ABSTRACT
Robert Misrahi has said that what makes J. P. Sartre great is his status as the first philosopher to have truly demonstrated freedom. Sartre understood individual freedom as neither a hope nor a preference, for in each instant one must decipher the world and oneself—nothing is given to consciousness. The problem of the instant returns in the last movement, which Sartre devotes to existential psychoanalysis, namely the possibility of furnishing a hermeneutic model of “existential discovery,” and even of “moral description”. In Sartre’s intellectual trajectory, there is therefore an implicit but fundamental transition from the “Martin Heidegger case” to the “Stalin case.” Whether it be Heidegger and Karl Marx, Sartre always sought an ethical radicalization of their thought. Original Heideggerian temporality seemed to them excessively sovereign as it is incapable of thinking about times of weakness, of reversion or of the need to stimulate an existence trapped in the bounds of banality.
