Dans l’ivresse mescalinique : Jean-Paul Sartre, clinicien de l’imagination ?
Cygne Noir May 27, 2026 Gautier Dassonneville 2 citations
The paper examines the cultural and theoretical context of Jean-Paul Sartre's 1935 mescaline experiment. It argues that a psychopathological model, specifically the Jacksonian paradigm of the degradation of consciousness, operated fully in Sartre's "Notes on the Mescaline Experience" and continued to influence his eidetic description of imagination in "L'Imaginaire" (1940), despite the phenomenological reduction intended there. The authors trace how this clinical framework shaped Sartre's phenomenology and explore the emergence of a phenomenology of the sign. They hypothesize that by submitting to the hallucinogen, Sartre became a formidable clinician of imagination, pushing the pathological method to its limits and thereby discovering Contingence.