Sartre on the Jew, Situatedness, and Responsibility

A discussion of the second half of Jean-Paul Sartre's Antisemite and Jew, exploring the relationship between the gaze, situatedness, and freedom and responsibility. Sartre is trying to maintain a balance between individual and institutional accounts of racism - that antisemitism is part of the antisemite's belief structure and also part of the infrastructure of the world - while not compromising his absolutism about freedom and responsibility. And so Sartre argues that we are not responsible for our situation, but rather for our relationship to it. No matter our role in forming that situation, we can configure and reconfigure our subjectivity in relation to institutions of hate and racism - resistance, complicity, indifference, and so on. His argument about responsibility is not moralistic, but instead existential: how we relate to our situatedness is constitutive of who and what we are as subjects, and our capacity to adopt a subjectivity of critique and resistance pushes our sense of self toward a transformation, rather than reification, of the world as we know it.