Abstract
This paper explores how Sartre's concept of " la sérialité ", as elaborated in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, can inform debates on social alienation in the age of the Internet and social media. Sartre's famous everyday examples of seriality are vivid descriptions of an atomization that stands in the way of genuine group gathering (praxis) : " the solitude of the organism as the impossibility of uniting with Others in an organic totality is discovered through the solitude experienced as the provisional negation by each of reciprocal relations with others ". The self-alienation I experience in situations such as queuing for the bus, or even more revealingly in the indirect gathering of the radio broadcast, is the result of a " internalization " of otherness. Indeed, I can only be " isolated " with others - " solitude in a crowd " as our organizer put it. Sartre's seriality thus defines a whole way of being social : " there are serial behaviors, serial feelings and serial thoughts ". In the spirit of this symposium, we will examine how seriality can define and help us better understand the condition of the refugee.
