Complicity is only a juridical notion that fails against freedom

Evidence

Therefore we must agree with the statement by J. Romains, “In war there are no innocent victims.” If therefore I have preferred war to death or to dishonor, everything takes place as if I bore the entire responsibility for this war. Of course others have declared it, and one might be tempted perhaps to consider me as a simple accomplice. But this notion of complicity has only a juridical sense, and it does not hold here. For it depended on me that for me and by me this war should not exist, and I have decided that it does exist. There was no compulsion here, for the compulsion could have got no hold on a freedom. I did not have any excuse; for as we have said repeatedly in this book, the peculiar character of human-reality is that it is without excuse. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1289

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes juridical complicity from existential responsibility — responsibility outstrips legal categories.
• XREF: connects to: Freedom consists in being a singularity, not an individual person — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 194
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Freedom consists in being a singularity, not an individual person — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 194