THE NOTION OF BODY IN SARTRE

Abstract

The analytical cut of the essays of phenomenological psychology and ontology, as well as
of fictional writings published by Jean-Paul Sartre throughout the 1930s and 1940s, reveals the
elaboration of a philosophical conception of body. Among the first essays, The Transcendence of the
Ego (1936), The Imagination (1936), and The Imaginary (1940) propose relations and suggest some
definitions – in particular, the association of the body with a magical object; in Sketch for a Theory of
the Emotions (1939), in a more direct way, Sartre refers to a double corporeal character-it is an "object
in the world," but also the "immediate lived experience of consciousness" (SARTRE, 1939/2008, p.
77). A more refined theoretical proposal appears only in 1943, with the publication of Being and
Nothingness and a chapter dedicated to the body's modes of being: the for-itself, the for-other and the
"for-itself-for-other". The body is facticity; the contingent texture of consciousness or the univocal
relation to the world - "I exist my body" (SARTRE, 1943/2015, p. 441). However, it is also an object
that refers to an otherness; a relation with the world and with oneself, to which I transcend - a psychic
object. Moreover, and finally, it points to an alienated self, the result of my apprehension as an object
for the other. This ontological and dialectical approach would demarcate, at the same time, bridges and
fractures in relation to the phenomenological psychology texts, and would put in evidence the Sartrean fiction, especially the novel Nausea, as a crucial theoretical reference, given the confluence between
the notions of body and contingency.