A single free choice can permanently end one’s status as a subject

Evidence

The resonance of Huis Clos is clear: this is a text about those who can no longer choose, who have ceased to be subjects. Fearing that they will be killed, the Lewises try to return the briefcase of money immediately, the very instant that Steward tells them that he will be sure to give the box to someone who doesn’t know them. But the horror is that Norma and Arthur have made a choice that means that it is now too late: they are already (as if) dead. There is no returning the gift. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 622

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that one irreversible decision converts the chooser into something already dead — a subject who can no longer choose — condenses Sartrean bad faith and Freudian repetition into a compact, unsettling proposition about agency.
• XREF: connects to: Only free choice can resolve an indeterminate chain of mutual objectification; Every human act makes the absolute through free choice — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 24; Denying that one freely chooses ends makes one enslaved to those ends — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 46

Broader Connections

• Only free choice can resolve an indeterminate chain of mutual objectification #expands (0.80)
• Every human act makes the absolute through free choice #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 24
• Denying that one freely chooses ends makes one enslaved to those ends #complicates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 46