Sartrean bad faith and antiblack racism

Lewis R. Gordon

pp. 107-129

in: Steven Crowell (ed), The prism of the self, Berlin, Springer, 1995

Abstract

What Natanson is considering in this passage from The Journeying Self is that antiblack attitudes and some pro-black attitudes may be forms of bad faith. Natanson's conception of bad faith in that work is "That which threatens the self by fixing and desiccating the subject.... Bad Faith consists in the individual's moving from subject to object in social roles which have congealed consciousness into routine expectancy and which have made of intersubjectivity a masked and masking reality" (45). Bad faith threatens every dimension of human reality, including the existential impact of history: "The binding of time in Bad Faith is a way of denying the possibilities of the self, of stripping the individual of his involvement in history" (92).

Cited authors

Sartre Jean-Paul