and word-image as object and source of enrichment anticipates and
parallels Sartre’s famous distinction between “prose” and “poetry”
introduced in a series of essays published inLes Temps Modernes( 1947 )
and gathered into a single volume asWhat is Literature?( 1964 ). On
this later account, “prose” can be politically committed because of its
self-effacing, instrumental character. It grants us immediate access to
the world without blocking our way. On the contrary, what he calls
“poetry,” which would include nonverbal forms of expression as well,
cannot be politically committed. It captures our attention and holds it,
turning our attention back to ourselves and again toward itself for
enrichment, much as the image-portrait does in the present example.^17
Thirdly, our consciousness of the sign “as such” is not explicit. Once
adept at reading signs, as is someone who has mastered a language, we
are scarcely aware of their status as signs. “The sign consciousness as
such is not positional.” We see through it, as it were, to the object. On
the other hand, in every image, regardless of its content, there is always a
positional determination. But the situation with the image-portrait is
more complex. The image-portrait of Charles VIII in the Uffizi Gallery –
a favorite example of Sartre’s – places us in the presence of the emperor
via the painted image taken aesthetically as an analagon of the individual
of flesh and blood. Of course, that individual is long deceased and the
image will render him “irreal,” not unreal; that is, present-absent;
present in the imaginary mode. Sartre admits that this is “an irrational
synthesis difficult to explain.” His fine-tuned analysis is an attempt to
account for a common imaginative experience. As with emotional con-
sciousness, we are again dealing with what Sartre calls a “magical”
situation. But this time it is not so much a case of changing our bodies
so as to conjure up a world where the limits of space, time and causality
do not apply, as it is a matter of “derealizing” a perceptual object with
the help of a similar “pre-logical” world.^18 Sartre believes that this
“primitive” mode of sense-making, which gave us cave paintings of
wounded bison to ensure a successful hunt and voodoo dolls to transmit
(^17) As we shall see, Sartre will revise his contrast in the face of black African poets who employ
the colonial language against colonialism (see Sartre’sBlack Orpheus, trans. John MacCom-
18 bie, inWL^289 –^330 ).
SeeImaginary 23. Sartre occasionally employs the term “prelogical” to denote the “myth-
ical” consciousness of “primitive” peoples. The expression comes from anthropologist
Lucien Le ́vy-Bruhl, whom Sartre will occasionally mention in this regard.
112 Consciousness as imagination