Inhuman Two

One of Sartre’s contemporary commentators (IT) remarks:

'Similarly, man exists in the first place and in general for everyone as non-human man, as an alien species.'

This perhaps recalls a famous Sartrean passage:

‘The century would have been good if man had not been tracked down by his relentless, immemorial enemy, by the carnivorous species that had set out to slay him, by that hairless, sly beast,.. Man himself’

And to me, free associating, it calls up this from Kafka:

'What is it that binds you more intimately to these impenetrable, talking, eye-blinking bodies than to any other thing, the penholder in your hand for example? Because you belong to the same species? But you don’t belong to the same species, that’s the very reason why you raised the question.”

What is ‘inhuman’ here, Man, or the point from which he is seen? To name Man as a ‘species’ - from where is this nomination made? A species, clinging to a dying planet, hopelessly governed and defined by its species-being, playing out some logic of genesis, flourishing and self-destruction unbeknown to itself.

The ‘inhuman’ is the way we are seen, captured in a foreign look, the object of a desire or project wholly extraneous to us.

As our commentator points out, for the USA the Soviet Union was 'inhuman' partly because it seemed to be pursuing a project in which the USA was an object, and this object was something it felt unable to quite reappropriate or make plain.

But, more generally, as Sartre suggests, we are forced, in pursuing our projects, to regard others as objects, instrumental to the realisation of that project. And so, for them, we are inhuman – we speak and act from a place eccentric to their freedom, praying on them, bringing about a self-estrangement against which they must perpetually fight. We must take on and subjectivise the disfiguring picture that the Other has of us, recast it, claim ownership. I assume this is partly what IT means by:

For Sartre, every action aiming to transform the inhuman into the human must, in the first instance, interiorise a particular inhumanity. Man only humanises himself by assuming against the inhuman order his own subjective part of inhumanity

But I may have missed the point entirely.