  Sartre’s early texts on the imagination already provided significant insights in that regard (in particular, see Dufrenne’s lengthy discussions of them in his The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 1973). The freedom that characterises human subjectivity is manifested most vividly in a specific type of intentionality: the imagining of an object. Imagination exemplifies the power of human consciousness because it is a type of intentionality that posits in the same act both the existence of the object and its inexistence, since it “intends” it precisely as a virtual object. In imagination, the object is indeed intended by consciousness, but “as absent”, as “containing a certain part of nothingness” inasmuch as it is posited as not existing here and now (Sartre 1940). This distinguishes it from the type of intentionality involved in perception, one of the key aspects of which is precisely the positing of its object as existent.