La nausea e la fine del mondo. Figure della condizione schizoide in Jean-Paul Sartre e in Ernesto de Martino

Abstract

Ernesto De Martino was the first to read from an anthropological point of view Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea, as the representation of a cultural and existential crisis, a cultural apocalypse which affected the whole bourgeois modern world in the 20th century. This article reconsiders the anthropologist's analysis, and focuses on a possible comparison between the two metaphors, Sartre's "nausea" and De Martino's "end of the world", to show how both may be read as figures of an individual pre-pathological psychic state: the schizoid condition. A phenomenological look to their autobiographical writings provides interesting insights into such a perspective.