Lifers

"You see that you don't love them," says Roquentin. "You wouldn't recognize them in the street. They're only symbols in your eyes. You are not at all touched by them: you're touched by the Youth of the Man, the Love of Man and Woman, the Human Voice.

In Sartre's Nausea there is famous attack on the Humanist. He is, says Roquentin, interested in people only as illustrations of an abstraction called 'The Human, ' he feels pity, concern etc for them only via his concern for this bloodless generality. In its negation of actual humans, Humanism is anti-humanism. I was reminded of this by the rhetoric of some 'pro-Life' campaigners, and by a genuinely unpleasant article on 'the Terri Schiavo case' linked to by Jodi Dean. The author states: '"There is a passionate, highly motivated and sincere group of voters and activists who care deeply about whether Terri Schiavo is allowed to live." This is false. They don't care about whether Terri Schiavo lives, i.e., about this individual in her particularity - about which they know nothing. Their object of concern (if we are being generous) is that someone is in this situation, and they would campaign regardless of who it was. The particular and individual life is inessential to their point, which concerns Life in the abstract. Terri Schiavo counts as an illustration of this abstraction, as a convenient embodiment of Life. And it is precisely because she has, sadly, been emptied of her particular qualities that she can stand for this abstraction. 'Life' swims into view when actual, particular and individual life is absent - the person in a coma, the unborn. Only when it is no longer ensnared in the world, only when it is life-less, does Life become precious - Life beyond the original sin of actually living.

There is, then, a notable contrast between the abstraction which is necessarily the object of the pro-Lifers' solicitations, and the casual familiarity with they refer to 'Terri', discarding even the formality of the surname, as if she were a long lost member of the family; or as if (see comments) they 'are Terri's personally chosen spokespeople.' Indeed, this fantasy of intimacy is particularly ugly - the self-delusion of pretending merely to be ventriloquising the wishes of someone else; the indignity, for that someone, of having substituted, for her lost personhood, the cloying fantasies of some deluded ideologues.

[The above is a slightly modified version of the original post.]