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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Le temps du désir : ontologies de l'imaginaire et de l'affectivité chez Sartre, Merleau- Ponty et Grimaldi

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This study aims at confronting the ontologies of the imaginary of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Grimaldi. Following the path of a critical assessment of Bergsonism, each of these philosophies develops by granting ontological value to the negative, and through a reconsideration of the meaning of temporality. A new approach of negativity emerges from the reflection on the status of the image and further, upon the relationships between real and imaginary, past and present, conscious and subconscious. Merleau-Ponty and Grimaldi thus reject dialectics of being and nothingness in favour of the idea of a negativity thoroughly penetrating being itself; the first one opening the way for a phenomenological alternative, and the second favouring a metaphysical alternative. They thereby claim to account, better than Sartre does, for the passivity of subjectivity, its rootedness in being–the living source of self-deceiving.The limitations of Sartrean ontology on the subject derive from a specific view of consciousness which locks off the relation between imagination and affectivity. On the contrary, the free play of this axis allows for the overflowing of the horizon of visibility of subjectivity toward a certain invisible. The concrete junction of imagination and affectivity then spreads out into the region of the notion of desire, which gives its determinate meaning to the negativity detected in the beginning. Unlike Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Grimaldi study the mediatizing character of being understood as desire, and they theorize about a decentring of subjectivity culminating for Merleau-Ponty in a thought of intercorporeity and for Grimaldi in an ethics of self-sacrifice.