Some of you might find this of interest - I’ve included the full text below and the original link too if anyone wants to read more related writings. (N.B. This is not an attack on existentialism)
Salamano distraught by the loss of the dog that he himself spent a lifetime abusing; Ivan Karamazov ardent enough in his atheism to suffers a satanically-coloured psychic breakdown at the death his father; Joseph Garcin obsessed by a telephone that inevitably connects him only back to the hell of other people that he is already in; Abraham witnessing his devotion to God singularised in his love for a sacrificed son; Clamence’s critical juggling between a virtuous debauchery and a debaucherous virtue; Joseph Grand’s literary impotence and self-doubt at the production of a single line in the height of the plague of Oran - these ‘narrative object-relations’ represent a logic that lies at the heart of the existentialist tradition. Fundamentally, the avatars of the existentialist ‘method’, from the literary characters of Dostoyevsky via Kierkegaard to Camus and Sartre, define themselves broadly by their obscure attempts to treat things (whether their object, their comrade, or their duty) directly, yet by a directness adopted from a distance, in a mediated, self-reflective view - they define themselves by treating singular instances as if they were isolated from the situation of which these instances are the inevitable reproduction. In Sartre’s Huis Clos [‘No Exit’], the telephone in the hotel room which Joseph Garcin finds himself in alongside two female strangers - this room being Hell, as it is later revealed - functions only insofar as it veils its own function. The uncertainty of its connection with an outside world acts as an internally necessary distortion of the fact that its connection is a ‘closed-circuit’ connection to the crushing immanence of the inescapable room in which it is positioned, a room for which the ‘outside’ acts as an unsettling memory or an idealised, ethereal vision. In Camus’ La Peste [‘The Plague’], whilst the central characters of the plot set to work managing and planning for the containment of the plague that has struck Oran, Joseph Grand is occupied with a parallel object - his book - which veils the impasse that the general population of Oran finds itself in. Yet this impasse is veiled precisely by reformulating the impasse as internal to its own distraction (the book becomes an impasse for itself). The book, of which Grand is unable to conclude even the first line, is an object that indirectly returns him to his situation (the plague) only by removing him from this very situation, reformulating a generalised impasse into a personal, subjectivized impasse. Sartre and Camus’ dramas rely on an object, a singular point of subjective engagement, to distort or cover a situation which the object itself is a direct reproduction of. The object is treated as nothing other than itself - as being a self-explanatory x which rejects integration into its background scene, and yet it is precisely this rejection, this negative relation of the object to the situation of the drama itself, which acts as its most faithful reproduction of the drama’s central antagonism. The object veils the situation insofar as it paradoxically acts as its structural support. This object, this distortion-in-itself which acts as the support of a structure which it disguises in the very act of supporting it - this is nothing other than the quality which Marx attributed to the commodity, under the category of ‘commodity fetishism’. One of the breakthroughs of Marx’s materialism was the reformulation of the commodity as the product of a mode of reproduction that it materialises in order to reproduce this same political economy by which it is conditioned. This can be understood by firstly looking at Marx’s inversion of the category of a commodity’s ‘use value’. One of Marx’s criticisms of the classical English economists was their understanding of the form of ‘value’ which a commodity possesses: the standard understanding was that the commodity was infused with value by its usefulness being superior to that of its raw materials. Any value, in other words, was thought to be inherent to the commodity, a representation of value concentrated in its use. Hence Foucault’s description of pre-Marxist political economy as characterised by an ‘episteme [mode of discursive knowledge] of representation’. Commodities do not, for Marx, hold their value ‘in themselves’, as a constitutive quality inscribed in the essence of the object itself. Instead, the object is something ‘other than it appears’ - the commodity re-articulates the mode of economic reproduction of which it is the product. The process of commodity production and commodity circulation which Marx presents in Capital begins with an analysis of the radical re-invention of the factory, or more generally of the social mode of serialised production, which capitalism introduced. (It is worth noting that Marx is not inherently critical of capitalism in this work, but slowly begins to enumerate the social and economic conditions which allow for a capitalist mode of production, eventually extracting the inevitable forms of exploitation constitutive of this revolutionary system.) Fundamentally, the essence of the commodity is the it has no immanent essence, but that it is a product of labour-force: certain time in which a wage-labourer dedicates his energy towards production. Capitalism, Marx argues, begins where a working day’s labour time/value exceeds the ‘necessary labour time’ required for a worker to return the next day in his capacity as a worker (i.e. the necessary labour providing for rent, food, clothes etc.). The day’s labour which exceeds this necessary labour time is called ‘surplus labour’. If the division of social and factory labour is advanced enough, surplus value can reduce the amount of time needed for necessary labour times to be achieved. This is ‘relative surplus value’ (as opposed to absolute surplus value), with which, Marx notes, capitalism proper emerges. A series of investments into fixed and variable capital, calculations of turnaround times, necessary maintenance etc. are components of the mode of circulation of commodities which directly contribute to their continued production. Production, reproduction, and circulation are reciprocally supporting, requiring capital investments, planned labour divisions, and a reproduction of the social conditions in which capitalised reproduction itself can operate. The capitalist mode of production is therefore, as Marx insists, revolutionary insofar as it is a socially revolutionary political economy. It colours a domain which was previously excluded from economic consideration - the 21st century only more directly displays the non-boundary of the economic and the social, where the intimacy of everyday life lends itself to the most aggressive forms of economic appropriation. The value of the commodity lies in its support of this economic process - the commodity is the input of productive, capitalised, labour force exchanged and circulated through its social forms of reproduction. Commodity fetishism is therefore the contradictory treatment of the commodity as nothing other than a commodity - treating it as having its value inscribed within itself, detached from the situation of which it is the simultaneous product and support. The act of fetishism tells itself that an object is nothing but an object, that its value is internal. It therefore distorts the general antagonistic scene in which it is framed, by reducing its ‘difference’ to itself. Fetishism reproduces a situation in the very act of veiling it. A distortion clouding a distortion by locating the justification of its own existence within itself, a veil which clouds a situation by the very act of making it possible - this is the fetishism of the object which Marx located in the classical conception of our engagement with commodities, and as we might see, it appears to be a strange communal feature of the existentialist relation to its subjective ‘object’. Consider the miserable figure of Salamano in Camus’ L’Étranger [‘The Outsider’]: a lonesome wretch devoting his energy towards hatred for his submissive dog by abusing it - kicking and shouting at it, blaming his troubles on his unwilling four-legged companion. By an ironic inversion, Salamano’s misery is nevertheless fully actualised only once this dog escapes. The misery that he has attributed to his dog is a ‘negative support’ (what Freud would call a compromise solution), a paradoxical bulwark, against a more direct state of nothingness and desperation which emerges if this ‘compromise’ is removed (for Freud, the removal of an unpleasant symptom only leads to a more absolute state of irreparable despair). What Salamano loses with his dog’s disappearance is his functional fetishisation of this dog: this object was treated as an isolated instance of misery, yet it is precisely this focus which veils the dog’s distortion (and support) of a more absolute and universal state of misery. This is the ‘broad stroke’ of the obscure existentialist tradition - noticeable even where we turn to its earliest manifestations, the most direct example being the ‘knight of faith’, represented by Abraham of the Book of Genesis, in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The paradox which, according to Kierkegaard, Abraham is forced to embody, is that whilst willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, at the command of God, he must in the very moment of intervention (being told that he no longer needs to carry out the sacrifice), return to the position of an unquestionable devotion to his son, as itself representing his love for God. The moment of binding, Abraham’s dedication to the sacrifice of Isaac, is a horror which in the instance of its positing covers up the greater paradox of what happens without this binding. Without the binding of Isaac, the paradoxical formula which makes possible the unquestioning devotion of the knight of faith is itself removed. For Kierkegaard, faith is based on paradox: remove the paradoxical instance and you remove faith itself. This fetishism of the ‘leap of faith’ is that the contradictory instance supports, by veiling, the inconsistency structuring the religious scene as a whole. Dostoyevsky is equally a prototype of this existentialist fetishism. The atheist figure of Ivan Karamazov maintains a fidelity to his atheism despite his suggestion that without God, ethical codes would break down (here we see his nuance, irreducible to the ‘new atheism’ of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris etc.). Yet this very fidelity to a form of pseudo-anarchic atheism leads him towards a severe psychotic break, of seeing a demon in his room, after his father’s death. The object of an amoral atheism here acts as a bulwark to a greater disharmony which nevertheless explains, by isolating, Ivan’s intellectual, anti-religious position. Precisely the same type of moral inversions would return in Camus’ La Chute: Clamance’s fixation upon virtue as an end in itself reveals itself to be a latent justification for an excess debauchery made possible by, and engaging in a dialogue with, the very category of ‘virtue’. The formula of commodity fetishism is evidently close to the existentialist mode of relating to its object. Across a series of dramas in this literary tradition, it is often a question of framing a singular subjective instance as an impasse or contradiction which veils, and in so doing supports (by reproducing), the central disharmony or paradox of a situation as a whole.