The Sleep of Bad Faith

Abstract

sciousness, intentional process of nihilation, is a movement in which facticity and transcendence play out their attractions and retreats for a self which is in complicity with strategies of authenticity and escape from responsibility. The for-itself at once chooses and suffers its longing to establish its being at moment it succumbs to nostalgia of being, as Sartre says, an elsewhere. Thus, Sartre writes, the condition of possibility for bad faith is that human reality, in its most immediate being, in intra-structure of pre-reflective cogito, must be what it is not and not be what it is.' There has been enough good exposition, clarification, and criticism of Being and Nothingness-the book which chiefly concerns me here-to make it possible to take if not a fresh look at least a deviating squint at bad faith. am interested not in rehearsing Sartre's theory but in reapproaching certain aspects of it. Standard objections to and critical questions about bad faith must await response of a less wayward author than am. propose instead to speak of of consciousness and to explore bad faith as metamorphosis of shape. My choice of word shape has been instigated by but is neither dominated nor restricted by certain sources in literary criticism. There has been a long-standing dis-ease with relationship between content and form-a complaint, one might call it. S.J. Perelman's I have Bright's disease and he has mine gives way, a few