Voicing a thesis that will be dramatized in his playNo Exitthe
following year, he concludes that death “is the triumph of the point
of view of the Other over the point of view which I am toward myself ”
(BN 540 ). So paceHeidegger, death, far from being my own most
possibility, is a contingent fact that as such escapes me and originally
belongs to my facticity and to my being-for-others. “There is no place
for classifying these attitudes [toward death] as authentic or inauthentic
since we always diein the bargain (par-dessus le marche ́)” (BN 548 ;
EN 633 ).
“Freedom and Responsibility”
Admitting that this brief section will be of interest primarily to the
ethicist, Sartre is in effect articulating the obvious “ethical” import of
the entire work as a prelude to arriving at the concrete with existential
psychoanalysis in the following chapter. Just as he has “humanized”
space and time, in what we may begin to deem the “existentialist”
manner, so he offers us an “authorial” understanding of “responsibility”
as distinct from the physically “causal” sense of the term. “Responsi-
bility,” he explains, is “consciousness (of) being the incontestable author
of an event or of an object” (BN 553 ). The parenthesis indicates
its nonthetic status as concomitant with any thetic consciousness of an
object. It extends to the full range of our world and is coextensive with
consciousness and freedom itself. One can call this “noetic” responsibi-
lity in virtue of its being a function of the meaning-giving character
of consciousness as such which implies “noetic” freedom as well.
A structuralist critic of Sartrean consciousness has remarked that “Exist-
entialist anthropos, even rid of its reference to a human nature, would
remain an arrogant anthropos who would take himself as the unique source
of meaning.”^33 We shall see that the later Sartre did reserve a clear role for
“structures” in his concept of the practico-inert in theCritique,butevenin
BNhe speaks of signs, directions and other “instrumental complexes,”
including “techniques for appropriating the world” (BN 512 – 521 and
SME 29 – 30 ). Of course, the crucial difference from what came to be
called the “structuralist” alternative to existentialism was the primacy that
(^33) Jean-Marie Benoist,La Revolution structurale(Paris: Grasset, 1975 ), 11.
220 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness