Sartre's second century

Temporality and the Death of Lucienne in Nausea 51
it constitutes this situation as the past. The past is revealed to
consciousness in this nihilating flight as the facticity of one's existence.
The past obligates him to exist and to exist within this particular, yet
contingent, reality. The past is not ineffectually "pensioned off and
Roquentin is not isolated on the instantaneous island of his present.
It is important to note that the obligation made by one's past is made
on a pre-reflective level. Earlier in Nausea, Roquentin claims that he is
unable to distinguish imagination from memory:
I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I
am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just
fiction. 18
Although he is unable to distinguish memory from fiction on a reflective
level, Roquentin's reaction demonstrates how the past is distinguished
from imaginative fiction at a pre-reflective level. This distinction is not
made by an effort of cognition or reflective examination alone. Rather, the
past invokes an obligation in a way that our imagination cannot. The past
lays a primordial, pre-reflective claim upon who we are. Even while
Roquentin is unable to distinguish memory from imagination reflectively,
the past is making its claim pre-reflectively. The past is distinguished from
imagination as that which is constituted in the nihilating flight of
consciousness.
But how is it possible for Roquentin to describe the pre-reflective
obligation that his past has upon him without being able fully to integrate
this past as memory? What accounts for the unity of the past as memory?
Sartre tells us in Being and Nothingness: "In order for us to 'have' a past,
it is necessary that we maintain it in existence by our very project toward
the future." 19 In order for a past experience to be retained in memory, it is
necessary that it somehow fits, and is accounted for, in the projection of
the self into the future. Past experience is ordered and made sense of, at
least tangentially, by one's projects. Even half-forgotten incidents and
ambiguous experiences are organised as far as possible into the many
overlapping projects that make up a self:
A living past, a half-dead past, survivals, ambiguities, discrepancies: the
ensemble of these layers of pastness is organised by the unity of my
project. It is by means of this project that there is installed the complex
18 Nausea, 32.
19 Being and Nothingness, 639.