Sartre's second century
Sartre's second century
Sartre's second century
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52 Chapter Four<br />
system of references which causes any fragment of my past to enter into an<br />
hierarchical, plurivalent organization, as in a work of art [...]. 20<br />
When one is unable to maintain the past as part of a project toward the<br />
future, it becomes lost to the "hierarchical, plurivalent organization" that<br />
informs our memory and our sense of self. However, we should not<br />
understand this as simply an experience or event that is lost to the past by<br />
an otherwise well integrated self that stands apart from the past. This<br />
"complex system of references" that synthesises the past is the self. One<br />
cannot object by saying, for example, that "/ would not forget an<br />
experience like thatY\ because this hypothetical "I" that does remember<br />
would be a wholly different "I" from the "I" that does not remember. The<br />
forgetting or remembering indicates a different "system of references"<br />
constituting a different "I". There is no "I" that stands separate from the<br />
integration of one's past. The "I"—or the ego, psyche, or self—is this<br />
integration. Roquentin's journal documents a growing inability to unify<br />
his past and himself into any sort of context or project. Roquentin has<br />
divested himself of any grounds upon which to justify his existence and<br />
recollect fragments of his past. Without this recollecting synthesis,<br />
Roquentin's ability to integrate his past breaks down and, to the same<br />
extent, his psyche, or ego, disintegrates. Roquentin's journal illustrates<br />
how this disconnection from the past is accompanied by a disconnection<br />
from a sense of agency, of freedom, and of self.<br />
However, Sartre recognises that a memory may stay with us despite<br />
this lack of integration. It may be carried with us via the body:<br />
This is nonetheless a real characteristic of the psyche—not that the psyche<br />
is united to a body but that under its melodic organization the body is its<br />
substance and its perpetual condition of possibility [...]. It is this, finally,<br />
which motivates and to some degree justifies psychological theories like<br />
that of the unconscious, problems like that of the preservation of<br />
memories. 21<br />
Thus, Sartre recognises that the preservation of memory relies on the body<br />
as that which keeps the past available for a synthesising recollection as<br />
memory. The past is the body in that it is only through the body that the<br />
preservation of memory is possible: "[...] the body as facticity is the past<br />
[...]. Birth, the past, contingency, the necessity of a point of view [...]—<br />
20 Ibid., 641-42.<br />
21 Ibid., 444.