The Failure of Hate

Abstract

From outset, one must admit that the failure of is hardly a hopeful phrase - at best, it is a sort of double negative whereby one negates hate without necessarily moving toward a more positive statement regarding relationships between human beings. Indeed, when one reads Sartre's Being and Nothingness,1 one is also struck by failure of love, and, in some ways, failure of any sort of relational interaction between two beings-forthemselves. The gaze of other, whether cast in love or in hate, objectifies, seeks to possess or reduce, and perhaps even annihilate other. Likewise, one both desires and fears that look, that gaze, directed upon oneself. Sartre himself acknowledges this impasse at end of Being and Nothingness, and suggests that this question of authentic relations, or ethics, is his next project. We all know, however, that this project - construction of an ethics-was never completed (or was left to us to complete),2 and thus we are left to sort through his notebooks, essays, and other works in order to piece together possibility of an ethics emerging from rather bleak landscape of Being and Nothingness. I shall contend here that while Sartre does indeed move away from this double negative of failure of hate via Marxism and a turn to a more socially oriented ethic, he does not fully escape shadow cast by Being and Nothingness, nor does he aim to do so. In this essay, therefore, I sketch a portrait of hate according to Sartre, using not only Being and Nothingness, but also Anti-Semite and Jew and several fictional works; I bring alongside this analysis some reflections on hate as it appears in Notebooks for an Ethics, and ask what this indicates regarding a Sartrean ethic. I then examine What is Literature? and Hope Now in order to do justice to more complex articulations of human relationships that Sartre explores in these works; articulations that indeed point toward a notion of human freedom that is more than merely ontological.3 What I hope to provide is a description of how hate operates viscerally both with regard to gaze or look of others and in oneself in Sartre's early works, and to use such a description to illuminate ongoing and unresolved complications that result when one tries to construct a coherent ethic out of Sartre's writings. Ultimately, what I think we find in early Sartre is both a compelling portrait of hate, and an equally compelling image of its failure; but something less than an answer to or solution for problem of such human interaction. This leaves us with an odd sort of hope, a recognition that hate is not total or totalizing, that there is always an escape, even into death; but it may not take us as far as we would like. I link this description to Hope Now, recognizing that latter is controversial, and that its ownership is in question. Yet it is precisely in questioning of origins of utterances that we may find modeled a sort of that does not annul Sartre's earlier work, but that nevertheless casts it in a light more along lines of beingtogether as a sort of thrownness that cannot be helped and that constitutes my situation. This being-together in mutual recognition is certainly helpful and more hopeful than what we find in Being and Nothingness, but I contend that it is still less than a compelling and robust ethic. Stones and Mirrors One of pleasures of studying Sartre is wide variety of genres he provides his audience. In this section, I take advantage of both Sartre's theoretical and narrative works in order to develop a more multi-faceted account of hate and inauthenticity than one may glean from an isolated account of either his philosophical texts or his fiction. Specifically, by bringing Anti-Semite and Jew, along with Being and Nothingness, alongside Childhood of a Leader and No Exit, I want to illuminate both abstractly and concretely Sartre's portrait of hatred and demonstrate his consistency with regard to its failures. …