ABSTRACT
It does not seem much of an exaggeration to say that nothing intrigued Sartre’s early thinking more than the variegated notion of nothingness (le néant). Sartre even coined a neologism, namely “négatité,”2 referring to existent yet irreducibly and essentially negative phenomena, examples of which include things as diverse as the desire for water, the distance between my desk and the refrigerator, or the lack of water in my glass. This fascination (if not obsession) for negative aspects of the human condition is not only operative in Sartre’s mature ontology of Being and Nothingness (B&N, 1943) 3 , but already visible in preceding works such as The Imaginary (1940) and the War Diaries (1939–1940).
