that these absurd partial systems are the result of a “leveling-down of our
normal consciousness rendered momentarily incapable of concentration:
It is a case of an imaging symbolic system that has for its correlate an irreal object –
absurd phrase, pun, inopportune appearance. It appears and is given as spontaneity
but, above all, as impersonal spontaneity. To tell the truth, we are very far from
the distinction between subjective and objective. These two worlds have collapsed:
we are dealing here with a third type of existence that we lack the words to
characterize. The simplest can perhaps be named lateral irreal apparitions, correlates
of an impersonal consciousness.
(Imaginary 158 )
This is what Sartre calls thepure eventof hallucination. Indicative of the
care with which he describes the phenomenon, he points out that what
was just described must be the “memory” of the experience of the event,
since every experience implies the existence of a thematic consciousness
with a personal unity. In fact, “the hallucination implies a sudden
reaction of consciousness to the partial system with sudden reappearance
of thematic unity.” It is this sudden appearance to our immediate
memory that gives the hallucination its distinctive characteristics as
external to current personal consciousness, as unforeseeable and as not
able to be produced at will. In other words, the hallucination presents
itself as approximating an object in the real world. And yet the object
retains the characteristics of spontaneity: it appears as capricious, furtive
and full of mystery. But if the object gives itself to memory as non-
thetically conscious of its irreality, explicitly, Sartre surmises, the hallu-
cinatory object retains a neutral character in memory.^35
“The Dream”
If the hallucination poses a major objection to Sartre’s theory of the
image, then our common experience of dreaming seems even more
problematic. Is not this, at least, a case where the production of an image
is not accompanied by nonthetic consciousness of imaging spontaneity?
Sartre offers several considerations in response. First, the dream
always appears to us with a character offragilitythat cannot belong to
(^35) Remember his claim that if the original awareness of the object were neither explicitly
perceptual nor imaginary, its characteristic in memory could be neutral in that regard,
despite the nonthetic consciousness of its original irreality.
The Imaginary 127