CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY : VALET GARCIN ESTELLE INEZ Huis Clos (No Exit) was presented for the first time at the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier, Paris, in May 1944. SCENE A drawing-room in Second Empire style. A massive bronze ornament stands on the mantelpiece. GARCIN [enters, accompanied by the ROOM-VALET, and glances around him]: Hm! So here we are? VALET: Yes, Mr. Garcin. GARCIN: And this is what it looks like? VALET. Yes. GARCIN: Second Empire furniture, I observe. . . Well, well, I dare say one gets used to it in time. VALET. Some do. Some don't. GARCIN Are all the other rooms like this one? VALET. How could they be? We cater for all sorts: Chinamen and Indians, for instance. What use would they have for a Second Empire chair? GARCIN: And what use do you suppose I have for one? Do you know who I was?. . . Oh, well, it's no great matter. And, to tell the truth, I had quite a habit of living among furniture that I didn't relish, and in false positions. I'd even come to like it. A false position in a LOUIS-Philippe dining-room—you know the style?—well, that had its points, you know. Bogus in bogus, so to speak. VALET: And you'll find that living in a Second Empire drawing-room has its points. GARCIN: Really? . . . Yes, yes, I dare say. . . . [He takes another look around.] Still, I certainly didn't expect—this! You know what they tell us down there? VALET: What about? GARCIN: About [makes a sweeping gesture] this—er—residence. VALET: Really, sir, how could you believe such cock-and-bull stories? Told by people who'd never set foot here. For, of course, if they had— GARCIN. Quite so. [Both laugh. Abruptly the laugh dies from GAR-CIN'S face.] But, I say, where are the instruments of torture? VALET: The what? GARCIN: The racks and red-hot pincers and all the other para-phernalia? VALET Ah, you must have your little joke, sir! GARCIN, My little joke? Oh, I see. No, I wasn't joking. [A short silence. He strolls round the room.] No mirrors, I notice. No windows. Only to be expected. And nothing breakable. [Bursts out angrily.] But, damn it all, they might have left me my toothbrush! VALET. That's good! So you haven't yet got over your—what-do-you-call-it?--sense of human dignity? Excuse me smiling. GARCIN [thumping ragefully the arm of an armchair]: I'll ask you to be more polite. I quite realize the position I'm in, but I won't tolerate . . . VALET. Sorry, sir. No offense meant. But all our guests ask me the same questions. Silly questions, if you'll pardon me say-ing so. Where's the torture-chamber? That's the first thing they ask, all of them. They don't bother their heads about the bathroom requisites, that I can assure you. But after a bit, when they've got their nerve back, they start in about their toothbrushes and what-not. Good heavens, Mr. Garcin, can't you use your brains? What, I ask you, would be the point of brushing your teeth? GARCIN [more calmly]: Yes, of course you're right. [He looks around again.] And why should one want to see oneself in a looking-glass? But that bronze contraption on the mantel-piece, that's another story. I suppose there will be times when I stare my eyes out at it. Stare my eyes out—see what I mean? . . . All right, let's put our cards on the table. I as-sure you I'm quite conscious of my position. Shall I tell you what it feels like? A man's , choking, sinking by inches, till only his eyes are just above water. And what does he see? A bronze atrocity by— what's the fellow's name?—Barbedienne. A collector's piece. As in a nightmare. That's their idea, isn't it? . . . No, I suppose you're under orders not to answer questions; and I won't insist. But don't forget, my man, I've a good notion of what's coming to me, so don't you boast you've caught me off my guard. I'm facing the situation, facing it. [He starts pacing the room again.] So that's that; no toothbrush. And no bed, either. One never , I take it? VALET: That's so. GARCIN: Just as I expected. Why should one ? A sort of drowsiness steals on you, tickles you behind the ears, and you feel your eyes closing—but why ? You lie down on the sofa and—in a flash, flies away. Miles and miles away. So you rub your eyes, get up, and it starts all over again. VALET: Romantic, that's what you are. GARCIN. Will you keep quiet, please! . . . I won't make a scene, I shan't be sorry for myself, I'll face the situation, as I said just now. Face it fairly and squarely. I won't have it spring-ing at me from behind, before I've time to size it up. And you call that being "romantic"! . . . So it comes to this; one doesn't need rest. Why bother about if one isn't ? That stands to reason, doesn't it? Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable?. . . Ah, I see; it's life with-out a break.

I. THE PHENOMENON MODERN thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the exist· ent to the series of appearances which manifest it. Its aim was to over­ come a certain number of dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy and to replace them by the monism of the phenomenon. Has the attempt been successful? In the first place we certainly thus get rid of that dualism which in the existent opposes interior to exterior. There is no longer an exterior for the .existent if one means by that a superficial covering which hides from sight the true nature of the object. And this true nature in turn, if it is to be the reality of the thing, which one can have a presentiment of or which one can suppose but can never reach because it is the "interior" of the object under considerationthis nature no longer exists. The appear­ ances which manifest the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all equal, they all refer to other appearances, and none of them is privi­ leged. Force, for example, is not a metaphysical conatus of an unknown kind which hides behind its effects (accelerations, deviations, etc.); it is the totality of these effects. Similarly an electric current does not have a reverse side; it is nothing but the totality of the physicalchemical actions which manifest it (electrolysis, the incandescence of a carbon filament, the displacement of the needle of a galvanometer, etc.). No one of these actions alone is sufficient to reveal it. But no action indicates anything which is behind itself; it indicates only itself and the total series. The obvious conclusion is that the dualism of being and appearance IS no longer entitled to any legal status within philosophy. The appearance refers to the total series of appearances and not to a reality which could drain to itself all the being of the existent. And the appearance for Its part is not an manifestation of this being. To the extent that men had believed in noumenal realities, they have presented appear­ ance as a pure negative. It was "that which is not being"; it had no other being than that of illusion and error. But even this being was borrowed, it was itself a pretence, and philosophers met with the greatest difficulty in maintaining cohesion and existence in the appearance so that it should not itself be reabsorbed in the depth of non'phenomenal being. But if we once get away from what Nietzsche called "the illusion of worldsbe­ hindthescene," and if we no longer believe in the beingbehindtheap­ pearance, then the appearance becomes full positivity; its essence is an "appearing" which is no longer opposed to being but on the contrary is the measure of it. For the being of an existent is exactly what it appears. Thus we arrive at the idea of the phenomenon such as we can find, for example in the "phenomenology" of Husserl or of Heideggerthe phe­nomenon or the relativeabsolute. Relative the phenomenon remains, for "to appear" supposes in essence somebody to whom to appear. But it does not have the double relativity of Kant's Erscheinung. It does not point over its shoulder to a true being which would be, for it, absolute. What it is, it is absolutely, for it reveals itself as it is. The phenomenon can be studied and described as such, for it is absolutely indicative of itself. The duality of potency and act falls by the same stroke. The act is every­ thing.Behind the act there is neither potency nor "hexis" nor virtue. We shall refuse, for example, to understand by "genius"in the sense in which we say that Proust "had genius" or that he "was" a geniusa particular capacity to produce certain works, which was not exhausted exactly in producing them. The genius of Proust is neither the work con· sidered in isolation nor the subjective ability to produce it; it is the work, considered as the totality of the manifestations of the person. That is why we can equally well reject the dualism of appearance and essence. The appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence. The essence of an existent is no longer a property sunk in the cavity of this existent; it is the manifest law which presides over the suc­cession of its appearances, it is the principle of the series. To the nominal­ism of Poincare, defining a physical reality (an electric current, for ex­ample) as the sum of its various manifestations, Duhem rightly opposed his own theory, which makes of the concept the synthetic unity of these manifestations. To be sure phenomenology is anything but a nominalism. But essence, as the principle of the series, is definitely only the concatena­tion of appearances; that is, itself an appearance. This explains how it is possible to have an intuition of essences (the Wesenchau of Husserl, for example). The phenomenal being manifests itself; it manifests its essence as well as its existence, and it is nothing but the well connected series of its manifestations. Does this mean that by reducing the existent to its manifestations we have succeeded in overcoming all dualisms? It seems rather that we have converted them all into a new dualism: that of finite and infinite. Yet the existent in fact can not be reduced to a finite series of manifesta­ tions since each one of them is a relation to a subject constantly chang­ ing. Although an object may disclose itself only through a single Abschat­ tung, the sole fact of there being a subject implies the possibility of multiplying the points of view on that Abschattung. This suffices to multiply to infinity the Abschattung under consideration. Furthermore if the series of appearances were finite, that would mean that the first appear­ ances do not have the possibility of reappearing. which is absurd, or that they can be all given at once, which is still more absurd. Let us understand indeed that our theory of the phenomenon has replaced the reality of the thing by the objectivity of the phenomenon and that it has based this on an appeal to infinity. The reality of that cup is that it is there and that it is not me. We shall interpret this by saying that the series of its appear­ ances is bound by a principle which does not depend on my whim. But the appearance, reduced to itself and without reference to the series of which it is a part, c6uld be only an intuitive and subjective plenitude, the manner in which the subject is affected. If the phenomenon is to reveal itself as transcendent, it is necessary that the subject himself transcend the appearance toward the total series of which it is a member. He must seize Red through his impression of red. By Red is meant the principle of the seriesthe electric current through the electrolysis, etc. But if the transcendence of the object is based on the necessity of causing the ap­ pearance to be always transcended, the result is that on principle an ob­ ject posits the series of its appearances as infinite. Thus the appearance, which is finite, indicates itself in its finitude, but at the same time in order to be grasped as an appearanceofthatwhichappears, it requires that it be surpassed toward infinity. This new opposition, the "finite and the infinite," or better, "the in­ finite in the finite," replaces the dualism of being and appearance. What appears in fact is only an aspect of the object, and the object is altogether in that aspect and altogether outside of it. It is altogether witllin, in that it manifests itself in that aspect; it shows itself as the structure of the appearance, which is at the same time the principle of the series. It is altogether outside, for the series itself will never appear nor can it appear. Thus the outside is opposed in a new way to the inside, and the being­ whichdoesnotappear, to the appearance. Similarly a certain "potency" returns to inhabit the phenomenon and confer on it its very transcendence a potency to be developed in a series of real or possible appearances. The genius of Proust, even when reduced to the works produced, is no less equivalent to the infinity of possible points of view which one can take on that work and which we will call the "inexhaustibility" of Proust's work. But is not this inexhaustibility which implies a transcendence and a reference to the infiniteis this not an "hexis" at the exact moment when one apprehends it on the object? The essence finally is radically severed from the individual appearance which manifests it, since on prin­ ciple it is that which must be able to be manifested by an infinite series of individual manifestations. In thus replacing a variety of oppositions by a single dualism on which they all are based, have we gained or lost? This we shall soon see. For the moment, the first consequence of the "theory of the phenomenon" is that the appearance does not refer to being as Kant's phenomenon refers to the noumenon. Since there is nothing behind the appearance, and since it indicates only itself (and the total series of appearances), it can not be supported by any being other than its own. The appearance can not be the thin film of nothingness which separates the beingofthesubject from absolutebeing. If the essence of the appearance is an "appearing" which is no longer opposed to any being, there arises a legitimate problem concerning the being of this appearing. It is this problem which will be our first concern and which will be the point of departure for our inquiry into being and nothingness.