Sartre and lacan: Considerations on the concepts of the subject and of consciousness

Abstract

In this paper we examine Jacques Lacan’s work from the late 1940s and early 1950s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego, published in 1936, in order to establish a conceptual connection between two authors who are usually considered, given their theoretical and methodological perspectives, as having opposing viewpoints. The proposed connection is based on Sartre’s concept of unreflective consciousness and Lacan’s concept of the subject. There are four notions that allow us to establish this connection: the transcendental, the active, the constitutive and the impersonal/transindividual. Finally, we present a shared epistemological basis for both concepts that is essential to support the considerations in this paper.