A portrait of the political agent in Jean-Paul Sartre : views on playing, acting, temporality and subjectivity

Abstract

The study discusses the political in Jean-Paul Sartre's work, focusing principally on the conceptual constructions through which the agent acting in a political action situation can be interpreted from the texts. Sartre's conception of the political agent is discussed against the background of the operational concepts and the limit-situation as an ideal type action situation construed as conceptual devices in the work for showing both Sartre's fashion of using and of construing concepts. In addition certain metaphors such as theater, play and mask are used for highlighting the political reading of the texts. The theme of the agent, in one form or another, runs through Sartre's entire work. It is a theme which largely gathers together the different conceptual devices and different perspectives he takes in his work. In this study, through concepts and figures interpreted from the texts, especially from Critique de la raison dialectique, itis shown that Sartre's construction of the agent forms a challenging attempt of a revised view into the classical concept of subject. It is also shown that his agent is both a political and a moral actor which cannot be reduced to a subject or to a person, but can be described as an actor, as a player of the political condition, and as a user of political action strategies through the concepts of limit, change and non-identity. Sartre's central point of view of action is that of the agent acting in an interior space of action in a construed world. This forwards a view within which the perspective of production forms a framework for the argumentation where the main themes through which the portrait of the agent can be drawn are temporality, interiority, exteriority and subjectivity. The agent of the Critique as a non-identifiable actor acting in a temporally and dimensionally produced action situation is produced in the process of internalization and externalization of the historical and inherently political condition of being condemned to freedom. In the study it is shown that it is this agent through whom the political comes to the world and who is condemned also to politics. It is also shown that this agent forms a perspective of interpretation as well to Sartre's plays as to the central concepts of his morals.