8TH LECTURE AT THE GRAMSCI MONUMENT, THE BRONX, NYC: 8TH JULY 2013 DEFINITION OF FREEDOM MARCUS STEINWEG
Jean-Paul Sartre
The death of God punches holes into the notion of an absolute programmer. It punches holes into the notion of the existence of an ontological program. There is no program. There is no one who has a plan; there is no one who knows. No one vouches for the meaning of the subject and its reality; or to put it in a variation on Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, everyone has nothing but his own plan and his doubts about its correctness.
Much as Sartre is to be blamed for not having gone beyond the framework of the phenomenology of self-consciousness, instead trusting in a conception of the subject that, by evoking the image of a more or less undisturbed self-address in freedom, is guilty of misapprehending the efficiency of that anonymous texture, that structural fabric we call the space of fact, his insistence on a certain irreducibility of the concept of the subject and its freedom remains important, at least unless we wish to switch directly from the narcissistic egocentrism of idealist provenance to the narcissism of total self-objectivation, or mauvaise foi.
As always in thinking, the goal must be to complicate the binary logic. At issue is neither a conception of (structuralist) subjectivity without subject vs. a subject without subjectivity, nor vice versa. Rather, the challenge is to affirm the compossibility of the subject without subjectivity with a subjectivity without subject. The subject in the horizon of God’s inexistence is not the owner of itself; therefore does it constitute itself as an inventor in the labyrinthine terrain that remains its life.