Du topos à la contre-topique. Cartographie du magique comme champ opératoire de la phénoménologie sartrienne

Abstract

This article questions the status of the magical in early Sartre both as an inheritage of the reading of french psychology and anthropology and as the place of the phenomenological break by which an original philosophy of existence can be developped. The author traces the apparition of magical consciousness, whose spontaneity persists in a specifical way where it seemed to be hindered, peculiarly in the pathologies of imagination and in the emotion. The category of the magical leads Sartre to think about the autonomy of irreflected consciousness by attributing a sense to its different attitudes, according to a synthetical understanding of the human reality. In an other neuralgic point, the author shows how the absolute consciousness imprisons itself in the world through a phenomenon of degradation thanks to which emerges the psychè : this mixed existence of For-itself and In-itself is implaccably magical. Well, the concrete relationships with the other being mediated by the psychical facts, then the author inlights that the magical appears anew in the phenomenological ontology through the category of possession – possession of the Other and possession of things – putting the transcendance at the rank of a primitive witchcraft.

Keywords

• Consciousness
• existence
• magical
• phenomenology
• possession
• psychology