Absential Locations and the Figureless Ground

Mac Cumhaill, Clare

Abstract

When Sartre arrives late to meet Pierre at a local establishment, he discovers not merely that Pierre is absent, but also Pierre’s absence, where this depends, or so Sartre notoriously supposes, on a frustrated expectation that Pierre would be seen at that place. Many philosophers have railed against this view, taking it to entail a treatment of the ontology of absence that Richard Gale describes as ‘attitudinal’ – one whereby absences are thought to ontologically depend on psychological attitudes. In this article, I aim to make Sartre’s intuition respectable. What Sartre perceives is an ‘absential location’, only the ‘boundaries’ of which are circumscribed by what Sartre is doing at that place: meeting Pierre. I explain how this Sartrean view, though not specifically attributable to Sartre, nonetheless honours some of the phenomenological data described, if a little opaquely, in Being and Nothingness.

Citation

Mac Cumhaill, C. (2018). Absential Locations and the Figureless Ground. Sartre Studies International, 24(1), 34-47. https://doi.org/10.3167/ssi.2018.240104

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Jun 1, 2018
• Publication Date: 2018-06
• Deposit Date: Mar 22, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 11, 2020
• Journal: Sartre Studies International: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Existentialism and Contemporary Culture
• Print ISSN: 1357-1559
• Electronic ISSN: 1558-5476
• Publisher: Berghahn Journals
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 24
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 34-47
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3167/ssi.2018.240104
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1360819