"In this way, society in its most concrete movement is shot through with passivity, and unceasingly totalises its inert multiplicities and inscribes its totalisation in inertia, while the material object, whose unity is thereby recreated, re-discovered and imposed, becomes a strange and living being with its own customs and its own movement" (p. 169).
Later Sartre writes, "This is not a metaphor. To preserve its reality as a dwelling a house must be inhabited, that is to say, looked after, heated, swept, repainted, etc.; otherwise it deteriorates. This vampire object constantly absorbs human action, lives on blood taken from man and finally lives in symbiosis with him. It derives all its physical properties, including temperature, from human action. For its inhabitants there is no difference between the passive activity which might be called 'residence' and the pure re-constituting praxis which protects the house against the Universe, that is, which mediates between the exterior and the interior." (p. 169)
from Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1"
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