The transmission of the craft and the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder have in common that they involve a relationship of act to act between the master and the apprentice on the one hand, and between the therapist and the patient on the other. Phenomenology has from the outset considered movement as inherent to the flesh: Hardy thus hypothesises that the origin of the flesh is a gesture. For all that, his description remains largely dependent on a flesh that is primarily perceptive: this gesture can thus be qualified as an aesthetic gesture. But if the flesh is as much mobile as it is perceptive, would there not be another gesture that generates the flesh in movement that is not linked to perception? Housset takes a step in this direction and allows us to hypothesize the kinesic gesture which, alone, allows us to account for the two experiences mentioned above.

The purpose of the following article is to juxtapose and compare the concept of shame as seen by two contemporary French philosophers, Jean Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas. The fundamental problem that is posed in this article concerns the role and significance of the impact of shame on the formation of human subjectivity. For both J.P. Sartre and E. Levinas, the subject attempts to bear the burden of being in a heroic way and the experience of shame proves to be an important experience in this process. Is it an ontological or ethical experience? Or perhaps metaphysical? For both J.P. Sartre and E. Levinas, shame is a relational experience, i.e., it occurs in relation to You. But does this Other have to come to me from outside? In Sartre’s case, shame appears in the experience of the gaze of the Other, and it is a traumatic experience. The Other interferes with my freedom and challenges me as a subject. The experience of shame makes me aware of my subjugation by the Other. In Levinas, the experience of shame comes originally from within myself. The shame of my own existence demands justification. I can be ashamed in relation to myself. I can be a menace of myself. I don’t need the presence of another human being for this. What unites and what separates the two philosophers in interpreting the experience of shame for human subjectivity?

By defining consciousness as nothingness or simply as “nothing,” Sartre plays with several meanings of these terms: negativity and negation, distance, indetermination, irreducibility. The nothingness of consciousness takes on an ontological meaning: it is a “tearing away” from being-in-itself, a transcendence understood as the capacity to transcend what is, while retaining an epistemological meaning: it is what cannot be positively determined as “something” or as a property of being. Still, on the epistemological level as well as on the ontological level, it is indeed from “something,” from physical and social being, that the nothingness of consciousness draws its existence and its capacities. In my article, I examine different meanings that can be given to the “nothing” of consciousness in the light of the thought of Sartre himself, emphasizing the difference between two major meanings of negation: as opposition and as indetermination. Then I confront Sartre’s concept of consciousness with more recent considerations of different inspiration, notably from researchers like Chalmers, Damasio, Gallagher, and Zahavi. My thesis is that the Sartrean concept, semi-transcendental and semi-naturalist, does admit the search for a naturalist explanation of consciousness, but assigns its limit precisely through the concept of nothingness.