The Soviet Look (Le regarde) in Lithuania

Abstract

This paper consolidates an existentialist understanding of the Soviet Look. A significant aspect of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, gaze theory or the look (Le regarde), is redeployed within the context of Soviet Lithuania, a pertinent choice as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited Lithuania in 1965. The primary aim thereof is to reconstruct the Soviet look from a Sartrean perspective. A primary problematic is integral to the  Soviet look; a look whose raison d'être is to fix Soviet Lithuanian as an objective world, a being-in-itself [1’etre-en-soi], in the face of a contradictory need, as Lithuanian self, to have an authentic lived experience, a Lithuanian being-for-itself [l'etie-poui-soi]. The process of objectification of Lithuanian subject occurs without an immediate gaze, which means that the kernel of the Soviet look is that it turns the subject into an object not so much as in absentia, but rather in an atmospheric, attunement manner. While the attributes of the Soviet look are referenced, including its controlling, panoptic presence, a crucial existentialist contribution is that the Soviet gaze is in bad faith.