Special Dossier: The New Politics of Existence

Abstract

Special Dossier: The New Politics of Existence William Egginton and Yi-Ping Ong When the editors of this special issue first met in 2019 to discuss hosting a conference on the topic of “The New Politics of Existence,” a world-wide pandemic that would kill tens of millions around the world, devastate economies, and exacerbate divisiveness and conspiracy mongering never crossed our minds. We focused instead on the apparent rise in the appeal of existentialist thought among students, colleagues, and even the general public. Sarah Bakewell had made a splash with a book on freedom, being, and apricot cocktails called At the Existentialist Café. Martin Hägglund’s This Life, an attempt to re-envision our political and economic order in light of mortality and finitude, had just come out. Yi-Ping had recently published The Art of Being, in which she analyzed the power of novelistic form to reorient existentialist philosophy towards the nature of human freedom and the meaning of life. Bill’s most recent graduate seminars on existentialism had attracted suspiciously large enrollments, and our colleague and contributor to this volume Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei reported similar numbers in her classes devoted to the subject. While we certainly speculated on the reasons for the upsurge our (admittedly minuscule) sampling suggested, the emergency whose most minor consequence would be to postpone our meeting for nearly three years ended up laying open what could be the primary driver: our abiding precarity. The sense that all we have rests on a razor thin sheet of ice over an abyss of the unknown leads us to reach for the illusive security of essences: the national and ethnic substances that anchor our identities amidst the rush of cultural differences; the sexual relation that reassures [End Page 853] half the world’s population of its nature-given dominance; the marching-orders given straight to our immortal souls regarding who is damned and who is saved. And when such essences are ascendant, the philosophy we call existentialist strives to break the fever dream in which one group’s salvation lies in the oppression, exclusion, or death of others. The six essays we gather in this volume were delivered at Johns Hopkins University on September 24, 2022. They represent a small but decisive intervention in our intellectual culture’s return for guidance to thinkers from Kierkegaard through de Beauvoir, while also making arguments for existentialist perspectives on philosophers and authors not traditionally associated with that canon. We collect these not in the spirit of self-satisfied complacency, but in the modest hope that even such minor efforts to revisit this tradition will constitute a modicum of inoculation against the ideologies that would divert us from our own fragile existence. William Egginton and Yi-Ping Ong, November 2022 [End Page 854] Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press