Sartre reserves for the agency of the conscious subject in “concretizing”
these otherwise abstract structures. Again, we encounter the ambiguity of
facticity and transcendence, the given and the taken. As one of the graffiti
slogans on Parisian walls during the student uprising of 1968 put it,
“Structures don’t take to the streets!”
Sartre concludes this chapter with what could be seen as a miniature
of the “authentic individual”emerging fromBeing and Nothingnessto be
projected on to the lectures and plays of the following years:
The one who realizes in anguish his condition as being thrown into a responsibility
which extends to his very abandonment has no longer either remorse or regret or
excuse; he is no longer anything but freedom which perfectly reveals itself and whose
being resides in this very relation. But as we pointed out at the beginning of this
work, most of the time we flee anguish in bad faith.
(BN 556 )
“Existential Psychoanalysis”
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, renowned psychoanalyst and former student of
Sartre’s, once remarked: “One day the history of Sartre’s thirty-year
long relationship with psychoanalysis, and ambiguous mixture ofequally
deep attraction and repulsion, will have to be written and perhaps his
work reinterpreted in the light of it.”^34 As we have witnessed thus far
and as Pontalis, whom Sartre had once suggested might analyze him,
knew well, Sartre’s problem was the unconscious, not psychoanalysis as
such. Can you practice psychoanalysis without the unconscious? The
concluding portion ofBNdraws on the ontological credit of the previous
chapters to show how it is possible to do so. His several “biographies”
composed over the following years and culminating in his massive
Flaubert study exemplified his evolving “psychoanalytic” method. In
the process, he attenuates his emphasis on consciousness to the point of
“suspending” it in favor of “lived” experience (le ve ́cu) till its return in
the Flaubert biography. We have noted a certain functional equivalent of
the unconscious in Sartre’s appeal to “comprehension.” That continues
and is enriched by his use of experience (le ve ́cu) which he admits:
(^34) “Reply to Sartre” from “The Man with a Tape-recorder,”BEM 220.
“Partiv: Having, Doing and Being” 221