The whirlwinds of totalization in Jean-Paul Sartre

Many commentators divide Sartre’s work into a first phenomenological phase, a second phase in which he approaches Marxism, and a third phase that would be that of a messianism close to that of Levinas. Through an analysis of the process of totalization as it appears in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, the author shows that the Sartrean dialectic that explains the scarcity around which the series is constituted was to be found in the whirlpool of the situation in Being and Nothingness, in the turnstile with which Sartre explains the work of Genet or in the figure of the spinning top that exemplifies all writing for the French philosopher. Thus, the process of totalization makes it possible to mend the different moments of Sartre’s philosophy and to show its profound coherence and consistency.