#jonathan ree

[zainabelhaj]

“We are none of us linguistic islands, after all; more like lost swimmers out at sea, buffeted by waves and dragged by currents that have no regard for our carefully groomed individualities. And our interpretations of ourselves will never become the serene sky borne perspectives we might like them to be.

They are just our wary thoughts about the changeable weather of our existence: not objective sciences gone wrong but anxious glances at the fragile techniques with which we try to keep ourselves and our objectivities afloat.

Strictly speaking, we have no such thing as a voice of our own.

-Jonathan Ree - I See a Voice

[j2parman]

What I have written is false. True. Neither true nor false, like everything else that is written about lunatics - or about human beings. Was I convinced by my delirium? That is the question - but I cannot make up my mind.

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, quoted by Ree, TLS, 26 November 2010, page 23.

[j2parman]

Sartre's idea: that the story of a self is really a story of others.

Ree, TLS, 26 November 2010, page 22.

[j2parman]

Sartre's theory [see below] has affinities with two schools of thought that were, in those times, at loggerheads with each other: Heideggerian existentialism, with its ideal of authentic freedom, and Freudian psychoanalysis, with its acceptance of the unconscious as the master of our fate. Sartre sought to combine the two in the idea that we are all unwitting fantasists, living our lives in terms of the tales we make up about ourselves, and endowing our present moment with specious significance by imagining it as an episode halfway between an opening chapter set in our past and a luminous denouement awaiting us in the future.

Ree, TLS, 26 November 2010, page 22

[j2parman]

We live our lives, as Sartre put it, by exploding into the world rather than absorbing and inwardly digesting it. Flights of imagination are not attempts to escape from reality but definite ways of relating to it; the ego is not an innate inward destiny but an elaborate fabrication, composed of the 'projects' with which we launch ourselves into the future and the social roles that we more or less deliberately act out.

Jonathan Ree, "All the time," a review of recent reissues of work by and about Jean-Paul Sartre, TLS, 26 November 2010, page 22. The quote is slightly modified.