Sarte and Sontag

"Abjection is a methodical conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoché: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of the divine understanding. The superiority of this method to the other two lies in its being lived in pain and pride. It therefore does not lead to the transcendental and universal consciousness of Husserl, the formal and abstract thinking of the Stoics, or the substantial cogito of Descartes, but to an individual existence at its highest degree of tension and lucidity.” -Jean-Paul Sartre

"His pre-war novel, Nausea, really supplies the key to all his work. Here is stated the fundamental problem of the assimilability of the world in its repulsive, slimy, vacuous, or obtrusively substantial thereness—the problem which moves all of Sartre’s writings. Being and Nothingness is an attempt to develop a language to cope with, to record the gestures of, a consciousness tormented by disgust. This disgust, this experience of the superfluity of things and of moral values, is simultaneously a psychological crisis and a metaphysical problem."

"In Being and Nothingness, Sartre reveals himself as a psychologist of the first rank—worthy to rank with Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud. And the focus of the Baudelaire essay is the analysis of Baudelaire’s work and biography, treated as texts equivalent from a symptomatic point of view, disclosing fundamental psychological gestures. What makes Saint Genet even more interesting than the Baudelaire essay (though, at the same time, more unmanageable as well) is that, through thinking about Genet, Sartre has gone beyond the notion of action as a mode of psychological self-conservation. Through Genet, Sartre has glimpsed something of the autonomy of the aesthetic. More exactly, he has redemonstrated the connection between the aesthetic dimension and freedom, rather differently argued by Kant. The artist who is the subject of Saint Genet is not psychologized away. Genet’s works are interpreted in terms of a saving ritual, a ceremony of consciousness. That this ceremony is essentially onanistic, is curiously apt. According to European philosophy since Descartes, world-creating has been the principal activity of consciousness. Now, a disciple of Descartes has interpreted world-creating as a form of world-procreating, as masturbation.

Sartre correctly describes Genet’s spiritually most ambitious book, Funeral Rites, as “a tremendous effort of transubstantiation.” Genet relates how he transformed the whole world into the corpse of his dead lover, Jean Decarnin, and this young corpse into his own penis. “The Marquis de Sade dreamt of extinguishing the fires of Etna with his sperm,” Sartre observes. “Genet’s arrogant madness goes further: he jerks off the Universe.” Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again. It is a rather good description, anyway, of Sartre’s own phenomenology of consciousness. And, certainly, it is a perfectly fair description of what Genet is about."

-Susan Sontag, en Sartre’s Saint Genet, de Against Interpretation.