Sartre and the Lived Body: Negation, Non-Positional Self-Awareness and Hodological Space

Abstract

Sartre’s analysis of negation covers a number of complex phenomena and lies at the heart of his ontology. Crucially important, the choice of term is typically Sartrean: dramatic and insightful, but sometimes obscure. Moreover, the difficulty of trying to understand what is meant by ‘negation’ is compounded by the fact that it is closely tied in with what is said about nothingness. In fact, it seems to me that this double-barrelled negativity often gets commentators off on the wrong foot when they try to explain his idea. So, for instance, one writer notes that negation allows us to experience absence in a uniquely human fashion as lack or failure. Indeed, ‘it is because men are capable of being separated from the world that they are capable of having a language. The nature of the for-itself is such that it brings nothingness and hence negation and all that follows from it into the world.’¹ Besides making a major assumption about the genesis of language, we are not told what precisely is meant by nothingness and why negation follows from it. In addition, it is never established that negation is, ontologically, first and foremost a manifestation of lack. And even if this were true, what is the precise mechanism that allows consciousness to experience lack as such? This question too is never answered.