Pure and Applied Consciousness in Valéry and Sartre

To speak of the ‘death of the subject’ today might seem anachronistic, even irrelevant. There are flagrant signs, however, of the ‘return of the subject’ in contemporary French literature, suggesting its persistence. Besides, unprecedented innovations in philosophy and literature galvanized precisely by the death of the subject have not produced tangible changes in the world, except perhaps for the rhetoric of diversity. These observations oblige a return to the fundamental question: what is the subject, or, rather, what must the subject be in order for an authentic intersubjective rapport to be freshly conceivable? Long before the subject was declared ‘dead’ in the 1960s, two thinkers for whom this question was a central concern were Valéry and Sartre. Tracing their earliest conceptions of pure consciousness and of its application in the world, this article seeks to go beyond the usual opposition drawn between Sartrean humanism and Valéryan inhumanism. I argue that their strikingly similar conceptions of pure consciousness based on its dual characteristics — negativity and impersonality — bind the two thinkers, and that the notion of pure consciousness serves each as a theoretical foundation to envision the transformation of society by means, paradoxically, of the negation of human subjectivity.