“A Kind of Magic”: Emotions, Imagination, Language – A Reading of Sartre

Abstract

This paper maintains that Sartre’s concept of magic has to be considered as a full-fledged and quite technical phenomenological concept. Such concept (a) describes a very specific way in which one is able to be conscious-of-something and (b) reveals some structural features of consciousness and its mode of existence. Moreover (c) the “magical” cluster emotions-imagination-language also appears to be the existential matrix, as it were, from which fictions are generated: starting from the most original fiction of all, namely the constitutive fiction upon which each individual existence is built, i.e. the fiction of one’s own essence.