Merleau-Ponty’s Invocations of the Sartrean Definition of the Imaginary Are Inseparable from His Critique of the Opposition Between Being and Nothingness

In many texts Merleau-Ponty seems to take up the elements of the Sartrean definition of the imaginary: unobservability, poverty, the flight from the real and into a ‘world’ that is entirely projected by the subject. However, as early as Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty initiates a critique of Sartre’s philosophy, and with the exception of his 1936 review of The Imagination, all of the texts in which Merleau-Ponty draws on the Sartrean definition of the imaginary also contain the first seeds of an effort to go beyond the notion of pure nothingness. In addition, I will distinguish the texts in which Merleau-Ponty is still exploring and does not fully thematize a radical critique of Sartre, from those in which references to the Sartrean opposition between imaginary and being is used by Merleau-Ponty in full awareness as a provisional methodological step.