Sartre’s authenticity formula is formally indistinguishable from heroic Fascist ethics

Evidence

There is, however, still another aspect of this problem which accounts for the historical direction that Sartre’s later thought has taken, and that is the private quality which authenticity still seems to have in this series of novels. To put this dilemma in its sharpest form, we may ask what there is to distinguish Mathieu’s salvation, as it is presented here, with its consent to time and death, from an ethic of heroic Fascism, with its own cult of death and action, intensity of experience, with its analogous distaste for middle-class individuality. At this point, it is obviously not Sartre’s own political sympathies which are in question, but rather the adequacy of his ethical formula as such: Is there anything built into that formula which necessarily implies a particular mode of being with others and a sympathy with oppressed rather than oppressing groups? — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 552

Categorization

• XREF: The formal identity of existential authenticity and Fascist cult-of-death ethics is the kind of charge Benjamin and Adorno leveled at certain existential and vitalist positions. Also echoes the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ pattern where outward ethical practice is ideologically underdetermined.
• QUESTION: This resembles the structural indeterminacy question — whether any individual ethical formula can guarantee progressive politics without a collective mediation. How does the Critique answer it?
• SEED: Essay angle: the formal fungibility of existentialist ethics — how a single formula can underwrite both heroic fascism and resistance, and what this says about the necessity of collective/political mediation.