Abstract
Seemingly a minor part of L’Imaginaire, Sartre’s literary examples therein are of great significance especially in the way they highlight the implicit yet crucial role of linguistic signs and words in his psychology of the image. While commenting on the act of reading a novel, he views literary words practically as images, endowing them with both an affective and representative status and illustrating the word-image through the figure of a drawing or dessin. The novel’s word-images or dessins solve an important problem in his phenomenology: in order to represent, they do not need an original perception as other, more typical images do. While the dessin suggests the opportune possibility of representation without presentation, it also introduces ambiguity in meaning, running counter to Sartre’s demand that linguistic signification be clear and transparent. Sartre attempts to contain such ambiguity by ascribing the image-like, representative use of words to poetry in What’s Literature? but I argue that the dessin indeed allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic sign and representation that covers both poetry and prose.
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Notes
For a critique of Sartre’s privileging the original perception of an existing thing in his phenomenology of the image, see Ricoeur (1981, pp. 167-168).
See Dominick LaCapra’s critique of Sartre’s dichotomous rhetoric (1978, p. 56).
The “schema” is all over L’Imaginaire and appears in many important discussions. It is indeed possible to argue the equivalence between the notions of the schema and the image, making schema the implicit focus of Sartre’s phenomenology of the image and imagination. The slippage between the image and schema can be observed in some of Sartre’s sentences, as when Sartre wonders: “it would have been interesting to know if all the [mental] acts, beginning with a certain degree of difficulty, are translated into a schema, or whether there can be intellections without images” (101). See Sartre’s discussions on material schemata or “schematic drawings” (“les dessins schématiques”) (TI 29–34, LI 63–74) and mental schemata (“symbolic Schemas and illustrations”) (TI 107–112, LI 206–216).
See for instance Sartre’s following remarks in L’Imaginaire: “the act of imagination, as we have just seen, is a magical act. It is an incantation destined to make the object of one’s thought, the thing one desires, appear in such a way that one can take possession of it. There is always, in that act, something of the imperious and the infantile, a refusal to take account of distance and difficulties. Thus the very young child, from his bed, acts on the world by orders and prayers. Objects obey these orders of consciousness: they appear” (TI 125) In another significant passage, the images are “phantom-objects”: “ambiguous, poor and dry at the same time, appearing and disappearing in jerks, they are given as a perpetual ‘elsewhere’, as a perpetual evasion. But the evasion to which they invite us is not only that which would make us flee our current condition, our concerns, our boredoms; they offer us an escape from all the constraints of the world, they seem to be presented as a negation of the condition of being in the world, as an anti-world” (TI 136).
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Süner, A. Sartre’s Dessin, Literature and the Ambiguities of the Representing Word. Phenom Cogn Sci 19, 891–904 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09623-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09623-8