lettersfromgrace 's review for:

Existentialism and Human Emotions by Jean-Paul Sartre

3.25

---

Intriguing. Next time I find myself doing nothing— or doomscrolling— I think I shall remind myself of what Sartre says about man’s action. Some incredible quotes that really resonate, especially earlier on in the collection. Such as: “Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning you choose”. At the existentialist psychoanalysis element it all goes a little too far for me. I get the gist, but it reiterates only the misogyny of psychoanalysis (be it empirical or existential). It always starts from the man, the he, he is always the absolute as she is the other— as de Beauvoir would go on to say. And is it enough to be a “strange flesh which is to transform herself into fullness of being” if it is only through “penetration and dissolution”? Is it enough to be the existence without the essence? It’s as if he would resign her to same place as say, Aristotle’s chair. He remains the thing that signifies her, the telos. And so, he does not free her, which is antithetical to the nature of existentialism: which is freedom. It’s midnight, maybe I am simply reading it the wrong way— but goodness, between Nausea and Annie’s awful exclamations about her “fruits”, her lovely “fruits” and this, I wonder if Sartre listened at all to Simone de Beauvoir.