What he calls our “conduct” in the face of the irreal, therefore, is
entirely the reaction of our perceptual or emotional consciousness to the
imaged object. Though this will strike many as counterintuitive, our
attempt to regain a certain feeling we previously felt in relation to a
previous image, he insists, is simply our decision to reproduce a similar
feeling in the face of a similar object. But that object cannot be the
“cause” of the reaction. To borrow from another vocabulary, one
might see it as the “occasion” at best. This quasi-voluntarist position
(“I must determine myself to be tender in the face of [the irreal object]”)
underscores Sartre’s unalterable commitment to the essential features
of imaging consciousness as exposited at the start, even to the point of
asserting that “I will affirm that the irreal object acts on me, while being
immediately conscious that there is not, that there cannot be, real action
and that I contort myself in order to mime this action” (Imaginary 142 ).
Still, Sartre admits to having come to accept the existence of “affective
memory” and “affective imagination” such that we can re-present a
previous gesture “suffused with affectivity” and react to it anew (see
Imaginary 202 ,n. 10 ). In sum, there is a difference in nature between
feelings in the face of the real and feelings in the face of the imaginary.
Imaginary feelings are not themselves irreal, but Sartre views them as
“essentiallydegraded, poor, jerky, spasmodic, schematic and needing
non-being in order to exist” (Imaginary 145 ).
Accordingly, there are two kinds of person in us: “The imaginary me
and the real me.” There are imaginary sadists and masochists, violent in
imagination. But “at each moment, at contact with reality, our imaginary
me shatters and disappears, ceding its place to the real me. For the real
and the imaginary, by reason of their essences, cannot coexist. It is a case
of two entirely irreducible types of objects, feelings and conducts”
(Imaginary 146 ).
Diagnosing the character of someone who chooses to live the imagin-
ary over the real, Sartre sets the stage for the analysis of Gustave
Flaubert that he will undertake two decades later:
To prefer the imaginary is not only to prefer a richness, a beauty, a luxury as
imagined to the present mediocritydespitetheir irreal character. It is also to adopt
“imaginary” feelings and conductbecauseof their imaginary character. One does not
only choose this or that image, one chooses the imaginarystatewith all that it brings
with it; one not only flees the content of the real (poverty, disappointed love, business
failure, etc.), one flees the very form of the real, its character ofpresence, the type of
The Imaginary 125