A discussion of the second half of Jean-Paul Sartre's Antisemite and Jew, exploring the relationship between the gaze, situatedness, and freedom and responsibility. Sartre is trying to maintain a balance between individual and institutional accounts of racism - that antisemitism is part of the antisemite's belief structure and also part of the infrastructure of the world - while not compromising his absolutism about freedom and responsibility. And so Sartre argues that we are not responsible for our situation, but rather for our relationship to it. No matter our role in forming that situation, we can configure and reconfigure our subjectivity in relation to institutions of hate and racism - resistance, complicity, indifference, and so on. His argument about responsibility is not moralistic, but instead existential: how we relate to our situatedness is constitutive of who and what we are as subjects, and our capacity to adopt a subjectivity of critique and resistance pushes our sense of self toward a transformation, rather than reification, of the world as we know it.
What is Black Existentialism?
Podcasted process pieces from my course Black Existentialism. The course introduces one of the most important and potent mid-century intellectual movements - the existentialist movement - through a series of black Atlantic thinkers. Our keystone will be Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which is arguably the most important work of Black existentialism from this period. Across the semester we will see why existentialism, with its focus on the ambiguities and ambivalences of lived-experience, had such a deep impact on Black thinkers across the diaspora. We will see these existentialist insights register in literature, philosophy, and film. Old and new.