L'Idiot de la famille as existential anthropology: analysis of passivity & alienation

Abstract

This research intends to examine the last Sartrean existential biography, L'Idiot de la famille, in the sense to identify there the modus operandi of an existential anthropology and the emergence of a theory of passivity. In this context, and contrary to the consecrated image of Sartrean philosophy as a philosophy of radical freedom, it is intended to show that Sartre constructs there an original theory about passivity and its correlate, the alienation. In this biography, operating through an intertwining theses of L'être et le néant, "Questions de méthode" and Critique de la raison dialectique, Sartre, in the first part, "La constitution", modalizes concepts such as existential psychoanalysis, praxis, projetc, dialectic, progressive-regressive method, universal-singular&, to then restore the supposed passivity/passive activity of the French novelist Gustave Flaubert. Initially, we intend to elucidate the existential anthropology forged from the 1960s, the redefinition of consciousness as a constituent praxis situated in an objectively given world, under conditions which it has not chosen and which it does not determine a priori, but in which it is, unlike this, determined. Then, we will study the theoretical elements that forge this anthropology, that is, the progressive-regressive method and the concept of universal-singular as a reintegration of the cogito into the dialectic. Once these considerations have been taken, it will be necessary to reorder the existential psychoanalysis under the heading of existential anthropology, and then to proceed to the way Sartre uses it in his biography about Flaubert. From this theoretical reasoning, we will be able to identify, in the sequence, an original theory of passivity/alienation that, through the constitutive aspect of childhood, family and social, will unveil the idea of alienated freedom.