Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence

Chapter 3. Levinasian Positionality in Sartre’s Account of Nausea

73 Chapter 3 Levinasian Positionality in Sartre’s Account of Nausea Positionality, as conceived by Levinas, refers to what is oftentimes felt as the unyielding obligation to be with one’s “self,” despite not being completely identical with that “self.”1 As positioned, the existent feels herself abandoned to the alterity of the il y a, and I read, in this abandonment, an inevitable solitude that pertains to the existent’s condition. In Sartre’s concrete descriptions of nausea, which emphasizes the sense in which embodiment captures the obligation to “be oneself,” I identify resonances with these (Levinasian) notions of positionality and solitude. On Sartre’s account, consciousness’s encounter with existence is founded on an obligation to exist that, I hold, exposes a level of vulnerability on the hither side of radical freedom.2 To be sure, this reading of Sartre is explicitly Levinasian. But this is only because it is informed by similarities that I identify between Levinas’s conception of the il y a and his (Sartre’s) concrete descriptions of nausea. I establish that not only do both thinkers portray a level of vulnerability that is more primordial than (spontaneous ) subjectivity, but also that they recognize a correlation between this vulnerability and the radically solitary condition of the self. For Levinas, the disruption that is brought on by the obligation to be with my “self,” along with my inability to identify with that “self,” births an existential forlornness such that I am left alone to carry the burden of existence.3 Chapter 2 presented phenomenologies of insomnia and fatigue to show that this encounter with the burden of existing happens outside the parameters of an intentionally constructed network of meanings. Sartre ’s descriptions of the experience of nausea are similar in this regard, 74 Moments of Disruption since they too capture a nonintentional encounter between consciousness and being. My claim is that, in such moments, consciousness’s experiences are no longer those of a world (any world), but rather exist in what can only be described as an ambiguous “in-between” of pure being (void of all meaning) and the meaningful totality of beings constitutive of a world.4 In this disintegration of “world,” there is also a similar disruption , or dissimulation of the subject’s position as a spontaneous flight from being.5 This would support my claim that Sartre recognizes a region of positioned solitude within the structure of consciousness, despite its movement of intentionality. Since they seem to indicate “an identity in disruption,” much like what sustains Levinas’s conception of transcendence -as-excendence, I read Sartre’s descriptions of nausea as calling into question his formal account of an absolute freedom that was outlined in chapter 1. In other words, given the similarities I presently trace, between these concrete descriptions of nausea and the phenomenology grounding the Levinasian notion of the il y a, the event of nausea seems to call for an understanding of human identity that is simply absent in the Sartrean structures of consciousness. In tracing these similarities, a fair reading of both Sartre and Levinas requires that one also takes note of the important differences between their accounts. Levinas identifies, as the conditions of an encounter with the il y a, the existent as already troubled with a certain modulation of alterity. Sartre, on the other hand, locates, in the breakdown of signification found in nausea, consciousness’s responsibility to create meaning, and as a consequence, its world. In this sense, the monstrosity of an undefinable field of existence is given over to the Sartrean consciousness as the template out of which it must freely make itself what it must be.6 Nevertheless, Sartre does explicitly recognize a marked forlornness that comes as a consequence of this radical responsibility.7 As such, when immersed in the horror of nausea, consciousness encounters itself as radically alone, supporting the burden of having to choose its world, in solitude. In Levinas’s account of the il y a, he identifies this primordial solitude as the promise of an excendence from being. The il y a “shows up” only through a positioned existent that, across its hypostasis, occupies its position alone. In this regard, both Levinas and Sartre understand the condition of the subject to be one of solitude, even though Sartre explicitly determines that a consciousness condemned to such solitude is subsequently free, while Levinas employs this solitude to found the passivity (or nonfreedom) of the existent. Nonetheless, the trajectory of...