That dimension is thus profoundly imaginary in a real and positive sense; that is to say, it exists and is real insofar as it is an image, marked and destined to remain as such, it is very unreality and unrealizability being what is real about it. I think of episodes in Sartre's plays which might serve as useful textbook allegories of this peculiar process: for example, the passionate desire of Electra to murder her mother, which, however, turns out not to have been intended for realization. Electra, after the fact, discovers that she did not want her dead (, i.e., dead in reality); what she wanted was to go on longing in range and resentment to have her /dead/. And so it is, as we shall see with those two rather contradictory features of the market system, freedom and equality: everybody wants to want them; but they cannot be realized. The only thing that can happen to them is for the system that generates them to disappear, thereby abolishing the "ideals" along with the reality itself.

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Info: The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre book cover
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