denoting “the immediate consciousness of [the object’s] nothingness”
(Imaginary 14 ).
This brings us to its final characteristic: imaging consciousness of an
object entails a nonthetic awareness of itself “as a spontaneity that
produces and conserves the object as imagined. It is a kind of indefinable
counterpart to the fact that the object gives itself as a nothingness”
(Imaginary 14 ).^13 We have already encountered Sartre’s distinction
between thetic or explicit self-consciousness, and nonthetic or what
we’ve been calling “implicit” self-consciousness. In the case of the
image, this implicit awareness entails a sense of creativity that permeates
the imaging act without explicitly attaching to its object.^14 The image is
“shot through with a flow of creative will” (Imaginary 15 ) a claim
repeated inWhat is Literature?a decade later.
So much for what Sartre calls the “statics of the image,” the image
considered as an isolated phenomenon. Let us now turn to the much
longer portion of his book, the application of these structures to the
empirical world of our imaginative life.
“The Image Family” (Image as a functional attitude)
In a brief survey of varieties of what are called “images,” from portraits
and caricatures, through schematic drawings, faces seen in flames, and
the like, as well as hypnagogic and oneiric images to the “mental images”
that, though their existence has been contested, Sartre considers crucial
to his theory, he draws the implications of the “essence” of the image just
analyzed. This chapter attends to the “matter” as distinct from the
animating “form” of the image, to borrow the famous Aristotelian
distinction that Husserl applied to objects of consciousness. The formal
(^13) Sartre will expand this feature of imaging to consciousness in general when he characterizes
consciousness inBeing and Nothingness, as “nihilating” its objects (see below,Chapter 8 ).
(^14) In a major essay “Cartesian Freedom,” published soon after the war, Sartre, perhaps for the
last time, will draw a parallel between Descartes’s view of divine creation, conservation and
freedom vis-a`-vis the world, on the one hand, and the meaning-giving character of Sartrean
consciousness (being-for-itself) that in turn resembles the “constitution” of Husserlian
meaning-giving consciousness, on the other (see “Cartesian Freedom,”Literary and Philo-
sophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson [New York: Crowell-Collier, 1962 ], 180 – 197 ,
190 – 196 ; hereafter CF;Sit 1 : 300 – 308 ; hereafter CF-F). The point of mentioning this
similarity here is to alert us to the close relationship between imaging consciousness, as
Sartre describes it in this book and being-for-itself or roughly consciousness as described in
Being and Nothingness.
The Imaginary 109