Boselli 1

John Boselli
Dr. Asher
English 250
24 October 2012
The Fury of Others
In his Being and Nothingness, Sartre limits his vision of free will to the simple
relationship between one person and another, or rather the Other. No longer working
microcosmically, Sartres play The Flies presents the first sociological application of his
theories, albeit simplistically. The work, inspired by the Greek myth of Electra and Orestes,
explores the dissolution of an ethics of guilt, where there is no Other but the dead.
In the wake of King Agamemnons murder by wife Clytemnestra and her paramour
egistheus, vice, or the love of failure, as Sartre refers to it, governs the city of Argos.
Fifteen years later, in disguise, Zeus informs Orestes upon his arrival that when the folks of
Argos heard their king screaming his life out in the palacethey rolled their eyes in a sort of
ecstasylike a woman in heat. Vice is an unavoidable consequence of bad faith, which is an
unavoidable consequence of the human condition.
However, egistheus creates an ancestral-Other god cult (akin to Nietzschean
philosophy) to remove all human judgment, i.e., Otherness, in the hopes of absolving himself
through commonality. Being and Nothingness tells us that any attempt at sincerity such as this
must fail, for if our being for-others is a fall through absolute emptiness toward objectivity,
then any self-evaluation is a self-alienation, which is impossible. This god cult is empowered
by the distance and silence of the dead. It makes events causal, where rain reflects good faith
and drought otherwise, which is precisely why Zeus slamming shut of the deads cave

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dwelling so effective. With no communication, the people of Argos may only feel shame, with
the look of the angered ancestors fixed upon them. God cults, as seen in Nietzsches On the
Genealogy of Morals, enforce static social identities (debtor and creditor), which Sartre terms
the in-itself.
The townsmen are so accustomed to construing their in-themselves as criminals that
they have removed their Otherness from one another. Their naked confessions founder as
egistheus did, where everyone knows his neighbors sins by heart. With only one possible
identity in Argos, there is no longer any power to objectify one another. Zeus tells egistheus
that Agamemnon would have died of apoplexy in a pretty slave-girls arms had he not been
murdered, but it is precisely mans mortality that gives human acts their power of definition.
Queen Clytemnestra is content in her own bad faith, finding a sort of nobility in her behavior:
Anyone has the right to spit in my facebut no one has the right to speak ill of my
remorse. She is likely the archetype of masochism in Sartre. The flies of the title may be read
as the physical manifestation of the deceased, an omnipresent reminder of the guilt myth
egistheus (and Zeus) created. The holiday, if we can call it as such, presented in The Flies,
reflects this power, where men beg that they may be [forgiven] for living while [the
departed] are dead.
Orestes sister, Princess Electra, the almost-heroine of the play, vacillates between
good and bad faith, ultimately choosing the latter. Psychologically, she is predisposed to
rebellion, living as servant to her murderous mother and stepfather. However, she cannot think
outside of the ethical system in place in Argos; when Orestes convinces her to rise against
egistheus on the day of remembrance, she gleefully dances in as the people revel in their
masochism, telling them youre too terrified to lift a finger, afraid of jolting your precious

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ghosts if you make any movement. But she does not tell them how to move. Furthermore,
she is revolted when her brother fulfills her dark desire of murdering the King and Queen,
believing herself to be a murderer (even if only by association), resorting back to her
shameful apprehension of what she sees as her in-itself. Sartre writes her off as the worst act
of bad faith, for she postpones the decision that grants her very freedom when she refuses to
leave with Orestes. Zeus created the universe and what is good, and he uses this logic to deny
Electra her freedom, for if Zeus is rejected, so is mans existence.
Again, while good faith is a human impossibility, attainable only by the very God that
Sartre rejects, Orestes certainly seems to be its best representative. A secular Christ-figure
without a historical precedent, Orestes recalls Nietzsches bermensch, the harbinger of a new
modern ethics. Once the flies have become their true form, the Furies, Orestes is not moved
by their flaunting of their Otherness; he knows the only sincere words man may say about
himself are that he is free. Because of his upbringing, which was nonexistent, he is a ghostlike figure, and this distance from the subject positions of Argos that allows him to understand
himself as neither slave nor master, but [his] freedom.
True, he killed his family, but he is not so easily reduced. If he identified with being
simply evil, Orestes becomes two-dimensional and an abstract concept, not a human. This is
precisely why he seeks to become a king without a kingdom. In order to create causality,
ethics do not tolerate the for-itself as a personality, only the in-itself. Safe in Apollos temple,
Orestes liberates man, denying their guilt complexes, the dead, and Zeus ideological chains.
To overcome this system for all of Argos as an bermensch, he must absolve all without
creating a religion in his wake. He cannot annihilate himself, so he chooses to leave Argos

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forever with the Furies trailing behind him, having left the positive nihilism he created
behind.