Looking and meeting : the act of seeing without the authorial role in La nausee by J.-P. Sartre

Prompted by the reflection that seeing others underlies two important actions, that of understanding and knowing, this study of the theoretical-critical philosophy of M. Bachtin lingers on the authorial connotation of the narratively conscious word, which in seeing 'knows', as it has knowledge, as, in other words, it places the observed detail within a preformed weave of meaning, according to the distinctive view of one's culture, identifiable as the author's code, a knowledge provided with a shape. When the reference to the author (langue) breaks down in the consciousness of a glance, the knowledge vanishes, so that even the ordinary, familiar world loses its comfortableness, and is encoded like a foreign, unconnected world, an uncanny ghost that does not match the commemorative words of the experienced meaning. A case in point is J.-P. Sartre's character Antonio Roquentin, who looks with "imagined contempt" on others, despite having felt some emotional involvement with them; he cannot even recognise the ordinary root of a chestnut tree that he regards as something "absurd" and as at a "wrinkled paw".