Dreaming substitutes for action when agency is blocked
Evidence
The girl does not have a real will but has desires, and she jumps from one to the other at random. What makes her flightiness sometimes dangerous is that at every moment, committing herself in dream only, she commits herself wholly. She puts herself on a level of intransigence and perfection; she has a taste for the definitive and absolute: if she cannot control the future, she wants to attain the eternal. “I will never give up. I want everything always. I need to prefer my life in order to accept it,” writes Marie Lenéru. So echoes Anouilh’s Antigone: “I want everything, immediately.” This childish imperialism can only be found in an individual who dreams his destiny: dreams abolish time and obstacles, they need to be exaggerated to compensate for the small amount of reality; whoever has authentic projects knows a finitude that is the gauge of one’s concrete power. The girl wants to receive everything because there is nothing that depends on her. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 900
Categorization
- DEFINE: This is the book’s distinction between dream-imperialism and authentic projective existence — imaginary projects inflated to compensate for real powerlessness.
- XREF: The absolutism of blocked agency — ‘I want everything, immediately’ — connects forward to Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity and to Sartre’s bad faith. — connects to: Daydreaming substitutes fantasy for the disciplined transformation of present reality; When one entrenchment form is blocked, actors switch to the other — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 160