Introduction: Talking 'bout my generation -- Part I: Looking for difference -- Levinas, multiculturalism, and us -- In respectful contempt : Heidegger, appropriation, facticity -- Whistling in the dark : two approaches to anxiety -- Part II: After Levinas -- The price of being dispossessed : Levinas' God and Freud's trauma -- The mortality of the transcendent : Levinas and evil -- Is ethics fundamental? : questioning Levinas on irresponsibility -- Part III: After Heidegger -- Intransitive facticity : a question (...) to Heidegger -- Demons and the demonic : Kierkegaard and Heidegger on anxiety and sexual difference -- Dissensus communis : how to keep silent "after" Lyotard -- Conclusion: In search of visibility. (shrink)

Sartre’s conception of “the look” creates an ontological conflict with no real resolution with regard to intersubjective relations. However, through turning to the pages of The Transcendence of the Ego one will be able to begin constructing a rich public ego theory that can outline a dynamic and fruitful notion with regard to interpersonal relations. Such a dynamic plays itself out between the bad faith extremes of believing too much in an all-powerful look on the one hand, as well as (...) believing too much in some deep “I” or persona on the other. Indeed: Through a rigorous analysis of Sartre’s main principles regarding his conception of the ego, we will see that the latter is first and foremost a transcendent object for reflective consciousness; an object, moreover, that gets “magically” reversed into a subject-bearer of states, qualities, and the like, only in a secondary moment. This has the consequence that there is no deep, graspable “I”; but precisely because of this one’s personality is there in the world, to be shared and displayed, discussed and challenged, at every turn. Thus a Sartrean notion of personality involves a matching up of external aspects of ourselves that others in fact know better, with our own interiorities that can nevertheless always be shared through a reflective language that always has the same structural core. (shrink)

Sartrean conceptions of the Ego, emotions, language, and the imaginary provide a comprehensive account of "magic" that could ultimately give rise to a new philosophical psychology. By focusing upon only one of these here— the imaginary —we see that through its irrealizing capabilities consciousness contaminates the world and bewitches itself in a manner that defies simple deterministic explication. We highlight this with an explication of what Sartre means by "nihilation" and the "analogon," and introduce a concrete example of nostalgia, hoping (...) to lay the scene for a detailed study into the dynamic between our ontological freedom and its constitution and experience of phenomena as enchanting and bewitching. "Magical being" must therefore involve a deep, Sartrean analysis that explicates ontological freedom as becoming concretely engaged in both the real and irreal alike, whereby the imaginary as magic can lead to the most insane, as well as the most artistic, incantations. (shrink)