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

In his celebrated review of the new French novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet read Sartre’s La nausée through its genuine intervention with seemingly banal objects. According to Robbe-Grillet (1963: 61–62), the nausea that hits Antoine Roquentin unexpectedly throughout the novel unearths a fissure in his wish to thoroughly signify the world, which is evoked by the resistance manifested in the opaque existence of things. Roquentin’s view of the world thus ventures to surpass the subject–object opposition by emphasizing its absurdity, refiguring the boundaries between the human and his or her surroundings.

Robbe-Grillet’s terminology, directly tackling the “anthropomorphization” of existence (1963: 62), uncannily resembles trends within the humanities that would resonate half a century later. The entanglement of the human and the non-human, and most specifically the challenge that seemingly inert matter presents to modern Humanistic epistemologies, would be the key topics addressed by posthumanism and new materialisms as fields of research. ¹ This move reflects the nature of current bio-politics, in which virtually all forms of life are abstracted and commodified through algebraic algorithms to calculate profit. In the words of Rosi Braidotti, “the opportunistic political economy of bio-genetic capitalism induces, if not the actual erasure, at least the blurring of the distinction between the human and other species when it comes to profiting from them” (2013: 63). Following Robbe-Grillet, and vis-à-vis the challenges of our time, it is useful to rethink ideas encapsulated within Sarterian thought – and current manifestations of this thought – in a way that might surpass anthropocentrism.

In this article, I explore 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 essence, 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 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.

This article ties into a vibrant field of research defined by Stephanie Posthumus as French Écocritique (2018). Illuminating ecological themes within recent French literature while clearly drawing a line between French literature and French thought, Posthumus concludes that “theory and fiction are embedded in evolving oikos of cultures, languages, and literature” (2018: 165). This presumption serves not only as a justification to examine posthuman themes within the specific scope of contemporary literature in French but also to rethink already-established French theoretical corpuses, such as Sartre’s, as keys to understanding the potentiality of contemporary works and of literature at large.

Explicitly, albeit briefly, referring to L’Étourdissement, Anne Simon (2016) has discussed the rebellious nature of animals in recent works of fiction – rebellious, of course, not only in terms of actual scenes but also as a constant threat to the margin of nature and culture and of human and non-human identities. Later, she elaborates on the novel when discussing her concept of biopoethics (Simon, 2020a), which neatly grasps the way in which literature intervenes with current bio-political realities. In L’Étourdissement, Simon identifies a wish to “credit anew the discredited and disqualified lives of animals and staffers alike” (2020a: 212). Elsewhere, Simon (2020b) adds that the virtual absence of the animal voice in the novel in fact marks their obliteration, referring to the protagonist’s dream; this obliteration is discussed below as a symptom of the shared conditions of humans and animals in the novel. Indeed, my aim here is to elaborate upon this notion of biopoethics, discussing L’Étourdissement against bio-political challenges. Nevertheless, I perform an in-depth reading of the novel to anchor its posthuman traits back in the existentialist Humanist tradition, a move that could shed a broader light on both theoretical and literary corpuses.

Although published relatively recently, Notre vie has also been the object of several interesting works of research. Benjamin Dalton (2020) has analysed the novel against Catharine Malabou’s notion of plasticity, affirming the novel’s potential to surpass general presumptions about the notion of cloning (Dalton: 55–73). Even more relevant to our context, the novel has been examined through its manifestations of resistance in a hyper-technological world (Fréville, 2020; Stojanovic, 2020) and as an imaginary establishment of a subversive community between humans and non-humans, interacting with our current ecological catastrophe (Brunau-Zaragoza, 2020; Posthumus, 2020). These readings are, in a sense, different from Annabel L. Kim’s thesis (2020), which insists that humanism is in fact reclaimed in Notre vie. My reading could offer a reconciliation of this supposed gap, as it shows how a Humanistic ontology from Sarterian Humanism is reconfigured in the novel in a posthumanistic fashion.

My comparison of Egloff and Darrieussecq to Sartre is perhaps limited in terms of a broader analysis in the history of French literature; I knowingly isolate one of the most celebrated works of the twentieth century to compare it with lesser-known works from recent times. Nevertheless, this choice is justified by my concentration on the look and its changing historical conditions. Not only do I try to identify subversive posthuman elements in Sartre’s existentialism, but I also aim to show how Egloff’s dizziness and Darrieussecq’s refuge in the forest are in fact a radicalization of Sartre’s nausea and the Sarterian drama of the look, a move that inevitably indicates today’s posthuman condition.

Strongly existing things

Triumphantly associating existentialism with humanism, Sartre uses a thing – that is, a paper knife – to illuminate his line of thought: “on ne peut pas supposer un homme qui produirait un coupe-papier sans savoir à quoi l’objet va servir. Nous dirons donc que, pour le coupe-papier, l’essence – c’est-à-dire l’ensemble des recettes et des qualités qui permettent de le produire et de le – précède l’existence” (1946: 18). Existentialism, the philosophy that involves this primary meaninglessness of all phenomena, is considered humanist in Sartre’s view:

parce que nous rappelons à l’homme qu’il n’y a d’autre législateur que lui-même, et que c’est dans le délaissement qu’il décidera de lui-même ; et parce que nous montrons que ça n’est pas en se retournant vers lui, mais toujours en cherchant hors de lui un but qui est telle libération, telle réalisation particulière, que l’homme se réalisera précisément comme humain. (1946: 93–94)

Of course, Sartre’s “existentialist humanism” is not the naive humanism readily criticized by posthumanist research. Deprived of any absolute transcendence, including humanism qua transcendence, this humanism affirms the limits of human experience and defies “the cult of humanity,” explicitly referring to the pioneering sociologist Auguste Comte (Sartre, 1946: 92). In L’être et le néant, this type of existentialist humanism is defined by the perpetual annihilation of phenomena by human perception. L’être et le néant (Sartre, 1943) marks the “nothingness” of the perceiving mind, the “being for itself” (être-pour-soi), which is always established ad-hoc in relation to the “being in itself” (être-en-soi), the realm of perceived objects. The initial emptiness of the “being for itself,” the fact that it lacks any essence, makes it dependent on the other, whether human or non-human (Sartre, 1943). Nevertheless, this very definition endows the human mind with priority, as for Sartre the non-human realm cannot negate the desire of the “being for itself” – the reciprocity of the look happens between humans in a duality of “being for itself,” which marks the dialectical duality of “being-for-others” (I'être-pour-autrui). The problem of the other is distinctly associated with “la réalité humaine” (Sartre, 1943: 275). As I explore in what follows, this ahistorical ontological paradigm can be reconfigured in light of current enmeshment of the human and the non-human.

As is assumed by some of its critics, La nausée can be construed as a literary exploration of Sartre’s ideas. ² Roquentin’s series of arbitrary revelations makes him acquainted with the meaningless void at the core of every human signification. Addressing this point quite literally, he comes to understand the interdependence of the Marquis de Rollebon and himself while dedicating his time to writing the biography of the former: “Il se tenait en face de moi et s’était emparé de ma vie pour me représenter la sienne. Je ne m’apercevais plus que j’existais, je n’existais plus en moi, mais en lui” (Sartre, 1938: 138).

By this token, the nausea is an experience of opacity and absurdity that emerges whenever Roquentin meets the contingency of his existence – an existence, we might add, that is inherently not self-sufficient but rather constituted by a perpetual yet impossible effort to comprehend the essence of phenomena outside human limitations. This has direct implications for Roquentin’s encounters with objects as things – from his fleeting yet intensive acquaintance with the resistant materiality of objects to the absurdity behind the paper knife when it is no longer signified as a means for human use.

Roquentin’s perpetual nausea intensifies with a strange incident concerning a sheet of paper. While the protagonist contests that he habitually collects random sheets of paper, he confides to the reader a bizarre incident in which an unexpected drive withheld him from gleaning a soggy paper from the mud. Afterwards, he states, “Je ne suis plus libre, je ne peux plus faire ce que je veux. Les objets, cela ne devrait pas toucher, puisque cela ne vit pas. On s’en sert, on les remet en place, on vit au milieu d’eux : ils sont utiles, rien de plus. Et moi, ils me touchent, c’est insupportable. J’ai peur d’entrer en contact avec eux tout comme s’ils étaient des bêtes vivantes” (Sartre, 1938: 25).

The protagonist thus experiences an ontological fissure – that is to say, a crack in the precedency of subject over objects, which seemingly opens a potential for non-anthropocentric perception. Furthermore, objects are no longer defined against their use value but rather seem alive; they can affect him intensively, as they withdraw from the inertness modern thinking ascribes to them. Correspondingly, the human body dissolves and exposes its blunt materiality. For example, Roquentin sees “un éclair rougeaud couvert de poils blancs” before declaring “c’est une main,” articulating the extraction of meaning, of known objects, that is posterior to his initial sensitivity towards them (Sartre, 1938: 36). In fact, Roquentin identifies this materiality behind his own reflection:

Mon regard descend lentement, avec ennui, sur ce front, sur ces joues : il ne rencontre rien de ferme, il s’ensable. Évidemment, il y a là un nez, des yeux, une bouche, mais tout ça n’a pas de sens, ni même d’expression humaine. […] J’ai dû me regarder encore plus longtemps : ce que je vois est bien au-dessous du singe, à la lisière du monde végétal, au niveau des polypes. Ça vit, je ne dis pas non ; mais ce n’est pas à cette vie-là qu’Anny pensait : je vois de légers tressaillements, je vois une chair fade qui s’épanouit et palpite avec abandon. Les yeux surtout, de si près, sont horribles. C’est vitreux, mou, aveugle, bordé de rouge, on dirait des écailles de poisson. (Sartre, 1938: 33)

Roquentin, scanning his face with alienation, sees it not as a whole – not as a signifier – but as an assemblage of distinct organs, some of them unearthing their non-human qualities. It is not a form of total self-alienation; it is more precise to claim that Roquentin now discovers his own face anew, beyond the firm ontological boundaries between the human and the non-human.

This genuine perception of his surroundings extracts the “thing power” that lies under seemingly inert or established objects. According to Bennett, thing power “gestures toward the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience” (2010: xvi). In this vital materialist view, things can resist the inertness modern man ascribes to them and show an “effectivity of their own” – a disturbing quality that cannot be reduced to our attempts to signify them (Bennett, 2010: xvi). Consequently, vibrant materialism aligns with posthuman trends within the humanities. Like various fields within posthuman thought, it dissolves the ontological preference of the human to find inherent vitality in the non-human.

However, in La nausée, it seems as if this vital materialist essence interacts with Sartre’s existentialist humanism. The novel culminates in Roquentin’s positive affirmation of the nausea, by which he bears a true understanding of the futility of human existence. In Roquentin’s final revelations, freedom must be accompanied by angst, and liberty is essentially dependent on meaninglessness: “si j’existe, c’est parce que j’ai horreur d’exister” (Sartre, 1938: 140). His understanding that existence precedes meaning is followed by a true material drama in which he injures himself to contemplate the dripping blood, sensing the material world with the utmost intensity: “Je roule le journal en boule, mes doigts crispés sur le journal; odeur d’encre; mon Dieu comme les choses existent fort aujourd’hui” (Sartre, 1938: 141). Affected by thing power, acknowledging the senselessness of human life, and accepting the perpetuality of his nausea, Roquentin compares his own existence with the non-human: “Manger, dormir. Dormir, manger. Exister lentement, doucement, comme ces arbres, comme une flaque d’eau, comme la banquette rouge du tramway. La Nausée me laisse un court répit. Mais je sais qu’elle reviendra : c’est mon état normal” (Sartre, 1938: 215).

Thus, La nausée establishes two parallel literary moves. On the one hand, it opens a threshold for subversive readings in which it predicts posthumanistic literature. On the other hand, by the ultimate affirmation of the nausea, Roquentin’s ultimate affirmation of the nausea reaffirms Sartre’s notion of existentialist humanism. This twofold move fascinatingly blurs the boundaries between humanism and posthumanism and compels us to ask to what extent existentialism is indeed a form of posthumanism.

Inhuman looks

To further contemplate this point, let us turn to a novel that could be more easily aligned with posthuman notions. Egloff’s L'étourdissement is narrated in the first person by a relatively young man whose name is not known to us. The story follows his dull life in an eerie small town in France situated next to an airport and a supermarket. In addition to these two main “attractions,” there is also a slaughterhouse, where the narrator works (Egloff, 2005). Living with his grandmother, the narrator spends his life trapped in a laborious routine, looking up at the airplanes and hoping for relocation. In his own words, addressing his habitual work at the slaughterhouse: “Moi j’ai jamais rien connu d’autre. Ça fait tellement longtemps que ça saigne, j’en ai des vertiges de cette longue hémorragie” (Egloff, 2005: 14).

The narrator’s vertigo, as we can see, is tied to the inhuman environment in which the novel takes place. My use of the term “inhuman” follows Katherina Kolozova and the Posthuman Glossary, where the condition is defined as it applied to entities that embody a “primitive configuration of subjectivity” and are doomed to exploitation: “In the Capitalocene, the inhuman constitutes the global concentration camp for the female, the animal, the black and the body that labours for wage or is exploited for the production of a commodity” (Kolozova, 2018: 201). Indeed, “L'étourdissement” is a term grounded in industrial language. In French, L'étourdissement means both dizziness and sedation, and it describes the phase in which an animal, according to French law, should be sedated before slaughter. Furthermore, without extending to the supernatural or the dystopian, Egloff situates his character in an industrially exhausted town, making another interesting juxtaposition between him and the animals he slaughters in his workplace. In the narrator’s town, as a result of hyper-industrialization, the climate is utterly distorted and artificial (“Quand c’est de l’est qu’il souffle, il y a comme une odeur de soufre qui nous prend à la gorge. Quand il vient du nord, ce sont des fumées noires qui nous arrivent droit dessus,” 9). It also affects the health of its inhabitants to the point that it is difficult to distinguish the old from the young (Egloff, 2005: 10). Against these unbearable conditions, the narrator feels at times defeated, again corresponding with the herds of animals he encounters at work: “Nous, au milieu de tout ça, ça fait bien longtemps qu’on n’y fait plus attention. C’est qu’une question d’habitude finalement. On se fait à tout” (Egloff, 2005: 9).

Similarly to Roquentin, the narrator of L'étourdissement is exposed in a distinct fashion to the non-human. In L'étourdissement, as in La nausée, the non-human demands attention by presenting a threat; the non-human cannot be fully controlled and manipulated both affectively and epistemologically. In L'étourdissement, this point is further manifested through the theme of dogs – for example, by a pack that seems to constantly hunt the protagonist on his way to the slaughterhouse. The multiplicity of the pack, and the fact that its force lies in brute impersonality, marks the ultimate threat to the protagonist as a seemingly individual subject: desubjectification and animality.

Throughout the novel, the protagonist oscillates between a defeated acceptance of his inhuman position, which involves the unethical slaughter of animals, and profound revelations about it. These revelations, similar to Roquentin’s moments of nausea, are highly contingent. For Egloff’s narrator, they occur mostly at night on his “lit peuplé de cadavres” (Egloff, 2005: 82). He confides the following:

Je suis pas pressé de m’endormir parce que je sais que, dans mon sommeil, y a des bestiaux sans tête qui rappliquent par trouoeaux entiers pour me demander des comptes. Et moi, j’ai beau essayer de leur expliquer que j’y suis pour rien, qu’on fait pas toujours ce qu’on veut dans la vie, que j’ai pas choisi, c’est peine perdue, je vois bien qu’ils m’en veulent. (Egloff, 2005: 26)

As we have seen, the vertigo or dizziness, “l'étourdissement,” arises when the narrator feels as if it “bleeds too much,” referring to his habitual work. Like Roquentin’s nausea, this dizziness marks an ontological fissure. Egloff’s protagonist is struck by it when he cannot maintain his habitual life, when he realizes something profound about himself and the animals he encounters in the slaughterhouse. These revelations take the form of abjection, similar to the thing power in La nausée, as the protagonist faces beheaded animals, blood, and corpses. I would like to stress that these understandings arise from acknowledging that he himself is like an animal, living under inhuman conditions – and, more profoundly, that his liberation as a human and the liberation of the animals in the slaughterhouse are utterly interdependent.

This point is connected with historical and material conditions that are much more evident in Egloff’s age than in Sartre’s. Even though L'étourdissement takes place in low-tech surroundings, the brute fact of the current political economy remains at its core. This theme intensifies towards the end of the novel after Pignolo, one of the workers in the slaughterhouse, is killed. A bull refuses to die “peacefully,” even after several gun shots, a rebellious act that is again connected with the firm resistance of the non-human in the novel, which questions human control over their “others.” As the bull deflects the gun, Pignolo is accidentally killed. Thinking of his widow, the narrator is struck by a dizziness in which all creatures – human and non-human – are connected:

J’essaie de m’agripper à sa voix de toutes mes forces, mais je me sens glisser sans pouvoir me raccrocher à rien. Je glisse et je pense à Coppi, seul dans son épave, je pense à Marcassin qui est tellement fatigué, et je vois des bœufs qui attendent, et la veuve qui pleure dans son verre de liqueur. Et les petits ballons de la fête se bousculent dans ma tête. Et abaortch remarque qu’il se passe quelque chose. Je le vois qui se lève et se penche sur moi. Je voudrais lui dire que j’aurais besoin prendre l’air. Juste prendre l’air. Mais j’ai beau articuler, plus un son ne sort de ma bouche. (Egloff, 2005: 133)

However, the clearest identification of the human and the non-human arrives in the form of a dream. In the dream, the narrator and his friend Bortch are alone in a deserted building. As always in this town, the climatic conditions make it hard to clearly differentiate between figures. Among a group of cows, the narrator perceives a slightly different creature, yet neither he nor Bortch can attest to its identity:

« Si au moins on y voyait un peu plus clair », je peste. Et je m’approche encore davantage de l’animal. Je l’observe sous toutes les coutures jusqu’à ce que l’évidence me saute à la figure. « Bortch ! Je lui dis, alors, gravement, je crois bien que c’est un homme ! ». Mais Bortch est pas convaincu du tout. « Mais si ! Regarde bien », j’insiste. Et finalement, il admet que j’ai peut-être raison. « Et qu’est-ce qu’on en fait, alors» il me redemande. J’y vais quand même ou quoi? – Attends ! je lui fais encore. Ce regard … je l’ai déjà vu quelque part. – Moi aussi, tiens, ça me dit quelque chose ». Et c’est là, seulement, que je me reconnais. (Egloff, 2005: 140)

This remarkable moment, which by no coincidence arrives in the final pages of the novel, is comparable to Roquentin’s embrace of his nausea. While Roquentin’s nausea affirms the meaninglessness of human existence, Egloff’s protagonist’s dizziness is somewhat less affirmative, juxtaposing both the human and the non-human in an inhuman state.

Between nausea and dizziness

Both the nausea and the dizziness, in the context discussed here, derive from an ontological fissure. They are both reflective in nature and are evoked whenever the characters experience desubjectification and lose control, thereby arousing shame. Roquentin and the narrator of L'étourdissement are caught in these mentally derived physical affects and subjected to them uncontrollably as the ontological precedence of modern Man over the non-human ephemerally collapses: objects seem alive, while human beings seem as passive as objects, or rather, are led to slaughter like herd animals. The nausea and the dizziness are both violent responses to understanding the artificiality of classic humanisms; they echo complete otherness, demanding a new sort of ethics.

However, as we have seen, Sartre’s existential approach is willing to go only halfway towards these conclusions. In defending existentialism while referring it back to humanism, Sartre assimilates some of existentialism’s radical qualities in an anthropocentric framework. For Sartre, the human condition is quite distinctive: the human experiences the world subjectively and projects his or her existence towards the future; hence, the responsibility to make this future meaningful regardless of any transcendent force is a human endeavour before all (1946: 21–23). Indeed, Sartre argues that the freedom of one should potentially involve the freedom of the other, as human existence is primordially an existence against an “other” (1946: 83) – but precisely because this philosophy is predicated so firmly upon dialectics, the opposition between the subject and the object could never be challenged.

Even without presuming any connection between Sartre the philosopher and Sartre the author, these ethics are evidently present in La nausée. After experiencing the contingency and brute materiality of his existence, Roquentin liberates himself from his dependence on the Marquis de Rollebon. At the very end of the novel, he chooses to write a book of a different genre (Sartre, 1938: 221–222). Roquentin’s new kind of freedom results in an interdependent action: a book that will address existence as it is, contingent and disturbing. Like a true missionary, he now wishes to spread the word of existentialism and thinks about

Une histoire, par exemple, comme il ne peut en arriver, une aventure. Il faudrait qu’elle soit belle et dure comme de l’acier et qu’elle fasse honte aux gens de leur existence. Je m’en vais, je me sens vague. Je n’ose pas prendre de décision. Si j’étais sûr d’avoir du talent. […] Naturellement, ça ne serait d’abord qu’un travail ennuyeux et fatigant, ça ne m’empêcherait pas d’exister ni de sentir que j’existe. Mais il viendrait bien un moment où le livre serait écrit, serait derrière moi et je pense qu’un peu de clarté tomberait sur mon passé. Alors peut-être que je pourrais, à travers lui, me rappeler ma vie sans répugnance. (Sartre, 1938: 222)

Roquentin’s liberty to act notwithstanding, the meaninglessness of existence echoes Sartre’s philosophy quite precisely, yet he affirms this philosophy in the same anthropocentric manner. Roquentin assumes that his own liberty is something he as a human can take responsibility for, divorced from any circumstantial conditions, including the vibrant materiality that was triumphantly exposed to him. Here, his existentialism essentially diverges from posthumanism. As Braidotti has argued, the latter should embody “a transverse inter-connection or an ‘assemblage of human and non-human actors’” (2013: 45). Yet in La nausée, the non-human unearths a kernel of truth that would be reclaimed by the human, but this does not occur in a condition in which they are truly interdependent.

From doubles to halves

In the above discussion of L’étourdissement and La nausée, nausea and dizziness are both affective traits connected to a broader structure. In fact, nausea and dizziness are affective for the reflective drama of the look. If the Sarterian drama of the look appears dyadic and anthropocentric in essence, the dizziness marks the look as an infinite reflection; the dyadic structure is exposed to an interdependence that is now not merely ontological but also political. This genuine form of reflectivity is manifested in Notre vie dans les forêts not as affective conditions but as prosthetic ones, which goes one step further from Egloff to explicitly embrace care towards the reflected other.

Notre vie is narrated in the first person by Viviane (originally named Marie), a psychotherapist who finds refuge with her clone in the forest among other fellow humans and clones. The ambiance is evidently dystopic, as the refugees are escaping the surveillance of the state and struggling with prosthetic chips detecting their activity (Darrieussecq, 2017). We come to understand that in this near future, clones are made and nurtured to potentially supply organs for transplantation to endow humans with a longer life span. In line with critical posthuman scholarship, the novel presents a dystopia that is in some sense a mere radicalization of our already posthuman conditions, in which all forms of life, human and non-human alike, are reduced to commodities under the logic of late capitalism. In the novel, indeed, owning clones is a privilege of the rich (Darrieussecq, 2017).

In practice, Notre vie rethinks the figure of the double by addressing the clone not as a double but as a “half” (“la moitié”). This definition, which problematically could suggest that Viviane and her clone comprise a self-sufficient “whole,” marks an inherent interdependence between them. From their first encounters, this interdependence leads Viviane to contemplate the nature of her clone instead of turning to a Hegelian battle for the elimination of the “other.” Even though Viviane’s clone is physically identical to her, she is more fascinated than intimidated by their resemblance. We are told that as a teenager, Viviane rarely visited the “rest center” (Centre de repos) to see her half (Darrieussecq, 2017: 64–69). If L’étourdissement ends with a reflective look, Notre Vie situates this drama at the beginning of the text. Viviane looks at her cloned double, who is identical to her:

Eh bien la mienne ouvrait les yeux. Systématiquement. Et elle m’interrogeait du regard. C’était touchant mais pénible. Le vide de ces yeux. L’angoisse, pas d’autre mot. Par quoi commencerJe lui disais mon nom, Viviane, et puis le sien : Marie. Je m’appelle Marie aussi, évidemment, mais j’avais pris Viviane pour nom de fugitive. Il faut suivre. (Darrieussecq, 2017: 14).

Viviane sees the emptiness in her double’s eyes, but the anxiety of the reflection (seeing myself as an object) is promptly followed by an act of sacrifice and care: giving up her name. This, as I am to show, is the crucial way in which Darrieussecq rethinks the reflective drama. Furthermore, similarly to the case in L’étourdissement, this marks her objectification not only ontologically but also in the most quotidian manner, as in the universe of Notre vie, all forms of life are commodified and objectified.

Nonetheless, this does not necessarily mean the clone, Marie, does not represent a challenge for Viviane. Marie’s presence makes Viviane envious at times (“Marie me semblait, à cette époque, éternellement plongée dans un bain de lait. Même aujourd’hui, son visage est si lisse que j’ai envie de la massacrer,” 24) and perplexed at others (“C’est très difficile à élever, une moitié. Une moitié c’est à la fois soumis et insolent, un peu chafouin. Impertinent et sournois. Je ne suis pas dingue des moitiés, mais il a bien fallu faire avec,” 32). Most importantly, despite the challenge Marie represents for her, Viviane cannot see her clone as a mere reservoir of organs. The distinction between human and non-human, embraced so easily by her mother, seems artificial to Viviane. Where her mother finds “life insurance,” Viviane finds a “sleeping sister”: “Le seul fait que Marie existe m’a beaucoup angoissée, petite. Pourtant ce n’était qu’une sorte de sœur endormie. Une jumelle, quasi. Et pour ma mère, une fille en rab. Un solide recours” (Darrieussecq, 2017: 52).

This peculiar view of the double connects with Eran Dorfman’s view of the same. Dorfman’s (2020) project, Double Trouble, aims to surpass the thought of the double as an enemy of the self by disposing of both parts of the equation. Dorfman views the double not only as a supplement of the self, due to their inherent interdependence, but goes on to stress that the double presents a challenge through which multiplicity could emerge (2020: 3–4). The double, in this context, is a call to overcome the dominance of the ego – to accept and embrace not the singular double but the many. In this sense, Notre vie endows the double with a firmer historical grounding. In the universe of Notre vie, a radicalization of our current Capitalocene, the liberation of the human is inherently connected to the liberation of the clones. This is because all lives are reduced to the value of their organs and their availability to be transplanted into the rich: “Ça coûtait beaucoup moins cher qu’un clone de toute façon. Je coûtais cher. Ça le faisait rire. Ha ! Mais ce qui coûtait le plus cher, c’était Marie. J’étais déjà un modèle d’occasion” (Darrieussecq, 2017: 123).

When merging humans and clones, Notre vie also makes implicit connections to the notion of prosthesis. Developing the uncanny in line with Derrida’s metaphysics of hauntology, Nicholas Royle illuminates this point, showing how the wish to fully master a sign or an identity is doomed to fail and how the uncanny can also be construed as a foreign body within the self or as the experience of oneself as a foreign body (2003: 2). In Notre vie, we come to realize that Viviane already carries Marie’s lungs and should have received her eyes as well. In this sense, Notre vie quite literally dramatizes some trends already apparent in today’s posthuman condition. However, in a refreshing move, the prosthetic is no longer conceived of as a challenge to one’s identity but rather a collective challenge, from the single double to a multiplicity of doubles. In Notre vie, it is not only Viviane’s identity that is challenged by prosthetics; the new banks of organs and mechanisms of recurrent transplants also make virtually all humans and clones corporeally enmeshed. In the novel, prostheticity is a threshold to an ethical mutual dependency: “Mais Marie était constamment dans un coin de ma tête. Pas dans un coin : elle était le fond d’écran permanent de mes pensées. Elle était là, sommeillant dans mon cerveau” (Darrieussecq, 2017: 72). The humans, with the catchy slogan “U-nis-sons / nos moi-tiés”! – clearly emphasizing this prosthetic enmeshment of the self and the other – end up liberating the clones from their “rest center” to escape with them to the forest. ³

Hence, Notre vie introduces the “half” to reconfigure the notion of the double. The half – by its “half-ness,” so to speak – inherently comprises the prosthetic dependency between the self and the other and is therefore viewed as a potential more than as an intimidating challenge. Equally important, the “half” in Notre vie does not presume a whole. Rather, the idea of the half embraces the impossibility of forming a community of halves. Marie and Viviane, just like the other humans and clones in the forest, are doomed to remain distinct parts, never to redeem their wholeness.

The comparison of Notre vie with L'étourdissement is even more intriguing when it comes to the appearance of dogs. In the forest, dogs are an integral part of the multi-species search for refuge. Outside the forest, they are implanted with chips to make them docile; in the forest, they are allowed to run freely. In fact, Viviane notes that she removed the chip in her own dog, named “Loup” (“Nous sommes tous devenus chirurgiens, dans ce monde,” 58). If in L'étourdissement the pack of dogs marks a threat of objectification, here, along with other differences between the novels, this supposed threat turns into the potential for a shared existence.

By this token, L’étourdissement marks an initial phase of acknowledgement in the shared fate of both human and non-human lives under current bio-political conditions. Then, Notre Vie imagines a near future in which this acknowledgment – in this case between humans, clones, and dogs – is a threshold from which shared ethics of care can emerge. As we have seen, whether through tropes of affect (nausea and dizziness) or prosthetics and the double, both novels exteriorize the optical drama. The environments in which these novels take place, whether an industrial town or a forest, emphasizes the fact that an encounter with the other is not dual but multiple and all-encompassing.

If in L’étourdissement reflectivity is manifested in the reciprocity of the look (I am looking at myself as a non-human looking at myself as a human and so forth), in Notre vie this reciprocity is already embedded in a corporeal interdependence. Viviane has been implanted with the eyes of Marie; Viviane looks at herself as an “other” implanted with her organs. The corporeal enmeshment surpasses the Sarterian dyadic ontology and forms care towards the other, which is in fact always already care towards all others. That is because in the bio-political conditions of the novel, perhaps a radicalization of our own world today, one cannot differentiate between bodies anymore, as corporeal boundaries between all forms of life are dismantled.

Posthuman futures

In Notre Vie, the forest acts as a base for the refugees, who are on the verge of human extinction. Thus, corresponding to Viviane’s immersion in an impersonal realm, the novel reconfigures the nature/culture opposition by juxtaposing “natural” spaces (forest) and “artificial” bodies (clones). I argue that the entanglement of the natural and the artificial is manifested in the imagination of a “people yet to come” – a virtual future beyond humanism and beyond the human.

As we have seen thus far, the double in Notre vie goes beyond the narcissistic desires of the ego, which interestingly concerns the interplay of mortality and immortality in the novel. In his encompassing study on the double, Auto Rank associates the doppelganger with immortality. Considerably influenced by Freud, Rank observes that the double could in fact fulfil a narcissistic desire to challenge the mortality of the ego (Rank, 1973: 108–111). The appearance of the double marks an animate exteriorization of the soul, hence affirming the possibility that the ego, embodied here in the soul, could survive material annihilation. However, as we have seen, in Notre vie the double is a companion who at times who at times encourages the transcendence of anthropocentric narcissism. Hence, in my interpretation, Viviane complies with her own annihilation for the sake of the survival of the clones.

From the beginning of the novel, the question of the protagonist’s death is overt. Viviane’s narrating voice is turbulent, virtually breathless, as if she has to complete her story before something happens to her. She alternately uses expressions like “passons,” “où j’en étais,” and “reprenons,” which indicate that her monologue is indeed immediate and spontaneous. As the story moves forward, we understand that Viviane is indeed sick and failing to breath, as her healthy lung was transplanted to another: “je vais mourir bientôt avec ce qui me reste de morceaux de mon corps. C’est pour ça que je me dépêche d’écrire” (Darrieussecq, 2017: 138). Correspondingly, the novel ends with her death: “Je suis dans la forêt et je n’ai plus de souffle” (Darrieussecq, 2017: 150). Thus, the novel can be read as a testimony of terror and a search for refuge both in form (the urgency of the narration) and content.

However, we are then compelled to ask to whom this testimony is addressed. The human race is on the verge of extinction; unlike other testimonies from dreadful times, Viviane’s writings will not serve to educate or urge humanity to become more moral or responsible. Rather, I argue that this testimony is addressed to a community of clones, a species that is in many ways yet to come. During her narration, Viviane tends to pause to make obvious remarks about human history that could be useful for the future reader of her notebook. For example, she explains in parentheses that Beethoven was a nineteenth century composer (Darrieussecq, 2017: 14), that a revolution occurred in Russia in the twentieth century (Darrieussecq, 2017: 32), and that Primo Levi was an author and survivor (Darrieussecq, 2017: 35). Furthermore, Viviane combines chains of words and associations in her testimony (“Bleu = ciel = vague à l’âme = musique = contusion = sang bleu = noblesse = decapitation,” 13) that remind us of the work of her patient, yet without any sufficient explanation. In another instance, she goes as far as explaining why she can understandably call her patient “my clicker”: “vous comprendrez que c’est une marque d’affection, pas d’appropriation” (Darrieussecq, 2017: 126). In this sense, her testimony is addressed to her doubles.

Thus, Viviane not only transcends the primal, narcissistic anxiety about her own mortality; she overcomes an anthropomorphic anxiety in general. In her testimony, in line with a fissure in linear time, human history is condensed, as Beethoven, Primo Levi, and the Russian Revolution are mentioned side by side as anecdotes. As we have seen, Braidotti claims that “in a posthuman perspective, the emphasis on the impersonality of life is echoed by an analogous reflection on death” (Darrieussecq, 2017: 131). Death, as the event that constitutes the limit of the human subject, has to be reconfigured in posthuman conditions. Going beyond humanity necessarily means going beyond mortality as the limit of the personal ego or beyond the personal projection to the future, which is exclusively a human tendency in Sarte's thought. Indeed, unlike in classic dystopian narratives, in Notre vie it is not the survival of humanity that matters but the survival of life as such.

In fact, Viviane is terrified by terrified by the prospect of immortality when she sees her transplanted organs in another woman:

C’était moi en très vieille. Déjà, ça, ça me faisait bizarre. Bricolée, modifiée, gonflée et déridée, mais très vieille et identique à moi. Moi quand je n’aurai jamais cet âge. Parce que moi je vais mourir bientôt avec ce qui me reste de morceaux de mon corps. C’est pour ça que je me dépêche d’écrire. (Darrieussecq, 2017: 138–139)

It is thus apparent that in these two future paths, living through Marie or living through the rich woman, Viviane is deprived of any sort of traditional mortality – she recognizes herself unmetaphorically in the older woman (“C’était moi”). She could never own her death, as she will physically survive through her incarnations in others. This again can be seen as a compelling complication of present bio-political conditions in which, as Braidotti argues, “the specific temporality of the posthuman subject needs to be re-thought beyond the metaphysics of mortality” (2013: 140). Viviane’s choice, in this context, is clear: she accepts death as a purely impersonal event to be experienced through her posthuman double, and the posthuman community of clones in general, rather than through the human who uses her organs in a hyper-capitalistic dystopian system.

Reflection beyond anthropocentrism: conclusion

The encounter between Sartre and the two novels explored here allows for a rethinking of existentialistic ontology vis-à-vis the posthuman conditions of our time. In the works of Egloff and Darrieussecq, the inherent interdependence of the self and the other is maintained while being radicalized beyond anthropocentric boundaries. The dyadic framework of the Sarterian look, such as the duality of the interior and the exterior affectively embodied in the nausea, becomes exposed in an all-encompassing dizziness or in a reality in which corporeal boundaries are surpassed. The Sarterian reflectivity turns from an internalized conflict into a shared struggle while radically blurring the boundaries between the I and the reflected other.

Here lies the difference between the nausea and the dizziness as affects. Even though the nausea is essentially perceived as an existential state, as an affect it seems to maintain the boundaries between the interior and the exterior, indicating that something disturbing within has to be exteriorized in cathexis. On the other hand, the dizziness blurs this distinction. Specifically, in L'étourdissement, the dizziness is purely affective, as it is taking over everything – it concerns the human, the non-human, and the climatic conditions under which they live. In dizziness, the interior becomes exterior, and the differentiation between objects is blurred; consequently, it flattens the ontology, making everything interdependent, as in the posthuman condition.

In terms of the encounter between existential philosophy and posthumanistic thought, I have aimed to show how this point reconfigures the Sarterian drama of the look. While still essentially reflective in a Sarterian manner, L'étourdissement offers an option not yet considered in the duality of annihilation and objectification articulated in L'être et le néant. Sartre’s nausea designates an affective potential that Egloff’s dizziness eventually appropriates. Similarly, where Roquentin is haunted by the anthropocentric premises of the organic and the inorganic, Egloff’s protagonist, albeit implicitly, gains a dizzy glimpse beyond firm distinctions between the human and the non-human. The reflective look in L'étourdissement repeats itself endlessly (I see myself as an animal who sees itself as human and so forth) and thus offers a plurality of subject positions, human and non-human.

In Notre Vie, the reflective interdependence goes one step beyond that. In the text, the objectification inherent in Sarterian reflection, the one that often invokes shame within the reflected self, is only a threshold for a shared struggle. As everyone is objectified, not only ontologically but also bio-politically, a potential for cooperation can be established. The prosthetic reflection (I look at my own eye implanted in another) manifests this point neatly. If the enmeshment of organs and the objectification of life are the very conditions of the dystopic space of Notre Vie, the prosthetic reflection can bear either potential or threat. Viviane makes a choice towards the potentiality of her particular reflection with Marie: giving her identity, surpassing the dyadic struggle of recognition, in a hope for a better world. Notre vie and L'étourdissement, in this sense, endow the ahistorical ontological Sarterian drama with historical groundings. When the core of Sarterian existential thought meets the reality of the climate change and mass extinction, existentialism can in fact become a foundation for an emerging posthumanism.