Towards a Phenomenology of Reflective Identification
Huis Clos’ Mirror Theme
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Abstract
This article deepens themes from Sartre's Being and Nothingness by studying the relevance of the mirror in his play Huis Clos. The mirror can be understood as a means for escaping anguish by identification with the reflected image-object, but also as a figure of the sado-masochistic relationship between two of the play's characters. What is at stake is our possibility of conceiving ourselves as objects independently of the Other. In truth, it is the Other's look that first reveals our objectivity, and is our being-for-Others that allows us to have objectivity at all. This is not to be overlooked in our attempt to avoid bad faith.
Contributor Notes
Simone Villani is a PhD student at the University of Bari, currently working on materialist understandings of communication, digital technologies and environmental issues. He lives and works in Bologna, where he is enrolled in a MA degree program in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology. Villani received his first MA degree in Philosophical Sciences at the University of Padova (summa cum laude), with a thesis on a conceptual understanding of the word as a sensible sign, focusing on the work of Sartre, Husserl and Derrida, and relying on anthropological, primatological and paleographical data. Villani graduated in Philosophy (BA, summa cum laude) in Padova too, and spent six months of his MA at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms- Universität Bonn thanks to an exchange program.