“If you don’t push it, it won’t fall”
> Anguish is in fact the recognition of a possibility as _my_ possibility; that is, it
> is constituted when consciousness sees itself cut from its essence by
> nothingness or separated from the future by its very freedom.
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Sartre, Being and nothingness
Interesting post by Bat and discussion at Long Sunday about reactionary vs. Leninist counterfactuals. I wonder if the distinction isn’t at least in part about _agency_. For the what-if historian, the question of who caused the alternate world is irrelevant if it is even coherent (it’s a necessary truth of Kripke’s possible worlds that we cannot actualise them). But for the revolutionary, as Bat says, the only question that matters is how we can bring about the alternate world; when we see that the possible future is _our_ future, and one from which we are “separated by [our] very freedom.”
I think Negri says somewhere that, whenever we think of political subjectivity, we find ourselves returning to Lenin; I hope he said that, because it’s true. I’m kind of surprised, though (perhaps I shouldn’t be), to find the political so close to the surface in Being and nothingness. It’s a commonplace to say that Sartre concentrates on the centrality of the subject in the world; but what seems often to be missed is that this is a necessarily political, and even a class, subject.
> There exist concretely alarm clocks, signboards, tax forms, policemen, so
> many guard rails against anguish.
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re Sartre: agreed. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason of course the ’subject’ of History is the ‘group-in-fusion’: the egalitarian uprising, transversal to class in some respects, but most definitely ‘political’.
Comment by infinite thought @ 8/22/2005 6:30 pm