Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason contains some brilliant little theoretical apercus in the footnotes. E.g:
“The employee allows himself to be beaten, also in so far as he is an Other. If he were insulted or struck by a Muslim, he would react as a particular individual (or as a member of a particular family). But he feels the blows of the colonialist in so far as other men of his religion are, also, at that very minute, being beaten, like him; in so far as these provocations are addressed through his person to the native, a character who is as little realisable as the colonialist himself. Thus, through the two individuals, the Other relates to the Other; and both are alienated to serial unities which cannot even be realised here and which, dislocating and generalising, remove the event from itself and constitute it as the formula of the recurrence and as an archetype which exists elsewhere.”
There are many theoretical riches in this passage, but one thing that strikes me is the theatricality of the scene depicted, in a way that recalls some of Sartre’s work on the ‘Imaginary’. Sartre there remarked on how, when we see an actor playing Hamlet on stage, we do not see an actor walking from one side of the stage to the other in order to make his living. This ‘real’ and empirical level is suspended, derealised, so that we agree to see Prince Hamlet walking across the battlements at Ellsinore. The literal is ‘replaced’ and overwritten by the imaginary. The actual actor becomes the mere support, the invisible carrier of this imaginary being. Now, does not something similar happen in the case cited above: the colonialist beats not the empirical individual but The Native, the alien presence (Other) incarnate in him, and the empirical individual allows this alien presence to be beaten, even while suffering the blows himself. The two enact a scene, a beating, which is the local incarnation of an ‘archetype’ - the colonialist/ colonised relation; they allow this relation between two phantom Others to play itself out through them, using their enraged or suffering flesh. And in so far as the individual beaten realises that it is not him who is being beaten, but him as native, then this places him in solidarity with those Others who are addressed as ‘Native’ in the act of being beaten.