Sartre e le condizioni della soggettivazione

The scope of this essay is very limited and, in a certain sense, modest: to revisit the terms of the process of subjectivation as conceived by Sartre after Being and Nothingness in order to focus on and proble-matise some of its contributions with a view to a phenomenology of the human. With his major work now complete, freedom and subjectivity are rethought as “the small deviation” (overcoming, transformation) intro-duced into what others have made of us. This is a process that has two moments: (constitution) internalisation of exteriority, of the conditioning in which each of us is born and grows up, and (personalisation) re-externa-lisation of internalised exteriority through actions and choices. Sartrean subjectivity is nothing more than this process. It is above all in The Idiot of the Family, dedicated to Gustave Flaubert, that the French philosopher undertakes to illustrate the process of constitution and personalisation. This essay aims to problematise the peculiar relationship between the two moments of the process, emphasising, on the one hand, that there is already personalisation in constitution and, on the other, that there can be no personalisation without consti-tution, showing that the conditioning that comes from others and from the situation is first and foremost the necessary condition for personalisation and not its antithesis.