reaction that it demands of us...An abyss separates the real from the imaginary...
The present requires an adaptation that the morbid dreamer is no longer capable of
supplying; it even needs a kind of indetermination of our feelings, a real plasticity:
because the real is always new, alwaysunforeseeable.
(Imaginary 147 )
Of course, this is a far cry from the “choice” of the imaginary as a
profession, much less as a way of life where that decision is motivated by
political and moral undermining of the bourgeoisie – a stance that Sartre
will subsequently ascribe to several of the authors (Jean Genet and
Gustave Flaubert, for example) whose “biographies” he produces.
“Pathology of the Imagination”
Insisting that “the Cartesiancogitoretains its rights even with psycho-
paths,” Sartre must account for the implication that the hallucinator
“believes” or “posits” as real what he is aware is irreal. In other words,
since the spontaneity of consciousness is one with the consciousness of
that spontaneity – a thesis Sartre will repeat on several occasions in
his subsequent work – he must explain “how the patient can believe in
the reality of an image that is essentially given as an irreality”
(Imaginary 151 ).
Referring to his own experience mentioned earlier, Sartre remarks:
“I was able to observe a short hallucinatory phenomenon when I had
administered myself an injection of mescaline.” He proceeds to confirm
the continued presence of the intuition of spontaneity amidst slight and
rapid alterations of the personality. These were accompanied by lateral,
marginal spontaneities that disappeared when he tried to grasp them but
their memory remained immediately afterwards as something “incon-
sistent and mysterious” (Imaginary 156 – 157 ). This disintegration of
personality is more thoroughgoing in “genuine hallucinations.” The
result is a kind of “twilight life,” wherein “a diffuse and degraded
connection by participation [that is, what he calls “the sudden formation
of a partial and absurd psychic system”] is substituted for the synthetic
connection by concentration” that is our normal conscious life. “There is
no longer a center of consciousness, nor a thematic unity, and it is
preciselyfor this reasonthat the system occurs” (Imaginary 157 ).
Sartre is aware that such talk of “twilight zones” might be miscon-
strued as admitting the existence of an unconscious. But he assures us
126 Consciousness as imagination