aesthetic object, a person or a historical period in its totality is rendered
“incarnate.” Thus, he will say that the entire Renaissance is present in
Michelangelo’sDavidand in the Mona Lisa’s smile (seeSitiv: 31 ).
Consider the following:
I shall say that an object hassenswhen it is the incarnation of a reality which
surpasses it but which cannot be grasped aside from it, and whose infinity does not
allow adequate expression in any system of signs; it is always a matter of a totality:
totality of a person, a milieu, an epoch or the human condition.
(Sitiv: 30 )
Sartre will extend this distinction betweensensandsignification,now
enriched by his use of “incarnation,” to his theory of the singular
universal in theCritique of Dialectical Reason, especially volumeii.^22
Accelerating through the family of images that Sartre discusses,
suffice it to say that each variety, whether schematic drawing (which he
locates as midway between sign and image), faces in flames or clouds
(that underscore the creative and sustaining power of our imaging action
since they disappear when we cease to “see them as such”) or hypnagogic
images (that bespeak a “fascinated” consciousness) – each meets Sartre’s
four conditions for membership in the family. Close to the last example
are the images in dreams. Like the person under hypnosis, the dreamer
experiences a “chained consciousness.” “The essential character of the
chained consciousness seems to be fatality.” In a particularly perceptive
remark that will be echoed inBeing and Nothingness, Sartre observes:
Determinism – which could in no way apply to the facts of consciousness – posits
that, such phenomenon being given, such other must necessarily follow. Fatalism
posits that such event must happen and that it is that future event that determines
the series that will lead up to it.It is not determinism but fatalism that is the inverse of
freedom. One might even say that fatality, incomprehensible in the physical world, is,
on the other hand, perfectly in its place in the world of consciousness.
(Imaginary 47 , emphasis added)
(^22) On “incarnation” or “embodiment” in some translations, seeCDRi: 622 – 623 , 631 , 681 n. 94 ,
702 ;CRDi: 598 , 599 , 605 and 662 as well as inTE 133 – 165. “Incarnation” figures centrally
inThe Family Idiotas well (see below,Chapter 15 ). The term Sartre uses is “singular
universal” (“l’universel singulier”) and he often identifies it withsens(see, for example,Sit
viii: 445 – 446 , 449 – 450 , andix: 178 as well as my “Role of the Image in Sartre’s Aesthetic,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 ( 1975 ): 441 ,n. 44.
The Imaginary 115