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Chapter 6 Making Nothing of Something Nihilation—the repudiation of coincidence, the opening of an “impalpable fissure” in being (Sartre 1971, 124) which renders the “total plenitude,” the “perfect equivalence of content to container” (120), porous and lacunary— is, to risk indelicacy, an ontological fantasy. As Flynn confirms, it is “revealed to consciousness only in the imagining act” (Flynn 1980, 106). Not only is imagination “an essential and transcendental condition of consciousness ” (Sartre 1991, 273), specifically, of our consciousness (of) nihilation, but in its production of “the objects of negation, and of privation” (Flynn, 106–7), imagination shows itself to be nihilation. And if “[t]o imagine is simultaneously to produce an imaginary object and to make oneself imaginary (s’imaginariser) . . .” (Sartre 1971–72, 912n; Flynn, 108), then not only are nihilation and the négatités which arise from it fabulated, but also we who nihilate. And in postulating that “[f]or a consciousness to be able to imagine it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able by its own efforts to withdraw from the world” (1991, 267), Sartre sets himself up for Merleau-Ponty’s stinging comment that he seems to have “deliberately taken up a position in the realm of the imaginary” (1955, 262), and that he had decided to “enclose himself in words” (270). All the difference, all the articulation and salience, all the relation and structure , all the richness and diversity of our world are—incredibly—purely “imaginary.” We do not discover the fissures, the gaps, the disparities, the distances , the absences which engender the extraordinary variegation of experienced reality, we create them—by imagining them. Or rather, we do encounter objective nothingness, en counter it as already eating away at the solidity of being—nihilation is an ontological act—but only after we ourselves have given birth to it. Sartre teeters unsteadily on the brink of idealism , and would no doubt succumb were it not for his “realism” with respect 131 to the in-itself: the “screen” upon which our imaginative projections play. Sartre confesses a psychological penchant for realism “out of a taste for feeling the resistance of things, but most of all in order to accord to everything I saw its character of unconditional absolute: I could enjoy a landscape or sky only if I thought it was absolutely as I saw it” (1984, 83). And he can be assured of this, since the “as” is controlled by nihilation. The purported event of nihilation is the indispensable condition for the arising of self-consciousness in all of its Sartrean modalities: the (reflective) consciousness of consciousness; consciousness of the summation, the pattern or Gestalt, of acts, states and dispositional qualities (the ego) thematized in reflection; and the prereflective self-presence—consciousness (of) consciousness—which enforces, in the non-positional mode, a subtle, impalpable , but nonetheless perpetually suggested and “haunting” hiatus between consciousness and itself—the “self” that it would be, both in the sense that consciousness is informed with a certain nisus to be what it cannot be, and in the sense that, like the peril of the moth attracted by a flame, the realization of this “futile passion” would spell the annihilation of consciousness . “In Sartre, consciousness is continually being frustrated by being thrown outside of itself, for consciousness can never achieve happiness or repose in itself. Thus, a Sartrean consciousness is denied the absolute” (Silverman 1988a, 302). Buddhism never denies the self—as appearance. It never needs to. Appearance is appearance. And a Buddhist phenomenology finds much in Sartre’s description of the self to admire. But admiration is not adoration, and if “[o]ntology is the interrogative word of adoration in the ear of . . . the Abyss” (Burke 1990, 83), Sartre stops short of hurling the apparent self into the void which devours all things, but at the same time, allows all things blossom, to borrow Dõgen’s poignant phrase, like “flowers of emptiness .” In Bataille’s exuberant vision, “everything in me gives itself to others” (1988, 129). And if the task of phenomenology is to trace the efflorescence of constituted objectivity to its rootedness in the dark, rich interiorized illumination of preobjective experience, we must unearth the roots. Or rather than expose the tender down-shoots to the harsh light of analytic day, we must appreciate, sensitize ourselves to, the dark/bright soil in which they are suspended. Sartre’s arrested ontology sinks no...

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