Sartre's second century

Sartre, Intentionality and Praxis 99
of the structures of the embodied, experiencing and perceiving subject
given in his analysis of the "lifeworld". Primary among these structures
are those involving kinesthetic processes, an implicit awareness of the
world-horizon and, as noted above, the communalisation of experience.
The first of these features refers to the fact that even perceptual
experience is a matter of an embodied "I can" and "I move" that forms the
core of what Husserl terms the "living body". Communicative speech
represents what might be the most distinctive accomplishment of the living
body, encompassing not only its gestural expressivity, but also the full
range of the rhythm and sonority of spoken and sung language. The
substance of speech is both its meaning and its necessary material
embodiment. When Sartre thinks of the practico-inert as a materiality in
which words as matter "carry the projects of the Other into me", he is
clearly thinking of the embodied materiality of speech.
Husserl's account of the world-horizon primarily refers to the fact that
our perceptual experience of the world occurs against the background of
an open-ended horizon within which individual experiences form a stream
of future-directed, presumptive, and, for the most part, harmoniously
conjoined perceptions. Communicative, situated discourse is fully
immersed in this stream of experience in at least two respects. First,
envoiced subjects are embedded in conversational time. Spoken discourse
has both a material and a temporal thickness that is situated within an
awareness of the more encompassing unfolding of the temporality of the
world-horizon. Second, discourse carries its own presumptive horizon and
is borne by presumptions that are both pragmatically and culturally shaped
and which implicitly, and often overtly, directly structure the flow of
conversation. The horizonality of discourse is formed by both its historical
situation and its temporal dynamic.
Finally, the communalisation of experience represents Husserl's understanding
of the inseparability of perception and intersubjectivity. To
perceive is to perceive a world that is also experienced by others. As the
two immediately previous Sartre quotations show, this is an irreducibly
central feature of the practico-inert. While Husserl's manuscripts propose
a complex interplay of a variety of different forms that the intersubjective
unity of existence may assume, Sartre's attempts in the Critique and The
Family Idiot to understand intersubjectivity as a "unity" that is always
partial, "in play" and never completed, extends this aspect of Husserl's
treatment of the lifeworld in an enriched manner.
However, it is not only the materiality of language that exemplifies the
nature of the practico-inert. Speech and language are, as Sartre noted
above, the products of history. As such, Sartre argues, they have a certain