This passage is echoed in Being and Nothingness where Sartre uses almost
the same words to describe Being-in-itself.
"Being-in-itself is never either possible or impossible. It is. This
is what consciousness expresses in anthropomorphic terms by
saying that being is de trop-that is, that consciousness abso
lutely can not derive being from anything, either from another
being, or from a possibility, or from a necessary law. Uncreated,
without reason for being, without any connection with another
being, being-in-itself is de trop for eternity." (p. lxviii)
pe this original contingency, this "obscene superfluity."
"We were a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed
at ourselves, we hadn't the slightest reason to be there, none of
us; each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt de trop in relation
to the others. De trop: it was the only relationship I could estab
lish between these trees, these gates, these stones. In vain I
tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by their rela
tionship to the Velleda, to compare their height with the height
of the plane trees: each of them escaped the relationship in
which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself and overflowed..••
And I-soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal
thoughts-I, too, was de trop.... Even my death would have
been de trop. De tlOp, my corpse, my blood on these stones, be
tween these plants, at the back of the smiling garden. And the
decomposed flesh would have been de trop in the earth which
would receive my bones, at last; cleaned, stripped, peeled,
proper and clean as teeth, it would have been de tlOP: I was
de trop for eternity." (pp. 17'2.-173)
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