Radical Conversion

Radical Conversion, as Sartre deploys it in Being and Nothingness, names the possibility—and necessity—of a total metamorphosis of one's fundamental project rather than the piecemeal revision of particular choices or attitudes. For Sartre, the human subject does not exist as a collection of habits or traits to be modified one by one; rather, it constitutes itself through an original, totalizing project that colors every particular act and choice from within. Ordinary willpower or voluntary decision operates entirely inside the compass of that founding project and so cannot contest it at its root. Genuine freedom, consequently, requires a rupture at the level of the project itself—not a small adjustment but a wholesale re-institution of the subject's mode of being-in-the-world. This is what Sartre calls radical conversion: a sudden, total "upsurge" in which the original project is dissolved and a new one takes its place, restructuring all subsequent choices and meanings in one stroke.

The concept sits in deliberate tension with the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious. Sartre's target is the idea that one's fundamental orientation—including the "inferiority complex"—is an unconscious datum passively undergone and only gradually modifiable through therapeutic working-through. Against this, Sartre insists that the fundamental project, though not always thematically explicit, is always freely chosen and sustained in bad faith. Radical conversion is therefore the moment bad faith is broken not by insight alone but by a total existential re-commitment: a self-making that does not gradually emerge but punctually erupts. Sartre notably observes that philosophers have neglected this phenomenon while novelists have long dramatized it—marking radical conversion as a lived, phenomenological reality requiring conceptual elaboration beyond available philosophical vocabulary.

Within the source (jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological), radical conversion appears as the logical complement to the concept of the Fundamental Project: if the fundamental project is the totalizing, freely-chosen orientation that underpins all particular acts, then only an equally total reversal can genuinely alter the subject's freedom. It functions as the positive, affirmative counterpart to Bad Faith — bad faith is the denial of freedom through self-deception about one's fundamental project; radical conversion is the moment that denial is shattered wholesale. The concept also speaks directly to the cross-referenced structure of Anxiety: just as Lacanian anxiety marks the terrifying proximity of the gap collapsing — the dread that desire's constitutive lack might be filled — Sartrean radical conversion is the moment the subject faces the vertigo of its own groundlessness fully enough to reconstitute itself from scratch, without the buffer of habitual self-deception.

When read against the Lacanian cross-references provided, radical conversion occupies an interesting structural position. It resonates with Hysteria's constitutive "ce n'est pas ça" — the refusal of the subject to coincide with what the Other tells it to be — but pushes past hysterical perpetual non-satisfaction toward an actual re-founding of desire's direction. It also mirrors the logic of the Gap: the fundamental project, like the symbolic order, can never fully close over itself, and radical conversion is precisely the eruption through that gap into a new configuration. Sartre's insistence that the will cannot modify the project from within parallels the Lacanian point (associated with Obsession and Repression) that symptomatic solutions always remain internal to the structure they attempt to escape — genuine transformation requires something more like a structural break than a negotiated revision. Radical conversion thus sits at the intersection of existentialist freedom and psychoanalytic structure, functioning as Sartre's name for the kind of total subjective re-founding that Lacanian clinical theory would later theorize as the endpoint of the analytic process.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.475)

Hence also the frequent upsurge of 'conversions' which cause me totally to metamorphose my original project. These conversions which have not been studied by philosophers, have often inspired novelists.

The word "upsurge" is theoretically decisive: it marks conversion as sudden and punctual rather than gradual, foreclosing any model of slow therapeutic modification; "totally to metamorphose my original project" specifies that what changes is not a behavior or attitude but the totalizing project itself, which is the only formulation consistent with Sartre's claim that the will is always already encompassed by the project it would contest.