Forced physical merging with others can feel comforting, not intrusive
Evidence
For months, he had been stuck with other prisoners all day and all night, and had discovered to his surprise that it was comforting to be so merged in solidarity and sameness with his fellow men. There was no fighting for personal space in the camp. As he wrote later, his own skin was the boundary of the space he had, and even as he slept he could always feel someone’s arm or leg against his own. Yet it did not disturb him: those others were part of himself. He had never found physical proximity easy before, so this was a revelation. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 464
Categorization
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: did this camp experience feed Sartre’s later idea of the ‘we-subject’ and his ambivalent take on collectivity? A biographer or philosopher likely addresses this.
- XREF: connects to: Continuing intimacy requires each person to remain partly indistinct