Is existentialism a posthumanism? The Sarterian reflections of Egloff and Darrieussecq

Abstract

The challenges of climate change and mass extinction have stressed the need to rethink our encounters with non-human others in the literary imagination. This article explores this question by reading L'étourdissement by Joël Egloff and Notre vie dans les forêts by Marie Darrieussecq vis-à-vis Sartre’s literary works (namely, La nausée) and philosophical works (namely, L’être et le néant). Drawing upon post-anthropocentric thought, I show how Egloff and Darrieussecq radicalize Sartre in a posthumanistic fashion. In L'étourdissement, this radicalization turns the drama of the look and of the affectivity of the nausea from a dyadic conflict of subject and object into an exposure to multiplicity. In Notre vie dans les forêts, the reciprocity of the self and its other is embedded in a corporeal interdependence, where the double is not perceived as a threat to the self but as a potential ally. In this sense, the Sarterian struggle against the undermining look of the other turns into a realization of radical interdependence and eventually into the emergence of care for the other.