Abstract:
Philosophical existentialism has sought to understand the nature of human existence
and the possible meaning(s) that might be made thereof. For the noteworthy
existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, the meaning of life cannot be said to subsist
somewhere beyond the province of individual human existence, since meaning is
born of a fundamental freedom which inheres in human consciousness. From a more
contemporary poststructuralist philosophical perspective, however, one might argue
that Sartre’s individualist conception of existential meaning in Being and Nothingness
remains fettered to an order of signification reliant upon a vestigial “metaphysics
of presence”, where the presence of the signified has simply been displaced from
the transcendental domain to immanent human subjectivity. This is potentially
problematic insofar as such an order of meaning qua signification is destined to
suspend meaning at a perpetually deferred distance; and concomitantly, human
existential meaning remains interminably frustrated. However, using the contemporary
philosophical insights of Jean-Luc Nancy, it can be argued that a contemporary (re)
conceptualisation of existentialist thought might allow existentialism to liberate itself
from a ceaselessly suspended signification of meaning, specifically by arguing for a
means-to-meaning(s) always already manifest(ing) between human beings oriented
towards the contemporary world as a shared space of sense.
