An Existentialist Guide to Feeling Nothing

I recently watched “the greatest film of all time,” and the most boring one. In retrospect, the title alone should have been a sufficient warning: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Alas, I’m old enough to be a bit nostalgic about massive telephone address books. And massive it is. Clocking over 200 minutes, Chantal Akerman's 1975 dreary drama follows three days in the monotonous routine of Jeanne, a widow, a mother, and a prostitute.

I watched Jeanne’s autopilot existence, until, staring at her back as she washes dishes, I decided to fast-forward a couple of minutes, only to discover she was still at it. And Jeanne is equally thorough when she’s busy baking, cleaning, folding laundry, or shining her son’s shoes. She speaks so scarcely and mechanically, that it’s impossible to detect any emotion or volition beyond her carefully controlled chores. Watching Jeanne Dielman is what the word “painstaking” was invented for.

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 1975

As the film progressed, I felt revulsion, as if I was visiting the uncanny valley, where we meet objects with near-human qualities that make our skin crawl (Benjamin and Heine 2022). But perhaps I was taking a deeper dive into that valley, for it had an unnerving twist: watching not a humanoid robot but a robotic human. If Jeanne is Sisyphus, a living dead forever condemned to repeat her routine, I cannot join Camus (1955) in imagining her happy.

I dismissed Akerman's Jeanne. It’s not just bad, boring cinema, I thought, it’s preposterous, no person is like that. A couple of conversations and contemplations later, I realized I was wrong, terrified by fear of familiarity: While Jeanne may take automaton life to its bourgeoisie end, we’re all on the spectrum, always teetering at the edge of nihilism. This may be Nietzsche’s gazing abyss: looking at Jeanne, we can see ourselves losing our humanity. How do we become zombies, and how can we come alive? Can Jeanne?

Jean Paul Sartre (1945) to the rescue. True, he was already seventy when Jeanne overcooked her potatoes, but agile enough to whisper in her ears his famous maxim: “Existence precedes essence.”

Say what? Well, for Sartre, “existence” is freedom, and “essence” is human nature. Unlike a knife, we assign form and function to, and then manufacture, “there is no human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it.” We create ourselves without a core. “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.” Don’t be a tool and fool for “bad faith,” Jeanne, there’s always a choice – make yourself.

I imagine Jeanne taking a day off her routine, to confront Sartre: You contradict yourself. If there is no human nature, no “essence,” how can it be preceded by existence or anything else for that matter? There’s simply nothing to be preceded.

And what about “existence”? Sartre argues that “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterward.” But then, offhandedly, Sartre reverses the sequence: Existence requires “projection of the self… man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be.” Wishes and will won’t do, “not even in the heaven of intelligence.” Existence entails a purposeful choice, that is, freedom. With this high bar for “existence,” how can “man first of all exist”? Indeed, he doesn’t: “nothing exists… to begin with [man] is nothing. He will not be anything until later,” when freedom-existence kicks in. “Existence precedes essence”? Nothing precedes existence, more like it.

Worse: Isn’t freedom-existence “nothing” too? Jeanne has a childhood flashback from after the war: a hardcopy of Sartre’s (1943) magnum opus Being and Nothingness laying on her friend’s dinner table, still encased in the presentation wrapper of the early 1945 reprint: “What counts in a vase is the void in the middle.”

Beneath the book’s hard hood, the void takes centerstage: Freedom is all about “nothing(ness),” when human consciousness, through imagination, annihilates the givens, the objective “things” in our world, including the destruction of that fragile vase. With an anxious sigh, as if she doesn’t have enough mashed potatoes on her plate, Jeanne further revises Sartre’s: Nothing precedes nothing. “Told you, old dude, join me in my zombie kitchen.”

“Hell’s kitchen!” Sartre blurts out, as he enters, realizing there’s no Exit sign, and recognizing a familiar face. “So, ‘Man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be’ – and Woman?” Simone de Beauvoir slowly asks, smiling at Jeanne.

I certainly wasn’t smiling as I browsed Jeanne’s third day on my tiny screen. Fast forwarding to its end – spoilers ahead – I watched Jeanne sitting at her dinner table for what felt like an eternity, giving me that Nietzschean gaze. I was already about to turn to The Handmaid's Tale’s new season when I noticed a red stain on Jeanne’s hand. It was time to browse back and realize she just used scissors to kill her last client. Why?

Boredom Essential Reads

Let Your Children Be Bored

Why and When the Familiar Feels Good

A moment before, in a most listless sex scene, Jeanne struggles with her client – not to avert intercourse with him but with herself: to block her own climax. She fails, covering her face in shame, then goes about to annihilate that hollow human vase. At the dinner table, blood on her white blouse and hand, Jeanne looks at her reflection on the polished table and briefly smiles.

When we think we hardly have a choice, or that our choices hardly matter, why on earth would we seek purpose, and how? We may as well gather crumbs of control to gain a semblance of stability, to survive. But then, when that illusion is broken, is the death of self-control the birthplace of freedom, or of controlling, annihilating others? Would either make us happy? We’ll seek answers in the sequel post, returning to Hell’s kitchen with Sartre and de Beauvoir. And maybe Jeanne will join us.