Magical Emotions: Jean-Paul Sartre and The Headless Woman
Film-Philosophy June 1, 2026 Ruochen Bo
This article reexamines Jean-Paul Sartre's early theory of emotion in light of his reflections on ego, consciousness, language and narrative, clarifying his often-overlooked but critical conception of magic. I first show how magical emotional consciousness transforms the instrumental world by disrupting deterministic logic and then trace a parallel reversal in The Transcendence of the Ego,...