The very act of questioning presupposes the possibility of non-being.

Evidence

Derrida’s interest (to summarize it overhastily) bears not on the fictionality of the “experience” of the past that Rousseau’s account seems to presuppose but on the internal contradictions of his formulation. To work our way back mentally to a situation that must have once existed (language must have once upon a time emerged for hominids; there must have been a time when surpluses did not exist, when social and tribal institutions themselves slowly came into being) requires us to postulate, either in language or in writing, a condition from which both of those “properties” are absent, something whose many incoherences and contradictions can at least be dramatized by this one: namely, the difficulty for a being who “possesses” speech/writing to imagine what their absence could possibly entail. This particular focus then strikes at all imagination of radical change or difference and poses the question of how a being informed by one system in the present could possibly have any appreciation of a condition radically different, since by definition the thesis of difference and change means just that, that the past is inaccessible and unimaginable. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 504 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

This perpetual act by which the in-itself degenerates into presence to itself we shall call an ontological act. Nothingness is the putting into question of being by being—that is, precisely consciousness or for-self. It is an absolute event which comes to being by means of being and which without having being, is perpetually sustained by being. Since being-in-itself is isolated in its being by its total positivity no being can produce being and nothing can happen to being through being—except for nothingness. Nothingness is the peculiar possibility of being and its unique possibility. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 336 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Negation enters the world through questioning, a pre-judicative relation to being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 189; The human is the unique entity whose Being includes questioning Being itself.; Non-being appears within human expectation, not as pure subjectivity — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 188 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• The human is the unique entity whose Being includes questioning Being itself. #corroborates (0.85)
• A being possessing speech cannot coherently imagine its own prior absence. #corroborates (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 504
• Nothingness is an act of being putting itself into question, unique to consciousness. #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 336
• Non-being appears within human expectation, not as pure subjectivity #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 188
• Absence is not given by objects but posited by a consciousness that negates #expands (0.75)
• Being is logically prior to nothingness, which has only borrowed existence. #complicates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 208
• Socratic questioning can shatter religious complacency and force genuine self-examination #exemplifies (0.72) — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 867