Gender and the Abject in Sartre — Page 9:
41 By the end of Les mouches, the threatening force represented by Electra, the threat posed by abjection, has been contained and transferred to — not to say, absorbed by — the male hero. This dénouement, among other traits, marks Sartre's Les mouches as a product of patriarchal society and a masculinist play, which depicts masculinized violence and sexuality as positive. Orestes addresses his sister, who is identified with the feminized city. For Sartre any encounter with the feminized Other is a project of forceful appropriation, not to say rape.
Viens Electre, regarde notre ville. Elle est là, rouge sous le soleil, bourdonnante d'hommes et de mouches, dans l'engourdissement têtu d'un après-midi d'été; elle me repousse de tous ses murs, de tous ses toits, de toutes ses portes closes. Et pourtant elle est à prendre, je le sens depuis ce matin. Et toi aussi, Electre, tu es à prendre. Je vous prendrai. Je deviendrai hache et je fendrai en deux ces murailles obstinées, j'ouvrirai le ventre de ces maisons bigotes, elles exhaleront par leurs plaies béantes une odeur de mangeaille et d'encens; je deviendrai cognée et je m'enfoncerai dans le coeur de cette ville comme la cognée dans le coeur d'un chêne. (Les mouches 179; my emphasis)
Reinforcing the philosophical proximity of Les mouches and L'être et le néant, the theme of appropriation also gains particular insistence in Part Four of L'être et le néant.
L'être et le néant
42 The fundamental concepts of Sartre's analysis in L'être et le néant, namely pour-soi, en-soi, pour-autrui, and en-soi-pour-soi are based on Hegel (Fürsich, Ansich, Für-Andere, Ansich-Fürsich).[15]Ronald Aronson also points out that "<em>L'être et le Néant</em> bears the traces of [Heidegger's] <em>Being and Time</em> on virtually every page" (94). Contrary to Heidegger, Sartre stresses the primacy of the thing; the in-itself is prior to consciousness. It was Hegel who introduced — but, given the history of Western patriarchy, in no way invented — the master-slave dialectic, the dichotomy between "Herr" (master, lord) and "Knecht" (slave, servant, bondsman). He distinguishes between "two opposed shapes of consciousness": "one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness, whose essential nature is simply to love or to be for another: the former is lord, the other is bondsman" (115).
43 Contrary to Hegel, however, Sartre denies the possibility of a synthesis or mediation between the subject (pour-soi) and the object (en-soi). Although the goal of the for-itself's totalizing appropriation is the establishment of the in-itself-for-itself, although, according to Sartre, man's desire is to be simultaneously en-soi and pour-soi — self-sufficient like a thing, but endowed with the freedom human consciousness provides — , the totality of en-soi-pour-soi [16]Sartre's term is obviously a translation of Hegel's <em>An-und-für-sich</em>. is ultimately illusory. In Sartre's philosophy, the higher dialectical synthesis, which Christianity identifies with God and Hegel with Absolute Knowledge, remains an unachievable ideal. As Sartre's drama Huis clos with its famous proclamation "L'enfer c'est les autres" demonstrates, for Sartre, the basic relationship with others consists of conflict:
Pendant que je tente de me libérer de l'emprise d'autrui, autrui tente de se libérer de la mienne; pendant que je cherche à asservir autrui, autrui cherche à m'asservir. Il ne s'agit nullement ici de relations unilatérales avec un objet-en-soi, mais de rapports réciproques et mouvants [. . .]. Le conflit est le sens originel de l'être-pour-autrui (L'être 431).
44 The power struggle between the for-itself and the in-itself in Sartre's philosophy and dramatic oeuvre is a variation of the struggle for domination that characterizes both Western patriarchal thought and practice and fascism. Sartre critiques neither the pour-soi's attempt to establish mastery nor the basic binary and oppositional structure of Western thought; instead, his work can itself be analyzed as a product of the Western logic of mastery and domination. The struggle for domination negates playful ambivalence, abjects it, and affirms dualistic structures.
45 In the subchapter "La Psychanalyse existentielle" of L'être et le néant, Sartre describes the threat posed to the pour-soi by the viscous, a clearly negativized, "hostile" and "horrible" state. Like Kristeva's abject, the slimy, despite its repulsive character, exerts a deadly, trap-like fascination and poses the threat of fusion, degradation, ego-dissolution (e.g. L'être 701), and engulfment by the (m)other. The physiological reaction to the viscous is "a sweetish sort of disgust" (Manser 12), nausea (e.g. L'être 404)