Now showing: all 4 of all notes tagged with existentialism | show yours
Sort options:
newest first |
oldest first |
group by author
Recent tags:
women
violent
sub-culture
sociology
communication
media
mass
politics
panics
moral
panic
bbfc
violence
horror
censorship
journalism
self-regulation
online
cyberspace
context
Philosophy and death
Albert Camus is straight to the point:
There is but one truly serious philosophical question and that is suicide.
The Venetian Blind [Jealousy]
Robbe-Grillet is recognised as the one of the foremost proponents of the nouveau roman - a genre which comes to prominence in the 50s and 60s, particularly in France. As such the genre takes its cue from cultural movements at work such as existentialism and the nascent ideas of structuralism, and ultimately, deconstruction.
The nouveau roman eschews such providential (authorial / narratorial) interventions as plot, narrative arc, chronological realism, intention, and even meaning and purpose. Instead, the surface of things becomes paramount: just as in Sartre's existential world, there is nothing behind objects, so in the world that Robbe-Grillet creates, there is no redemptive purpose, intention, meaning, underlying truth, or even allegorical or analytical logic.
As such, a novel like Jealousy divides readers: some will stare as the sentences pass them by, wondering blankly why they shouldn't go and do something else. Others however, find in the novel's studious avoidance of narratorial intervention and continual striving towards utterly objective descriptions of the surface of things, the geometry, the dimensions, the slowly decaying unity of space and time, and the obsessively repeated presentation of re-presented events and objects, the same intellectual joy that Roland Barthes is celebrating in his advocation of the writerly text - for what 'lies beneath' the surface of things is no more and no less than what we put there.
Before Being and Nothingness
Nausea (1938) was written 5 years before Sartre's philosophical work Being and Nothingness (1943), but there's a precursor to the thought here.
"... we find it so difficiult to imagine nothingness. Now I knew. Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing."
Live or recount
"... a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it."
A stunning couple of pages in Nausea in which Sartre suddenly spears the illusion of meaning that we grasp from thin air and try to smother over the yawning abyss of existence. We narrativise existence, construct and impose meaning onto experience - but Sartre recognises we can only do so in retrospect:
"...people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be such things as true stories; events take place one way and we recount them the opposite way. You appear to begin at the beginning [...] in fact you have begun at the end."
When we 'recount' our lives, we try to seek out the pinnacles and troughs, the 'annunciations' and 'promises', as though they were events there to be recognised and named, rather than conjured and created retrospectively.
"We forget that the future was not yet there; the fellow was walking in a darkness devoid of portents."
It is a Nietzschean moment, where Sartre manages, as he said was his intention, to follow the consequences of atheism to their conclusion. Without any inherent order to experience, we create our own illusion of order; but examination reveals the futility:
"I wanted the moments of my life to follow one another in an orderly fashion like those of a life remembered. You might as well try to catch time by the tail."