not objectifying. It joins a number of other attempts to “materialize”
our prereflective awareness by introducing a dialectical relation
between that awareness and the situation which it conditions
and which dialectically conditions it. (This, in turn, builds on
Sartre’s notion of “situation” as an ambiguous mix of facticity and
transcendence, the given and the taken.) One should note that inBN
he had removed the substance (en-soi) from subjectivity, leaving us
with the “immanence of self to itself ” (BNlvii). This is yet another
description of prereflective consciousness as presence-to-self, but it
adds the distinctive note of alimitto reflective withdrawal, for Sartre
describes immanence as “the smallest recoil (recul) which can be made
from self to itself ” (BNlxv; F 32 ). In other words, “subjectivity” is
another word for the impossibility for a man’s being an object for
himself: “I am the one who cannot be an object for myself ” (BN 241 ).
Years later, in his brilliant study of Jean Genet, Sartre will explain that
what he is calling “presence-to-self ” is “this vague sense of a want
of exact correspondence between the subjective and the objective”
(SG 592 );inotherwords,itisthedifferenceto which he is about to
appeal in the following paragraphs of his lecture.
Sartre discusses various examples to show that “I recognize subject-
ivity best in the results of work and ofpraxisin response to a situation.
If subjectivity can be discovered by me, it’s because of a difference that
obtains between what the situation demands of me commonly and the
response that I give to it” (MS 23 ). Unlike in the previous reflections,
his vocabulary has shifted from consciousness to “praxis” as epitom-
ized in physical work. He wishes to draw a social lesson from this
arrangement – namely, that our social situation (our class) modifies our
subjectivity, our way of being in the world, if you will, at a prereflective
level. We are witnessing once more an important modification of the
unblinking eye of Sartrean consciousness as described inBN. Indeed,
Sartre admits: “There are several dimensions of subjectivity for a man”
(MS 33 .) Two such dimensions of subjectivity that are constantly
retotalized, without our knowing it: thepastandclass being.Tothis
he adds a third,repetition,andaforth,invention,which,asweshall
see in the next Rome lecture, distinguish inauthentic and authentic
moralities respectively. And to these last two he adds another essential
character of subjectivity, namely,projection(MS 33 – 34 ). One begins
to see what Jean-Bertrand Pontalis meant when he called Sartre’s
366 A second ethics? 0