Bad Faith

The human being is only the being through whom negatities are disclosed in the world; it is also the being that can adopt negative attitudes in relation to itself. In our Introduction we defined consciousness as ‘a being for whom in its being there is a question of its being, in so far as this being implies a being other than itself&s;. The liar intends to deceive, hide this intention or to mask the translucency of consciousness; on the contrary, when the need arises to decide on his secondary modes of behaviour, he draws on this intention — it explicitly exercises a regulative control over all his attitudes. In order to escape these difficulties, many people blithely resort to the unconscious. In psychoanalytic interpretation, for example, the hypothesis of a censor will be used — conceived of as a demarcation line with its customs, passport services, currency control, etc., – to re-establish the duality between deceiver, deceived.

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