Hell is other people

Jean-Paul Sartre’s most celebrated line has achieved the peculiar distinction, shared by almost no other philosophical observation of the twentieth century, of being universally quoted in direct contradiction to its meaning for longer than anyone alive can remember, a feat that suggests either a monumental failure of reading comprehension across several generations of educated people, or a collective determination that the actual argument is less satisfying than the misreading, which would itself be a fairly Sartrean conclusion and saves everyone the inconvenience of engaging with what he actually said.

The line belongs to the play No Exit, published in nineteen forty-four, and is spoken by Garcin when he and two other dead souls discover that their hell contains no fire, no demons, and no physical torture, only a closed room with three sofas and eyelids that do not blink, where they will spend eternity as each other’s audience. What Sartre described was not the general unpleasantness of human company, a thesis that would have found a captive market in any century, but something far more precise, which is the structural dependency we have on the judgment of others to construct a coherent image of ourselves, and the particular catastrophe that ensues when we allow that judgment to become definitive. Hell is not the presence of the other. It is the moment you stop being able to imagine yourself as anything other than what the other has decided you are.

I work as a night guard, which means spending many hours in a silence that other people fill with sleep or distraction and which I have learned to occupy with thought, generating consequences that are professionally irrelevant and intellectually substantial. I am sixty-three years old, dedicated decades to a completely different field, chose this country for reasons tied to identity and history rather than the job market, and have worked nights for two years because life is vastly larger than the dreams we weave about it and has shown, so far, no interest whatsoever in consulting them. Some people, upon learning this, perform a small but distinct recalibration, adjusting their estimate of what I might possibly have to say by subtracting everything that, in their experience, a night guard would never say, which leaves them with a figure that does not resemble me but is considerably easier to manage, and with which they proceed to have a perfectly satisfying conversation.

Sartre clarified later that the phrase had been continuously misinterpreted, that he did not mean all human contact was poisoned, but that when relationships become distorted, when a person becomes entirely dependent on the judgment of others to know who they are, that is when the closed room builds itself around them without the help of any philosopher, which is an irony Sartre himself would have appreciated. During the early-morning hours of the shift, without an audience and without enough distraction to escape oneself, I learned that the only exit that consistently works is to refuse the image others have assembled for you, not with argument or demonstration but with the serene confidence of someone who has spent enough time alone to have formed a prior opinion before anyone attempted to replace it.

What interests me about this argument is its applicability in both directions and at every scale. The label others impose on me is no more imprisoning than the label I impose on others before paying close enough attention to be surprised, and both are no more imprisoning than the labels governments impose on entire peoples and call policy. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has built exactly the room Sartre described, one where Israel is defined by its enemies, war is the only available language, and any citizen who attempts to imagine things otherwise is reclassified as a threat to national survival before finishing the sentence. The gaze that imprisons is always, ultimately, the one we stop questioning, and Netanyahu has governed for a quarter of a century on precisely this principle. The mirror he holds up to Israel reflects only enemies, only emergencies, only the permanent indispensability of himself, and it works for as long as no one turns it over. On this side of it, in the early-morning hours when the silence is honest enough not to lie, what appears on the back of the mirror is simply a man who needed a permanent war to keep appearing indispensable.