ABSTRACT
Temporality is clearly important in understanding the slogan, which fi rst occurs in a discussion of various ways in which we can relate to our past and our future in bad faith (B&N: 81), is prefi gured earlier in a discussion of the relation between consciousness and its own past and future (B&N: 58), and later occurs in a discussion of the notion of time itself (B&N: 157). This has led a number of commentators to read it wholly or partly in terms of our temporality. David Cooper, for example, writes that the slogan is claiming that individuals are not identical with their sets of past actions, on the basis of which other people form opinions of them (Existentialism, 118-19), since people are intelligible only in relation to the future self that they are becoming through the pursuit of their projects (75). Ronald Santoni concurs, reading Sartre to be claiming that a human being is ‘never just its past, for it is also “what it is not” but could be; that is, its possibilities, its future’ (Bad Faith, 14). This emphasis on temporality seems supported by the fact that the slogan is borrowed from Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel delivered in Paris in the 1930s. Kojève intended the phrase to capture Hegel’s notion
of becoming: no longer being what one has been in order to be what one will be (see Schrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy, 24-5).
