Hipótesis General

Hazel E. Barnes (1974: 13) asks whether there is such a thing as “a Sartrean system, a total

Weltanschauung?” This question touches on one of the foremost debates afflicting Sartre

scholarship. A number of interpreters have portrayed Sartre as a sporadic philosopher, void of any underlying and continuous ontology or philosophical and political engagement. His oeuvre, it is said, is punctuated by a series of divergent and conflicting views. In particular, with its emphasis on consciousness, Sartre’s early work between Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness is typically taken to represent a deeply subjectivist or even rationalist position, which would later face the axe in Sartre’s turn towards a neo-Marxist or even ‘postmodernist’ dialectic of praxis.1 _{Against these interpretations, others have}

attempted to locate a stable vantage point from which to grasp and fix all of Sartre’s thinking under one heading. This is typically identified in the ‘dialectic of the self’, of which an early formation is evident in Being and Nothingness. In this reading, the Critique and its ‘totalisation-detotalisation’ of praxis is said to represent its historico-material fruition.2

Badiou (2012: 20) goes so far as to claim that Sartre’s later encounter with Marxism in the

Critique was “unavoidable,” precisely due to the presence of the dialectic in Being and Nothingness. Thus, as opposed to signifying a radical split, it is supposed that each major

work of Sartre’s focuses on a particular aspect of the dialectic. Whereas the earlier work can be said to focus more on the nature of existential ‘choice’, the later work focuses more on its situational or contextual limits.

The true irony here is that despite the divergence of these interpretations, each unwittingly establishes an overarching image of Sartre as a thinker of formal transcendence. Deleuze (2004b: 114n6) contributes to this view when he holds that while repudiating transcendence in the form of a field of consciousness immanent to a transcendental subject, the ‘subjectivist’ Sartre retains its form, insofar as the transcendental field is still determined as a field of consciousness, “and as such it must be unified by itself through a play of intentionalities or pure intentions.” For Deleuze, the transcendental is still individuated at the personal level, as already possessing a subject-predicate structure. Similarly, by starting off with this formal subject, the ‘holistic’ Sartre of the dialectic evokes an intentional relation between nomination and the thing, effectively breaking with the All-One of immanence in favour of a metaphysical polarity. In this way, Sartre seemingly pushes forward a formal transcendence of a different sort, in which the Outside/Other replaces the transcendental

subject as that to which the field of consciousness is related, entailing a transcendence of the subject and of the object.

To a certain degree, such a reading can be forgiven, considering there are numerous occasions where Sartre, particularly in his early to middle works, explicirly rejects immanence. For instance, in ‘Intentionality: A fundamental Concept of Husserl’s Phenomenology’, Sartre (2013: 4-5) writes:

Imagine now a linked series of bursts that wrest us from ourselves, that do not even leave an ‘ourself’ the time to form behind them but rather hurl us out beyond them into the dry dust of the world, onto the rough earth, among things. Imagine we are thrown out in this way, abandoned by our very nature in an indifferent, hostile, resistant world. If you do so, you will have grasped the profound meaning of the discovery Husserl expresses in this famous phrase: ‘All consciousness is consciousness of something’. This is all it takes to put an end to the cozy philosophy of immanence, in which everything works by compromise, by protoplasmic exchanges, by a tepid cellular chemistry. The philosophy of transcendence throws us out onto the high road, amid threats and under a blinding light.

Against these obscurations, and indeed Sartre’s own statements, this chapter argues that with Sartre there is a total Weltanschauung, but it is located in the continuous presence of, and deepening engagement with, immanence. What is important to note vis-à-vis Sartre’s express rejection of immanence, is that he is fundamentally referring to phenomenological immanence, as in ‘immanent to consciousness’. This is clearly a very different, and certainly restricted use of immanence from the one defined at the opening of this work. In fact, despite his rejection of immanence, Sartre moves over time towards a different kind of immanence as fold, or rather he moves away from this rather simplistic understanding of immanence as pure idealist interiority, as “the pure subjectivity of the instantaneous cogito,” (Sartre 2008a: 68) to one which has its own Outside. Furthermore, it is precisely through this engagement with immanence as fold, as this chapter argues, that Sartre instigates the politics of immanence, establishing its philosophical context and paving the way for Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze. There are three critical stages to this engagement that this chapter will highlight: i) in working through inconsistencies within Husserlian phenomenology, specifically regarding intentionality, Sartre displaces the necessity and centrality of the ego, giving the object itself the role of providing identity for the subject, and the flux of consciousness the role of unity through the retention of previous experience. This serves to bypass representational machinery in favour of an impersonal transcendental field without an ego, wherein consciousness is no longer immanent to a transcendental subject that goes

beyond the flux of experience; ii) in confronting subsequent issues within phenomenology, specifically its ontological void and its solipsism, Sartre ventures into a dialectic premised on a primordial bond of facticity via the flesh and relations of desire, in which consciousness is thoroughly embedded in the Outside/Other to which it relates via intentionality. Despite being rooted in a problematic dualistic discourse, this greatly anticipates Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the disjunctive fold; iii) lastly in confronting several criticisms regarding charges of idealism and apoliticism, Sartre materialises the dialectic and the flesh within the context of scarcity and processes of totalisation-detotalisation. In this instance, Sartre argues that all interior exteriorisations of praxis are modified by a material multiplicity, but remain immanent inasmuch as they work inside the practical field. Aside from revealing a continued presence of immanence, this last stage additionally anticipates Foucault and Deleuze’s contention that there is a heterogeneous yet immanent relation between micro- and macro- arrangements.

All three stages initiate a series of investigations and conceptual arrangements orientated towards what we can retrospectively call the ‘micropolitical’ domain, concerning an image of subjectivity and fundamental transformations operating at a level below that of oppositional and second-order Otherness, and thus the constitution of the subject and identity. This corresponds to Sartre’s existential ethics of authenticity that, as opposed to finding a ‘true’ self or ego simultaneously serving as the centre of our agency, speaks to a continued process of self-experimentation and creativity, in which the ego serves a practical function.

The First Stage: Phenomenology and the Transcendental Ego

Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 47) claim that Sartre’s presupposition of an impersonal transcendental field “restores the rights of immanence.” This claim is not followed by any sort of concrete analysis, although it is clear it refers to the way Sartre handles the Kantian legacy of the transcendental field – the ‘I think’ that accompanies all representations. Specifically, it relates to Sartre’s repudiation of Husserl’s Kantian categories and the development of an alternative impersonal transcendental field as one with the form of neither a synthetic consciousness nor a subjective identity. It is here that our story of immanence begins, for it is here that the legacy of the I as indispensable to the coherence of our agency is first displaced. Instead, the ego is envisioned as a simulation, wherein its corresponding agency is merely a semblance and its central function a cover.

In striving to take a far more humble and realistic approach to philosophy, Husserl suspends the ‘natural attitude’ or ‘judgment’ in favour of the epoché (‘suspension of judgment’). By following the epoché, the philosopher ‘brackets out’ all the assumptions of the world and the nature of existence and its contents, and instead focuses on experience as an appearance or ‘phenomenon’. Through so doing, Husserlian phenomenology attempts to wade through all metaphysical concerns and focus instead on the living human subject, or ‘Absolute Being’, thereby returning to concrete lived human experience. That does not mean to say one makes a judgment towards the ‘natural world’ by rejecting it, but rather that one is barred from “using any judgement that concerns spatio-temporal existence (Dasein)” (Husserl 2012: 59). Even if we bracket the natural world, it “still remains there like the bracketed in the bracket, like the disconnected outside the connexional system” (57). It is to “put out of

action the general thesis which belongs to the essence of the natural standpoint” (59).

Through this, Husserl (2012: 59) establishes a descriptive ‘science of consciousness’ or a ‘new’ eidetic science. By the systematic investigation into ‘pure consciousness’ we can uncover essential truths about the nature of experience (62) – thus the clarion cry of phenomenology: ‘back to the things themselves’, back to the experience of the person, to the ‘giveness’ (Gegebenheit) of experience.

Presupposed in this project is the view that an “object that has being in itself (an sich

seiender) is never such as to be out of relation to consciousness and its Ego,” for the “thing

is the thing of the world about me” (Husserl 2012: 91). The hypothetical assumption of a Real Something outside the world of subjective experience is “indeed a ‘logically’ possible one’,” but these things have “purely factual grounds in the factual limits of this experience” (92-3). We cannot grasp the transcendent as it is merely given through certain empirical connexions. Thus “consciousness (inward experience) and real Being are in no sense co- ordinate forms of Being, living as friendly neighbours, and occasionally entering into ‘relation’ or some reciprocal ‘connexion’” (95). Immanent absolute Being, as with transcendent Being (object), has its objective determining content, but such objective determination bears the same name only when we speak in terms of the empty logical categories – between the “meanings of consciousness and reality yawns a veritable abyss” (95). As such, consciousness, considered in its purity, must be construed as a self-contained system of Being “into which nothing can penetrate, and from which nothing can escape; which has no spatio-temporal exterior, and can be inside no spatio-temporal system” (Husserl 2012: 95). The spatio-temporal world, to which man claims to belong as a

subordinate singular relation, is in truth intentional Being, and so a Being with a secondary relative sense of being for consciousness. Reality so defined has no absolute essence. It has the essentiality of something “which in principle is only known, consciously presented as an appearance” (96). Thus the basic field of phenomenology, when considering consciousness, concerns the bracketing of the nature-constituting consciousness with its transcendent theses.

Clearly, Husserl sustains a gap between consciousness and reality, wherein reality is grasped only through consciousness as an aspect of phenomenological experience. In this way, Husserl proposes to regard reality only as a phenomenon for consciousness, and consciousness as a consciousness of reality. That is, the intentional relation is personified by the interplay and separation of the for and the of, in which case one term of the relation cannot be reduced to the other. Thus we “fix our eyes steadily upon the sphere of Consciousness and study what it is that we find immanent in it” (Husserl 2012: 62). In construing consciousness this way, Deleuze (2001: 33n. 5) holds, Husserl readily admits that all transcendence is constituted in the life of consciousness, as inseparably and intricately linked to that life. However, Deleuze maintains that this plane is immediately related back to a subject, taken as transcendent to the real, in which the empirical is made into nothing more than a double of the transcendental. Thus, in returning to the universal subject to which immanence is attributed, “the transcendental is entirely denatured, for it then simply redoubles the empirical (as with Kant), and immanence is distorted, for it then finds itself enclosed in the transcendent” (Deleuze 2001: 27). Similarly, Sartre argues that with Husserl we find a latent Kantianism, which in turn leads to an unnecessary duplication of the self. At first, Husserl describes a psychical and psycho-physical me, but then goes on to add a ‘pure’ or transcendental Ego (Sartre 2004: 5). In so doing, he creates a point from which various consciousnesses can engage in various acts of apprehension while retaining their coherent unity. Thus we are returned to an internal synthesis, similar to Kant’s, in which we must account for consciousness’s contact with an object that is transcendent to it, lest we fall into solipsism. Indeed, within the sphere of consciousness, Husserl locates a hyletic structure, which effectively mediates the experience of the object, playing “so great a part in the perceptive intuitions of things” (68).3

Sartre argues that such a move runs up against the fundamental requisite of phenomenology (‘back to things themselves’), for consciousness’s direct access is here mediated by

representational machinery. If the epoché is supposed to exclude any transcendent being, then we cannot have an Ego of the sort to which Husserl refers (it is for this reason, moreover, that Sartre targets Husserl rather than Kant).4 Indeed, how can consciousness be intentional if it is loaded down or driven by something else (Sartre 2004: 42)? Thus the transcendental I is gratuitous and unwarranted. To allow either substance or opacity to enter the realm of consciousness is to dilute its true description as understood by phenomenology, to undermine its absolute status, and in effect to create a consciousness that is governed, that is “heavy and ponderable” (5). Indeed, “Consciousness…cannot be limited except by itself” (7). Consequently, Husserl, “in spite of his denial,” should be called a phenomenalist rather than a phenomenologist (Sartre 2008a: 97).

Transcending the I

This subsequently raises the question as to the requirement for the transcendental ego in the first place. As Sartre (2004: 6) notes, “it is usually believed that the existence of a transcendental I is justified by the need for consciousness to have unity and individuality.” That is, it is required, first, to overcome confusion between consciousnesses and therefore retain individuality, and, second, to explain how disconnected experiences taking place in a variety of locations and at different times can be attributed to the same individual. Both concern retaining coherent unity, and a subject to which that unity is attributed. In other words, the ego is introduced in order to retain the unity of self, for the purity of phenomenology risks reducing us to unlocalisable disconnected experiences. In rejecting the transcendental ego, then, Sartre must provide an alternative that can meet these demands. For Sartre (2004: 6), “phenomenology does not need to resort to this unifying and individualizing I,” as consciousness is defined by intentionality, and through intentionality consciousness “transcends itself, it unifies itself by going outside itself.” Consciousness is envisioned as a radical activity that intends toward an object, as opposed to merely synthesising representations. Thus consciousness is neither pure subjectivity nor pure objectivity. It is other-orientated, for all consciousness “is consciousness of something” (Sartre 2004: 10 see also 2008a: 7). In this instance, it is the unity of the object that renders the I plausible, which means consciousness arises when it is orientated towards a being which is not itself.

Intentionality is accorded a different meaning to that of Husserl, for, as Sartre argues, the being of knowledge cannot be measured by knowledge. Consciousness is the knowing being, the person, insofar as he is, “not insofar as he is known,” which means abandoning the “primacy of knowledge if we wish to establish knowledge” (Sartre 2008a: 7). All there is of intention in my actual consciousness “is directed toward the outside,” thus “all my judgments or practical activities, all my present inclinations transcend themselves” (8). The necessary and sufficient condition for a knowing consciousness to be knowledge of its object is that it be “consciousness of itself as being that knowledge,” for otherwise it would be consciousness of the thing without consciousness of being so (loc. cit). The reduction of consciousness to knowledge “in fact involves our introducing into consciousness the subject-object dualism which is typical of knowledge” (8). But if we “accept the law of the knower-known dyad, then a third term will be necessary in order for the knower to become known in turn, and we will be faced with this dilemma: either we stop any one term of the series – the known, the knower known, the knower known by the knower, etc,” wherein “the totality of the phenomenon would fall into the unknown, in that we would bump up against a non-self-conscious reflection and a final term” or “we affirm the necessity of an infinite regress (idea ideae ideae, etc.)” (loc. cit). If an infinite regress is to be avoided, then we must establish an immediate, non-cognitive relation of the self to itself.

Insofar as consciousness transcends itself in order to reach an object, and exhausts itself in this same positing, it is non-positional (it is not its own object). As such, it cannot be a material presence with an Ego found within. Rather it is something, psycho-physical, found without or out in the world, devoid of content, with nothing lurking behind it. Indeed, “all that there is of intention in my actual consciousness is directed towards the outside, towards the table” (Sartre 2008a: 76). The I of consciousness only appears when consciousness reflects on itself or on its previous activity during or within the thetic stage. Therefore, we have a “pre-reflective cogito” or “pre-reflective being of the percipiens” (16), a ‘non-thetic’ absorption into an activity, which is distinct from the consciousness apprehending the reflection of this activity. Consciousness is never aware of itself as an I at the time of its being focused or absorbed in something. Yet during both stages of consciousness – pre- reflective and reflective – there is a non-intentional and non-thetic awareness of self. This is also how Sartre explains self-awareness, devoid of any transcendental faculties or Ego (Sartre 2004: 47).

The upshot of this thesis is that, despite its repudiation, there are still experiences in which the ego features. Indeed, “it is undeniable that the Cogito is personal. In the ‘I think’, there is an I which thinks” (Sartre 2004: 9). But this is not an encounter with a pre-existing self. Rather, when confronted with this ego, “we are dealing with a mere appearance” (33) – that is to say, with a semblance.5 _{This semblance of an ego is no less functional on that account,}

offering a sense of agency or a disguise, as if “consciousness constituted the Ego as a false representation of itself” (48). It is due to the appearance of the ego “that a distinction can be drawn between the possible and the real, between appearance and being, between what is willed and what is yielded to,” through which a grounded self-to-self relation can be sustained (loc. cit).

At this stage, we are still left with the question of unity in duration and individuality. As Sartre notes, it will be objected that “it is necessary for there to be some principle of unity