Instituer la singularité. La normativité de l’exemple chez Sartre

Abstract

This article examines the status of the examples used by Sartre in the manuscripts Les racines de l’éthique (1964) and Morale et Histoire (1965), interpreting them as an underlying yet profound dialogue with the concept of “institution” developed by Merleau-Ponty. Our hypothesis is that the examples not only constitute the driving force behind Sartre’s reflection on the normative (which, literally, enables it to move forward), but that they also indicate the primary place of the problem, the most appropriate space for examining the relationship between the universality of the norm and the singularity of its historical embodiment. The dialectical and materialist ethics that Sartre developed in the 1960s thus seems to find in the example, at the same time, one of its objects, a method, and a content.