Introduction

The imaginary is one of the principal guiding threads in Sartre’s work, and it is one to which very early on he devoted two books: The Imagination in 1936, and then The Imaginary in 1940. Being and Nothingness, which at first glance seems to be a more general study of existence and Being, remains positioned under the sign of this key concept. As conceived by Sartre, human existence has the striking feature of being constituted in its very flesh by a certain absence, by the ceaseless play of reflections and symbols, in short, by the mysterious magic of the imaginary. The Words confirms this unambiguously: the problem of acting, of trickery, of the deficiency of being, and of the presence of what is absent marked the life of Sartre. He thus placed this notion of imagination more distinctly at the center of his philosophy than Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, seeing clearly and immediately that this was one of the touchstones of phenomenology. He thus gathered together a rich body of study materials, and his analyses opened up crucial avenues for any reflection on the imaginary, in particular for that which Merleau-Ponty would later undertake. But paradoxically, it may be Sartre who was least successful in integrating all the complexity of the imaginary into his definition of it, and in overcoming the problem of inauthenticity. Sartre remains torn between, on the one hand, a fascination for the imaginary and for the extraordinary freedom that enables us to transform the world, to survey it from above and to escape from being mired in the “slime” [le « visqueux »], and, on the other hand, the ongoing impression of a loss of reality (very clearly exhibited in Nausea and The Words, for example) which we must struggle against.