Occupation disappearance registered in everyday objects and empty rooms

Evidence

At the most unexpected times, terrifying holes could open up in the fabric of things. Sartre described it with his usual cinematic sense: You would phone a friend one day and the telephone would ring and ring in the empty apartment; you would ring his doorbell and he wouldn’t come to the door; if the concierge broke in, you would find two chairs drawn up together in the hallway with German cigarette ends between the legs. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 474

Categorization

• XREF: Beauvoir’s phrase ‘precisely, a nothingness’ and the empty café seats resonate with Sartre’s concepts of nothingness and being-for-others developed in Being and Nothingness, written partly in this period.