Temporality of the Subject

The "Temporality of the Subject" as developed across both occurrences in Sartre's Being and Nothingness refers to the ontological structure by which the for-itself — pure, nihilating consciousness — is constituted not as a static substance but as an ekstatic diaspora across three temporal dimensions: past, present, and future. The for-itself is never coincident with itself; it is always already "elsewhere," deriving the meaning of what it was only from what it is projected toward, and vice versa. This is not a psychological account of time-experience but an ontological claim: temporality is the very mode of being of the for-itself, the condition under which consciousness exists as flight, negation, and freedom. The subject has no fixed nature because its being is always deferred across temporal dimensions that mutually refer to one another without ever resolving into a stable whole.

Crucially, this temporal structure grounds Sartre's critique of the Psyche as constituted by impure reflection. When reflective consciousness misrecognizes the for-itself as a substantial object — a persistent ego with enduring states and qualities — it produces what Sartre calls a "psychic form" that exists in the mode of "has been": a solidified, already-completed shadow of the living temporal flow. This is the structural mechanism of bad faith, whereby the radical indeterminacy of the subject's temporal diaspora is suppressed and replaced by the illusion of a fixed in-itself. The temporality of the subject is thus both what makes freedom irreducible and what makes self-deception perennially tempting.

This concept appears exclusively in the Sartrean source (jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological) and operates as the foundational ontological condition underwriting several of the cross-referenced canonical concepts. It extends and grounds the account of Consciousness by specifying its mode of being: Sartrean consciousness is not a substance or interiority but a temporal nihilation, a perpetual self-dispersal that is the precondition for both freedom and misrecognition. It also directly underpins the account of the Ego and Identification: the ego (Psyche) that impure reflection constitutes is precisely what remains when temporal flight is frozen into a pseudo-substantial object — structurally parallel to the Lacanian claim that the ego is an imaginary construct built from misrecognition, and that identification is always a falsifying capture. The concept further anchors Bad Faith, since bad faith is the specific existential move by which the subject disavows its own temporal diaspora and pretends to be a completed in-itself. In relation to Phenomenology, the concept marks Sartre's departure from a purely descriptive account toward an ontological one: temporality is not an experiential datum but the condition of experience itself.

Relative to the Lacanian canonical concepts in the corpus, the "Temporality of the Subject" occupies an adjacent but tensioned position. Whereas Lacan's decentred subject is constituted through the signifying chain and the retroactive logic of the après-coup (Nachträglichkeit), Sartre's temporal diaspora is grounded in the for-itself's own nihilating freedom rather than in the alterity of the Other or the symbolic order. The structural logic is comparable — meaning is always "elsewhere," derived from another temporal dimension — but the Lacanian subject is barred by language, not liberated by it. In this sense, the "Temporality of the Subject" can be read as the phenomenological precursor that the Lacanian corpus both appropriates (the retroactive constitution of meaning, the non-self-identity of the subject) and transforms (by subordinating temporal flight to the structuring constraint of the signifier and the Real).

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.201)

the for-itself is a being which by means of its future makes known to itself the meaning of what it was... we must always look for the meaning of a temporal dimension elsewhere, in another dimension. This is what we have called the diaspora

The quote is theoretically dense because "diaspora" names the constitutive non-coincidence of the subject with itself across time — meaning is never immanent to any single temporal dimension but always referred "elsewhere," making self-presence structurally impossible. The phrase "makes known to itself the meaning of what it was" encodes the retroactive logic (future → past) that underpins both Sartrean bad faith and the Lacanian après-coup, while "diaspora" insists that this scattering is not a defect but the very ontological form of the for-itself.