Ritorno a Jean-Paul Sartre. Esistenza, infanzia e desiderio

While few intellectuals have had such a decisive influence on twentieth-century culture as Jean-Paul Sartre, today the French philosopher, in a sort of revenge of indifference, appears to have been unduly marginalized by dominant thought. All the more critically suggestive for this is the novel portrait that Massimo Recalcati offers of him. At the center is the relationship between freedom and destiny, necessity and contingency, invention and repetition, constitution and personalization. And above all, an idea of childhood conceived not so much as an evolutionary stage or archaeological remnant, but rather as an unassimilable presence that existence has the task of unceasingly taking up again. In this process, the comparison with Freud and Lacan becomes decisive: how to liberate desire from that mirage of accomplished totalization that Sartre calls “desire to be”? How to deliver it to a lack capable of being truly generative?