Author's Note: In retrospect, this is rather impressionistic :) SHOUTOUT PROF. AL-SAJI FOR BEING ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANT AND INSPIRING IRAQI THINKERS AND PROFESSORS!!!! Thank you for listening to my dumb self-destructive troubles, letting me be curious and paranoid too hahahhaha 

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Consciousness Sartre

​Pre-reflective consciousness is the domain of our mental lives that remains unconscious until we shine the light of consciousness by reflecting on its contents. It is a self-conscious and immediate expression of our natural minds and our sensations, the domain of intuition, and for De Beauvoir and Fanon, the domain of racialization. When consciousness experiences reality in the present and loses its sense of Self, the pre-reflective awareness hasn’t dichotomized the unity of an object in the world’s essence yet. It shares a border with reflective consciousness and differs mainly in the temporality of its contents and the presence or absence of the Self as an object of consciousness. If we reflect on the unreflective consciousness we make it known and thus reflective. An example that accentuates the difference between unreflective consciousness and reflective consciousness is when the unreflective mind keeps a mischaracterization of its own nature from the reflective mind in bad faith. When engaged in Sartrean bad faith, consciousness keeps from itself the truth of its nature, freedom. This causes a dissonance between the pre-reflective awareness that the lie exists, and the reflective mind that flows from the presumption of unawareness that the lie exists at all. This process introduces a brute distinction between the pre-reflective and reflective mind, and thus a duality where a unity of natural consciousness ought to hold. This unity is underlined by the unconditional acceptance of the contents of the mind, and invites unobstructed awareness of its contents when consciousness separates itself from its mental propositions and recognizes its self-nhilating nature. 

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In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, abandoning the “hypothesis of the contents of consciousness” speaks to the recognition of the self-nhiliating nature of consciousness. For Sartre, consciousness is void of any substance, rather than being a container for knowledge and motives. It is characterized by the freedom of being nothing; whereby nothingness “insinuates itself between motives and acts” (122). Motives aren’t held by consciousness, they are the expression of consciousness. The difference is that authenticity is preserved by the unobstructed modality of consciousness. The motive of consciousness cannot be distinguished from the mind that posits it. The motive is contextualized within a network of personal ascriptions meaning and value systems for the importance of the object of the motivation. In addition, the modality of a motive in consciousness traps the motive in an echo chamber of a consciousness that is in-itself rather than for itself. In contrast, when the motive is recognized to be for consciousness and in awareness of the freedom of a nhilating consciousness in conferring substance to motives. 

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Racialization

Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon says: “I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me.” (p. 140) [“Impossible d’aller au cinéma sans me rencontrer. Je m’attends. À l’entracte, juste avant le film, je m’attends.” (p. 136)]

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When Fanon waits for himself on the screen of a film, he is waiting for the incessant droning of white racialization. These films, or any source of media and literature for that matter, propagate racial schemas that glorify white victory and portray minorities as subordinate accomplices. Fanon’s process of naturalization captures the white projection of its inferior qualities onto Blacks. These projections find themselves on movie screens and on magazines, but they infiltrate the corporeal schema of racialized peoples. This social projection is veiled by a circular logic for racism that confuses the outcome of racialization with its genesis. White America will justify over-policing predominantly Black neighborhoods because high incarceration rates amongst Blacks make it seem like Blacks are more violent. This however neglects the order of causality, that Blacks are incarcerated at higher rates because they are over-policed, overcoming a generational delay of wealth caused by red-lining, and have their culture commodified and exploited. When White films boast white superiority, they poke at the objectification and diminishment of Blacks that this moral grandstanding was founded on. These self-perpetuating attempts at racialization stand in the way of the unguarded surrender of the colored film watcher, for Fanon this imposition of racial inferiority moves him to “a feeling of non-existence” (139). 

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This quote is from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, in his chapter on the fact of Blackness. The white gaze is the socially imposed attempt at racializing Blacks into the inferior anti-thesis to white superiority. Meeting this gaze symmetrically and non-reactively, fragments the corporeal schema, revealing a substrate of racial epidermal schema. Corporeal schema is the ontological conception of our bodies as they find themselves situated in a time, place, and within a social setting. In other words, it is the material anchor that figures itself in our mental lives. Given that this social setting is informed by a colonial history that permeates a hierarchy within the collective Spirit, racialized peoples internalize a racial epidermal schema. This schema is a racial imaginary that underlies their bodies and the personal and collective memories it stores.

 

The Woman in love and Motherhood in De Bouvoire's Second Sex

The woman in love and a mother share their abandonment of the Self as the intrinsic benefactor of freedom in exchange for fulfillment through external and temporary means of freedom. The woman in love for Simone De Beauvoir is taken aback by their partner's world. They surround themselves with the interests of their partner, in their preferences and their judgments. They confer onto the partner the role of a planet they can orbit, and their hodological pathways are consumed by the partner. An important note, however, is that this characterization is not completed by the intensity of the woman’s love, but by the abandonment of their personal project of self-realization for their realization through the partner. The woman in love cannot confer legitimacy and worth onto their own self-actualization, and instead, they chase themselves from the corner of their partner’s eye. These projects are problematic because they consume the livelihood of the woman, and make them complicit to their own objectification as dependents to a man. In addition to succumbing to the patriarchal views that invite these shaded areas of paternalistic dependency, the woman in love also keeps themselves from realizing their consciousness as being for itself rather than in-itself and for the male gaze. I've personally been a woman in love once, and on dwindling occasions, a male whose faulty gaze unintentionally maims.

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In Simon De Bouveoire’s The Second Sex, she emphasizes the importance of lived experience in giving an existential and ontological account of the impacts of the patriarchal socialization of women. Men lack the experience necessary to contend with the “privileges whose full extent they can hardly measure” (16). The effects of social discrimination against women are minimized because men can’t really understand the experience and debilitating elusiveness of women’s freedoms from the objectified modality of consciousness. The indoctrinating efforts of the patriarchy to contain women to docility pervade the corporeal schema of women. In effect, these sexist schemas become beguilingly persuasive propositions in a woman’s moral and intellectual life. So much so, that if left unnoticed, these propositions become the complacent expression of their apparent nature.