Political prisoners in the Islamic Republic of Iran are tortured to the point that they may be psychologically broken, confess to something against their will, and actively bring degrading effects upon themselves. Phenomenologists maintain that consciousness is thoroughly intertwined with the body. It is not that we have bodies but that we are our bodies. In light of this position, torturing the body thus allows the torturer to break the consciousness and freedom of the tortured. How can tortured individuals stand (...) up again as authentic and free agents after their forced confessions? I will examine the relationship between tortured confessions and human freedom, basing my examination on the experiences of Iranian political activists. I argue that, although the victim's consciousness has been manipulated, the victim's freedom is as intact as it was before the tortured confession. (shrink)

This article will examine Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea from the perspectives of philosophical fiction and world literature. Philosophical fiction is a specific kind of literature that insists on its absolute modernity. However, the literary aspects of philosophical fiction place it within its political and historical context, thus threatening this pretense to universality. Our examination of Nausea will show the internal tension between philosophy and fiction and how the interplay of both of those elements informed the structure of the novel. The (...) formal, literary aspects help further the actual philosophical content that purports to be the central focus. The implications of that interplay will lead us to a new understanding of the inner logic of world literature. (shrink)

Jazz improvisation requires a set of phenomenological practices, through which musicians confront their own sonic situatedness. Drawing on writings from Paget Henry, Mike Monahan, and Storm Heter, these phenomenological practices can be characterized as creolizing, and can reveal a sense in which, as Sidney Bechet says, music gives you its own understanding of itself. Specifically, improvising musicians engage their own situatedness by slowing things down, and through repetition. Bass players can listen through other players’ hands, and audiences can hear more (...) of what's happing in jazz by understanding the ways musicians practice. (shrink)

This article deepens themes from Sartre's Being and Nothingness by studying the relevance of the mirror in his play Huis Clos. The mirror can be understood as a means for escaping anguish by identification with the reflected image-object, but also as a figure of the sado-masochistic relationship between two of the play's characters. What is at stake is our possibility of conceiving ourselves as objects independently of the Other. In truth, it is the Other's look that first reveals our objectivity, (...) and is our being-for-Others that allows us to have objectivity at all. This is not to be overlooked in our attempt to avoid bad faith. (shrink)

The study of the early manuscripts of the great authors most often becomes a process of monumentalising or (re)legitimising their work. The recent publication of two of Sartre's early manuscripts – first Empédocle (Empedocles) in 2016 and second, in 2018, his dissertation for his graduate diploma (diplôme d’études supérieures or DES), L'Image dans la vie psychologique (The Image in Psychological Life), both texts written in 1926–1927 – encourages us to propose another type of genetic reading that insists on the collective (...) conditions of the production of knowledge, including philosophical knowledge. Such a collective genetics, applied to Sartre's intellectual formation during the interwar years, allows us to highlight some of the little-known forms of Parisian intellectual societies (the activities of the International Information Group of the École Normale Supérieure, the critical logic of the psychology journals, the regular meetings of the cenacles, and the literary and philosophical research groups). It also reveals, at the same time, the original relationship between Sartre's thought and the German literature and philosophy mediated to him by Bernard Groethuysen, Stefan Zweig and Alexandre Koyré. (shrink)

This translation is of an article in the April–June 1948 issue of the Bulletin de la société française de philosophie (42, no. 3: 49–91). That article consists primarily of a lecture that Sartre had presented to La Société Française de Philosophie on 2 June 1947 in which he provided an overview of some of his main points in Being and Nothingness, with particular emphasis on its Introduction (especially its third section, ‘The Pre-Reflective Cogito and the Being of the Percipere’) as (...) well as on the first chapter of its second part, that is, “The Immediate Structures of the For-Itself” (covering content in three of its five sub-sections: I, III and IV). The title of the lecture thus does not wholly encompass the subjects that are discussed in it, although it may well be said to reflect its central theme (even in a literal sense, as the positioning of the hypothetically demarcated ‘Section III’ in the Table of Contents above shows). In addition to the presentation, the article in the Bulletin is preceded by a brief introductory statement – seemingly written by Sartre himself1 – which functions largely as a sort of ‘extended abstract’ for the talk (although not all the points in the introduction are covered in the presentation), and is followed by a transcript of the discussion that took place after the presentation between Sartre and some of the reputable scholars who were in attendance (i.e. a ‘question and answer’ session). (shrink)