SARTRE AND THE UNINHABITABILITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Starting from Sartre's insistence in The Transcendence of the Ego that the ego is not the inhabitant of consciousness, I set out to describe what the uninhabitability of consciousness could mean. I contrast Sartre's discussion of 'bourgeois property' in The Critique of Dialectical Reason with classic phenomenological accounts of the dwelling (Bollnow, Levinas) in order to demonstrate that the habitation or dwelling is the product of an outside which threatens it, resulting in the fact that it cannot be posited as a protection against this outside. I finish by returning to The Transcendence of the Ego through the focus on Sartre's notion of 'absolute interiority' which is in no way comparable to the interiority of the dwelling, but instead makes the contingency and therefore dependency of the interiority of the dwelling on an outside intelligible.