The Philosopher and his Poor – Jacques Rancière, trans. Andrew Parker, (Duke University Press: Durham & London, 2003, pp. 144- 145)

Even before worked matter enters the scene, the philosopher has protected himself against this colloid. He has built a wall in the décor of rustic and peasant happiness: ‘From my window I can see a road paver on the road and a gardener working in a garden. Between them there is a wall with bits of broken glass on top protecting the bourgeois property where the gardener is working. Thus they have no knowledge at all of each other’s presence.” [Sartre]

The broken glass and the bourgeois property are there for ambiance. The décor itself has another purpose. Sartre wants to show that in their separation and mutual ignorance there always exists between two workers relations of interiority; but also and above all, that these relation of a third. Thus, in the perception where the man at the window is figured as object, the two men outside become the “hemorrhagic center” of the object, each of them united with the other at the point of gaze: “The mere fact, for each of them, of seeing what the Other does not see, of exposing the object through a special kind of work, establishes a relation of reciprocity in my perceptual field which transcend my perception itself: each of them constitutes the ignorance of the Other…. They are ignorant of one another through me to the precise extent that I become what I am through them.”

Clearly the philosopher at his window, too, feels someone’s gaze on him: the ironic gaze of his privileged opponent. And he also insists that no one is going to get him to say that he is a transcendental subject constituting others in his own perception. He is not the philosopher-master; he is not the Leibnizian God of action at a distance. He is merely an intellectual on vacation, a petty bourgeois who does not know how to weed flower beds, how to crush pebbles, and against whom is already exercised the mute complicity of these workers who are ignorant of each other.

But this modesty is useless, or misleading. The philosopher’s act was not the dissolution of the stone wall in order to “interiorize” the workers. It was the erection of the wall to put them in the true element of the dialectic: not the colloid of reciprocal relations but the steel and concrete of worked matter that seals meaning in consigning backward workers to their solitudes, their turnings in place, or their aphasic dialogues. Much more than The German Ideology’s laboriously demonstrated historicity of the cherry tree, the philosopher’s rustic wall engages humanity on the road of the productive dialectic. When the two workers have entered the workshop, the philosopher at the window will give way to a more severe figure of the dialectical Third: the time-keeper, a pure representative of the Exigency of worked matter.