RESEARCH PROJECT 4
In The Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre presents a theory of groups that he thinks provides a foundation for authentic political community that is comprised of positive and constructive social relations.  If his theory provides this foundation then it must apply to non-group settings, too.  The problem is that Sartre does not provide an account for how his theory applies in non-group settings.  I believe that if we apply Michel Foucault’s theoretical constructions of power, subjectivity, and freedom to this problem we can begin to provide such an account.  If we make explicit underlying dynamics of power in our social relations, we can actualize Sartre’s goal of genuine reciprocity between individuals in non-group settings.  We can also improve upon Sartre’s theory in the group situation itself.

The deeper problem is how we can create the conditions under which individuals will actually promote the kind of authentic political community that Sartre envisions.  This requires that we investigate three different domains of our global discussion of freedom: 1)  the ontological; 2) the practical; and 3) the psychological/psychoanalytic.  We can explore the ontological and practical domains by scrutinizing Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and The Critique of Dialectical Reason in terms Foucault’s work on power.  With regard to the psychological domain, though, in addition to some of the work Sartre did in Being and Nothingness (see "Concrete Relations with Others" and concepts like the
"circuit of selfness," as well as his ideas about sado-masochistic social dynamics), we will look at Jacques Lacan’s linguistic structuralism.  By comparing a
phenomenological approach with a structuralist approach, we hope to show the difficulty, from a psychological perspective, in creating the conditions under which Sartre’s developed theory of freedom can actually be applied.

This research is a preliminary step in bridging philosophical and psychoanalytic discourses about the nature of freedom.