ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of existential philosophy for understanding the nature of political life today. Engaging primarily with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), I explore a central dilemma in political life. At certain moments of history, what Sartre calls ‘fused groups’ or ‘hot groups’ take form in order to reject an oppressive political status quo: I use Occupy Wall Street movement as an example. However, hot groups inevitably cool, and if the liberatory aims of the group are to have any enduring life, they must become articulated into what Sartre calls ‘organisations.’ Organisations tend to become ‘institutions’ that take on a life of their own—often to the detriment of the original aims and vitality of the group. The ambiguous relationship between spontaneous group action and the inertia of political institutions has an analogue in human freedom as such. In Part One of this chapter, I draw on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1939) in order to describe the manner in which freedom plays out in each of our lives as the lived tension between original, inherently unpredictable choice, on the one hand, and the enduring structures or ‘exigencies’ that this choice projects in the world, on the other hand. Part Two explores how this structure of freedom takes on a monstrous form in ordinary historical existence, in which individuals generally exist in a situation of mutual isolation or what Sartre calls ‘seriality.’ Here, collections of individuals each pursuing their own ends leads to what Sartre calls ‘counter-finalities,’ or situations that no one would have intended, such as the financial crisis of 2008. Part Three turns to an analysis of the Occupy Movement and its legacy in conversation with Sartre’s analysis of different forms of group life. I conclude by arguing that group political action—accompanied by the existential angst that comes with facing up to our own communal freedom to give political shape to our world—will always be necessary.
