This is Your Daddy's Existentialism: Notes on a Dead Orthodoxy

There was a time when the word "existentialism" meant something here in America. I estimate that time to have been roughly 1950 through 1965, and during that time existentialism meant Sartre and Camus. It meant that life is absurd because there is no God, but that humans can create meaning in the face of the void through decision, dignity and decency. It meant the antithesis of bourgeois conformity, seen as an attempt to mask the essential absurdity of life; it meant an aesthetics of political engagement largely ungrounded by a politics. And as far as I can tell it was at some point an orthodoxy among the literary thinking classes.

The most recent piece of evidence that has come my way on this point is Blanche Gelfant's really-quite-embarrassing 1966 reading of Clarissa Dalloway as Sartrean heroine in "Love and Conversion in Mrs. Dalloway," an essay whose laughable self-assurance-- it complains that the novel fails because the bourgeois, conventional Clarissa is unsuited to embody the radical sense of the absurd Woolf was "trying" to express-- could only exist on the foundation of firmly established thought-cliche. Evidence from the other side is Cavell's 1969 essay on Beckett's Endgame (republished in Must We Mean What We Say?), where he crushes a then-existing Camusian orthodox reading of Beckett wherein Beckett "expresses" silly things like "life is absurd" by showing some people who seem to be living absurdly. To my knowledge this radical orthodoxy produced no novels which are still read, but many of its proponents also seem to admire the Beats. "Beat," by the way, isn't what I always thought it was-- syncopation-- but turns out to have to do with getting the shit kicked out of you. The vision of life as something that kicks the shit out of you for no reason, and the kind of joy and sense of power one can achieve merely by facing up to this fact in its full glory, is the heart of the aesthetic I'm trying to pin down-- an aesthetic that has left us entirely, leaving behind only the vaguely derogatory connotations of a term like "existential angst." One sees it pop up now and again-- there was one old-fashioned Camusian activist in my freshman dorm, and the film Waking Life has an old professor defending Sartrean authenticity against "postmodernism" -- but I think it's fair to say that on the whole, this whole macho-decisionistic outlook on life seems to us either melodramatic or faintly laughable.

My question is, why? Sure, I know, the whole enterprise is based on a trivially flawed reading of Heidegger, willful ignorance of the social and an amateurish theory of "value," but intellectual bankruptcy is no reason for abandoning an intellectual orthodoxy as long as it seems timely; we've all been reading Zizek for like 5 years now and haven't yet grown out of it. The kind of answer I'm looking for lies elsewhere. I would say to begin with that Sartrean existentialism is the flip-side of the conformism of the 1950s. I have no idea whether the 1950s really were conformist, but I'm sure that they saw themselves that way; cf. The Lonely Crowd (1951), White Collar (1948). The sense was of a crushing normalcy that one could abandon only at enormous cost; community was dead, and authenticity meant loneliness.

Directly correlative to this is the emptying out of affirmative political possibility. Which is not to say that Sartre and Camus were not political, but that the ideal of political engagement looked more like the Spanish Civil War or the Resistance than it did like anything the 1950s had to offer: an evil enemy, overwhelmingly powerful, with no chance of success and so no question of a positive social ideal. Politics was precisely the place in which one engaged oneself "absurdly"-- which meant that politics meant nothing. Politics can play the important role it plays in existentialism only if there are no serious and meaningful political choices to make, which is to say only if the battle is already lost. (The recurrence of this valorization of suicidal political engagement for itself in Zizek+Badiou today is, as the Marxists say, "symptomatic.")

We might say, then, that with the opening up of social alternatives in the mid-1960s existentialism naturally disappeared, as there seemed the prospect of something better than angst-ridden freedom: genuine social transformation, the creation of a community in which individuality could thrive. What I take to be an effect rather than a cause of this, the structuralist / post-structuralist interest in social determinations of subjectivity, killed existentialism intellectually in France on or about June 1, 1966; in America the winds shifted as a new generation of serious young men joined SDS.

What complicates this story, to my mind, is that the American 1960s didn't replace existentialism with anything quite as serious as, say, Marxist-revolutionary engagement; what we retain from the 1960s, in the novels that have lasted and in the culture at large, is a kind of Yippie playfulness tinged with the sense of impending apocalypse (Vonnegut, Pynchon)-- and that's what makes Sartre laughable. He takes himself so entirely seriously. The political possibilities of the 1960s have long receded, the oppressive conformism of the 1950s hasn't after all changed that much (we may go to BDSM bars but we don't do it on Tuesday nights, since we'd be tired at the office the next day), but what we've retained is the inability to imagine ourselves staring into the void, entirely alone with the absence of God. Things have become too ordinary. The graffiti of May '68 already announces a revolution whose goals are childish. If those goals are far more comprehensible to me, far more inspiring because far more real, than those of Sartre... Well, I'm not sure that's a good thing.

I'd like to understand the Sartrean orthodoxy better because (1) it emphasizes the individual, whereas modern thought-cliche avant-gardism remains political in an era with no serious politics; (2) it takes things about as seriously as they might actually be, and we don't do that anymore. What do you think? What is living and what is dead in your daddy's existentialism?