Elad Magomedov

This paper will revitalize the notion of force in Sartre’s phenomenology by reinterpreting thrown-projection as propulsion. From there, Sartre’s analysis of agency will be explored as regards the constitutive moments pertaining to the dynamics of striving. We will see that such striving relates to Deleuze’s ideas on how bodily forces take consciousness into possession. In the final steps of the analysis, it will turn out that freedom is dependent on a rupture that emerges from self-determination of consciousness, which is itself not of the order of freedom.

Whenever we think of impostors, we tend to think of liars. Yet impostures cannot be phenomenologically reduced to lies. Every lie presupposes a distinction between true and false, and it operates through a negation of reality, presenting falsity as truth and vice versa. An imposture, on the other hand, seeks to erase the distinction between true and false altogether. An impostor constructs a fiction that aims at substituting reality. In this process, an entire network of lies is put to work in order to attain the ontological status of the real. This results in a dynamic that deprives truths of their authority, while making untruths highly potent in terms of their capacity to produce effects.

Different kinds of fakery and imposture can be differentiated by means of the imaginary regimes within which a performative simulation unfolds. Engaging with Sartre’s analysis of the imaginary, we will identify three such regimes, calling them the objective, the reflective, and the phantasmatic. Each of these regimes involves its own kind of image and accordingly a specific type of simulation. It is proper to the objective image to attain dissimulation of the self by replacing the real with fiction. In the reflective regime, the real is not substituted by the imaginary, but rather contaminated by it. Finally, whereas the objective and the reflective regimes operate within the sphere of intentional simulation, the phantasmatic image carries us beyond Sartre’s findings, as it shapes the very structure of pre-reflective disclosedness which provides the background for our projects.