Mailer reframed existentialist authenticity as a pro-psychopathy stance

Evidence

Not all polemics against inauthenticity were so carefully thought out. The novelist Norman Mailer — the only major American author to identify explicitly as an existentialist — devoted his 1957 essay ‘The White Negro’ to a figure whom he lauded as: the American existentialist — the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled … if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 897

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘White Negro’ hipster passage is a sharp cultural artifact for an essay on how existentialism was popularly misread as a license for psychopathy rather than a discipline of responsibility.
• XREF: Connects to Sartre’s own post-war embrace of violence and ‘scum’ in his play Dirty Hands and to the chapter on Heidegger’s silence about Nazism — the question of whether existential authenticity licenses amorality. — connects to: Mailer’s public existentialism rested on secondhand popular summaries, not primary texts — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 898; Authenticity is the radical self-recovery that escapes the good-bad faith dichotomy; Existentialist ‘choice’ rhetoric can become a form of torment toward the suffering — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 561

Broader Connections

• Mailer’s public existentialism rested on secondhand popular summaries, not primary texts #complicates (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 898
• Existentialist ‘choice’ rhetoric can become a form of torment toward the suffering #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 561
• Authenticity is the radical self-recovery that escapes the good-bad faith dichotomy #qualifies (0.72)