Denoon, C. (1965) The Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, New York: Random House.

• Man constructs signs because in his very reality he is signifying; and he is signifying because he is a dialectical transcending of all that is simply given. What we call freedom is the irreducibility of the cultural order to the natural order. 415
• If I am to transcend the succession of gestures and perceive the unity which they give themselves, I must myself feel the overheated atmosphere as a need for fresh air; that is, I must myself experience the transcending of our material situation. 416
• behavior unifies the room, and the room defines his behavior. 416
• my own behavior in its projective movement should inform me about my own depths--that is, about my wider objectives and the conditions which correspond to the choice of these objectives. This understanding is nothing other than my real life; it is the totalizing movement which gathers together my neighbor, myself, and the environment in the synthetic unity of an objection in process. 417
• Everything at every instant is always signifying, and the significations reveal to us men and relations among men mediated by the structures of our society. 418
• It was legitimate for the natural sciences to free themselves from the anthropomorphism which bestows human properties on inanimate objects. But it is perfectly absurd to introduce by analogy the same scorn for anthropomorphism in anthropology. In the investigation of man, what procedure can be more exact and rigorous than to recognize his human properties. 418
• Totality is defines as being, radically distinct from the sum of its parts, which is complete--in one for or another--in each of these parts, and which relates to itself either through its relation to one or several of its parts, or else by its relation to the connections that all, or several, of thee parts maintain among themselves. But when, by hypothesis, this reality is made (a painting or a symphony are examples where the integration is pushed to its limits), it can exist only with the imaginary--that is, as the correlative of an act of the imagination. 421
• the totalization has the same status as the totality: through the multiplicities, it continues that synthetic labor which makes of each part a manifestation of the whole, and which relates the whole to itself through the mediation of the parts. But this is an act in process, one which cannot stop without the multiplicity returning to its original status. 422
• the intelligibility of the dialectical reason can easily be established; it is none other than the very movement of totalization. …it is the context of totalization that the negation of negation become affirmation. 422
• it is within a unification in process (a unification which, moreover, has already defined the limits of its field), and there alone, that a determination can be called a negation, and that the negation of negation must necessarily be an affirmation. 423
• the dialectical knowledge must be a moment of totalization, or, if you prefer, the totalization must include its reflective retotalization within itself, as an indispensable structure and as a totalizing process within the process as a whole. 423
• the dialectic is a totalizing activity. It has no laws other than the rules that are produced by the totalization in process. 423
• one must think of reflection, not as a parasitical and separate consciousness, but as the particular structure of certain "consciousness." 424
• only a man living inside a sector of totalization may grasp the internal relations which unite him with the totalizing movement. 426
• it is the totalization itself which has caused his success and his failures, through the vicissitudes of his community, his particular joys and sorrows; the dialectical links are disclosed through his amorous or familial ties, through his friendships, through the "relations of production" which have left their imprint on his life. 426
• the investigator must, if the unity of history exists, grasp his own life as the Whole and the Part, as the link between the Parts and the Whole, and as the relation of the Parts among themselves, in the dialectical movement of unification. He must be able to make the leap from his own singular life to History, by the simple, practical negation of that negation which determines it. 427
• through the lived relationship of affiliations we shall grasp--in this self which is disappearing--the dynamic relations of the different social structures, insofar as they are transforming themselves through history. 427
• The major discovery of the dialectical experience…is that man is "mediated" by things to the exact extent that things are "mediated" by man. 428
• Everything is discoverable in need: this is the first totalizing relation between that material being, a man, and the material group to which he belongs. 428
• Transcendence is envinced here as the simple unity of a total function. 429
• This temporal relation between the future and the past, through the present, is nothing but the functional relation of the totality to itself; the totality is its own future, seen across a present of reintegrated disintegration. 431
• Scarcity--as the lived relation of a practical multiplicity with the materiality environing it and within it--is the foundation of the possibility of human history. 433
• man is that stunted being, misshappen but hardened to suffering, who lives to labor from dawn to dusk with these (rudimentary) technical means, upon an unproductive and forbidding earth. 433-4
• scarcity is the foundation of the possibility of human history, its possibility only in the sense that it could be lived (through internal adaptations of the organism) within certain limits, as an equilibrium. 434
• many groups stabilized in repetitiveness have a legendary history; but this proves nothing, since that legend is a negation of History; its function being to introduce the archetype into the sacred moments of repetition. 434
• scarcity…is not of itself sufficient to bring about historical development or he bursting, in the course of its development, of a bottleneck which is transforming History into repetition. 434
• scarcity can be considered as a relation of the individual to the environment. 435
• in the realm of scarcity…even if individuals were unaware of each other, even if social stratifications and class structures were to break off reciprocity completely, still each person within the definite social field exists and acts in the presence of each and every one. 436
• scarcity realizes the passive totality of the individuals of a collectivity as the impossibility of coexistence. 437
• inhumanity is a relation of men among themselves, and cannot be anything but that… 438
• human relations (positive and negative) are relations of reciprocity; this means that one's individual praxis in its practical structure recognizes, in order to accomplish its purpose, the praxis of the other. 439
• In reciprocity, the praxis of my reciprocal is, as it were, fundamentally my praxis, separated in two by accident; each truncated part becomes a complete praxis again, but each preserves, from its original indifferentiation, an appropriateness to and an immediate understanding of the other. I am not claiming that the relation of reciprocity has ever existed in man before the relation of scarcity, since man is the historical product of scarcity. But I do say that, without this human relation of reciprocity, the inhuman relation of scarcity would not exist. 439
• Violence claims always to be a counter-violence, that is, retaliation to the violence of Other. This violence of the Other is an objective reality only to the extent that it exists in all as the universal motivation of counter-violence. 441-2
• it is man, and nothing else, that I hate in the enemy--that is, myself as Other, and it is certainly I whom I wish to destroy in him, in order to prevent him from destroying me, actually, in my body. 442
• scarcity can unite men in a common practical field, while the free human relations, taken outside of economic constraint, reduce themselves to constellations of reciprocity. 443
• we are united by the fact that we all inhabit a world defined by scarcity. 445
• It goes without saying that scarcity can be the occasion for the realignment of social groups with the project of combating it. 445
• for a given society the number of tools designates, by itself, the producers; and, at the same time, the sum of producers and of means of production defines the limits of production and the margin of nonproducers (that is, of rejected producers) which society can permit itself. 447
• it is the absence of an internal market capable of absorbing all the production which, since antiquity, has compelled maritime societies to trade by sea (that is, to search for new products or raw materials, and especially to organize reciprocal markets); it is this which has forced the Continental powers into military imperialism. 448
• scarcity can unite men in a common practical field, while the free human relations, taken outside of economic constraint, reduce themselves to constellations of reciprocity. 443
• we are united by the fact that we all inhabit a world defined by scarcity. 445
• It goes without saying that scarcity can be the occasion for the realignment of social groups with the project of combating it. 445--social facts are things to the extent that all things, directly or indirectly, are social facts. 453
• as Marx has shown, the machine, as passive materiality, realizes itself as negation of this human interdependence, interposing itself between the workers, to the exact extent it is the indispensable means of their work; the living solidarity of the group is destroyed before it has ever been able to form. What a man expects of another man, when their relation is human, defines itself in reciprocity, for expectation is a human act. 455
• Consider a group of people on the place Saint-Germain. They are waiting for a bus, at the bus stop in front of the church. I use the word "group" here in its neutral sense: as yet we do not know whether this gathering we are concerned with is, as such, the inert result of separate activities; or whether it is a conventional or contractual organization. 456
• We must, in fact, note first of all that we are concerned with a plurality of solitudes: these people do not care about one another, do not speak to one another, and in general do not look at one another; they exist side by side, around a signpost. 456
• the solitude of the organism, as the impossibility of uniting with the Others in an organic totality, reveals itself through the solitude lived by each person as the provisory negation of reciprocal relations with Others. This man is isolated not only by his body, as such, but by the fact that he turns his back on his neighbor--who, moreover, has not even noticed him… 456
• solitude becomes,--for every man and through him, for him and for the others, the real and social product of big cities. Actually, for every member of the group waiting for the bus, the big city is present…457
• Organic solitude, experienced solitude, lived solitude, solitude-behavior, solitude as a social status of the individual, solitude as the exteriority of the individuals, solitude as a reciprocity of isolations in a society that creates masses: all these forms, all these oppositions come together at once in the little group we are considering, insofar as isolation is an historical and social means of man's behavior among a gathering of men. 458
• solitude does not lift one out of the visual and practical field of the Other, and that it realizes itself objectively in this field. 458
• They are all--or almost all--employees, users of the bus line, knowing the timetable and frequency of the buses; consequently they are waiting for the same vehicle: the 7:49 bus. 459
• The bus they wait for unites them, as being their interest as individuals who this morning have business on the other side of town. 459
• There is identity when the common interest (as determination of generality by the unity of an object, in the context of defined practices) is revealed, and when the plurality is defined exactly with respect to that interest. In the moment, in fact, it matters little that the passengers are differentiated by the biological or social characteristics; insofar as they are united by an abstract generality, they are, as separate individuals, identical. 460
• The passengers, waiting for the bus, have lined up in the order of arrival. … they remain upon the terrain of the common interest of the identity of separation as meaningless negation; positively, this means that they seek to differentiate each Other from the Others without adding anything of his character of Other as unique social determination of his existence. 461
• His free activity, in its freedom, takes upon itself everything that crushes him: exhausting work, exploitation, oppression, rising prices. This is tantamount to saying that his freedom is the means chosen by the Thing and the Other to crush him, and to transform him into a processed Thing. 462
• there is the multiplicity of workers and their false unity through the factory--that is, through a destiny to be denied and experienced together. 463
• freedom, here, does not mean the possibility of choice, but the necessity of living the constraint, in the form of a requirement to be fulfilled by a praxis. 463
• The upheaval that rends a collectivity [collective] of individuals by the lightning stroke of a common praxis obviously originates in a synthetic -and consequently, material--transformation, which occurs in the context of scarcity and of existing structures. 464
• one must understand above all that the origin of any restructuring of collectivity into group is a complex fact that occurs simultaneously at every stage of materiality, but a fact that is transcended, as organizing praxis, at the level of serial unity. But the event, universal as it may be, cannot be lived as its own transcendence toward the unity of all, unless its universality is objective for each person…464
• Yet neither the common need, nor the common praxis, nor the common objective can define a community, unless the latter makes of itself a community by feeling the individual need as common need, and by projecting itself, in the internal unification of a common integration, toward the objectives that it produces as common. 465
• On the basis of what external circumstances will groups constitute themselves? 466
• The explosion of the revolt, as liquidation of the collectivity, does not directly draw its sources from the alienation, revealed by freedom, nor from freedom suffered as powerlessness; a conjunction of historical circumstances is needed; an historical change in the situation, a risk of death, violence. 472
• The group in fusion found its unity quite simply in real common activity, that is, just as much in its undertaking as in that of the adversary and in the violent, dangerous, sometimes mortal effort to destroy the common danger. 472
• active and passive were closely mingled, such that, often, one could not know whether the group differentiated by the enemy maneuver. In contrast, the differentiation--when the enemy is not realized by the force undergone--becomes, within the group, the action of the group upon itself. In other words, the group becomes the means of future action, by becoming its own immediate objective. 473