Sartre's second century

52 Chapter Four
system of references which causes any fragment of my past to enter into an
hierarchical, plurivalent organization, as in a work of art [...]. 20
When one is unable to maintain the past as part of a project toward the
future, it becomes lost to the "hierarchical, plurivalent organization" that
informs our memory and our sense of self. However, we should not
understand this as simply an experience or event that is lost to the past by
an otherwise well integrated self that stands apart from the past. This
"complex system of references" that synthesises the past is the self. One
cannot object by saying, for example, that "/ would not forget an
experience like thatY\ because this hypothetical "I" that does remember
would be a wholly different "I" from the "I" that does not remember. The
forgetting or remembering indicates a different "system of references"
constituting a different "I". There is no "I" that stands separate from the
integration of one's past. The "I"—or the ego, psyche, or self—is this
integration. Roquentin's journal documents a growing inability to unify
his past and himself into any sort of context or project. Roquentin has
divested himself of any grounds upon which to justify his existence and
recollect fragments of his past. Without this recollecting synthesis,
Roquentin's ability to integrate his past breaks down and, to the same
extent, his psyche, or ego, disintegrates. Roquentin's journal illustrates
how this disconnection from the past is accompanied by a disconnection
from a sense of agency, of freedom, and of self.
However, Sartre recognises that a memory may stay with us despite
this lack of integration. It may be carried with us via the body:
This is nonetheless a real characteristic of the psyche—not that the psyche
is united to a body but that under its melodic organization the body is its
substance and its perpetual condition of possibility [...]. It is this, finally,
which motivates and to some degree justifies psychological theories like
that of the unconscious, problems like that of the preservation of
memories. 21
Thus, Sartre recognises that the preservation of memory relies on the body
as that which keeps the past available for a synthesising recollection as
memory. The past is the body in that it is only through the body that the
preservation of memory is possible: "[...] the body as facticity is the past
[...]. Birth, the past, contingency, the necessity of a point of view [...]—
20 Ibid., 641-42.
21 Ibid., 444.