Sartre - The Imagination

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Jean-Paul Sartre, L'imagination

Presses Universitaires de France, 1936

Nouvelle Encyclopdie philosophique
6, avenue Reille, 75014 Paris

Translation Routledge, 2012
Translators' Introduction Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf, 2012

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 19051980.
[Imagination. English]
The imagination / by Jean-Paul Sartre.
p. cm.
Translated by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Imagination. I. Williford, Kenneth. II. Rudrauf, David.
III. Title.
BF408.S263 2012
248.4dc23
2012002511

ISBN: 978-0-415-77618-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-77619-6 (pbk)

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, Jean Paul Sartre

We would like to thank Jonathan Webber for his very useful feedback on an early draft of the translation and Adam Johnson and Tony Bruce for their good nature and patience with us. Sometimes it felt like our promises about the completion of the work were like so many predictions of the end of the world: it doesn't matter that the vast majority of them turn out to be false; someday, some prophet of doom will turn out to be right. And that, apparently, is motive enough for them to keep making the forecast.

We'd also like to thank Andrea Swenson for letting us take over and trash her apartment for a translation frenzy early in the process.

As is customary, the translators blame each other for any flaws remaining in this translation.

I (KW) would like to dedicate this work to the memory of Denny Bradshaw who first showed me the importance of Sartre's early phenomenological works and to Panayot Butchvarov, Denny's mentor and then my own, whose course on Sartre at The University of Iowa was the stuff of academic legend and whose philosophical breadth and depth continues to astound.

I (DR) would like to dedicate this work to my father, Jacques Rudrauf to whom I owe an understanding of a certain French intellectual tradition and discourse that was pivotal in the making of this translation.

Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf

SARTRE'S ANNI MIRABILES

Duly acknowledging the element of arbitrariness in all such claims, it is still fairly safe to say that the thirteen-year period stretching from September 1933, when Sartre began his nine-month residency at the Institut franais de Berlin, to the publication of Existentialism is a Humanism and Anti-Semite and Jew in 1946, stands as a truly remarkable period of productivity in the annals of philosophical and literary biography. During this period Sartre wrote and published (though not always in the order written) no less than five philosophical classics: The Imagination (1936), The Transcendence of the Ego (1937), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), The Imaginary (1940), and Being and Nothingness (1943). Remarkable as that is, in the same period he wrote (or rewrote) and published (or premiered) no less than seven literary classics: Nausea (1938), The Wall (1939), The Flies (1943), No Exit (194445), The Age of Reason (1945), The Reprieve (1945), and The Respectful Prostitute (1946). If one thinks of other significant works published right after 1946, like The Chips are Down (1947) and Baudelaire (1947), this should serve as a reminder of the arbitrariness just mentioned.

And if one thinks of smaller, but not unimportant pieces, like Intentionality: a fundamental idea of Husserl's phenomenology (1939) and Consciousness of self and knowledge of self (1948), one will gain a still better sense of the fecundity of this period and its long afterglow. Sartre's perceived importance as a philosopher and writer has continued to wax and wane inside and outside of France, but no one who has spent careful time in the pages from his anni mirabiles can fail to be unmoved, if not fully persuaded, by his overall vision or seriously doubt his philosophical breadth and depth, the occasional interpretive or argumentative lapse notwithstanding.

THE UNEXPECTED SIGNIFICANCE OF SARTRE'S EARLY PHENOMENOLOGICAL WORKS

As academic years go by and old ideological obstructions melt into the past, we continue to witness a deepening appreciation of Sartre's early phenomenological works on the part of philosophers from many different intellectual orientations and micro-traditions inside and outside of France. Outside the home country, this development has been encouraged by new and better translations and scholarship. The interest in these works on the part of recent Anglophone philosophers of