La vita di coscienza come flusso e desiderio. Sartre e le metamorfosi della fenomenologia negli Stati Uniti

In this article, I examine the early reception of Sartre’s philosophy in the United States. Discussing two apparently alternative views propounded by Herbert Marcuse and Jean Wahl on Sartre’s conception of freedom in Being and Nothingness, I will first propose a distinction between those interpreters that in the 1940s attributed to Sartre a form of Bergsonism from those who saw in his transformation of Husserl's perspective a way to retrieve Hegelian phenomenology. In the second section, I will focus on Aron Gurwitsch’s appeal to Sartre’s non-egological conception of consciousness, as well as on Sartre’s interpretation of consciousness as an impersonal spontaneity and an ongoing flux. Finally, in the third section, I will deal with Maurice Natanson’s critique of Sartre’s ontology by paying specific attention to the importance he attributes to sexual desire. As will be shown, his account is consistent with Marcuse’s and anticipates what his student Judith Butler will later argue in her masterpiece Subjects of Desire