Enfance et institution. Une relecture des phénoménologies existentialistes (Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty)

Abstract

This essay examines how the question of institution is rethought within early French existential phenomenology through a reflection on childhood and education in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By reading these authors together, the paper highlights their shared attempt to analyze the formation of subjectivity and the effects of social integration and exclusion in the aftermath of the Second World War. The essay shows how childhood becomes a privileged site for understanding the relation between individual existence and social institutions. Education and socialization are interpreted not as neutral processes, but as forms of symbolic and material violence that shape moral, political, and social identities. Through engagements with psychoanalysis, sociology, and anthropology, existential phenomenology develops a critical conception of institution grounded in the tensions between freedom, history, and social conditioning. The contribution also engages contemporary interpretations, particularly those of Massimo Recalcati, in order to rethink subjectivity as a transformative “small displacement” capable of opening new forms of social and ethical life.