| Summary: | The author confronts the positions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Erving Goffman. In his Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (1938), Jean-Paul Sartre proposes a phenomenological approach. Taking his distances both with psychoanalysis and behaviourism, he places emotion as a spontaneous and experienced degradation of the conscience confronted with the world; the body thus becoming strangely nothing other than the experienced belief of consciousness. The author compares this position with Goffman’s definition of the “social situation”. Here, emotion is identified as a disturbance intervening in the normal order of the sequence of events delimited by the situation. Symbolic interactionism is confronted with Sartre’s existentialism and its position of a magic structure underlying the world, thus making one the mirror of the other. Whilst being both assigned to the phenomenological current, Jean-Paul Sartre and Erving Goffman are considered here in terms of their strategies intent on avoiding psychological theories. The conclusion frames the question of the heuristic status to confer to the concept “magic”, invoked by Jean-Paul Sartre.
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