© Cedoc Profile
I quote Sartre: “Since 1760, the American colonists defended slavery in the name of freedom: if the colonist, citizen and precursor, wants to buy a Negro, is he not free to do so? And, if he has bought it, is he not free to use it? In 1947, the owner of a swimming pool refuses to admit a Jewish captain, a hero of the war. The captain writes to the newspapers to complain. The newspapers publish the protest and declaim: ‘What an admirable country America is! The pool owner was free to deny a Jew access to the pool. But the Jew, a citizen of the United States, was free to protest in the press. And the press, free as is known, mentions, without taking sides, the pros and cons. Finally, everyone is free’. The only annoyance is that the word freedom, which covers such different meanings –and a hundred more– is used without it being believed necessary to warn about the meaning it has in each case”.
Various objections have been raised to Sartre, by the way: from Camus to Michel Foucault, passing through Theodor Adorno. But questioning it is not the same as simply omitting it, simply leaving it aside.
Especially in times like these, when that word “freedom” is thrown around so often. Although perhaps, if one notices, it is precisely that.
The postulation of an idea of freedom linked to that of responsibility and defined in relation to others, the warning about its hollow uses not less than the concrete fact that it is usually used as an alibi for the most tenacious oppression, are aspects of the Sartre’s proposals that do not fit with the superfluous formulations that are used so frequently today, alien to any emancipation, functional to the existing domination.
For such variants to flourish, bypassing Sartre may be, why not, even indispensable.