Reflection on the wish-element in thought is the sole route to Utopia

Evidence

The goal in short is to overtake that being which flees itself while being what it is in the mode of not-being and which flows on while being its own flow, which escapes between its own fingers; the goal is to make of it a given, a given which finally is what it is; the problem is to gather together in the unity of one regard this unachieved totality which is unachieved only because it is to itself its own non-achievement, to escape from the sphere of the perpetual reference which has to be a reference to itself, and-precisely because it has escaped from the chains of this reference-to make it be as a seen reference-that is, as a reference which is what it is. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 511 (#expands, via linked claim)

Thus reflection (reflexion) as the effort of a for-itself to recover a for-itself which it is in the mode of non-being is a stage of nihilation intermediate between the pure and simple existence of the for-itself and existence for-others; it is an act on the part of a for-itself to recover a for-itself which it is not in the mode of non-being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 513 (#expands, via linked claim)

But something more fundamental can be argued from the spirit of the works themselves, and in particular from a renewed scrutiny of the same high-modernist celebration of the self that the anti-political critics adduced to support a notion of the modernists’ subjectivism (in this, they joined hands with the Stalinist tradition). I want, however, to propose the alternative proposition that modernism’s introspective probing of the deeper impulses of consciousness, and even of the unconscious itself, was always accompanied by a Utopian sense of the impending transformation or transfiguration of the “self” in question. “You have to change your life!”Rilke’s archaic Greek torso tells him paradigmatically; and D. H. Lawrence is filled with intimations of this momentous new sea change from which new people are sure to emerge. What we now have to grasp is that those feelings, expressed in connection with the self, could only come into being in correlation with a similar feeling about society and the object world itself. It is because that object world, in the throes of industrialization and modernization, seems to tremble at the brink of an equally momentous and even Utopian transformation that the “self” can also be felt to be on the point of change. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 681 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Modernist inwardness paired with a utopian sense of self and world transformation — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 681; Reflection is an intermediate stage of nihilation between self-existence and existence-for-others — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 513; Reflection aims to make the self-coincident being that consciousness can never simply be — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 511 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Reflection aims to make the self-coincident being that consciousness can never simply be #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 511
• Reflection is an intermediate stage of nihilation between self-existence and existence-for-others #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 513
• Modernist inwardness paired with a utopian sense of self and world transformation #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 681