute freedom target Sartre's theory. See Ronald E, Santoni, “Camus on Sartre’s “Freedom’—Another ‘Misunderstanding,” Review of Metaphysics 61 (June 2008): 785-813. Walter Kaufmann, Without Guilt and Justice (New York: Delta, 1973), 144, Reinhold Grossmann, Phenomenology and Existen- tialism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 167. Wilfrid Desan, The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 170. Herbert Marcuse, “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean- Paul Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (March 1948): 322. Margaret Whitford, Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Sartre's Philosophy (Lexington, KY: French Forum Publishers, 1982), 56; emphasis in original. Ibid., 56-57. Ibid., 154n1. David Detmer, Freedom as a Value (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1988), 63. Santoni, “Camus on Sartre,” 790. Ibid., 791. William Wilkerson, “Time and Ambiguity: Reas- sessing Merleau-Ponty on Sartrean Freedom,” Jour- nal of the History of Philosophy 48 (April 2010): 209. Santoni, “Camus on Sartre,” 791n26. For example, Wilkerson elaborates on—among other issues—Merleau-Ponty’s assertions that Sartrean freedom cannot explain our activities; that it is too abstract; and that since it is present in all human activities it becomes a meaningless category. Santoni discusses Camus’s criticism that Sartrean freedom PHILOSOPHY TODAY conflicts with justice, allows revolutionary totalitari- anism, and gives license to violence. 17. Ihave focused here on the conflict between Sartre's assertions regarding absolute freedom and some of his assertions about situatedness, But the claims regarding absolute freedom clash also with some of his assertions on being-for-others, such as “the Other’s existence brings a factual limit to my freedom, This is because of the fact that by means of the upsurge of the Other there appear certain determinations which Tam without having chosen them” (Being and Noth- ingness,523; L'Eire et le néant, 606; Sartre’s emphasis). Similarly, “We must recognize that we have just encountered a real limit to our freedom—that is, a way of being which is imposed on us without our freedom being its foundation” (Being and Nothing- ness, 524; L'Etre et le néant, 607; Sartre's emphasis). 18. Interestingly, Sartre is suggesting here that more fundamental projects perform for less fundamental projects the same function that projects perform for situations: they confer meaning. It appears that a choice can function as the “project” of a less fundamental choice and as the “situation” of a more fundamental one. “Being a project” and “being a situation” seem in this passage as relations between choices rather than as two distinct spheres of choices. 19, Sartre adds that choosing a project “anticipates a margin of unpredictability” (Being and Nothingness, 507; L’Etre et le néant, 588), so that we expect the unexpected to possibly happen. Indeed, when we choose projects we know that things may not turn out as we hope they would. But this in itself does not rule out that situatedness restricts our ontological freedom to choose projects. Our choice of projects may be limited by our knowledge, inclinations, and other circumstances even if we expect the unpredictable to possibly happen. 20. Sartre's emphasis; see also Being and Nothingness, 483, 507; L’Etre et le néant, 563, 588. 21. Detmer (Freedom, 65) distinguishes between inconsistency “as a general criticism of Sartre’s theory of freedom” and inconsistency “as an objection to certain specific individual passages.” He suggests that although Sartre’s theory of freedom might be guilty of the latter, itis not guilty of the former. I find the distinction problematic. To say that Sartre's theory of freedom is inconsistent means that it includes claims that are inconsistent (that is, contradict one another), and if claims in a theory are inconsistent, the theory is inconsistent. Perhaps Detmer means that Sartre’s inconsistent claims are not central to his theory of freedom. However, Sartre’s claims about absolute freedom and restricted freedom, ontological freedom and practical freedom, are among the most central—if not the most central—claims in the theory of freedom he proposes. 22. For some usages of “freedom ina situation” or “situated freedom,” see, e.g., Whitford, Merleau-Ponty, 57,and Wilkerson, “Time and Ambiguity.” 208-09, 23. Detmer, Freedom, 64 (his emphasis), 24. Ibid. 25. Detmer’s claim also renders his discussion of the distinction between ontological and practical freedom redundant: if, when Sartre uses “absolute freedom,” he in fact means “nonabsolute freedom,” whatever he says about absolute freedom clashes neither with empirical reality nor with his claims about the limitations on freedom. Itis inconsequential, then, whether in referring to “absolute freedom” Sartre is referring to ontological freedom or to practical freedom. 26. Iam grateful to Lior Levy, Ariel Meirav, and Saul Smilansky for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel 31905. SARTRE’S ABSOLUTE FREEDOM

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