Abstract

In an interview concerning his novel The Anatomy Lesson, Philip Roth remarked that narrator Nathan Zuckerman “has to be in a state of vivid transformation or radical displacement. ‘I am not what I am—I am, if anything, what I am not!’”1 The utterance has been traced to Jean-Paul Sartre’s encounter, in Being and Nothingness, with ecstatic relations. Sartre, anticipating Roth’s description of Zuckerman, similarly defines the ecstatic dimensions of consciousness that constitute Dasein. According to Sartre, consciousness must fulfill three requirements: “ to not-be what it is, to be what it is not, to be what it is not and to not-be what it is—within...