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