Late Modern Projectivity and Existentialism

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of the relationship between existentialism and late modern projectivity interpreted in terms of project work and of biographical projectivity. It does so from the perspective of transformations of subjectivity in modernity and late modernity, and, therefore, from the perspective of the process of individualization. The objective is to answer the question of the belonging of existentialism to one of these sociocultural formations. For these purposes, some major categories of existentialism such as project, anxiety, and temporality are analyzed. Their analysis leads to the conclusion that there is a close, structural correlation between existentialism and sociocultural structures of modernity as well as that existentialism, in contrast to late modern projectivity, has some emancipatory potential related to its alienating status in modernity. The article refers to the methodology of qualitative sociology.