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A very different reading, and a very different recommendation, can be found in the work of Sartre.
The basis for Sartre's reading of history, and his politics, was laid in that section of Being and Nothingness that describes the birth of the social in the "Look" of the other.
In making me an object for his projects, the other alienates me from myself, displaces me from the subject position (the position from which the world is defined in its meaning and value) and constitutes me as something.
Concretely, what I am constituted "as" is a function of the other's project and not something that I can make myself be.
I am constituted as a "Frenchman" in and through the hostility emanating from that German; I am constituted as a "man" in the resentment of that woman; I am constituted as a "Jew" on the basis of the other's anti-semitism; and so on.
This sets up a dimension of my being that I can neither control nor disavow, and my only recourse is to wrench myself away from the other in an attempt to restore myself to the subject-position.
For this reason, on Sartre's model, social reality is in perpetual conflict — an Hegelian dialectic in which, for ontological reasons, no state of mutual recognition can ever be achieved.
The "we" — the political subject — is always contested, conflicted, unstable.
Sample text from
Standford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy
article on
Existentialism,
§ 4.2.