Sartre: Imaginary Pursuit of Being Sartre: Imaginary Pursuit of Being
not address the larger question of the existential origins and meanings of
imagining.
The second book, L'imaginaire, published in 1940, restates the thesis
of the earlier tract, namely, that images ought to be understood as forms
of intentional consciousness, but also makes some forays into the existen-
tial ground of imagining. Throughout this book, largely in the context of
unsystematic asides, Sartre begins his speculations on the relationship
between desire and the imaginary. In this context, intentionality becomes
an essential structure not merely of perception and imagination, but also
of feeling. Dismissing the claims of representational theories of knowl-
edge, Sartre claims that perception, imagination, and feeling are inten-
tional forms of consciousness, i.e., that they refer to objects in the world
and are not to be construed as impoverished perceptions or solipsistic
enterprises. Indeed, Husserl 's doctrine of intentionality signified for Sartre
the end to solipsistic idealism in the tradition of modern epistemology
("I," 4-5).
Sartre's extension and reformulation of Husserl's view of intentionality
entails a shift from an epistemological to an existential perspective. Inten-
tionality for the Sartre of the 1930s signifies not merely the various ways
in which we stand in knowing relations to things, but also an essential
structure of the being of human life. The directionality of consciousness,
its comportment toward things outside itself, comes to signify the onto-
logical situation of human beings as a "spontaneity" and "upsurge." As
intentional beings, it is not merely our knowledge that is of the world,
but our essential passion as well; our desire is to be enthralled with the
world, to be "of" the world. Intentionality comes to signify human access
to the world, the end to theories that close off consciousness and subjec-
tivity from the world, forcing them to reside behind the dense screen of
representation.
Sartre discovered the possibility of a non-solipsistic view of conscious-
ness in Husserl's Ideas. 1 Against a background of psychologistic theories
of perception and knowledge, Husserl appeared to Sartre as the first
philosopher successfully to avoid the " illusion of immanence"-the ma-
laise of "digestive philosophy"-which understood objects of perception
as so many contents of consciousness, fabricated and entertained within
the spatial confines of the mind ("I" 4) . In claiming that all consciousness
is consciousness of an object, Husserl's view of intentional consciousness
[102]
affirmed the capacity of consciousness to reach outside itself and gain
knowledge of the world that was not simply an elaboration of the self.
One might suspect that Sartre fashions himself a realist, yet he consis-
tently qualifies the ascription, arguing instead that neither consciousness
nor the world is primary, but that both "are given in one stroke: essentially
external to consciousness, the world is nevertheless essentially relative to
consciousness" ("I" 4). The world does not unilaterally impress itself on
consciousness, as if consciousness were a tabula rasa to be formed at will
by the contingencies of the world; nor does consciousness create the world
as a particular representation. Consciousness reveals the world through
determinate intentional relations; it presents the world through specific
modes without ever denying the essential externality of that world. Al-
though the world never makes itself known outside of an intentional act,
this noematic pole of experience-the object pole-is in itself irreducible;
every intentional act, by virtue of being directed toward a noematic
correlate, affirms the independence and externality of consciousness and
its world. In Sartre's early essay on intentionality, he affirms the difference
between consciousness and world as an external relation, but insists that
this very externality is what binds the two indissolubly. The externality
of this relation assures a non-solipsistic encounter with the world: "You
see this tree, to be sure. But you see it just where it is : at the side of the
road, in the midst of the dust, alone and writhing in the heat, eight miles
from the Mediterranean coast. It could not enter into your consciousness
for it is not of the same nature as consciousness" ("I" 4) .
Consciousness, then, does not apprehend the world in virtue of a
common identity with the world, except insofar as consciousness and
world represent noetic and noematic poles which are structurally iso-
morphic. 2 This structural isomorphism, however, does not refute the
ontological distinctness of both poles: one intends the world in the mode
of fearing, imagining, desiring, yet the world cannot intend consciousness
in the mode of fearing or desiring, and neither can consciousness success-
fully enclose itself in its object without first denying itself as conscious-
ness-the denying of which would, in effect, affirm itself as consciousness,
the power to negate. Consciousness eludes the world even as the world-
and its own self-elision-remains its proper and necessary theme. Con-
sciousness, for the Sartre of "Intentionality" as well as The Transcendence
of the Ego, is a translucent revelation of the world, an active presentation,
[103]
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pher. As in the Phenomenology, the words that pursue difference become
an inadvertent means of overcoming difference. Words are thus subjected
to the project of desire and facilitate its satisfaction; they give presence to
negativity, constructing both the subject and its tentative satisfaction.
Two questions emerge about Sartre's literary project of existential
4
psychoanalysis. The first has to do with the limits of what can be articu-
lated, and the second, internally related to the first, with the accessibility
of the personal past. Sartre assumes that language brings forth the history
The Life and Death Struggles
of negation that constitutes an individual, but is it fair to assume that
infantile development, understood in terms of primary repression, is
of Desire: Hegel and
wholly accessible to consciousness and to words? What happens to words
when what cannot be spoken makes itself felt in speech? As we shall see,
Contemporary French Theory
the answer to this question poses a severe challenge to Sartre's entire
theory of the subject, its autonomy, and the nature of its linguistic power.
"It is the subject who introduces
division into the individual."
Lacan, Ecrits
The twentieth-century history of Hegelianism in France can be under-
stood in terms of two constitutive moments: (1) the specification of the
subject in terms of finitude, corporeal boundaries, and tempora lity and
(2) the "splitting" (Lacan)2. "displacement" (Derrida), and eventual death
(Foucault, Deleuze) of the sub·ect. 1 In the course of this history,
the Hegelian traveler in pursuit of a global place which he always already
occupies loses his sense of time and location, his directionality and, hence,
self-identity. lndeed, this subject is revealed as the trope it always was,
and one comes to see the hyperbolic aspirations of philosophy now clearly
inscribed in the very logos of desire. But Hegel is not so easily dismissed,
even by those who claim to be beyond him. The contemporary opposition
to Hegel rarely evidences signs of indifference. The difference from Hegel
is a vital and absorbing one, and the act of repudiation more often than
not requires the continued life of that which is to be repudiated, thus
[174] [175]