Bad faith replaces the unconscious while preserving its explanatory power

Evidence

Sartre had already faced such a dilemma earlier, when, attacking the Freudian model of the unconscious (another such reductive model, which can easily be reinterpreted in semiological terms), he found himself obliged to substitute in its place something else which would do justice to our lived experience of dimensions of the mind beyond rationalistic consciousness—which would preserve, in other words, the truth of Freud’s discoveries, while eliminating the unacceptable hypothesis of an unconscious. His solution to this dilemma took the form of the theory of bad faith (mauvaise foi), in which he showed how one can be aware of the intention of one’s acts on an unthematic, unselfconscious level, while at the same time failing to know that intention thematically or “consciously,” in the ordinary sense of the word. Mauvaise foi is an enterprise of self-mystification designed to persuade ourselves that the unpleasant facts in question do not exist, all the while that we are still dimly aware of being in the process of so persuading ourselves. It is a structure of self-deception which becomes ever more intricate as we attempt to maintain it in being, and may aptly be symbolized by the desperate and contradictory attempt to keep ourselves from thinking about something (which we have to think about in order to know what we want to avoid). Thus the notion of mauvaise foi provides a means whereby a given act may be seen as both containing and not containing an awareness of its own basic intention or conscious purpose. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 456

Categorization

• DEFINE: The clearest definition of bad faith as an unthematic self-awareness that substitutes for the unconscious while avoiding its ‘unacceptable hypothesis’.
• XREF: This is the phenomenological mediation of the Freudian schema — a move that parallels Adorno/Lukács’s reworking of ideological false consciousness and connects to the reader’s whole Frankfurt-School lineage. — connects to: The Freudian unconscious reintroduces a deceiver-deceived duality rather than explaining bad faith — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 282; Bad faith collapses the deceiver and deceived into one consciousness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 280

Broader Connections

• The Freudian unconscious reintroduces a deceiver-deceived duality rather than explaining bad faith #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 282
• Bad faith collapses the deceiver and deceived into one consciousness #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 280