Sartre and Death: Forgetting the Mortal Body in Being and Nothingness

Abstract

This chapter focuses solely on the treatment of death in Being and Nothingness.¹ Sartre certainly does not ‘forget’ the bodily aspect of death in literary works such as Le Mur (1939), Morts sans sepulture (1946) or Les Chemins de la liberté (1945–9), where it is indisputably prominent; nor in later texts such as L’Idiot de la famille (1971–2), where his early account of facticity is deepened and transformed. But in Being and Nothingness we would also arguably expect to see a discussion of the complexity and ambiguity of bodily facticity in relation to mortality. Death would seem to lie at the heart of any discussion of subjectivity, of the mind-body question, or of the relationship between en soi and pour soi, all of which are analysed at length in Being and Nothingness:

Being-for-itself must be wholly body and it must be wholly consciousness; it cannot be united with a body. Similarly being-for-others is wholly body; there are no ‘psychic phenomena’ there to be united with the body. There is nothing behind the body. But the body is wholly ‘psychic’.