Sartre’s Look explains how oppressed classes politicize their oppressors

Evidence

Now, it seems to me, we are in a little better position to evaluate that “action at distance” of the workers which Sartre described as an influence on his intellectual development and which we evoked at the beginning of this essay: this almost gravitational influence, which the workers exercise through the mere fact of their existence even before any concrete historical contact has taken place, what is it essentially but the Look itself? Those petit bourgeois intellectuals, of whom Sartre describes himself as one, were bound to react to the existence of the workers as a class because they were themselves implicitly seen and judged by that other class, because that look constituted for them an objective, external being which they had to attempt to recuperate in some fashion, either by refusing it on the grounds of their own superiority, or by assimilating it and attempting to take the point of view of the workers on themselves. But they were not free not to react to this look, and it is this politization, it seems to me, that characterizes any period in which a massive oppressed collectivity—whether workers in France or blacks in the United States—makes itself felt as a new consciousness of its oppressor, as a look in its turn, fascinating for the oppressors, attractive or terrifying by turns, in any case exercising a profound ontological magnetism: that which puts me into question in my very being, and with which, in one way or another, I must come to terms. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 588

Categorization

• XREF: This is the Sartre Look extended from the face-to-face individual case to a collective, structural mechanism — connects to the reader’s ongoing dialectical-criticism project and to Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique. — connects to: The oppressed classes look and this look is ontologically more fundamental — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 586; Oppression begins in an act of violence and shapes both oppressors and oppressed alike — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 140; Oppressors recast the oppressed as the violent ones — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 134
• DEFINE: Jameson redefines Sartre’s phenomenological Look as a pre-contact gravitational class effect, making the abstract existential concept historically concrete.
• DEEPTHINKING: The redefinition of the Look as a collective ontological magnetism that the intellectual ‘was not free not to react to’ forms a dense, paradigm-shifting bridge between phenomenology and historical class struggle — exactly the kind of dialectical synthesis the reader is tracing.

Broader Connections

• Oppression begins in an act of violence and shapes both oppressors and oppressed alike #expands (0.75) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 140
• Oppressors recast the oppressed as the violent ones #expands (0.72) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 134