Sartre's second century

Sartre's Second Century
Edited by
Benedict O'Donohoe and Roy Elveton
CAMBRIDGE
SCHOLARS
PUBLISHING

Sartre's Second Century, Edited by Benedict O'Donohoe and Roy Elveton
This book first published 2009
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2009 by Benedict O'Donohoe and Roy Elveton and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-0161-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0161-4

To
Heather
and to
Kevin and Solveig

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ix
ROY ELVETON AND BENEDICT O'DONOHOE
CHAPTER ONE 1
SARTRE: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
DAVID DRAKE
CHAPTER Two 17
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, ONTOLOGY AND RESPONSIBILITY
ROY ELVETON
CHAPTER THREE 35
LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY IN SARTRE'S EARLY WRITINGS
ALAIN FLAJOLIET
CHAPTER FOUR 46
TEMPORALITY AND THE DEATH OF LUCIENNE IN NAUSEA
CAM CLAYTON
CHAPTER FIVE 56
SARTRE AND NIETZSCHE: BROTHERS IN ARMS
CHRISTINE DAIGLE
CHAPTER SIX 73
1945 - 2005: EXISTENTIALISM AND HUMANISM SIXTY YEARS ON
DEBORAH EVANS
CHAPTER SEVEN 86
SARTRE, INTENTIONALITY AND PRAXIS
ROY ELVETON
CHAPTER EIGHT 104
THE NEW SARTRE: A POSTMODERN PROGENITOR?
NICHOLAS FARRELL FOX

viii Table of Contents
CHAPTER NINE 123
A SURREPTITIOUS ROMANTIC? READING SARTRE WITH VICTOR HUGO
BRADLEY STEPHENS
CHAPTER TEN 142
HIDDEN WORDPLAY IN THE WORKS OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
PETER ROYLE
CHAPTER ELEVEN 155
DESTABILIZING IDENTITIES AND DISTINCTIONS:
THE LITERARY-PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERIENCE OF HOPE NOW
IANRHOAD
CHAPTER TWELVE 173
CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES:
SARTRE, CLOONEY, MCCARTHY, MURAKAMI
BENEDICT O'DONOHOE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 191
SARTRE'S IMPACT ON THE WRITINGS AND MOVIES OF OSHIMA NAGISA
SIMONEMULLER
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 202
SARTRE'S LEGACY IN AN ERA OF OBSCURANTISM
WILLIE THOMPSON
CONTRIBUTORS 215

INTRODUCTION
ROY ELVETON AND BENEDICT O'DONOHOE
It is reasonable to claim—as does Bernard-Henri Levy, for example, in
the title of his landmark study, Le Siecle de Sartre (2000)—that the
twentieth century was "Sartre's century". But what might be Sartre's
legacy to the twenty-first?
Sartre's life encompassed two world wars, together with the Cold War
that dominated the latter half of the twentieth century. As a political
activist and prolific political commentator, Sartre was both immersed in,
and an engaged reporter of, the significant events of his century. Being and
Nothingness, a philosophical best-seller, confirmed the 1950s as the
"existentialist" age—and the age of anxiety—and sounded themes that
reverberated in much literature, poetry, film and philosophy. Sartre the
phenomenologist extended the relevance of continental European
philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Sartre the
Marxist philosopher, initially siding with Stalin's Russia, voiced his
support for the proletariat and the victims of colonialism, and effectively
aligned his public stances with important themes of western democracies,
such as the fight against racism and the centrality of individual freedom.
Although philosophical culture in the later twentieth century tended to
celebrate the work of Heidegger and Wittgenstein above that of Sartre, a
good deal of Sartre's philosophical contributions have become standards
of philosophical culture: "bad faith", "authenticity", "the look", the themes
of consciousness and intentionality, to name only a few.
A second dimension of Sartre's enduring significance is his reliance
upon the resources of literature—in the forms of drama and the novel,
biography and autobiography—and, together with the requirements of
ontological analysis, the study of history and historical events, and
engaged political commentary. The pathways leading to his exploration of
freedom are as diverse as is the richness of their content. The novel and
the theatre offer vehicles for communicating the metaphysical depths of
human experience that Sartre's ontology, historical analysis and dialectical
methodology may supplement, but not replace. Is there an educated
westerner who cannot quote: "Hell is other people"? Sartre's work is

X Introduction
unique in embracing such a diversity of genres. The sheer variety of those
methods will surely continue to encourage a unique breadth of readership.
A third reason for the likely vigour of Sartre's "second century" is the
fact that the great creativity of his later years has only recently been made
available. Though unfinished, his Notebooks for an Ethics, for example,
can be read as, at least, a sketch of the study of ethics promised in the
concluding chapter of Being and Nothingness. Likewise, though
unfinished, the Critique of Dialectical Reason appears to signal a
considerable shift in his ontology of human consciousness, the "for-itself'.
Taken together, Notebook and Critique can prompt a serious re-reading of
Being and Nothingness, no doubt Sartre's most famous work. Great works
of literature and philosophy invite continued study and reinterpretation, in
the light of repeated close readings and the products of subsequent writers
and thinkers. The last century had only just begun the careful study of
these late manuscripts. Sartre's "second century" offers the possibility for
a substantial re-reading of his entire oeuvre.
The centenary of Sartre's birth in 2005 was the primary occasion for
many of the essays collected in the present volume. Hosted by the UK or
North American Sartre Societies, contributors participating in Sartre's
centennial celebrations were asked to address the central themes and
overall development of his life and thought. It was to be expected, then,
that there would be a retrospective dimension to these contributions.
However, it quickly became apparent that attempts to view Sartre in a
synoptic and retrospective light also provided a basis for assessing aspects
of his work that are important here and now, and would probably remain
so for the new century.
Thus, the following essays reflect the richness of Sartre's vision of the
human condition, the diversity of the means he employed in grappling
with it, and the lengthy trajectory of his enquiry, in a variety of wider
cultural perspectives. Is Sartre a humanist? How persuasively can he be
read as a romantic, a nihilist, an existentialist, a phenomenologist, a postmodernist?
Are there significant cultural traditions that Sartre effectively
advances by whole-heartedly embracing them or by substantially
modifying them, or even by fusing or transcending them? How is it
possible to bring him into fruitful dialogue not only with a living Japanese
novelist, but also with contemporary movie-makers in Tokyo and
Hollywood? What was his life, what was his death? What is his legacy in
an "era of obscurantism"? Given the multi-layered quality of that legacy,
such questions are less a matter of historical labels than of measuring the
plurality of themes, motifs, approaches and genres that make up Sartre's
unique bequest.

Sartre's Second Century XI
It is difficult to imagine that Sartre's preoccupation with the question
of human freedom would not remain crucial for the continued influence of
that bequest. His treatment of this central theme is complex and nuanced.
Nausea and The Flies present human freedom as unsettling and disruptive.
Being and Nothingness couples his ontological account of freedom with
distinctive phenomenological descriptions of freedom in its embodiment,
temporality and intersubjectivity. Notebooks for an Ethics relates freedom
to ethical, social and political themes. The unfinished Critique of
Dialectical Reason fuses the freedom of the for-itself with the objective
structures of society and material existence. The biographies of Genet and
Flaubert offer detailed accounts of historically situated freedoms. These
diverse approaches to the fundamental question of individual human
liberty comprise a multi-facetedness of vision, an acuity of perception, and
an elegance of expression that will guarantee its continued relevance for
the generations of the twenty-first century.
No less so, we assert, will Sartre's salient translations of his theoretical
stances into the practical sphere of political writing and action: for, if the
obverse face of the coin is freedom, its reverse is responsibility. Where
(alas!) is there a playwright of genius capable of stigmatising torture in
Guantanamo Bay, or anywhere else, as Sartre denounced French
brutalities in Algeria with the allegorical Condemned ofAltonal Where is
the committed global intellectual capable of denouncing illegal wars and
their concomitant crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan—"the world's richest
nations bombing the world's poorest"—with the eloquence of Sartre,
chairing the Russell Tribunal on American genocide in Vietnam? Where is
the unsurpassed polemicist capable of writing a fitting sequel to Sartre's
"Elections, piege a cons" ("Elections, idiot-traps"), critiquing the
grotesque distortions of supposedly democratic systems that gave the
world Tony Blair and George W. Bush? If Sartre could write his
devastating "Preface" to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth,
spectacularly exposing the murderous colonialising mindset, in 1961,
why—almost fifty years later—can we not find a worthy successor to
decry the hegemonic western institutions that continue to hold poor
African nations in thrall? And if Sartre, sometimes called "the first thirdworldist",
could write (as early as 1970!) a coruscating piece entitled "Le
tiers monde commence en banlieue" ("The Third World starts in the
suburbs"), why, nearly forty years on, is that still true—not only in France,

Xll Introduction
but throughout western Europe and in the US—and who will say so?
"There is somebody missing here: it's Sartre." 1
It is incumbent upon those of us who read and discuss Sartre to keep
asking such questions, to make his voice ceaselessly heard, in absentia:
there is never a good time for not asking difficult questions, and the
irrepressibly contestatory (and incorrigibly self-contestatory) discourse of
the pugnacious little polymath, Sartre, was never more needed than now.
Whilst predominantly American and British forces enter their sixth year of
illegal occupation of countries in the Middle East; whilst the "free market"
of western capitalism—allegedly, irreversibly triumphant over Eastern
Bloc communism only twenty years ago—finds itself (at the time of
writing) apparently in complete meltdown; whilst some partially medieval
regimes—China (murdering up to 8,000 of its own citizens annually for
petty offences), or India (with its handful of super-rich and tens of millions
of super-poor), or Saudi Arabia (still forbidding women to go out alone,
much less vote)—continue to earn the fawning respect of post-
Enlightenment western democracies, where is Sartre? Vivant (alive), as he
himself wrote in his touching tribute to the lately deceased Andre Gide, for
example. 2
In the absence of any comparable colossus, however, the onus is on us
(as the word suggests) to keep asking awkward questions. Not merely to
turn political satire into harmless TV comedy (like Jon Stewart in the US
or Rory Bremner in the UK), nor even to campaign earnestly, if not always
effectually (like the brilliant and admirable journalists, John Pilger in the
UK or Michael Moore in the US), but at least to keep interrogating—like
Voltaire, like Hugo, like Zola—the mindless cliches of a smug bourgeois,
or first-world, elitism. What is a "terrorist"? And what an "extremist"?
And what a "fundamentalist"? And what an "asylum-seeker"? And what
an "immigrant"? And what a "refugee"? Are we really "all middle-class
now"? Who cares, and what would it matter? We need a Sartre to question
the unthinking shibboleths of a self-deceiving western quietism, of a
consumerist capitalism radically "in bad faith", and to do so by way of
every available medium. For want of any obvious successor—Bernard-
Henri L£vy is manifestly more photogenic than Sartre, but markedly less
subversive—Sartre himself must continue to speak to the present age, and
he still has plenty to say that we would do well to heed.
"II y a quelqu'un qui manque ici: c'est Sartre" (Sartre, Les Mots, Paris:
Gallimard, 1964,93).
2 The time of writing being October-November 2008, it is with relief and optimism
that we welcome a shaft of light suddenly penetrating this gathering gloom,
namely the election to the US Presidency of Senator Barack Obama.

Sartre's Second Century xm
We venture to hope, therefore, that the present collection—bringing
together essays by promising postgraduates, young academics in their
prime, established and emeritus professors as well as formally retired
scholars from the UK, USA, Canada and continental Europe, and covering
many aspects of Sartre's astoundingly multi-dimensional work—will play
some small part in making Sartre's indispensable voice heard in this, his
"second century".

CHAPTER ONE
SARTRE: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
DAVID DRAKE
Paris, Saturday 19 April 1980. An estimated 50,000 people are lining
the streets of the capital to pay their final respects as the funeral cortege of
the most important French intellectual of the twentieth century wends its
way to Montparnasse cemetery. Jean-Paul Sartre eclipsed all his fellowintellectuals
not only in terms of the fame and notoriety he enjoyed, but
also in the sheer volume and variety of his ceuvre. For example, Albert
Camus, like Sartre, was a novelist and a playwright but a lightweight as far
as philosophy was concerned; Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a serious
philosopher but, unlike Sartre had no literary aspirations. Nor did
Raymond Aron, the self-styled spectateur engage (committed spectator)
whom Sartre had known during his student days, make any claims as a
literary figure. He, like Sartre, penned articles on contemporary politics,
but his sober liberal writings were the antithesis of Sartre's polemical
prose. How and why did Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, born in Paris
on 21 June 1905, become one of the most famous Frenchmen of modern
times? This is the question that this mini-biography will attempt to
answer. 1
Following the death of Jean-Paul's father, a mere fifteen months after
Sartre's birth, Jean-Paul and his mother were obliged to move in with her
parents, first in the Paris suburb of Meudon and later in a flat near the
Sorbonne University. Jean-Paul was a rather sickly child and, around the
age of three or four, an infantile infection caused him to lose most of the
use of his right eye. "Poulou", as Sartre was known within the family, had
a very isolated early childhood: he only attended school very intermittently
and until the age of ten remained alone with an old man (his maternal
grandfather) and two women (his maternal grandmother and his mother).
He was largely educated at home by his grandfather, a former teacher who
1 This chapter was contributed by the author at the invitation of the editors.

2 Chapter One
had come out of retirement in order to fund his newly-expanded
household. For his part, Sartre would later claim that he had taught himself
to read and write on his own and was soon writing stories inspired by the
tales of derring-do that he loved reading.
In his autobiography Les Mots {Words), Sartre asserts that this passion
for writing that he discovered at an early age provided him with a
justification for his existence. In October 1915, he enrolled at the Lycee
Henri IV, and by the end of the year was deemed to be excellent from
every point of view. In April 1917, Sartre's mother remarried, this time to
Joseph Mancy, a factory manager. Sartre was mortified: another had
appropriated his mother, who had been more like a sister to him. A month
later, M. et Mme Mancy—with Sartre in tow—moved to La Rochelle,
where Mancy took up a new post as head of a shipyard and Sartre started
attending the local boys' lycee. He would later describe the next three or
four years as the worst years of his life. He had been snatched away from
new-found school-friends in Paris, including Paul Nizan, who shared his
passion for writing. He disliked and continued to be jealous of his
stepfather. Mancy, for his part, was hostile to Sartre's literary aspirations
and attempted to steer him towards science and maths. Furthermore, Sartre
found it difficult to adjust to his new school, where the perception of him
as a precocious Parisian led to him being subjected to much bullying. His
unhappiness led him to abandon his efforts at writing and, in 1920,
although his school results were quite satisfactory, his mother and Mancy
decided to send him back to school in Paris, where he would be away from
"bad influences".
Sartre was now reunited with Nizan and the two became inseparable.
While they pursued their secondary school studies, they discussed
literature endlessly and, importantly, they wrote. In 1924, both Nizan and
Sartre passed the competitive entry examination to the prestigious Ecole
Normale Superieure (ENS) that, Sartre later observed, marked the
beginning of his independence and the start of four years of happiness. At
the ENS, although he decided to specialise in philosophy, he read as
widely as he did voluminously, devouring contemporary literature,
philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, in an attempt, as he
expressed it, to become the man who knows most. His reputation as a
diligent worker with a frighteningly powerful intellect co-existed with that
of an anti-authoritarian rebel renowned for his pranks against symbols of
authority and convention. However, while his friends turned towards
political commitment—Raymond Aron towards the socialists of the
Section frangaise de VInternationale ouvriere (French Section of the
Workers' International, or SFIO), and Nizan towards the French Communist

Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 3
Party (PCF)—Sartre displayed no such inclination. He remained a rebel
but, for the moment, a rebel without a cause.
In 1928, to the astonishment of his fellow-students, Sartre failed the
final exam (UAgregatiori) because, he later said, he had tried to be too
original. The following July, while revising for the re-sit, he met Simone
de Beauvoir, known to her friends as le Castor? and who was to become
his life-long companion. Soon after the publication of the exam results—
in which Sartre came first and Beauvoir was placed second—Beauvoir
accepted Sartre's terms for their relationship. They would not get married,
nor would their relationship be monogamous: theirs would be "a necessary
love", but they would also experience "contingent loves".
After completing his military service, Sartre took up a post as a
philosophy teacher at the lycee in the port of Le Havre, while Beauvoir
was appointed to a girls' school in Marseille, hundreds of miles away.
Since the Agregation was the highest teaching qualification, working in a
lycee was the logical progression from the ENS. And yet Sartre had mixed
feelings about the prospect. On the one hand, it was not too onerous, a
secure job that offered a reasonable salary and long holidays which would
allow plenty of time for writing and travelling. On the other hand, as a
teacher, he would be expected to be an authority figure who enforced rules
and regulations and set an example to his pupils. Furthermore, by now
Sartre had extended the deep antipathy he felt for his stepfather to the class
of which he was a typical representative, namely the bourgeoisie. Sartre
tried to square the circle of his new situation by living in a somewhat rundown
hotel near the station and refusing to conform to the role of teacher
as it was conventionally defined. Not only did he give a talk at the end-ofyear
prize-giving ceremony on the cinema, which was definitely not
considered a "proper" topic, but he also adopted a very relaxed manner
with his pupils in school, and went drinking and playing cards—and even
visited a brothel with them—outside class. It was shortly after his arrival
in Le Havre that he began his work on what he called his "factum on
contingency". The book, which was both literary and philosophical (and
would become La Nausee), was set in Bouville ("Mudtown"), a French
provincial port that drew on both La Rochelle and Le Havre.
Sartre spent the academic year 1933-34 in Berlin while Raymond Aron
replaced him at Le Havre. Aron had talked to Sartre about the German
philosopher Edmund Husserl and phenomenology. Sartre was keen to find
out more about Husserl's notion of intentionality that posited that
2 A punning conceit: "castor" means "beaver" (cf. "Beauvoir") in Latin, and
beavers are notoriously industrious, as was Simone de Beauvoir.

4 Chapter One
consciousness is always conscious of something. In Berlin, Sartre's main
intellectual activities involved engaging with Husserl's writings and
working on his novel on contingency. While he found himself in
agreement with much of Husserl, Sartre concluded that the ego was not
located within consciousness, as Husserl contended, but was itself an
object of consciousness. When he was not writing and researching, Sartre
spent much time hanging around in the bars and cabarets of the capital,
apparently little concerned by the political drama unfolding around him,
following Hitler's seizure of power the previous January.
In the autumn of 1934, Sartre returned to Le Havre in time for the new
academic year. Despite the fact that Beauvoir was now teaching in Rouen,
only an hour away, Sartre was soon plunged into depression. He disliked
being a teacher and saw himself as a balding, portly, failed writer. This
sentiment was reinforced when, in 1936, Gallimard rejected his novel on
contingency. In the course of the same year, Sartre and Beauvoir formed
an intense three-way relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz, a former pupil
of Beauvoir's, upon whom Sartre became fixated. Beauvoir later published
a fictionalised account of this episode entitled UInvitee (She Came to
Stay). Sartre supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War,
which had just begun, and welcomed the victory of the Popular Front in
France, although he had abstained from voting. But despite his sympathy
for leftwing or progressive causes, Sartre continued to abstain from
political activity.
By 1937, Beauvoir had secured a teaching job in Paris while Sartre
was now teaching in the well-heeled western suburb of Neuilly. Both were
living (in separate rooms) in a hotel in the 14 th arrondissement of Paris,
and Sartre's future as a writer was now looking more promising. In 1936
his book entitled L'Imagination appeared, and the following year saw the
publication of his critique of Husserl, La Transcendance de Vego (The
Transcendence of the Ego), and of a short story, "Le Mur" ("The Wall"),
which appeared in France's most prestigious literary review, La Nouvelle
Revue frangaise (NRF). Other short stories appeared in 1938 and were
subsequently published in a single collection as Le Mur. In 1938,
Gallimard finally published Sartre's work on contingency, whose title had
been changed from Sartre's Melancholia to Gallimard's La Nausee
(Nausea). Nausea is the record of Antoine Roquentin's attempts to
understand the nature of a deep sense of unease that he periodically
experiences. After considering and discarding various hypotheses,
Roquentin understands, in a blinding insight, that everything in the world,
including himself, is contingent, that is to say exists without any a priori
reason: it just is.

Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 5
By the end of the 1930s, Sartre was beginning to establish himself on
the Paris literary scene. La Nausee had been well received, as had Le Mur,
and he was contributing book reviews on a regular basis to the NRF,
including a highly critical one on Francois Mauriac, which provoked an
outcry. 3 However, in September 1939 Sartre's life, like that of millions of
other French people, was thrown into disarray by the declaration of war.
Sartre was one of the five million Frenchmen mobilised in the first ten
days of September. Suddenly, the anti-conformist, anti-authoritarian,
passionately independent budding writer was thrust into the world of rules,
regulations and uniforms. To begin with he had a pretty easy time of it.
Throughout the "Phoney War" (from September 1939 to May 1940) he
was assigned to a meteorological unit operating in the east of France
where his duties were far from onerous, leaving plenty of time for reading,
thinking and writing. He continued with his novel L'Age de raison (The
Age of Reason) that he had begun in the autumn of 1938. He kept
notebooks, published posthumously as Carnets de la drole de guerre (War
Diaries), in which he recorded his thoughts about his daily life and his life
hitherto, as well as his thoughts about ethics and the philosophy of
existence, which were informed by his reading of Kierkegaard, Heidegger
and Hegel. He also wrote daily to his mother as well as to Beauvoir and
other friends. In all, it is estimated that he wrote over a million words
during this period.
This somewhat tranquil and largely uneventful existence was shattered
by the German offensive of May 1940. On 23 May, Paul Nizan was killed
near Dunkirk. Almost a month later, on his thirty-fifth birthday (21 June),
Sartre was captured and incarcerated in a POW camp near Trier where,
despite his uncompromising atheism, he made friends with a number of
priests. He later stated that he had found in the camp a "form of collective
existence" that he had not known since his time at the ENS, and that on the
whole he was happy there. At Christmas 1940, Sartre wrote, directed and
performed in an allegorical "nativity" play, Bariona, which he hoped
would act as an antidote to the pervasive spirit of defeatism and
resignation. In mid-March 1941, he managed to wangle his release from
the camp and made his way back to Paris, where he expressed his intention
to form a resistance group. This he duly did by gathering together a
number of friends, including Simone de Beauvoir, and joining forces with
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's embryonic resistance group, Sous la botte
(Under the Jackboot), to create Socialisme et Liberte (Socialism and
Freedom).
3 Sartre, "M. Francois Mauriac et la libertd".

6
Chapter One
In the summer of 1941, Sartre and Beauvoir cycled to the south of
France where they attempted unsuccessfully to persuade Andre Gide,
Andre Malraux and Daniel Mayer (who had replaced Leon Blum as leader
of the SFIO) to join their resistance group. In the autumn, Sartre took up a
teaching post at the Lycee Condorcet in Paris, and at the same time he and
Merleau-Ponty decided to dissolve Socialisme et Liberte. They had failed
to break out of their isolation and the risks were out of all proportion to the
effectiveness of the group which was, to say the least, very limited.
With the end of Socialisme et Liberte, Sartre returned to writing with a
vengeance. He began he Sursis (The Reprieve), the sequel to L'Age de
raison, and at the same time was writing a dense treatise that fleshed out
many of the philosophical ideas he had developed during the Phoney War.
It was finally published in April 1943 under the title L'hre et le neant
(Being and Nothingness), but made very little impact at the time. Early in
1943, Sartre accepted the invitation from Jean Paulhan, former editor of
the NRF, to join the Comite national des ecrivains (National Writers'
Committee, or CNE), a PCF-sponsored, broad-front writers' resistance
organisation. He had already contributed articles to resistance publications,
including a review of Camus's Vttranger (The Outsider), and now began
writing for the CNE's clandestine publication, Les Lettres frangaises. In
June, Sartre's play, Les Mouches (The Flies), based on the Greek myth of
Orestes and Electra, with Olga Kosakiewicz in the role of the latter, began
a short run in Paris. Sartre was convinced that he had fooled the German
censors and had succeeded in presenting a resistance play in occupied
Paris. While it is true that the play argued for a rejection of passivity and
bad faith, and embraced the notion of taking responsibility for one's
actions, it remains debatable whether the audiences understood it as a
resistance play per se. The following year saw the staging of what is
probably Sartre's most famous play, Huis clos, known in English as In
Camera, or No Exit, and containing the celebrated, if misunderstood line:
"Hell is other people." The play, in which two women and a man are
condemned to live for eternity within the same enclosed space, is a
dramatisation of sections ofL'&re et le neant that explore the difficulty of
establishing authentic interpersonal relations. In August 1944, Paris was
liberated and an account of these historic days appeared under Sartre's
name in the newspaper Combat, with which Camus had been closely
associated. Summing up his role during the war long after the event, Sartre
stated that he was a writer who resisted and not a resistant who wrote. 4
Sartre, (Euvres romanesques, lviii.

Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 7
The war, Sartre later remarked, had divided his life in two. His
experiences as a soldier and as a POW had taught him that he was,
whether he liked it or not, a social being, and that he could no longer stand
apart from society and his historical context. It was this desire to engage
with his times that had led him to write Bariona and Les Mouches, and to
try to form a resistance group.
In the wake of the Liberation, Sartre's public persona underwent a
dramatic transformation. Whereas before the war he was becoming known
in Parisian literary circles as a writer, in the autumn of 1945 he was frontpage
news, leading him to observe that it was not pleasant to be treated as
a public monument in one's own lifetime. September saw the
simultaneous publication of his novels, L'Age de raison and Le Sursis, and
the following month the first issue of Les Temps modernes, a review
launched by Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, appeared. Sartre's
preface, in which he argued that the writer was inevitably implicated in his
times, either by his words or by his silences, provoked uproar in the
literary world. These publications underpinned what Beauvoir called "the
existentialist offensive" of the autumn of 1945.
In post-Liberation Paris, Sartre's name was inextricably linked to the
term "existentialism". Such was the popularity of existentialism, and so
widespread was the misunderstanding of what it meant, that in October
Sartre felt obliged to give a public lecture to set the record straight. 5
Briefly put, Sartre's atheistic "philosophy of existence" posited that
existence preceded essence, that is to say we exist but we are not "fixed".
We embark on a continual process of becoming through the choices we
make. At the core of this philosophy lies the notion of freedom: we are
free and we alone are responsible for the choices we make. To pretend
otherwise is to fall into "bad faith".
"Freedom" after the dark years of Nazi occupation caught the spirit of
the times, especially when coupled with responsibility. An "existential"
perspective allowed people to take responsibility for what they had (or had
not) done during the Occupation and also gave them a philosophical and
moral basis on which to re-invent themselves. "Existentialism" was also
used to refer to a fashionable "anything goes" life-style particularly
adopted by middle-class youth, whose habitat was the caves (cellars) of St
Germain-des-Pre's. In this context, the popular press carried lurid stories of
Sartre's allegedly sordid, bohemian existence that inevitably dwelt on his
"immoral relationship" with Simone de Beauvoir.
5 Later published as UExistentialisme est un humanisme.

8 Chapter One
Sartre had hoped to express his political commitment through working
closely with the PCF, as he had done at the end of the war in the CNE.
However, this was not to be. While he was sympathetic to the Party's aims
and recognised that it had the support of the bulk of the working class with
whom he sympathised, he rejected its espousal of historical and dialectical
materialism and objected to many of its political methods. The Party, for
its part, launched unremitting attacks on Sartre's novels, plays and
philosophy, as well as his petit-bourgeois background, and his politics.
The main reason for the ferocity of the attacks, which lasted throughout
the 1940s, was that the PCF was threatened by the popularity of Sartre's
ideas, especially among young people whom the Party was keen to recruit.
In the second half of the 1940s, Sartre continued to provoke scandal
and upset amongst both individuals and groups across the political
spectrum. In November 1946, he presented as a double-bill Morts sans
sepulture (usually translated as Men Without Shadows)? and La Putain
respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute). 1 The first, set during the
Occupation, provoked a walk-out by Raymond Aron and his wife on the
opening night because of the violence of scenes depicting the torture of
resistants; the second, an attack on racism in the USA, led to charges of
anti-Americanism. A year later, Sartre caused uproar again when a radio
programme, presented by the team of Les Temps modernes, compared de
Gaulle with Hitler; and in April 1948 his play, Les Mains sales (Dirty
Hands)? inspired in part by the assassination of Leon Trotsky, brought
forth yet more bile from the PCF who condemned it as an anti-Communist
work. In the same year, the Vatican placed Sartre's works on the infamous
Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of forbidden books). By now the
Cold War was an undisputed fact of life, and political differences were
taking their toll on Sartre's friendships. In 1947, he broke with Aron and a
more recent acquaintance, Arthur Koestler, a former Communist now
turned rabid anti-communist. Relations with Camus, another former
Communist who objected to Sartre's refusal to condemn the USSR, were
also somewhat strained.
Sartre had visited the USA immediately after the war and, although
there were aspects of the USA that he liked, he was opposed to American
foreign policy. At the same time, despite a degree of sympathy for the
USSR, he was of the opinion that "the politics of Stalinist communism
6
Although the French literally means "dead persons without tombs", or "unburied
dead".
7
Frequently mistranslated as The Respectable Prostitute.
8
Originally mistranslated in the US as Red Gloves and in the UK as Crime
passionnel.

Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 9
were incompatible with the honest practice of being a professional
writer". 9 Early in 1948, Sartre joined the Rassemblement democratique
revolutionnaire (RDR), a newly formed revolutionary socialist movement
which rejected both Soviet-style communism and American-style
capitalism. The group failed, both in its attempt to form a mass
organisation and to maintain a "democratic, revolutionary socialist"
middle way. After the organisation lurched to the right, Sartre resigned in
October 1949.
In the second half of the decade, Sartre expressed an interest in the
Jewish question. In 1946, he had published Reflexions sur la question juive
(Reflections on the Jewish Question), and in February 1948 he appeared as
a witness for a former pupil accused of storing arms for the terrorist group
Stern, who were fighting the British in Palestine. The following month,
Sartre declared his support for the creation of the state of Israel.
At Les Temps modernes it was Merleau-Ponty who was de facto the
political editor. Initially on good terms with the PCF and more
sympathetic to Marxism than was Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was becoming
increasingly disillusioned with the USSR. In January 1950, an article
written by Merleau-Ponty, and signed by him and Sartre, appeared in Les
Temps modernes denouncing the Soviet camps. That summer, the outbreak
of the Korean War was the tipping point for Merleau-Ponty, who viewed
the crossing of the 38 th parallel by Soviet-backed North Korean troops as
incontrovertible evidence that the USSR was as bellicose and expansionist
as the USA. He declared that he would refuse to comment, and urged that
Les Temps modernes do the same. Sartre, for his part, remained sceptical
but unsettled by Merleau-Ponty's stance. Sartre's political uncertainty
reflected his inability to resolve the contradiction between the intellectual
and the man of action, a dilemma articulated by Goetz, the hero of Sartre's
play, Le Diable et le bon Dieu (The Devil and the Good Lord), which
opened in June 1951.
The growing polarisation of the Cold War, Sartre's sympathy for the
working class, who continued to support the PCF, and the Party's desire to
broaden its support among the French intelligentsia were creating the
conditions for a rapprochement between Sartre and the Communists. It
came in 1952, when Sartre accepted an offer from leading members of the
Party to join its campaign to free Henri Martin, a sailor imprisoned for five
years for his opposition to French military involvement in Indochina.
Sartre secured an interview with Vincent Auriol, the French president, and
9 "[L]a politique du communisme stalinien est incompatible avec l'exercice
honnete du metier littdraire: [...]" ("Qu'est-ce que la littfrature?", 280, my
translation).

10 Chapter One
undertook to write a book about the affair. In the summer, while he was in
Italy, Sartre learned of a massive anti-Communist crackdown in Paris
following violent demonstrations against Ridgway, an American general,
accused (wrongly) of sanctioning the use of chemical weapons in Korea.
Seething with rage and suspecting that the French ruling elite were
preparing a coup d'etat, Sartre returned to Paris where he wrote furiously
day and night to produce Les Communistes et la paix (The Communists
and Peace), which marked the beginning of a four-year period as a fellowtraveller.
In the summer of 1952, Les Temps modernes published Sartre's
acerbic response to a letter by Albert Camus, written after Les Temps
modernes had published a scathing review of Camus's book, VHomme
revoke (The Rebel), The two men never spoke again.
Between 1952 and 1956, Sartre's literary output was far lower than in
previous years. He wrote two plays. Kean, based on the life of the English
Shakespearean actor, Edmund Kean (and first performed in November
1953), and Nekrassov, a biting satire on the bourgeois popular press (first
performed in June 1955). He also produced a lengthy biographical essay
on the playwright Jean Genet. But most of his energy was being expended
supporting the Communist-backed peace movement and encouraging
contacts between writers from the East and West. In 1952, he attended the
international peace conference in Vienna, an event to which he attached
the same importance as the victory of the Popular Front and the
Liberation. In 1954, he made the first of a number of visits to the USSR,
and in 1955 he and Beauvoir visited China where Sartre met Chairman
Mao Zedong. In November 1956, as a result of the Soviet invasion of
Hungary and the PCF's enthusiastic endorsement of it, Sartre distanced
himself from the French Communists and also resigned from the Franco-
Soviet Friendship Society, of which he had been elected Vice-President in
1954.
For Sartre, the next few years were dominated by his engagement with
the theory and practice of Marxism and his increasingly radical opposition
to French involvement in Algeria. In relation to Marxism, Sartre was
attempting to understand what the Soviet intervention in Hungary revealed
about the USSR, and concluded that it could only escape its state of
ossification by a comprehensive process of de-Stalinisation. Sartre had
earlier expressed his sympathy for Tito's Yugoslavia and now supported
the beginnings of liberalisation in Poland which he visited in January
1957. He was also starting to explore the compatibility between Marxism
and existentialism that resulted in an article "Questions de me*thode"
("Search for a Method") which appeared in Les Temps modernes in
September and October 1957. By now, Sartre, fuelled by amphetamine-

Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 11
based drugs, was frenetically working on a substantial philosophical
treatise in which he attempted to extricate Marxism from the impasse in
which it was locked, to develop it and adapt it to contemporary conditions.
It was published in 1960 as Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of
Dialectical Reason).
January 1956, the month in which Sartre made his first speech on
events in Algeria, coincided with the appointment of Guy Mollet as Prime
Minister. Mollet soon secured "special powers" and doubled the number
of French soldiers serving in Algeria. As the independence movement
headed by the Front de Liberation Rationale (FLN) gathered momentum,
disturbing accounts of the use of torture by the French army began to
circulate. Sartre initially attacked the oppression, super-exploitation and
violence to which the colonized peoples of Algeria were subjected and
which condemned them to a life of misery and ignorance, but he was soon
denouncing the use of torture by the French army as well.
In May 1958, with France threatened by an army coup, de Gaulle
returned to power, an event that prompted a resurgence of Sartre's
antipathy to le General, whom he now suspected of intending to establish
a dictatorship. The massive endorsement, by referendum, of de Gaulle and
a new Constitution in September only served to increase Sartre's sense of
foreboding and his despair with his fellow-citizens, whom he was soon
lambasting for their indifference over Algeria where the war continued. In
September 1959, he staged a new play, Les Sequestres d*Altona (The
Condemned of Altona), which explored notions of torture, guilt and
national responsibility. Although the play was set in post-Nazi Germany, it
clearly resonated with events in Algeria.
In February and March 1960, Sartre and Beauvoir visited Cuba for a
month where they met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and announced their
enthusiastic support for the Cuban revolution. In May, Sartre went to
Yugoslavia where Tito received him. Back in France, he was soon
expressing his support for conscripts who refused to serve in Algeria, and
asserting his solidarity with a clandestine FLN support network headed by
a former colleague at Les Temps modernes, Francis Jeanson. Not only did
Sartre march and continue to protest against French policy in Algeria, but
he was also now explicitly supporting the use of unrestrained violence by
the FLN against Europeans in Algeria, as his notorious preface to Frantz
Fanon's book, Les Damnes de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), clearly
illustrated. 10 Sartre's vigorous opposition to French policy in Algeria had
already led to an anti-Sartre backlash when, in October 1960, pro-French
See Sartre, "PreTace".

12 Chapter One
Algeria demonstrators took to the streets chanting "Fusillez Sartre!"
("Shoot Sartre!"). In July 1961, Sartre's Paris flat was bombed by rightwing
ultras, and was bombed again the following January.
After the declaration of Algerian independence in June 1962, Sartre
again turned his attention towards the USSR, which he visited nine times
over the next four years. His official motivation was to resume his role as
a builder of bridges between writers in the East and West (which he had
relinquished in 1956) and to support "progressive oppositionists" among
the Soviet intellectuals. But another reason for his visits was that he had
formed an amorous relationship with his guide and interpreter, Lena
Zonina. In the early 1960s, Sartre returned to an earlier project, namely
revisiting his childhood in order to understand the source of his obsession
with writing and being a writer. The resulting account of his life, up to the
time of his mother's remarriage, was published as Les Mots {Words) in Les
Temps modernes in 1963 and in book form, dedicated to "Madame Z"
(Lena Zonina), a year later. In the same year, Sartre was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature, which he declined as he thought this distinction
would turn him into a "literary monument" and limit his freedom to speak
out on political issues.
From the mid-1960s, Sartre demonstrated his opposition to American
involvement in Vietnam. In 1965, he turned down an invitation to speak at
Cornell University and the following July accepted Bertrand Russell's
invitation to join the "tribunal" that Russell was establishing to investigate
American war crimes: in May 1967, Sartre became its executive president.
The Middle East, with its seemingly intractable question of Arab-Israeli
relations, was another area of renewed interest for Sartre at this time. He
had been an unconditional supporter of Israel's right to exist since the end
of World War n, but by the mid-1960s he had become more sensitive to
the plight of the Palestinians. In 1967 he travelled to Egypt with Beauvoir
and their friend (and her lover), Claude Lanzmann, where they were joined
by one of Sartre's former mistresses, Arlette El Kai'm, whom he had
legally adopted as his daughter in 1965.
Sartre's international reputation as a philosopher, as a writer, and as
the very personification of "the committed intellectual", was at its zenith.
In France, existentialism was no longer fashionable and Sartre was being
eclipsed by a new generation of structuralist and post-structuralist
philosophers that included Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Sartre
was now perceived as something of an elder statesman on the intellectual
stage but—like many elder statesmen—he seemed to have lost much of his
relevance and his ability to inspire.

Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 13
However, when the revolt by students and workers erupted in May
1968, Sartre was quick to reach for his pen and sign petitions to support
the students, to castigate the French system of university education, to
denounce the repressive actions of the riot police, and to urge unity
between workers and students. After the revolt fizzled out in June, Sartre
turned on the PCF, whom he accused of objectively siding with de Gaulle
and of opposing student-worker unity—in short, of betraying the "May
revolution". In the summer, Sartre also broke definitively with the USSR,
following its invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring"
programme of reform initiated a few months earlier by Alexander Dubcek.
The "events" of May-June 1968 had revealed the existence of a
vibrant revolutionary potential within French society, but also led Sartre to
reconsider the persona of the committed intellectual that he had epitomised
hitherto. He now concluded that it was not enough for the intellectual
simply to support those in struggle against oppression, the intellectual had
to be an integrated part of the struggle. This was a far cry from his view
of the intellectual that he had outlined in a series of talks in Japan in 1965,
when he presented the intellectual as living in a kind of no man's land
viewed with suspicion by the working class, as a traitor by the ruling class,
and as a would-be fugitive from his own class which he never quite
manages to escape. 11
Sartre soon had the opportunity to put into practice his notion of what
he called the "revolutionary intellectual" or "new intellectual". In April
1970, leaders of the Gauche proletarienne (Proletarian Left), a Maoist
group, asked Sartre to take legal responsibility for the group's newspaper
La Cause du peuple {The People's Cause). Although Sartre had his
political differences with the Maoists, he approved of their spontaneous
approach to revolutionary politics, their refusal to respect "bourgeois"
legality, and their willingness to embark on "symbolically violent actions",
as when they openly stole food from an up-market store and distributed it
among the down-at-heel inhabitants of the suburbs. He admired the
militants who had "de-intellectualised" themselves by abandoning their
studies and going to work in factories. Sartre was on very friendly terms
with the Maoist leadership, especially Benny L£vy (alias, Pierre Victor),
with whom he would discuss politics and philosophy for hours on end.
Also, unlike his experience as a Communist fellow traveller when the
Party discouraged any contact between workers and intellectuals, Sartre's
involvement with the Maoists led to exchanges with workers, in particular
with Renault car workers and with miners from the Pas de Calais.
11 See Sartre, "Plaidoyer", 426.

14
Chapter One
Despite his age and frail health, Sartre engaged in actions with the
Maoists. He sold La Cause du peuple on the streets at a time when
possession of a single copy could mean a fine or even a prison sentence.
He addressed the workers outside the Renault car plant, and on another
occasion even tried to hold a meeting inside the factory. He took part in an
illegal occupation of the Sacre Coeur basilica to protest at police brutality.
Sartre's Maoist period was the most politically radical of his life. It
also coincided with one of his most ambitious literary projects, namely his
multi-volume study of the nineteenth-century novelist, Gustave Flaubert.
Sartre had read Flaubert as a child, returning to him again during his time
at the ENS, and again during the Occupation. In the 1950s, he wrote about
1,000 pages of an existentialist analysis of the author of Madame Bovary
before abandoning it. In 1971, the first two volumes of U Idiot de la
famille {The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857) were published,
followed by a third in 1972, making a total of over 3,000 pages. Two more
volumes were promised, but in June 1973 disaster struck when Sartre lost
the use of his "good" eye, rendering him almost blind. He realised that he,
who had written for up to ten hours a day for fifty years, would never write
again. Undeterred, he began work with Benny Levy on a political history
of the twentieth century for television, but opposition from the political
establishment resulted in the project being aborted. Now Sartre turned to
collaborative writing with Levy, who had been his secretary since 1973
and with whom he had formed a close relationship. Some thought Levy's
challenging engagement with Sartre's views had a rejuvenating effect on
him. Others, especially Sartre's old friends—and in particular Simone de
Beauvoir—who were marginalised by Levy's forceful presence,
considered L6\y to be an interloper, taking advantage of a frail old man
and forcing Sartre to accept Levy's views as his own. Despite his
infirmity, Sartre travelled to Germany in December 1974 to visit Andreas
Baader, co-founder of the Red Army Fraction, in prison; and in April 1975
he went to Portugal to see what life was like after the overthrow of the
fascist regime. In June 1979 there was a rapprochement of sorts with
Raymond Aron, when both went to the Palais de l'Elysee, trying to secure
assistance for the Vietnamese boat people from the then-President, Valery
Giscard d'Estaing.
Ldvy continued to play a prominent role in Sartre's life and, in 1979,
organised a meeting of Arab and Israeli intellectuals in Paris, but it was
not a success, and Sartre played a minor part. In March 1980, Le Nouvel
Observateur's intention to publish three dialogues between Levy and
Sartre confirmed the worst fears of Sartre's entourage, for it appeared to
them that Levy had pressured Sartre into denying some of the

Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 15
philosophical notions he had held most dear. Was it a case of an old man
taking the line of least resistance, or of a philosopher doing once again
what he had always done, namely to think against himself? In any event,
Sartre rejected attempts by Beauvoir and others to prevent publication, and
personally telephoned the editor of the weekly magazine to insist that the
articles appear. On 20 March, while the dispute was still raging, Sartre was
rushed to hospital and died three weeks later, on 15 April.
Despite a large exhibition at the Bibliotheque Nationale in 2005 to
mark the centenary of Sartre's birth, the celebration of the man and his
works in his native country was more muted than in the rest of the world,
where Sartre is still (as it were) alive and well. Sartre's reputation rests on
the staggering breadth of his oeuvre for—as a leading North American
Sartre scholar, Ronald Aronson, has observed—it is possible to study
Sartre in relation to topics as diverse as Marxism, colonialism, the
developing world, violence, racism, art, music, fiction, the theatre and the
cinema. 12
Whereas Sartre remains one of the most studied of all French thinkers
or literary figures, his relevance and significance are not restricted to the
relatively closed world of academia. Sartre's philosophy of freedom is a
practical philosophy, as he himself demonstrated. His willingness to
question himself, to think against himself, to explore the tensions between
the man he had been, the man he was, and the man he wanted to become,
underpins the dynamic nature of his life. His philosophy, both at a
personal level and at a broader level, is an optimistic and generous one.
From 1945 until his death, he marched (until he was too frail), wrote,
proclaimed and agitated to oppose all forms of oppression and
exploitation, in particular racism, colonialism and imperialism. He was
convinced that the world could be a different and better place, although,
true to his anti-determinist philosophy, he never assumed that it
necessarily would be.
Works Cited
Aronson, Ronald. "Meanwhile: Jean-Paul Sartre at 100: Still Troubling Us
Today", International Herald Tribune, 22 June 2005.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. "M. Francois Mauriac et la liberte", La Nouvelle Revue
frangaise, no. 305, February 1939, 212-32; and in Situations, /. Paris:
Gallimard, 1947.
See Aronson, "Meanwhile".

16 Chapter One
—. (Euvres romanesques, (eds Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka). Paris:
Gallimard, 1981.
—. UExistentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Nagel, 1946.
—. "Qu'est-ce que la literature?", in Situations, II. Paris: Gallimard, 1948.
—. "Preface", in Frantz Fanon, Les Damnes de la terre. Paris: Maspero,
1961.
—. "Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels", in Situations, VIII. Paris: Gallimard,
1972.

CHAPTER TWO
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, ONTOLOGY
AND RESPONSIBILITY
ROY ELVETON
The following reflections explore the relationship between ontological
structures and structures of individual responsibility. 1 By the former, I
mean the kind of self-conscious, reflective concern with essential
structures of human experience exemplified in the phenomenological
philosophies of Heidegger and Sartre. By the latter, I mean the situated
historical reality of the philosopher and the thinker's response to and
acknowledgment of this situation.
The question of an individual thinker's responsibility for political
actions has recently focused intensively on Heidegger's relations with the
Nazi party. For example, it is a question central to the relationship between
Paul Celan, perhaps the most important European poet of the post-war
years, and Martin Heidegger. Recall the celebrated conversation between
Celan and Heidegger that occurred in Heidegger's Black Forest cabin on
25 July 1967, the aftermath of which has added to the continuing dismay
felt by many regarding Heidegger's relationship to the Third Reich. Celan,
fully expecting a public acknowledgment by Heidegger of his affiliation
with the Nazis during the 1930s, was so greatly disturbed by the absence of
any such confession that the two men remained thereafter estranged until
Celan's death by suicide in 1970.
While Sartre's stances on many social and political issues have also
been questioned and debated—notably his support of Stalinism—his own
candour has tended to defuse the question of responsibility in his case, just
as Heidegger's lack of candour has fueled the ongoing discussion of his
political actions and commitments.
1 A draft of this chapter was presented on 21 October 2006 to the 13 th Annual
Conference of the UK Sartre Society at the Institut Fran^ais, London.

18 Chapter Two
It will be useful to distinguish between the strictly autobiographical
question of individual responsibility and what I will term the "ontoautobiographical"
question of individual responsibility. The former
represents questions regarding how individuals may or may not have
decided to act and what responsibilities they may or may not have chosen
to accept. Whether or not Heidegger failed to publicly acknowledge his
Nazi past is an autobiographical question. However, whether Heidegger's
own thought succeeds in accommodating the question of the thinker's
individual responsibility is a further question, a question I will call an
"onto-autobiographical" one. Another way of phrasing this distinction is
by calling attention to what might be termed an individual's "categorical"
choices, choices in which ontological structures are directly at stake, such
as choices for freedom, or choices for communal, historical aims. An
underlying assumption here is that the relationship between ontological
reflection and individual action can be an important measure of a
philosophical position's coherence. Concerns of this kind clearly play an
important role, for example, in Kierkegaard's critical stance toward
Hegel's speculative idealism. Since both Sartre and Heidegger accept the
historically embedded nature of their ontological reflections, it is
reasonable to ask how thought and action might be correlated in their
philosophical reflections and how these accounts might in turn be
correlated with more autobiographical expressions.
Sartre
The case of Sartre is particularly significant in this connection. Sartre's
account of individual freedom shows a marked evolution from Being and
Nothingness to the later Critique of Dialectical Reason and The Family
Idiot, an evolution that reveals the increasing importance for Sartre of a
viable account of "embedded" freedom. The later Sartre also pays explicit
attention to the historical embeddedness of his own philosophical analyses.
The result is Sartre's recognition of both the self-referential nature of his
ontology and a self-critical development of a positive account of
individual responsibility. Taken together, these elements provide a useful
framework within which onto-autobiographical questions may be
addressed.
Being and Nothingness offers a rather uneasy alliance between the
individual and the individual's situation. In the important Part Four of
Being and Nothingness, Sartre addresses two dimensions of human
freedom: its situated nature and the for-itself s responsibility. Chapter 2 of
this section, "Freedom and Facticity: The Situation", expresses Sartre's

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility 19
central claim: "There can be a free for-itself only as engaged in a resisting
world. Outside of this engagement, the notions of freedom, of
determinism, of necessity lose all meaning." 2 The world within which the
for-itself exercises its freedom is a world of affordances and resistances,
both of which are measured in terms of the projects the for-itself has
adopted. The rock in front of me is an obstacle if I wish to reach the other
side, but it is an affordance if I intend to climb it. However, my projects do
not entirely create the situation that provides the opportunity for my
choice. The resisting world contains an irreducible "particular datum" 3
which freedom does not choose, for the freedom of the for-itself is not a
freedom to choose its existence, but is constrained to exercise its free
projects within the context of a given situation:
But what is this relationship to the given? Are we to understand by this that
the given (the in-itself) conditions freedom? Let us look more closely. The
given does not cause freedom (since it can only produce the given). Nor is
it the reason of freedom (since all "reason" comes into the world through
freedom). Neither is it the necessary condition of freedom since we are on
the level of pure contingency. Neither is it an indispensable matter upon
which freedom must exercise itself, for this would be to suppose that
freedom exists ready-made as an Aristotelian form or as a Stoic Pneuma
and that it looks for a matter to work in. The given in no way enters into
the constitution of freedom since freedom is interiorized as the internal
negation of the given. It is simply the pure contingency which freedom
exerts by denying the given while making itself a choice. 4
Sartre identifies the implications of this view of situated freedom for
human temporality. He notes that "the past (is) the essence which the foritself
was." 5 He adds that as a "nihilating withdrawal", the for-itself is a
nihilation of the given present and the past "essence". More significantly,
both nihilations form a "single reality". 6 However, the precise nature of
this "single reality" is unclear. Perhaps these nihilations are "single"
because they are nihilations resulting from one and the same spontaneous
act of the for-itself. In this case, their unity appears to be simply an
external one, consisting solely in the unconditioned spontaneity of the for-
2
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 483.
3
Ibid., 487.
4
Ibid.,486f.
5
Ibid., 487.
6
Ibid. We shall see below that the Sartre of the War Diaries offers a dissenting
analysis of this "single reality" of the negation of the present and the negation of
the past.

20 Chapter Two
itself. On the other hand, perhaps these nihilations are identical. However,
there appears to be a distinctive connection between the past and present
that makes my current situation an inheritance from my past actions and
that reunites me in the present with my past. Is my past in fact identically
"external" to me in the same way as the "particular datum" of the present
given elements of my worldly situation? Such a "bridging", as it were,
between the past and the present would appear to constitute at least a
necessary condition for a relationship of responsibility with respect to the
for-itself s past actions. But since, as Sartre notes, nothing, including the
past as a critical dimension of my situation, enters into the constitution of
my freedom, there is a sense in which the situated for-itself indeed remains
a "pure contingency" whose ontological core remains untouched by both
its history and its present situation. Nevertheless, the Sartrean formula: "I
am my past in the mode of not being it", appears to be an
oversimplification. To recognise my past action as something for which I
am now responsible would appear to entail a more substantial connection
than the Sartrean formula allows. Surely Sartre's claim regarding the
ontological status of the past is dictated by the need for the for-itself to
remain untouched by a single trace of the in-itself. However, the
possibility that a connection between my past and my present is at work
above and beyond my simply spontaneous and simultaneous nihilation of
them both (in the sense of their apparent "singleness" discussed above)
entails just such an ontological condition (at least within the confines of
the ontology outlined in Being and Nothingness). We shall see below that
an additional text of Sartre's outlines just such a condition.
We need not turn to Sartre's later works to discover sketches of such a
connection. Even as early as the War Diaries we find an important series
of reflections on the nature of situated, historical, temporal consciousness.
In several passages Sartre's comments strongly suggest that the
corresponding discussions in Being and Nothingness sketch an inadequate
account of the situated for-itself.
Sartre begins by noting that, while accepting Heidegger's account of
Dasein's projective nature in Being and Time, Heidegger's account is open
to a severe criticism. To claim, as Heidegger does, that Dasein "is" its
possibilities, is simply to create a new and useless form of immanence. 7
Rather than considering my possibilities as being contained within me as
(to employ Sartre's phrase) an Aristotelian form, "my possibilities" must
be thought of as belonging to my power to "escape myself." In addition to
their transcendent status, Sartre also stresses that my possibilities are
7 Sartre, War Diaries, 39.

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility 21
marked by temporality in a way that is only glossed over by this new form
of immanence:
All immanence is a dream state. Even the Heideggerian immanence, since
being rediscovers itself as possibilities beyond the world. And I am well
aware that there is time between the projecting being and the projected
possibilities. But as this time is read backwards, it loses its separating
virtue and ceases to be anything but the substance of Dasein's unity with
itself. 8
It may be noted in defence of Heidegger that Being and Time is
concerned primarily with Dasein's transcendental structures. As a result,
Sartre may be confusing structure with process. To say that Dasein's
possibilities are structurally contained in Dasein may not be to deny the
reality of the "there is time" but only serves to maintain the unity of lived
temporality at the level of ontological analysis. However, Sartre's own
analysis of "situation" in Being and Nothingness is subject to a criticism
parallel to that which he directs against Heidegger. To say that the
nihilation that results in the fact that "I am my past in the mode of not
being it" is singly conjoined with my negation of the present situation as it
is given to me, is to suggest incorrectly that my relation to my past is a
relationship of the same kind to something that is transcendent to me in the
sense in which the present given is transcendent to me. Yet my very
temporality ("there is time") would imply that my past is related to me in a
manner that is distinct from my relationship to my present. The
"immanence" of the nihilating nature of the for-itself abstracts from this
important difference.
Sartre's comments on Heidegger are followed later in the War Diaries
by an important discussion of the relationship between temporality and the
for-itself in which alternatives to the ontology of Being and Time are
proposed. Time, Sartre notes, is of a different nature than the in-itself. It is
also of a different nature than the for-itself. The passage in which these
claims occur deserves extended citation:
In La Nausee, I assert that the past is not; and earlier I tried to reduce
memory to a true fiction. In my lectures I used to exaggerate the share of
reconstruction in remembrance, because reconstruction operates in the
present. This incomprehension perfectly matched my lack of solidarity
with myself, which led me to judge my dead past insolently from the
vantage-point of my present. The difficulties of a theory of memory,
combined with the influence of Husserl, decided me to endow the past with
Ibid.

22 Chapter Two
a certain kind of existence [...]. I tried in La Psyche to derive time
dialectically from freedom. For me, it was a bold gesture. But all that
wasn't yet ripe. And, behold, I now glimpse a theory of time! I feel
intimidated before expounding it, I feel like a kid.
Let me first observe that time is not originally of the same nature as the
in-itself [...]. If I consider it from one point of view, it is; and if I consider
it from another point of view, it is not: the future is not yet, and the past is
no longer, the present vanishes into an infinitesimal point, time is now but
a dream.
I see clearly, too, that time is not—as contemporary theories would
have us believe—of the same nature as the for-itself. I'm not in time, that's
for sure. But I'm not my own time either, in the way that Heidegger means.
Otherwise there would be a temporal translucidity coinciding with the
translucidity of consciousness; consciousness would be time, inasmuch as
it would be consciousness of time. 9
One important consequence of this analysis is that, while the
temporality of the for-itself is defined in Being and Nothingness as not
being its past and not being its future, Sartre here understands that the foritself
is a being which, if not in time, is perhaps of time. 10 It is possible that
Sartre understands being "in time" in the same manner in which Being and
Nothingness understands "being in a situation". For Sartre, to be in a
situation is to confront possibilities. 11 Since my situation is defined by my
projects and since my projects are transparent to me by virtue of my freely
projecting them, my situation is defined by the translucidity possessed by
the spontaneous upsurge and transparency of my freedom. Consequently,
being in time would carry the connotation of the self-transparency of
freedom. In contrast, to say that I am of time is to say that there is a
"thickness" or "substantiality" to time that cannot be foreshortened or
alleviated by the consciousness I have of it. Sartre's following gloss
suggests the reasonableness of such an interpretation:
I escape in time from my own motives; in time from my essence, since it is
what has been [...]. Yet it obviously is not the same thing, since I am my
own nothingness while I am not my own time. If you prefer, there is no
difference between nihilation and temporalisation, except that the for-itself
9 Ibid., 209.
10 The expression "of time" is not Sartre's, but is employed here in order to
reference aspects of the theory of time Sartre may have "glimpsed."
11 Sartre's expression for this concept in the War Diaries is "exigencies" {War
Diaries, 39).

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility 23
nihilates itself but is temporalised. And yet, though existentially distinct,
nihilation and temporalisation are given in one and the same movement. 12
Having offered a different account from the analysis presented in
Being and Nothingness, the claim that the for-itself is of time amounts to a
reassessment of the "pure contingency" that informs Sartre's Being and
Nothingness analysis of situated consciousness. It will require the lengthy
volumes of the Critique and the biography of Flaubert to fully articulate
this alternative view. As a foretaste of these later works, the War Diaries
advance a unique interpretation of the past.
Sartre's Being and Nothingness account of the past claims that "the
meaning of my past is strictly dependent upon on my present project." 13 It
is precisely this view that the lengthy passage from the War Diaries,
quoted above, rejects. The meaning of the past is not just what I take it to
be from the standpoint of the present, for my past, too, as we have just
seen, as an integral part of my temporality, betrays a movement of
temporalisation that is not identical with the nihilating movement that
makes my past "what I am in the mode of not being it". The past,
according to the War Diaries, is not annihilated, but persists with the
ontologically hybrid character of a dimension of the in-itself within the
for-itself.
To be sure, the for-itself cannot be understood apart from that toward
which it bears a nihilating relationship. It is dependent upon that which it
escapes:
It is dependent on the in-itself, by virtue of the very fact that it exists as
escaping from it. From another point of view, however, this dependence is
nevertheless total independence, since the for-itself is constituted with
respect to extension as that which is not extension. It makes itself
unextendedness; it is its own non-extension. All this we have already
explained. But the in-itself recaptures the for-itself as a by-effect, by virtue
of the fact that it is of a certain in-itself that the for-itself is nihilation. In a
word, the for-itself (which is nihilation of the in-itself and nothing other
than this nihilation), inasmuch as it is for-itself, appears in the unity of the
in-itself as a certain existent belonging to the totality through a phenomenon
of synthetic connection. 14
When applied to the past, this manner of analysis allows Sartre to
distinguish between the present being of the for-itself, which is "a not
12 War Diaries, 210.
13 Being and Nothingness, 498.
14 War Diaries, 2U.

24 Chapter Two
being what it is", from the matter of the past, for which a different
dialectical relationship holds: "I can escape the past only by not being
what / am [...] the former for-itself undergoes an essential modification
[...]. It is not annihilated, but it is recovered by the in-itself [...]. So the past
has over consciousness all the superiority of substantiality and solidity—of
opacity too—which the in-itself confers upon it." 15 In Sartre's view, none
of this compromises the freedom of the for-itself, for the for-itself is not
identical with its past. On the other hand, its special "nihilating"
relationship to its past shows that it is the self in the form of "what I was"
that is now synthetically bound to the free and present for-itself. To the
extent that we are time, Sartre argues, "we are something in another mode
than the for-itself'. 16 And to the extent that we are something in another
mode than the for-itself, we bear a relationship to our past that combines
that translucent consciousness of our freedom with a penumbral shadow of
the in-itself nature of our past that can play the role of a condition for the
possibility of a responsibility for our past. Our past belongs to our freedom
in a way that differentiates past actions from present transcendent givens.
"Time", Sartre claims, "is the opaque limit of consciousness." Moreover,
as an "indiscernible opacity", time eludes the transparency of
consciousness, for if the for-itself is transparent to itself by virtue of its
nothingness, "to the extent that we are time, we are something in another
mode than that of the for-itself." 17
Since we can now speak of a "structural", if not "substantial", bond
between my present and my past, an element of continuity between my
past actions and my present situation can serve as basis for the ontology of
responsibility. The recognition of a distinctive ontological complicity
between what I am and what I have been enables Sartre to state: "/ have
become a situation for myself. In this way, / am in my character and my
work. Beginning from a situation that is not-me in relation to me, I have
transformed itself into me." 18
It is outside the scope of the present discussion to go beyond the
suggestion that these notebook entries prefigure the enhanced dialectic of
the for-itself and in-itself that is distinctive of the opening pages of the
Critique of Dialectical Reason. It is also outside the scope of this
discussion to document how Sartre's reflections on temporality and the
for-itself might have served as an ontological prolegomena to the later
Notebook entries concerning the life of William II. At this point it will
15 Ibid., 213.
16 Ibid., 209.
17 Ibid.
18 Sartre, Notebooks, 121.

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility 25
suffice to note Sartre's discussion of William II and its contrast to a
"classical historian's" account of William II as reacting to external
circumstances (his character being "moulded by the action of various
forces" 19 ). In contrast, Sartre attempts to understand this historical figure
in terms of William II's self-understanding and responsibility:
So it seems to me that William IPs original freedom is called royalty.
Moreover, freedom reigns again in the manner of being-to-reign. I see that
William, initially, wants to be a "great" king [...]. One might want to be a
great king in order to excuse oneself for being a king. One may want to use
royalty in order to be great. But William merely considers greatness as the
individualisation of royalty. He wants to be great in order to be that
particular king; in order to be more deeply, more individually king; in
order to appropriate more firmly to himself the title of king [...]. He is the
reign. And this he establishes in his being: his pre-ontological selfunderstanding
coincides with the pro-ject of himself towards coronation.
For, in the very constitution of his being as a being-to-reign, the Crown
Prince remains free to assume his facticity. [...] Behold how he's wholly
and deeply responsible in his being for what the historian first gave us as
an external and contingent fact. The reign is not an outside for William II.
Neither is it an inner and privileged representation. The reign is him. 20
The focus on temporality, the past and responsibility intensifies as Sartre's
thought develops and provides an important framework for assessing his
own candour with respect to his richly active and varied public political
life. In principle, Sartre's ontology of responsibility is sufficiently rich so
as to be able to accommodate his political life and choices. Before turning
our attention to the contrast between Sartre's conception of history and
responsibility and Heidegger's emphasis upon history and das Volk, let us
briefly examine the political biographies of the two.
Politics and History
Like Heidegger's, Sartre's political life contains moments of controversy,
including his endorsement of Russian Communism. However,
whereas, at least for a period of time, Heidegger's endorsement of Nazism
appeared to be unequivocal, Sartre's relationship to Stalinist Russia is in
fact quite complex. Our purpose here is not to justify Sartre's political life
and condemn Heidegger's, but to reflect upon Sartre as an example of an
ontological thinker who affirmed both the necessity of individual
Ibid., 304
Ibid., 305.

26 Chapter Two
responsibility and the reality of historical and cultural forces, and who
sought to combine both in his ontology of dialectical freedom. Sartre's
later work offers a view of human choice, history and the human condition
that rejects human oppression in every form. It is Sartre's insistence upon
the reality and necessity of responsible action in the face of human
oppression that calls for emphasis.
Prior to 1939, Sartre considered himself more apolitical than political.
A self-described "anarchist", Sartre became an avid reader of Trotsky's
works. The French Communist Party and its support of the Stalinist
regime represented the political left in pre-and post-war France. Sartre
steadfastly declined to join this party and appeared to be on a constant
search for political and social alternatives further to the political left. As
Ian Birchall stresses, Trotsky's conception of a "permanent revolution"
appealed to the young Sartre far more than the engineered society of
Stalin's Russia. 21
Both Sartre and Heidegger shared a profound dislike for the
bourgeoisie. Whereas Heidegger saw Germany as caught between Russian
communism and American materialism, Sartre recognized the important
difference between Stalinism and Marxism and viewed the distinct forms
of the oppression of the working class in both Russia and America, and the
racism of the latter, as unacceptable denials of human freedom. Sartre's
historical-political vision was also more encompassing than Heidegger's.
Sartre tended to see the need for a revolutionary politics not only in the
history of the French Revolution, but in the American and Russian
Revolutions as well. Heidegger's increasing concern with the destiny of
the Volk was decidedly Germanic. Sartre's views were closer to the
universalism explicit in Marx's view of a communist revolution, whereas
Heidegger's alliance with the Third Reich, at least initially, appeared to
betray a strong nationalism.
One of the more important early influences upon Sartre was his
friendship with Colette Audry. 22 Audry was an anti-communist leftist, one
of the first to write publicly about Heidegger's identification with the Nazi
Party. She wrote an article in 1934, entitled "A Philosophy of German
Fascism", published in a French political weekly, L'Ecole emancipee. 23
Audry writes that Heidegger's philosophy "constitutes a translation into
21 See Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism. The above brief account of Sartre's
political commitments is heavily indebted to Birchairs insightful narrative and
detailed scholarship.
22 The details of her friendship with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir can be found
in Birchall.
23 Birchall, 19.

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility 27
philosophical language of the state of mind of the German people since the
war [...] all he did was to follow, as a philosopher, a path parallel to that of
the petty bourgeois masses." Our reference below to Heidegger's
relationship to the "war-ideology" prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s
confirms how insightful this early analysis was. It also points out just how
much the product of his age Heidegger in fact was. Audry also calls
attention to the close connection between Heidegger's notion of historical
destiny and the Nazi Party's doctrine of Germany's national destiny.
Finally, in the concluding paragraphs of her article she chides the Marxists
for restricting their analyses to political and economic factors, leaving the
opponents of Marx, such as Heidegger, free rein to engage in a "monopoly
of intellectual audacity in everything that goes beyond the scope of the
purely economic and political". 24 Sartre's writings after Being and
Nothingness (a work heavily influenced by his reading of Heidegger in the
early 1940s) extend Marx's view of the dialectics of the historicaleconomic
world to include the analysis of culture, not as a derivative
superstructure, but as a domain interwoven with the material conditions of
human existence and as a legitimate dimension of human freedom.
Sartre's rejection of fascism brought him closer to the communism
Heidegger found totally unacceptable. Between the years 1952 and 1956,
Sartre formed a loose rapprochement with the French Communist Party
(PCF) and defended Stalin's Russia as providing the sole possibility for a
truly revolutionary social order. It was understood that the French
Communist Party was under Moscow's control. Given this context,
Sartre's urging individuals to join the party was tantamount to publicly
endorsing Stalinist policies and Stalin's notorious work camps. Sartre
visited Russia for the first time in 1954.
By 1957, Sartre had publicly withdrawn from his loose alliance with
the PCF. The crushing of the Hungarian Revolt in 1957 now saw Sartre
condemning Russian communism. His political writings argued that
Stalin's Russia had become a class society, with a class of exploited
labourers on the one hand and a political dictatorship that called itself
socialist, while clearly oppressing the Soviet worker, on the other. Sartre's
political Marxism is complemented by his "critique of dialectical reason".
His form of dialectical analysis rejects the existence of an external point of
view from which knowledge of history is to be attained: "A materialist
dialectic will be meaningless if it cannot establish, within human history,
the primacy of material conditions as they are discovered by the praxis of
particular men and as they impose themselves on it. In short, if there is to
Ibid., 21.

28 Chapter Two
be any such thing as dialectical materialism, it must be a historical
materialism, that is to say, a materialism from within [...]." 25 Sartre, in
clearly situating his own ontological and political reflections within their
historical context, argues that, far from excluding a systematic access to
his age, such reflections are the sole means capable of addressing the
meaning of our "social universe".
Heidegger
Being and Time's conceptions of being-in-the-world, care, temporality,
conscience and historicity, suggest a robust conception of situated
existence. As we shall see, however, Heidegger's appeal to "historicity"
serves more to obscure the notion of individual responsibility than to
clarify it.
Perhaps it is possible to derive an ontological account of individual
responsibility on the basis of Being and Time's passages on authenticity,
care and the call of conscience. However, Heidegger's elaboration of a
properly understood, historically situated Dasein occurs primarily in the
discussion of temporality and history in the last sections of Being and
Time. Dasein's "thrownness" largely involves possibilities that "circulate"
in the everyday world of inauthenticity. In this context, "resoluteness"
entails that Dasein disclose to itself authentic possibilities of its "heritage":
"A resolute coming back to thrownness involves handing oneself over to
traditional possibilities, although not necessarily as traditional ones." 26
Central to this account is an emphasis upon the future. Dasein's
"authentic" situation is one in which the heritage of the past ("traditional
possibilities") reveals its "power": "Only factically authentic historicity, as
resolute fate, can disclose the history that has-been-there in such a way
that in retrieve the 'power' of the possible breaks into factual existence,
that is, comes toward it in its futurality." 27
James Phillips has recently argued that this definition of authentic
historicity represents the initial development of Heidegger's notion of das
Volk. 2B Phillips's line of reasoning is as follows: Heidegger does not
preach a radical individualism in Being and Time; authenticity is achieved
through a shared, communal "destiny," not through anarchic individual
choice. Phillips argues that Heidegger's notion of Destiny defines the role
Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, /, 33.
26
Heidegger, Being and Time, 351.
27
Ibid., 360.
28
James Phillips, Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry.

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility 29
of das Volk: "The Volk that it designates knows neither unity or disunity,
because in the transcendence of its historicising, it has always already
reached beyond the isolation of individual subjects, as well as the isolation
of an individual ethnic group." 29 When Heidegger claims that: "Authentic
Being-one's-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the
subject, a condition that has been detached from the 'they'; it is rather an
existentiell modification of the 'they'—of the 'they' as an essential
existential 9 , 30 this modification of the "they" is interpreted by Phillips as
referring to "destiny". The significance of Phillips's discussion resides in
his attempt to identify destiny's defining characteristics, arguing that
Heidegger's notions of destiny and Volk are both inconsistent with the
language of the Nazi Party and ineluctably associated with it.
For Phillips, the core of Heidegger's notions of destiny and das Volk is
"decision". 31 Yet, in Phillips's analysis, ultimately nothing definite is in
place for "decision" to act upon. The core of Destiny becomes an
emphasis upon the pure uncertainty of the future and the "impenetrable
idiocy of time". 32 Phillips has outlined the growing centrality of das Volk
in Heidegger's writings and has pointed out its historical, futural/temporal
nature. In the following discussion, I shall be less concerned to agree or
disagree with Phillips's interpretation than I shall be to offer a complementary
path to understanding Heidegger's post-1930s view of history in
contrast to Sartre's.
The opening sections of Being and Time celebrate the pragmatically
oriented involvement of Dasein with the "world" understood as the totality
of instrumental complexes. Dasein is what it does. Dasein 1 s ultimate aim
in this, Heidegger tells us, is Dasein itself. Being and Time's account of
the "world" is the world of work and pragmatic instrumentality.
As early as the Basic Problems of Philosophy, written one year after
Being and Time, we see an important modification of this somewhat
earlier analysis of Dasein's relationship to the world. In Basic Problems,
worldly things are no longer viewed exclusively in terms of their
instrumentality, but are also to be understood in what I will term their
"embodied presence". Things carry a specific ontological weight as things
above and beyond their pure instrumentality. Heidegger writes: "The
characters of thingness [...] were fixed for the first time in Greek ontology
and later faded out and became formalized. [... the Greek meaning of] to
pro-duce, place-here [...] means at the same time to bring into a narrower
Heidegger's Volk, 13.
30 Being and Time, 168.
31 Heidegger's Volk, 199.
32 Ibid., 204.

30 Chapter Two
or wider circuit of the accessible, here [...] so that the produced being
stands-for-itself on its own account and remains able to be found there and
to lie-before as something established stably for itself" 33
Heidegger will use a variety of strategies in his attempt to recall the
genuine meaning of this originally Greek conception of thingness,
acknowledging that things in their essential being are also expressive of
cultural and spiritual values above and beyond, but frequently
incorporating, their use-value. This shift allows us to understand the
importance of the 1935 essay, The Origin of the Work of Art. Even though
it is a produced artefact, the work of art has a "thingly" nature that
transcends its source in human productivity. In fact, Heidegger focuses
less upon the work of art as the product of human labour in emphasizing
the fact that "great" works of art are less the product of individual artists
than they are the "product" of an historical era. Major works of art, such as
the Greek temple, are central points of cultural illumination in which the
light of disclosure (Being) struggles with the concealing darkness of the
earth in order to establish the presence of things. The voice of Being is
announced in great works of art, an announcement that celebrates human
doing as a response to the historical disclosedness of a world and not as
the inspired behaviour of a single individual within the confines of a
purely pragmatic intervention in the world.
Let us term this a shift from a work-centered to a "cultural" view of the
products of human labour. It is this shift that dominates Heidegger's
central argument in the important The Question of Technology. Heidegger
understands technology to be a global, all-encompassing framework
defining the modern world. Technology is defined as a "setting upon", a
"standing reserve", an "ordering". By "standing reserve", Heidegger
means "nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is
wrought upon by the challenging revealing. Whatever stands by in the
sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over and against us as an
object." 34 Heidegger continues: "Yet an airliner that stands on the runway
is surely an object. Certainly. We can represent the machine so. But then it
conceals itself at to what and how it is. Revealed, it stands on the taxi strip
only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure the possibility
of transportation." 35
Technology is the transformation of thing-hood, the object standing
before us in its accessibility on its own terms, into the instrumentality of
worldly Dasein. The opposite of technology is poesis. The Question of
Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 108.
34 Heidegger, The Question of Technology, 17.
35 Ibid.

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility 31
Technology gives us several examples of "poetic objects". Two are of
particular significance.
Poetic objects reveal essentia. For Heidegger, the essence of something
is the way in which it develops, its optimal "flowering". As examples of
such development Heidegger cites "the 'essence of a house' and the
'essence of a state'." These are not empty universals, but refer to "the
ways in which house and state hold sway, administer themselves, develop
and decay—the way in which they 'essence' [Weseri]. [...] It means the
city hall in as much as there the life of the community gathers and village
existence is constantly in play, i.e., comes to presence." 36 The emphasis
upon village life and community reflects Heidegger's preoccupation with
the Volk, in contradistinction to the urban anonymity that he critiqued in
Being and Time, and relates to the importance of history in Being and
Time's concluding sections. In the final paragraphs of The Question of
Technology, Heidegger argues that art for the Classical Greeks was not
just one aspect of cultural life among others, but was understood as
something that embraced all revealing of the presence of things, from
sacred objects to public life.
Twenty years earlier, The Origin of the Work of Art displayed a similar
concern with an all-embracing "aesthetic" culture. More specifically, it is
"great" works of art that are the central concern. The work of art
announces a "world". What is a world?
World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths
of birth and death, blessings and curse keep us transported into Being.
Wherever those decisions of our history that relate to our essential being
are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are
rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds. 37
Poetry, art, architecture and language are the means whereby the world is
disclosed. The substances of such expressions and artefacts are "the
concepts of a historical people's essence, i.e., of its belonging to world
history, are preformed for that people." 38 The world is the disclosure of a
people's historical destiny, the end toward which they are summoned and
subjected.
Heidegger's The Question of Technology suggests that this folkhistorical
dimension has disappeared from the modern, technological
36
Ibid., 30.
37
Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art", in David Krell (ed.), Basic
Writings, 170.
38
Ibid., 185.

32 Chapter Two
world. Heidegger's identification with the Nazi Party appears to have
been, at least partially, related to the aspects of his writings just discussed,
beginning with Being and Time (1927) and including The Origin of the
Work of Art (1935) and the important The Question Concerning
Technology (1954). There is little doubt that Heidegger's alliance with the
Third Reich was undertaken in part to struggle against this loss of a world
in which the presence of things and the village life of the community
"flowered". For Heidegger, the Third Reich seems to have represented
precisely that "authentic historicity as resolute fate" mentioned in Being
and Time. As noted above, a people's authentic being-with is defined as its
comprehension of the importance of decision and the futural dimension
of human historical time. To rejoin Phillips's analysis, rather than
misunderstand themselves as a nation-state community, Heidegger's Volk
experiences the decisiveness of historical existence as a form of openness
to the future that precludes being identified with the empirical features of
national, geographic or political characteristics. The Volk is not the nation
state, but a consciousness of the non-repeatability of historical time. On
Phillips's reading, Heidegger is mistaken in identifying the crisis of
Germany as a sign of the decisiveness of the true Volk. National Socialism
turns out to define the German people in categories that are the opposite of
Heidegger's Volk. Although Heidegger was clearly tempted by National
Socialism, the rootlessness of the Volk's radical openness to temporality
and the future clashes with the biologism and nationalism of the Third
Reich. 39
A striking consequence emerges from the confluence of Heidegger's
critique of the world of technology and his reflections on the nature of das
Volk. The Question of Technology suggests that the modern world limits
"being" to use, thereby distancing itself from the possibility of a
potentially new form of poetic disclosure. As is well known, such a
possibility was just what Heidegger seemed to identify with the
"metaphysical" heritage of the German people. Modernity, however,
seems to preclude such a possibility by being identified with the
perspective of technology. At the same time, the true nature of das Volk
appears to be increasingly vacuous, for as a "radical openness to the
future" it appears to collapse into the tautology that the future is simply
what must be awaited. As a consequence, Heidegger's later thought moves
a significant distance from his earlier call for Dasein to exist authentically
by resolutely taking over its heritage. The characterless nature of das Volk
3 A differing view of Heidegger's conception of das Volk and its relationship to
National Socialism can be found in Domenico Losurdo's Heidegger and the
Ideology of War: Community, Death and the West, Chapters 2 and 3.

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility 33
would appear to entirely dissolve the earlier concept of "heritage", and the
world of modern technology would appear to forestall the possibility of an
enriching experience from the side of any inherited "aesthetic culture".
Conclusion
What role might remain for individual responsibility on the
Heideggerian account, and what ontological structures serve to support
such a role? Within the framework of Heidegger's construal of history and
technology, there appears to be no role for individual responsibility. The
past world of the Greeks is no longer available to us. The present world of
technology, disclosing things as pure tools, is a world from which we are
encouraged to turn away and simply await our "future". The later
Heidegger may believe that it is our "responsibility" to wait for a new
disclosure of Being. But it is difficult to align such a responsibility with
individual action. On Heidegger's account, the ontological conditions
upon which an historical epoch rests are beyond the reach of individual
actions. 40 It is no surprise that the later Heidegger writes explicitly that the
concept of Volk is not to be defined in nationalist terms. The rootless and
anti-nationalist nature of the Volk's radical openness to temporality
appears to represent a notion of community in terms of which individual
agency simply fails to pass the test of ontological relevance.
At this point, the contrast with Sartre's thought is striking. For Sartre,
the for-itself involves dimensions of history and intersubjectivity that are
insurmountable and represent an irreducible call for individual responsibility:
"Furthermore, it must be understood that there is no such thing as
man; there are people, wholly defined by their society and by the historical
movement which carries them along; if we do not wish that the dialectic
become a divine law again, a metaphysical fate, it must proceed from
individuals and not from some kind of supra-individual ensemble." 41
Given this context, it is tempting to interpret Heidegger's silence
regarding his personal affiliation with the Third Reich as directly
reflecting just this absence of any ontology of responsibility. In rejecting
the incipient nationalism inherent in Being and Time's early conception of
authenticity, Heidegger's ontology of historical action, in marked contrast
to Sartre, closes off all access to historically significant and responsible
action on the part of the thinker. When correlated with his view of history,
Heidegger's public silence is understandable, for only a people can act
David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger and After, 230.
41 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 7, 36.

34 Chapter Two
responsibly on the world-stage of history. However, if his ontology of
history is as vacuous as it appears to be, his silence has no excuse.
Situated thinking necessarily confronts responsibilities and its history.
It is perhaps overly dismissive of the suggestiveness of Heidegger's later
thought to view it as simply a strategy to nullify individual historical
responsibility and accountability. Yet the substantive correlation between
responsibility and ontology that can be discovered in Sartre's thought and
life appears to have been destroyed in the case of Heidegger. Paul Celan's
anguished dismay over Heidegger's public silence not only raises the
question of individual responsibility, but provokes direct reflection upon
the onto-autobiographical dimension of the thinker as well.
Works Cited
Birchall, Ian. Sartre Against Stalinism. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004.
Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 1982.
—. Being and Time. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1996.
—. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York:
Harper & Row, 1977.
Kolb, David. The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel Heidegger and
After. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Krell, David. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. London: Routledge, 1993.
Losurdo, Domenico. Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community,
Death and the West. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2001.
Phillips, James. Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and
Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Philosophical
Library, 1956.
—. Critique of Dialectical Reason, I. London: Verso, 2004.
—. Notebooks for an Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
—. War Diaries. London: Verso, 1984.

CHAPTER THREE
LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY
IN SARTRE'S EARLY WRITINGS
ALAIN FLAJOLIET
It has often been remarked that the philosophical analysis developed in
VEtre et le neant {Being and Nothingness) can be related to Sartre's
literature. 1 As a consequence, Sartre's early writings have often been
criticised from two points of view. The philosophical works, it is said, are
not sufficiently rigorous, and the novels, short stories, plays, are nothing
but problem literature, too philosophical to arouse curiosity. Sartre's
phenomenological works are not taken seriously, especially in France (the
situation is quite different with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology). The
aim of this chapter is to critique this commonly-held opinion. Being and
Nothingness, according to the rules of ontological phenomenology, is a
strictly philosophical work. But the phenomenological field comes under
the influence of a metaphysics that, for its part, is contained in literary
works like La Nausee (Nausea), Le Mur (The Wall), and Une Defaite (A
Defeat)? From a historical point of view, Sartre's project of metaphysical
literature is prior to the philosophical works and becomes more and more
precise as Sartre studies philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure. 3
This literary project does not disappear when Sartre writes his first
philosophical works, La Transcendance de VEgo (The Transcendence of
the Ego) and "Une idee fondamentale de la ph£nom£nologie de Husserl:
l'intentionnalit£" ("A Fundamental Idea of Husserlian Phenomenology:
1 See G. Prince, Metaphysique et technique dans Vceuvre romanesque de Sartre,
2 We shall not address the influence of the metaphysical psychology contained in
Sartre's diploma dissertation: "L'Image dans la vie psychologique: role et nature"
('The Image in the psychological life: role and nature"). For Une Defaite, see
Merits dejeunesse.
3 See Sartre, Carnets de la drole de guerre, Simone de Beauvoir, La Ceremonie
des adieux, and Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat, Sartre; unfilm.

36 Chapter Three
Intentionality"). In Berlin (1933-34), Sartre writes these two articles and
La Nausee simultaneously. The writing of the novel influences the articles
in a way that we shall examine here. 4
The Project of Metaphysical Literature
As far as Sartre's early writings are concerned, we shall consider
Nausea and the Ecrits de jeunesse (Juvenilia). His autobiography, Les
Mots (The Words), is also important for understanding the earliest origins
of the project of metaphysical literature. The latter is a highly original
literary project, involving the creation of fictions, using every means of
inventive metaphors and complex plots. But it is also a philosophical
project, because the writer aims at revealing metaphysical truths. In her
Memoires d*une jeunefille rangee, Simone de Beauvoir portrays Sartre in
1929 as follows:
He liked Stendhal as much as Spinoza and did not want to separate
philosophy from literature; in his mind, contingency was not an abstract
idea, but a real feature of the world: 5 it was necessary to use all means of
art to make one's heart sensitive to the secret weakness he saw in man and
in all things. 6
It should be emphasised that, in Sartre's literary works, the metaphysical
experiences are never conceptually explicated: literature comes first. In
1974, Sartre, conversing with Beauvoir about his studies at the Ecole
Normale Superieure, said:
At that time, I did not want to write books of philosophy. I did not want to
write the equivalent of Critique de la raison dialectique or of L'hre et le
niant. No, I wanted to express in my novel the philosophy I believed, the
truths I would discover. 7
Why are the truths revealed by literature "metaphysical" truths?
First, these truths appear in the "Conclusion" to Being and Nothingness,
where they are called "metaphysical implications" ("apergus
An earlier draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the Centenary Conference
of the UK Sartre Society at the Institut Francais, London, in March 2005.
5 Let us note that "contingency" is a fundamental concept of metaphysics.
6 Simone de Beauvoir, Memoires d'une jeune fille rangee (Memoirs of a Dutiful
Daughter), 479. [Translations are by the author unless stated otherwise.—Eds].
7 Simone de Beauvoir, La Ceremonie des adieux (The Farewell Ceremony), 203.

Literature and Philosophy in Sartre's Early Writings 37
me'taphysiques"). One example of such an implication is the problem of
the origin of consciousness:
Ontology teaches us two things: 1) if the in-itself were to found itself, it
could attempt to do so only by making itself consciousness [...];
consciousness is in fact a project of founding itself; that is, of attaining to
the dignity of the in-itself-for-itself or in-itself-as-a-self-cause. 9
Therefore, phenomenological ontology can affirm nothing categorically
about the "upsurge of the for-itself\ 10 As far as this problem is concerned,
it has the form of what Sartre calls a metaphysical hypothesis. Ontology,
writes Sartre, "will limit itself to declaring that everything takes place as if
the in-itself gave itself the modification of the for-itself. It is up to
metaphysics to form the hypotheses which will allow us to conceive this
process [...]." n
Secondly, these truths belong to a philosophical tradition referred to by
Heidegger as the "onto-theological" tradition. Ever since Baumgarten,
metaphysics has been understood as the "science which contains the
primary principles of human knowledge", 12 and has been divided into a
metaphysica specialis (the science of God, soul and world), and a
metaphysica generalis (the science of being qua being).
In Sartre's early writings, metaphysical truths do not form a welldefined
philosophical system that might pre-exist a literary work. Sartre is
not in possession of a set of rigorously demonstrated statements about
God, the soul, or being qua being. There is indeed a philosophical system
in his early writings, but it is not a metaphysical one. It is the
transcendental phenomenology sketched in Berlin in 1933-34 in The
Transcendence of the Ego and "A Fundamental Idea of Husserlian
Phenomenology: Intentionality". Sartre's metaphysics is composed of
uncertain and evolving convictions that can be expressed only by storytelling
and not by conceptualisation. If we try to summarize briefly the
very complex subject of these metaphysical convictions, we can identify
four experiences.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 637.
9
Ibid., 641.
10
Ibid
11
Ibid., 640.
12
"Metaphysica est scientia prima cognitionis humanae principia continens"
(Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 1739, § 1).

38 Chapter Three
The first metaphysical experience is the experience of life as "brute
existence" , n an experience that corresponds with the radical upsurge and
appearance of the for-itself: "The for-itself corresponds [...] to an expanding
de-structuring of the in-itself, and the in-itself is nihilated and absorbed in
its attempt to find itself." 14
In Nausea, Roquentin repeatedly experiences the horrible coming to
life of inert things that begin to swarm and bud, especially when he
encounters flesh as the reluctant and gloomy birth of consciousness.
Looking at his face in a mirror, he says:
What I see is well below the monkey, on the fringe of the vegetable world,
at the level of jellyfish. It is alive, I can't say it isn't; [...] I see a slight
tremor, I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.
The eyes especially are horrible when seen so close. They are glassy, soft,
blind, red-rimmed, they look like fish scales. 15
When Roquentin's book on Rollebon's life proves to be a failure,
Roquentin is overwhelmed by a violent seizure of nausea in which he
sinks into the repulsive living matter of things.
The second metaphysical experience is that of the desire of human
reality to be God, that is, ens causa suL When Sartre describes the foritself
as a "lack" ("manque") 16 in Being and Nothingness, he remarks:
"Human reality is a perpetual surpassing towards a coincidence with itself
which is never given." 17
In Les Mots, a narration of the birth of Sartre's vocation as a writer,
this metaphysical experience is, as Paul Ricoeur would say, "put into
play". 18 At the end of the book, Charles Schweitzer's grandson throws
himself into writing in order to stifle and hide his feeling of deep anguish
in front of an absolute freedom he understands as the radically gratuitous
nature of all of his choices: 19 "One writes for one's neighbours or for God.
I decided to write for God with the purpose of saving my neighbours." 20
Upset by his discovery of writing, the young Sartre glimpses the
possible eternalisation of his life through literature. He begins to scribble
Being and Nothingness, 509.
14
Ibid., 108.
15
Sartre, Nausea, 17.
16
Being and Nothingness, 110.
17
Ibid., 113.
18
See P. Ricoeur, Temps et recit, I.
19
Being and Nothingness, 501.
20
The Words, 180.

Literature and Philosophy in Sartre's Early Writings 39
fantastic tales, adventure novels inspired by Jules Verne, Michel Ze*vaco,
and, finally, mystical fictions. The latter are written under the influences of
Charles's humanistic religion, readings such as Charles Perrault's
Griselidis and Edmond Rostand's Chantecler, and a Platonic idealism
shaped by his grandfather's library. The child's mysticism is a key to
understanding most of Sartre's early writings where the topic of salvation
through art occurs repeatedly.
Une Defaite, an unpublished novel written in 1927 and inspired by the
relationships between Richard Wagner, Nietzsche and Cosima Wagner,
relates the troubled situation which binds Fr£d6ric, an ambitious young
student, Organte, an ageing musician unable to create, and Cosima, the
bright and beautiful wife of Organte. Frederic's life is a pitiful failure
whose advances are spurned by Cosima. Organte stifles him and prevents
him from writing. However, Fr&ie'ric finally manages to finish his inspired
Empedocle, and all the hardships are thereby redeemed. The novel
concludes with the lines:
We can leave [FrddeYic] on this defeat, on this fruitful defeat. He is
humiliated and distressed. He will have doubts about himself for a long
time, he will realise the loss of his strength. He is alone. [...] but it will
soon be time for his victories. 21
The third metaphysical experience is intimately connected to the
second. It is the intuition of absolute freedom. In Being and Nothingness
Sartre asserts that "man is wholly free". 22 He adds: "We shall never
apprehend ourselves except as a choice in the making. But freedom is
simply the fact that this choice is always unconditioned." 23 Sartre does not
hesitate to retreat, apparently, from the theory of the "facticity" and
"finitude" of the for-itself given in the second part of Being and
Nothingness. He now writes: "Freedom is total and infinite, which does
not mean that it has no limits but that it never encounters them." 24
Let us now return to The Words at the moment when, as a child, Sartre
dreams about his "false birth":
When I examine my life from the age of six to nine, I am struck by the
continuity of my spiritual exercises. Their content often changed, but the
program remained unvaried. I had made a false entrance; I withdrew
21 Sartre, Merits dejeunesse, 286.
22 Being and Nothingness, 464.
23 Ibid., 501.
24 Ibid., 552, my emphasis.

40 Chapter Three
behind a screen and began my birth over again at the right moment, the
very minute that the universe silently called for me. 25
At this point we encounter a phantasy of self-recreation, in which Sartre
expresses his metaphysical intuition of the creatio ex nihilo that Descartes
attributed to God, and that Sartre attributes to human consciousness. In
The Words, self-recreation ex nihilo, that is to say, absolute freedom, is
experienced by the child as a deep anguish:
I lived in a state of uneasiness: at the very moment when their ceremonies
convinced me that nothing exists without a reason and that everyone, from
the highest to the lowest, has his place marked out for him in the universe,
my own reason for being slipped away; I would suddenly discover that I
did not really count, and I felt ashamed of my unwonted presence in that
well ordered world [...]. A father would have weighted me with a certain
stable obstinacy. Making his moods my principles, his ignorance my
knowledge, his disappointments my pride, his quirks my law, he would
have inhabited me. That respectable tenant would have given me selfrespect,
and on that respect I would have based my right to live. My
begetter would have determined my future. 26
But Jean-Baptiste Sartre was dead a long time ago and the child was
compelled to grow up with a feeling of total gratuitousness, without any
paternal law to interiorise.
The fourth metaphysical experience is that of the contingency of every
real entity—real thing or human reality. In Being and Nothingness Sartre
claims that "Being-in-itself can neither be derived from the possible, nor
reduced to the necessary. [...] This is what we call the contingency of
being-in-itself." 27 In the famous scene of the public garden in Nausea,
Roquentin stops in contemplation before the black, gnarled root of the
tree, and experiences the unintelligible fact that this root lies in front of
him at this place and at this time, without any reason why it appears
precisely at this time, at this place, with its specific qualities and to him,
Roquentin. This concrete intuition of contingency underlies the entire
narrative of Jesus la Chouettet professeur de province (Jesus the Owl, A
Provincial Schoolmaster), a novel partly published in 1923. 28 In this book,
25 The Words, 113.
26 Ibid., 86-87.
27 Being and Nothingness, 22.
28 The title contains an ironic and untranslatable play on words because, in popular
speech, "chouette" can also refer to an ugly and cantankerous old woman, or to
anything that is "neat, smart, chic", etc.

Literature and Philosophy in Sartre's Early Writings 41
Sartre describes a small provincial town as a symbol of hell on earth:
everywhere manners mask violence, cowardice, cynicism, cruelty, and
cupidity.
The Influence of Metaphysics on the Early
Phenomenological Works
Written in Berlin, The Transcendence of the Ego and "A Fundamental
Idea of Husserlian Phenomenology: Intentionality" are two proper
philosophical works using the rigorous Husserlian method of
transcendental reduction. The challenge is to display a transcendental
phenomenology inspired by Husserl, but simultaneously criticising
HusserPs Logical Investigations, the first volume of Ideas and the
Cartesian Meditations, But the way Sartre works in Berlin is very
interesting.
In the film made in 1972 by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat, 29
Sartre explains that when he was in Berlin he worked at his philosophical
works in the morning and that in the afternoon he settled down to his
literary task, that is to say, he tried to rewrite his "pamphlet about
contingency", which was to be published later in 1938 under the title,
Nausea. Sartre's schedule is significant. It would be misleading to claim
that he mixes his two activities. For him, the ways of writing philosophy
and literature are essentially different, as he clearly explained in 1975:
In philosophy, every sentence should have only one meaning. [...] In
literature, which in some way always has to do with what has been
experienced [vecu], nothing that I say is totally expressed by what I say.
The same reality can be expressed in a practically infinite number of
ways. 30
This is the main reason why there is a sharp contrast between the
philosophical and the literary manuscripts: all of the philosophical
manuscripts are written in one go; on the other hand, the literary
manuscripts are scratched out, erased and rewritten many times.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that there is a connection between
philosophy and literature in the early works of Sartre, especially in the
works of the mid-1930s. For example, in the "pamphlet on contingency",
Roquentin's adventures express two metaphysical convictions that are not
assumed as such by the phenomenologist because they are in principle
Sartre, unfilm, 44.
Sartre, "Self-Portrait at Seventy", 7-8.

42 Chapter Three
"reduced" or "excluded" ("bracketed", Husserl would say), but which
nevertheless influence the phenomenological analysis: the convictions that
all real existence is contingent and that consciousness is an absolute
spontaneity.
Let us begin with contingency. If we turn to Nausea, we see a clear
sequence of significant events in Roquentin's life, each one linked to the
other. We find the heart-breaking discovery that "there are no
adventures" 31 —nothing in real life begins and ends like a hero's adventure
in a novel. The famous visit to the museum in Bouville follows. Here,
Roquentin becomes aware that the quiet happiness of the bourgeois is
nothing but cowardice and nastiness. A few days later, meeting Dr Roge at
the restaurant Chez Camille, Roquentin mocks him as a "professionnel de
l'experience" ("an experience professional")—the truth is that it is a
complete illusion to think that any life improves by experience: to live is
to decline in an irresistible decay. Further on in the novel we witness the
death of the project of writing the scholarly book on Rollebon. Finally, we
have the lunch with the Autodidact, a repulsive caricature of genuine
culture, the embodiment of disgusting humanism:
The Self-Taught Man's face is close to mine. He smiles foolishly, all the
while close to my face, like a nightmare. [...] People. You must love
people. Men are admirable. I want to vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the
Nausea. 32
This crisis introduces the episode of the public garden, the discovery of the
contingency of the tree's root and, more generally, the discovery of the
contingency of all things existing in the world.
Finally, we encounter the definite death of the love for Anny ("we
have nothing more to say" 33 ) and the conclusion that in every real life
everybody loses the game. 34 In this entire sequence of events, the
metaphysical experience of contingency is expressed in a plot and fixed in
metaphors. As a consequence, the phenomenological article on intentionality
rejects the most idealistic implications of Husserl*s phenomenology.
Indeed, intentionality itself is considered by Sartre to be a "burst" ("un
dclatement") of consciousness in the midst of the world and not the
"constitution" of the world within the "transcendental Ego", as Husserl
repeatedly insists in Ideas and in the Cartesian Meditations. Let us read a
31 Sartre, Nausea, 150.
32 Ibid., 122.
33 Ibid., 153.
34 Ibid., 157.

Literature and Philosophy in Sartre's Early Writings 43
few lines of Sartre's article that try to describe the intentionality of
consciousness with the assistance of the image of a "bursting out"
("eclatement"). To have consciousness of things, Sartre says,
[...] is to "explode towards", to uproot oneself from the moist intimacy of
one's visceral being in order to flee over there, beyond oneself, towards
what is not oneself, out there, near the tree and yet outside it, for it escapes
me and repels me as something in which I can no more dissolve myself
than it can dilute itself in me: outside of it, outside of me. 35
Sartre thinks—incorrectly, but that is not the point here—that his reinterpretation
of Husserlian intentionality as a "bursting out of
consciousness" is closer to the interpretation in Being and Time of
"Dasein" as "being-in-the world" and "transcendence". If we ask why
Sartre, forsaking Husserl's transcendental idealism, moves to a kind of
realism in which transcendent things always overflow consciousness, the
answer is to be found in his metaphysical literature. If, for example, we
return to the episode of the public garden in La Nausee, we see that the
sickness of nausea experienced by Roquentin discloses the raw,
indeterminate being of the repulsive black root as something quite beyond
all thought. Expressed as an episode in a novel, the metaphysical truth
does not give rise to a philosophical and conceptual account, but rather
forms a conviction that influences the arguments of the article on
Husserl's theory of intentionality.
Let us now consider the matter of the spontaneity of consciousness. In
The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre significantly alters Husserl's
conception of transcendental consciousness. He states that this
consciousness is not a reflective Ego, but an anonymous, non-reflective
consciousness that he terms "spontaneity" ("spontandite"), a term rarely
used by Husserl in Ideas because it is clearly reminiscent of the
metaphysical concept of causa suL Sartre asserts that the transcendental
pre-reflective consciousness is "absolute": "This transcendental sphere is a
sphere of absolute existence, that is to say of pure spontaneities which are
"Connaitre, c'est 's'eclater vers\ s'arracher a la moite intimity gastrique pour
filer, la-bas, par-dela soi, vers ce qui n'est pas soi, la-bas, pres de l'arbre et
cependant hors de lui, car il m'£chappe et me repousse et je ne peux pas plus me
perdre en lui qu'il ne se peut diluer en moi: hors de lui, hors de moi" (Sartre, "Une
ide*e fondamentale de la phe'nome'nologie de Husserl: rintentionnalite'", 30—
translation by author and editors).

44 Chapter Three
never objects and which themselves determine to exist." According to
Sartre, consciousness lives its spontaneity in anguish and terror. The day
after the meeting with Dr Rogd, Roquentin writes in his diary: "I must not
be afraid." 37 Dense fog is hanging over Bouville, the familiar objects
disappear, at the Cafe Mably a frosty darkness welcomes Roquentin, who
suddenly falls into a panic. The owner could be dead:
A real panic took hold of me. I didn't know where I was going. I ran along
the docks, turned into the deserted streets [...]. The houses watched my
flight with their mournful eyes. I repeated with anguish: Where shall I go?
Where shall I go? Anything can happen. 38
Within the context of the novel, "anything can happen" suggests a
possible sex crime, and can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, if
I am an absolute freedom, I can choose or refuse to commit the crime, a
situation of anguish. On the other hand, this crime may be so fascinating
that I am condemned to commit it, which terrifies me.
Conclusion
Thus, Sartre's literary works, such as Nausea—and we could add Er
VArmenien {Er the Armenian) with its reminder of the Platonic myth about
the original choice of existence—can be considered the source of the
fundamental metaphysical concept of "spontaneity". Spontaneity is a way
of living one's life for a consciousness that does not feel the weight of
circumstances, family, social class, language, and moral rules. For
example, in The Words Sartre writes: "The days of happiness originated in
me; I drew them from the nothingness of my own abilities in order to bring
to others the books they loved." 39
In theory, Being and Nothingness is entirely written in accordance with
the rules of ontological phenomenology. But, as we have seen,
metaphysics is not totally absent from the book. In his conclusion, Sartre
explains that phenomenological investigation leads to the metaphysical
question of the origin of the for-itself: why and how does the for-itself
emerge from the in-itself? At this point, ontological phenomenology offers
"Cette sphere transcendentale est une sphere d'existence absolue, c'est-a-dire de
spontaneous pures, qui ne sont jamais objets et qui se d&erminent elles-m§mes a
exister" (Sartre, La Transcendance de VEgo, 11—editor's translation).
37
Sartre, Nausea, 70.
38
Ibid., 78.
39
Sartre, The Words, 146.

Literature and Philosophy in Sartre's Early Writings 45
two suggestions. First: every process of self-foundation breaks the identity
of the in-itself. Second: the for-itself really is the failure of the project of
self-foundation. The significant point is that ontological phenomenology
cannot answer the "metaphysical question". In fact, only literature can
face the metaphysical problem of the origin of the for-itself not with the
help of concepts and arguments, but by means of metaphors and plots. A
detailed analysis of Nausea and of all the texts published in Merits de
jeunesse would confirm this assertion.
If it is literature that truly faces the metaphysical problem of the origin
of the for-itself, literature is also the key for understanding all of the
passages in Being and Nothingness in which ontological phenomenology
approaches metaphysics in sketching its theories of facticity, freedom, the
body, and being-for-others.
Works Cited
Astruc, Alexandre and Michel Contat. Sartre, un film. Paris: Gallimard,
1977.
Baumgarten, A. G. Metaphysica. Halle, 1739.
Beauvoir, Simone de. La Ceremonie des adieux. Paris: Gallimard, coll.
Folio, 1981.
—. Memoires d'unejeunefille rangee. Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio, 1958.
Contat, Michel. "Self-Portrait at Seventy", in Life/Situations (trans. Paul
Auster and Lydia Davis). New York: Pantheon, 1977.
Prince, Gerald. Metaphysique et technique dans Vozuvre romanesque de
Sartre. Geneve: Droz, 1968.
Ricceur, Paul. Temps et recit, I. Paris: Seuil, 1983.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness (trans. H. E. Barnes). New York:
Philosophical Library, 1956.
—. Carnets de la drole de guerre. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.
—. Nausea (trans. Lloyd Alexander). New York: New Directions, 1964.
—. (Euvres romanesques. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Plelade,
1981.
—. "Une idee fondamentale de la phenom£nologie de Husserl: l'intentionnalite",
in Situations, I. Paris: Gallimard, 1947,29-32.
—. The Words. New York: George Braziller, 1964.
—. Une Defaite, in Ecrits de jeunesse. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.
—. ErVArmenien, in Merits de jeunesse. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.
—. La Transcendance de VEgo. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin,
1972.

CHAPTER FOUR
TEMPORALITY AND THE DEATH
OF LUCIENNE IN NAUSEA
CAM CLAYTON
Sartre's celebrated novel, Nausea (1938), is usually interpreted by way
of the themes of contingency, absurdity, nausea, and freedom. There has
been little attention given to the role of temporality and the temporal
structure of consciousness in understanding and explaining the strange
malaise of Sartre's protagonist, Antoine Roquentin. It is by way of Sartre's
conception of temporality, as presented in Being and Nothingness (1943),
that I propose to interpret Nausea in this chapter. 1
There is one scene in particular in Nausea that commentators have
struggled to explain and therefore often ignore. Roquentin is at the library
doing historical research for a biography on which he is working. His
journal entry describes the difficulty he is having making sense of, and
giving order to, the past. Sartre thereby signals that temporality and man's
relationship to the past is the theme of this section of the book. Roquentin
is struggling to understand whether and, if so, how the past can continue to
exist through him and through his writing. He asks: "How can I, who have
not the strength to hold to my own past, hope to save the past of someone
else?" 2 Only two days after declaring that this work "represents the only
justification for my existence", 3 Roquentin gives it up declaring that "the
past did not exist". 4
The journal entry then takes a strange turn when Roquentin reads about
the rape and murder of a little girl named Lucienne. This news triggers a
1 A previous draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the 15 th Biennial
Conference of the North American Sartre Society at Fordham University,
Manhattan, New York City, 27-29 October 2006.
2 Nausea, 95.
3 Ibid., 70.
4 Ibid., 96.

Temporality and the Death of Lucienne in Nausea 47
sort of panic attack in which Roquentin becomes sexually aroused, admits
to a desire for rape, and gives details of the rape from the point of view of
the rapist. There is no previous mention of Lucienne in the book, and the
reader is left to wonder how and why Roquentin's anxiety about the past
and about existence would be catalysed by this news into such a sexualised
episode of panic and self-doubt. The scene seems to represent a thematic
break from the discussion of temporality leading up to it. But it is by
examining the journal entry as a whole in the context of the theme of
temporality that I think we can find an explanation for Roquentin's strange
reaction. I shall argue that Roquentin's reaction to the news of Lucienne's
rape and murder is a demonstration of the temporal structure of
consciousness. By examining this section of Nausea in parallel with
Sartre's discussion of temporality in Being and Nothingness, we shall see
that the desire for rape that Roquentin admits to, and the details of the
rape, are all fragments of his own past. This hypothesis will suggest, in
other words, that Roquentin raped and murdered little Lucienne.
In trying to make sense of time and the past, Sartre has Roquentin
formulate two conceptions of time that Sartre will later specifically argue
against in the section on temporality in Being and Nothingness. First, let
us quote Roquentin:
The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It
is true that I had realised a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But
until then I believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the
past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of
vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself
politely into a box and became an honorary event [...]. Now I knew: things
are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them [...] there is
nothing. 5
Originally, Roquentin thinks that the past exists, though in a state
disconnected from the present and unable to affect the present. However,
his estrangement from his own past, and his inability to resuscitate the past
by way of his historical research, lead him to conclude that the past does
not exist and that he is "forsaken in the present". 6 On the one hand we
have the idea that the past exists, but ineffectually isolated from the
present, and on the other hand we have the idea that the past does not exist
at all.
5 Ibid., 96.
6 Ibid., 95.

48 Chapter Four
Sartre makes the argument, in Being and Nothingness, that both of
these conceptions of the past are inadequate for the task of explaining the
temporality of consciousness, because they strand consciousness in an
instantaneous present. Sartre writes:
[...] if we begin by isolating man on the instantaneous island of his
present, and if all his modes of being as soon as they appear are destined
by nature to a perpetual present, we have radically removed all methods of
understanding his original relation to the past. We shall not succeed in
constituting the dimension "past" out of elements borrowed exclusively
from the present [.. .]. 7
Sartre is arguing that understanding our existence only in terms of the
present cannot explain the original relationship that we have to our past.
Sartre is not arguing that the past does, in fact, exist in and of itself.
Rather, he is arguing that we cannot understand man's original ontological
connectedness to his past if we understand his modes of being, or his
modes of consciousness, non-temporally in the instantaneous present.
Similarly, Sartre challenges the notion, as expressed by Roquentin, that
"each event puts itself politely into a box and becomes an honorary event".
In this case the past would exist but impotently disconnected from the
present. For Sartre, this conception is no better than a non-existent past:
Popular consciousness has so much trouble in refusing a real existence to
the past that alongside the thesis just discussed [that the past does not exist]
it admits another conception equally imprecise, according to which the past
would have a kind of honorary existence. Being past for an event would
mean simply being retired, losing its efficacy without losing its being. 8
Note that Sartre uses here the same metaphor that he had Roquentin make
use of. In Nausea, the past is "pensioned off to become an "honorary
evenf, while in Being and Nothingness the past is "retired" to become a
kind of "honorary existence". In both books, the same conceptions of time
are described, in the same order, and using the same formulations. It
would seem that, in Nausea and in Being and Nothingness, Sartre's
understanding and usage of these conceptions of time remained constant.
It would be surprising if Sartre had Roquentin express these erroneous
notions without repudiating them in some manner. And, in fact, what I am
suggesting here is that the strange scene of the news of Lucienne's death is
the repudiation of Roquentin's musings on the nature of time. In Being
7 Being and Nothingness, 161.
8 Ibid., 161.

Temporality and the Death of Lucienne in Nausea 49
and Nothingness, Sartre repudiates these conceptions of the past by
describing the temporal structure of consciousness, and by describing the
past as an integral aspect of this structure. In Nausea, the repudiation of
these conceptions takes a different form. Rather than describing the
temporality of consciousness directly, Sartre has Roquentin illustrate this
temporality by way of his stream-of-consciousness reaction to the news of
Lucienne's murder.
Upon hearing of the fate of Lucienne, Roquentin admits to having a
desire to rape. He describes how this desire comes upon him: "A soft
criminal desire to rape catches me from behind." 9 Note how Sartre has
Roquentin emphasise this formulation of being taken "from behind":
[...] existence takes my thoughts from behind and gently expands from
behind; someone takes me from behind, they force me to think from
behind, therefore to be something, behind me [...] he runs, he runs like a
ferret, "from behind" from behind from behind [...]. 10
Sartre has Roquentin repeat the phrase "from behind" a total of thirteen
times in the space of a page and a half. Why does Sartre place such
emphasis on this formulation?
The reason can be found in Sartre's discussion of temporality in Being
and Nothingness. This formulation plays a very specific role in Sartre's
phenomenology of temporality. I give below three examples from Being
and Nothingness in which Sartre describes the past as an unavoidable
obligation that catches one "from behind":
[...] the past is precisely and only that ontological structure which obliges
me to be what I am from behind. 11
The past is given as a for-itself become in-itself [...]. It has become what it
was—behind me. 12
[...] the Past is an ontological law of the For-itself; that is, everything
which can be a For-itself must be back there behind itself [.. .]. 13
Sartre uses this imagery of being claimed "from behind" to describe our
relation to the past. The past is an ontological structure of consciousness
9
Nausea, 101.
10
Ibid., 102.
11
Being and Nothingness, 172.
12
Ibid., 174.
13
Ibid., 175.

50 Chapter Four
which reveals itself as that which one is obliged to be "from behind". The
specific and repeated use of this phrase signals that the past—this
"ontological law of the For-itself'—is operative in Roquentin's desire for
rape and in his visions of rape. With this in mind, consider again
Roquentin's strange reaction to the news of Lucienne's rape and murder:
"A soft criminal desire to rape catches me from behind." 14 Roquentin does
not choose this desire as a mode of consciousness. Rather, this desire is the
past catching him unaware and claiming him as the facticity of his
existence.
Sartre gives another indication that the rape is from Roquentin's own
past. Sartre emphasises the flight of Roquentin in this section several
times. Let us cite several lines in the account of Roquentin's reaction:
The criminal has fled [...].
I flee. The criminal has fled [...].
[...] I walk, I flee [...].
He runs to flee [...]. 15
Roquentin then literally "flees" by running through the streets of Bouville,
and later flees Bouville altogether. From what is he "fleeing"? The answer
again can be found by reading this scene from Nausea in parallel with
Sartre's discussion of temporality. Consider these two examples from
Being and Nothingness, illustrating Sartre's use of the imagery of flight to
describe our relationship to the past:
My past is past in the world, belonging to the totality of past being, which I
am, which I flee. 16
The present is a perpetual flight in the face of being [...]. As For-itself it
has its being outside of it, before and behind. Behind, it was its past; and
before, it will be its future. It is a flight outside of co-present and from the
being which it was toward the being which it will be.
Instead of beginning with the three temporal phases of past, present, and
future, and then situating consciousness within the flow of time, Sartre
begins with consciousness and describes how these three temporal modes
arise as an aspect of the nihilating activity of consciousness. Consciousness
temporalises itself. As the For-itself flees itself and its embodied situation,
lA Nausea, 101.
15 Ibid., 102.
16 Being and Nothingness, 285.
17 Ibid., 179.

Temporality and the Death of Lucienne in Nausea 51
it constitutes this situation as the past. The past is revealed to
consciousness in this nihilating flight as the facticity of one's existence.
The past obligates him to exist and to exist within this particular, yet
contingent, reality. The past is not ineffectually "pensioned off and
Roquentin is not isolated on the instantaneous island of his present.
It is important to note that the obligation made by one's past is made
on a pre-reflective level. Earlier in Nausea, Roquentin claims that he is
unable to distinguish imagination from memory:
I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I
am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just
fiction. 18
Although he is unable to distinguish memory from fiction on a reflective
level, Roquentin's reaction demonstrates how the past is distinguished
from imaginative fiction at a pre-reflective level. This distinction is not
made by an effort of cognition or reflective examination alone. Rather, the
past invokes an obligation in a way that our imagination cannot. The past
lays a primordial, pre-reflective claim upon who we are. Even while
Roquentin is unable to distinguish memory from imagination reflectively,
the past is making its claim pre-reflectively. The past is distinguished from
imagination as that which is constituted in the nihilating flight of
consciousness.
But how is it possible for Roquentin to describe the pre-reflective
obligation that his past has upon him without being able fully to integrate
this past as memory? What accounts for the unity of the past as memory?
Sartre tells us in Being and Nothingness: "In order for us to 'have' a past,
it is necessary that we maintain it in existence by our very project toward
the future." 19 In order for a past experience to be retained in memory, it is
necessary that it somehow fits, and is accounted for, in the projection of
the self into the future. Past experience is ordered and made sense of, at
least tangentially, by one's projects. Even half-forgotten incidents and
ambiguous experiences are organised as far as possible into the many
overlapping projects that make up a self:
A living past, a half-dead past, survivals, ambiguities, discrepancies: the
ensemble of these layers of pastness is organised by the unity of my
project. It is by means of this project that there is installed the complex
18 Nausea, 32.
19 Being and Nothingness, 639.

52 Chapter Four
system of references which causes any fragment of my past to enter into an
hierarchical, plurivalent organization, as in a work of art [...]. 20
When one is unable to maintain the past as part of a project toward the
future, it becomes lost to the "hierarchical, plurivalent organization" that
informs our memory and our sense of self. However, we should not
understand this as simply an experience or event that is lost to the past by
an otherwise well integrated self that stands apart from the past. This
"complex system of references" that synthesises the past is the self. One
cannot object by saying, for example, that "/ would not forget an
experience like thatY\ because this hypothetical "I" that does remember
would be a wholly different "I" from the "I" that does not remember. The
forgetting or remembering indicates a different "system of references"
constituting a different "I". There is no "I" that stands separate from the
integration of one's past. The "I"—or the ego, psyche, or self—is this
integration. Roquentin's journal documents a growing inability to unify
his past and himself into any sort of context or project. Roquentin has
divested himself of any grounds upon which to justify his existence and
recollect fragments of his past. Without this recollecting synthesis,
Roquentin's ability to integrate his past breaks down and, to the same
extent, his psyche, or ego, disintegrates. Roquentin's journal illustrates
how this disconnection from the past is accompanied by a disconnection
from a sense of agency, of freedom, and of self.
However, Sartre recognises that a memory may stay with us despite
this lack of integration. It may be carried with us via the body:
This is nonetheless a real characteristic of the psyche—not that the psyche
is united to a body but that under its melodic organization the body is its
substance and its perpetual condition of possibility [...]. It is this, finally,
which motivates and to some degree justifies psychological theories like
that of the unconscious, problems like that of the preservation of
memories. 21
Thus, Sartre recognises that the preservation of memory relies on the body
as that which keeps the past available for a synthesising recollection as
memory. The past is the body in that it is only through the body that the
preservation of memory is possible: "[...] the body as facticity is the past
[...]. Birth, the past, contingency, the necessity of a point of view [...]—
20 Ibid., 641-42.
21 Ibid., 444.

Temporality and the Death of Lucienne in Nausea 53
such is the body, such it is for me. In his discussion of the body, Sartre
describes how pain, for example, when not directly apprehended,
"disappears in the ground of corporeality". 23 Similarly, one's past
disappears into the ground of corporeality until apprehended in memory.
In this way, even though a past experience may not be integrated into the
psyche as memory, the experience can stay with the body as a sort of
somatic memory. The body, as "substance" and as "perpetual condition of
possibility", allows for its preservation. This explains how it would be
possible for the past to maintain a hold upon Roquentin without his being
able to recognise and affirm this past as his own. The rape of Lucienne has
stayed with Roquentin's body. The news of Lucienne's death triggers a
somatic or pre-reflective recognition "from behind" that Roquentin
attempts to recover as memory. His psyche, however, is unable to provide
the synthesis or "melodic organisation" that would make sense of this
fragment from his past. Without this synthesis, Roquentin remains
alienated from his past—he remains unable to make sense of these images
of violence from his past.
An encounter earlier in the book gives us a clue as to why Roquentin
might have murdered Lucienne. Roquentin comes across a man staring
lecherously at a little girl. Roquentin describes the scene:
It would have been enough to cough or open the gate. But in my turn I was
fascinated by the little girl's face [...] they were riveted one to the other by
the obscure power of their desires, they made a pair together. 24
The scene is interrupted when the man notices Roquentin. Roquentin is not
concerned for the safety of the little girl. Instead, he is drawn to the
"obscure power of their desires". Sartre tells us in Being and Nothingess
that "the unique goal of desire" is the "reciprocity of incarnation". 25 In the
apparently reciprocating look of the little girl, the "unique goal" of the
man's desire seemed to have been achieved. Rather than objectifying the
man, the little girl's look seemed to complete the man's self-justifying
project. This early example of "The Look" 26 shows the apparent
redemptory power of possessing the look of the Other, and we can imagine
that Roquentin may have been inspired by this scene in his own pursuit of
self-justification. We know, however, that any attempt by Roquentin to
22 Ibid., 431.
23 Ibid., 440.
24 Nausea, 79.
25 Being and Nothingness, 517.
26 Ibid., 340.

54 Chapter Four
possess the look of the Other would have ultimately failed. In his
discussion of "Concrete Relations with Others", 27 Sartre describes a sort of
logical progression as the failure of desire leads to sadism and then to the
ultimate despairing strategy of hate. We can imagine how Roquentin, fully
absorbed in a project of objectification and desire, and moved solely by
the doomed logic of these strategies of objectification, might have ended
up raping and murdering Lucienne.
The book that Roquentin decides to write at the end of Nausea can be
seen as an attempt to remove himself from this spiral of failure by
providing a unifying project for his ego and his past. This book project
would be the "melodic organisation" for a re-integration of his past.
Roquentin says of this book:
[...] a time would come when the book would be written, when it would be
behind me and I think that a little of its clarity might fall over my past.
Then, perhaps, because of it, I could remember my life without
repugnance. 2
Roquentin hopes to relieve himself of the sense of alienation from who he
is, and from who he was: "And I might succeed—in the past, nothing but
the past—in accepting myself." 29 By the end of Nausea, therefore,
Roquentin has come to recognise the unshakeable hold that his past has
upon him, as well as the necessity of giving sense to this past. Roquentin
recognises that he is not isolated or forsaken in the present and that his
existence will seem meaningless to the extent that his past—and therefore
his sense of self—is not unified and justified by a synthesising project.
When Roquentin considers what kind of book to write, he muses:
It would have to be a book [...]. I don't quite know which kind—but you
would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, at
something which would not exist [...]. 30
Perhaps Nausea is that book. And perhaps behind its printed words,
behind its pages, is a past that does not exist in and of itself but which
catches and lays claim to the author with a rigour that cannot be avoided.
That past is the rape and murder of "little Lucienne".
27 Ibid., 471.
28 Nausea, 178.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.

Temporality and the Death of Lucienne in Nausea 55
Works Cited
Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness (trans. Hazel E. Barnes). New
York: Washington Square Press, 1966.
—. Nausea (trans. Lloyd Alexander). New York: New Directions, 1964.

CHAPTER FIVE
SARTRE AND NIETZSCHE: BROTHERS IN ARMS
CHRISTINE DAIGLE
Nietzsche and Sartre have been two major figures for the twentieth
century. Both stand at the centre of the existentialist movement, one as a
precursor, and the other as its main proponent. Interestingly, the deep
connections found between Sartre's and Nietzsche's thought have been
little investigated. It is only recently that works have begun to appear on
this "Nietzschean connection". 1 This chapter will investigate what I
consider to be the crux of the connection: the reconstructive ethical
programme that both propose as a solution to nihilism. 2
Indeed, as I see it, there is a necessary connection between nihilism,
the search for meaning, and ethics. If one is a nihilist and consequently
rejects traditional worldviews, as Nietzsche and Sartre do, then one must
tackle the problem concerning the meaning of existence, i.e. one must
establish a new worldview. Following this rejection, ethics is reconsidered
and new ethical proposals are presented in order to guide the human being
in a post-nihilistic world. In this chapter, I will explain how both Sartre
and Nietzsche share the same kind of nihilism that hinges on an atheistic
worldview. Although there certainly is a difference in their nihilistic
attitudes, I will argue that this divergence ought not to be mistaken for a
divergence in their nihilism. Nietzsche's and Sartre's nihilism, regardless
of how it is manifested, will nonetheless result in the same essential
problems. Both thinkers have to deal with the loss of meaning that
accompanies the disappearance of a metaphysical Christian worldview.
1 See my Le Nihilisme est-il un humcmisme? Etude sur Nietzsche et Sartre. For
specific analysis in English of the question of meaning and its articulation with the
problem of nihilism, see my "Sartre and Nietzsche". For a study of the Nietzschean
influence on Sartre's literature, see Louette, Sartre contra Nietzsche. One may also
consult the article by Debra Bergoffen, "Nietzsche's Existential Signatures".
2 An earlier draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the Centenary Conference
of the UK Sartre Society at the Institut Frangais, London, in March 2005.

Sartre and Nietzsche: Brothers in Arms 57
Their immanent thinking forces them to look within the human realm
alone for that meaning of life. They both find it in the notion of human
creation. Both claim that although there is no intrinsic meaning to the
world nor to the human's existence, the human being can still infuse
meaning in his own life and in the world. This shedding of meaning, to
both thinkers, is a crucial component of post-nihilistic human existence.
Consequently, this will lead Nietzsche and Sartre to build an ethics that
rests on the reconstruction of human values. Throughout this chapter I will
demonstrate how close Nietzsche and Sartre in fact are, and how, because
of this, they can be considered to be fighting the same battle: the
establishment of a new morality based upon their new answer to the quest
for meaning. I will show that both have similar manners of grounding their
ethics in ontology.
The ''unaware Nietzschean"
Before getting to the crux of the argument, a few things need to be said
about the reception of Nietzsche in Sartre's thought. Nietzsche is an
ambiguous figure for Sartre and in fact, Sartre may have misunderstood a
lot of what Nietzsche had to say. Owing to his misunderstanding of
Nietzsche, I call Sartre an "unaware Nietzschean". I believe that Nietzsche
was not only very present in Sartre's intellectual universe, but that he
could possibly have influenced his thinking, despite the fact that he
misunderstood his philosophy.
There are many references to Nietzsche in Sartre's works. However, it
is not clear that Sartre had a comprehensive understanding of Nietzsche's
writings. For one thing, he uses only a small number of direct quotations
from Nietzsche and some of the quotations that he does in fact use are
taken from Charles Andler's biography on Nietzsche instead of from
Nietzsche himself. 3 It is very likely that he gathered most of his
information from reading this particular biography as well as that of
Daniel Haldvy. It is also speculated that he may have read a selection of
aphorisms published by Jean Bolle in 1934, or even the selection of
aphorisms published as La Volonte de puissance by Genevieve Bianquis in
the late 1930s—however, the latter is doubtful. 4 In his Ecrits dejeunesse
3 This is the biography of Nietzsche in six volumes by Charles Andler. Contat and
Rybalka think that Sartre had read at least volume 2. See their commentary in
Sartre, Merits dejeunesse.
4 Not only is this doubtful, but given the nature of the text and the many editions
that The Will to Power has gone through, it is not clear what picture of Nietzsche
Sartre could have derived from such a reading. The collection of aphorisms that

58 Chapter Five
(Juvenilia), Sartre explicitly claims to have read Nietzsche, though he is
not very specific with regard to which texts he has in fact read. 5
Furthermore, it is possible that Sartre could have learned about Nietzsche
through his earlier education, especially by having to write a paper on him
in a class he took with Brunschvicg. 6 Annie Cohen-Solal explains that at
the moment of writing his early novel, Une Defaite (A Defeat), Sartre did
re-read Nietzsche, specifically Ecce Homo. 1
Nietzsche is an ambiguous figure for Sartre: he says that he is more a
poet than a philosopher; the form of his thought is better than the thought
itself. 8 He loathes Nietzsche's vitalism and his notion of the will to power
(which he accordingly misunderstands as being the brute desire to exert
power over others). Sartre furthermore rejects the Nietzschean notion of
eternal recurrence, which he exposes in Saint Genet, by showing that he
understands the notion in a literal fashion—a reading now rejected by
most, if not all, Nietzschean scholars. His interpretation of Nietszche's
"Overman" also reveals his misunderstanding of Nietzsche, as he presents
this creature as the fruit of a natural evolution in which only the strongest
survive. The one thing that he admires in Nietzsche is the atheism that
leads to "terrestrial thought". It is to Nietzsche's nihilism that he refers
approvingly in the opening pages of Being and Nothingness. In fact,
Nietzsche is the first philosopher mentioned by name in the treatise. I
would like to contend that this is no small thing. 9 The person of Nietzsche
and his life must have interested him immensely since he did write Une
Defaite, a novel on the famous Tribschen triangle (Nietzsche, Richard and
bears the title "The Will to Power" is constituted of notes published posthumously.
I am in agreement with Mazzino Montinari who contests the use of the text and
claims that despite its many avatars The Will to Power as a work by Nietzsche does
not exist. See his "La Volonte depuissance" n'existepas.
5 See Sartre, fccrits dejeunesse, 471.
6 When questioned about his education in an interview by Rybalka, Pucciani and
Gruenheck, Sartre stated that the lycee and the Sorbonne were determining of his
knowledge in philosophy. He was also asked whether he was influenced by
Nietzsche, to which he answered: "I remember giving a seminar paper on him in
Brunschvicg's class, in my third year at the ficole Normale. He interested me, like
many others; but he never stood for anything particular in my eyes" (Rybalka,
Pucciani, Gruenheck, 9).
7 See Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 146.
8 This he says in his "Carnet Midy", a little notebook he had found in the subway
and filled with notes of all kinds (Merits dejeunesse). See my previous works for a
listing of Sartrean statements on Nietzsche and their sources.
9 He says: "[...] but if we once get away from what Nietzsche called 'the illusion of
worlds-behind-the-scene' [...]" (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 2).

Sartre and Nietzsche: Brothers in Arms 59
Cosima Wagner). Something in Nietzsche's philosophy must have also
been attractive, at least to the young Sartre, as he included several
Nietzschean ideas^h morality in this other early novel, Er VArmenien (Er
-the^Armeniari).vrurther proof of Sartre's continued interest in things
Nietzschean can be found in the fact that he wrote a text which Contat and
Rybalka describe as follows:
One of the most mysterious texts by Sartre and one that it seems no-one
has read (it is not yet found and might be lost) is a long study on Nietzsche
that he began in the period of the Notebooks for an Ethics (1947-1948) and
which, according to Sartre, was a part of his ethical research. 10
Although it is not clear whether Sartre's interest in Nietzsche stemmed
from a recognised affinity or from a spirit of opposition—seeing himself
as an opponent of Nietzsche—I would like to make the claim that Sartre is
in fact much closer to Nietzsche than he would like to admit. True enough,
if there has been a Nietzschean influence on his thought, this influence can
be seen as slowly disappearing as Sartre's preoccupations become
increasingly political. However, I am not concerned with the later
developments of Sartre's philosophy, preferring instead to concentrate on
his earlier existentialist philosophy.
Two Nihilists
Sartre's and Nietzsche's common point of departure is nihilism. As I
have indicated, the initial reference to Nietzsche in Being and Nothingness
is indeed a reference to his nihilism. In fact, Nietzsche and Sartre hold the
same kind of nihilism even if this nihilism is expressed differently in both
thinkers. As I like to put it, we are dealing with a "militant nihilism" in
Nietzsche and a "passive nihilism" in Sartre. Indeed, Nietzsche is waging
My own translation of: "L'un des textes les plus myste*rieux de Sartre et que nul
ne semble avoir encore lu (il n'est pas localise' a l'heure actuelle, et peut-£tre est-il
perdu) est une longue dtude sur Nietzsche entreprise a l'epoque des Cahiers pour
une morale (1947-1948) et qui, selon ce que Sartre nous en a dit, faisait partie de
sa recherche dthique" (Sartre, Merits de Jeunesse, 194, footnote). Perhaps this is the
analysis of the ethics of the will to power that Sartre had promised in Appendix I
of the Notebooks. But, contrary to what Contat and Rybalka assert, it seems that at
least Simone de Beauvoir read it, as we can gather from this part of their
discussion: "S. de B.—'Then after Being and Nothingness, you began writing a
work on ethics [...]. That was the book in which you wrote an important, long, and
very fine study of Nietzsche.' J.-P. S.—'That formed part of it.'" (Simone de
Beauvoir, Adieux. A Farewell to Sartre, 180).

60 Chapter Five
a war against the metaphysical-religious tradition of Christianity whereas
Sartre is merely the consenting heir to this kind of nihilism. He no longer
needs to fight since the predominant worldview of Nietzsche's time has
already crumbled. All he needs to do is nod approvingly.
Nietzsche's own nihilism comes as a reaction to the nihilism he finds
already active within the metaphysical-religious tradition. This accounts
for the severity of his nihilism. He diagnoses one form of nihilism,
proposing a stronger one as a remedy. The nihilism he diagnoses is that of
the Christian and rationalistic worldview that negates both the human life
and the human being itself through the weight it places on transcendence.
The immanent life of the individual is here seen as devalued in favour of a
supposed "after-life". In other words, the human is seen as striving for an
illusory beyond. Further, the traditional anthropological position is
nihilistic in that it values only the rational aspects of the human being. In
The Antichrist, Nietzsche explains: "If one shifts the centre of gravity of
life out of life into the 'Beyond'—into nothingness—one has deprived life
as such of its centre of gravity." 11 Of course, Nietzsche's critique of
Christianity is intimately tied up with his critique of the philosophical
tradition upon which it is based. After all, "Christianity is Platonism for
'the people'." 12 For him, they both present an ethics of "impossible
virtue". 13 Much of this is also shared by Sartre, but again, he presents his
own criticism in a much more moderate form. His statements are so mild
in comparison to Nietzsche's that we may say that in Sartre we find a
"subdued Nietzsche".
As a remedy to the nihilism he diagnoses, Nietzsche proposes atheism.
Atheism is the first step of his own nihilism. Since God is responsible for
holding the whole system of values together, rejecting God means
destroying the entire system. This, Nietzsche undertakes as a task in order
to clear the ground for the reconstruction of values he has in view.
However, as any close examination of the Madman's announcement of the
death of God would reveal, this liberation from the yoke of an alienating
worldview will first be experienced by humans as abandonment. God is
dead, we killed Him. The madman asks:
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we
doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving
now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging
11 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist, §43,165.
12 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, 2.
13 Nietzsche, Daybreak, §87, 88.

Sartre and Nietzsche: Brothers in Arms 61
continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still
any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? 14
The immediate result is thus a loss of meaning for the human being. It
hence becomes necessary to tackle the question of meaning in hopes of
ultimately establishing new meanings as a replacement.
Sartre agrees with all this. He also considers the death of God as a
genuine liberation for human beings, as expressed in such plays as The
Flies (Les Mouches, 1943) and The Devil and the Good Lord (Le Diable et
le bon Dieu, 1951). As he explains though, this liberation is also a
condemnation as we are entirely responsible for what we make of
ourselves. We are condemned to be free, i.e. to be responsible for
ourselves and for our lives. Sartre has said that the death of God is the
equivalent to the death of all transcendence but with it comes "the opening
of the infinite", 15 that is, the infinite of human possibilities. As he puts it in
his Notebooks for an Ethics, "In this way, man finds himself the heir of the
mission of the dead God: to draw Being from its perpetual collapse into
the absolute indistinctness of night. An infinite mission." 16 Thus, nihilism
brings us to the loss of meaning, a meaning that the human being will have
to create in the wake of God's death and the absence of any transcendent.
Two Optimists
Immediately following nihilism, the human must deal with the
question of the meaning of existence. One must find an answer to the
question of whether life has any meaning and, if the answer is positive,
one must also determine what exactly that meaning is. The rejection of the
traditional worldview means a loss of a meaning-provider and consequently
of meaning itself. One must replace God by providing life with a
new meaning. And it is only through this that one can hope to erect a new
ethics entirely. Interestingly, Nietzsche and Sartre are both optimists in
relation to this quest for meaning. They believe that there is a meaning to
human existence and that we can uncover what that meaning is, since the
human being is the sole meaning-provider.
Their dealings with the problem are in each case very similar. Both
begin by stating that the world does not have intrinsic meaning. 17
14 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125,181.
15 Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 34.
16 Ibid., 494.
17 Their theoretical bases for claiming this are different. I have given the details of
this in my previous works (see note 1).

62 Chapter Five
However, they both agree that despite this a priori lack of meaning, the
human being is in a position to create his own meaning. Actually, both see
the human being as an intentional consciousness that sheds meaning on the
world as soon as it grasps it. The human being is thus fundamentally
creative in that she literally makes the world her own.
Interestingly, the first answer given to the problem of meaning in both
thinkers' writings is an aesthetic answer. Both provide us with an aesthetic
justification of life: Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy and Sartre in
Nausea. In The Birth of Tragedy, the initial identification of creation as
artistic creation is immediately broadened by Nietzsche into an aesthetic
creation, that is, the creation of both oneself and one's world. However, in
Sartre's case, it takes some time before the notion of artistic creation
indicated as the solution to the problem in Nausea is broadened. In fact, it
is only through the development of a number of texts published in the
early 1940s, and through the writings later collected for his Notebooks for
an Ethics, that such a solution fully emerges.
Nietzsche presents an interesting angle on his answer to the question of
the meaning of life in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, namely an angle that is
particularly relevant to his ethical proposals. He says that life is
meaningful only as an expression of the will to power, i.e. as the constant
overcoming and re-creating of oneself. Life can only be meaningful if it is
dynamic and creative. When the individual sets out to become an
Overman, she is on the path of creation and is thusly justified. The human
ought to embody the affirmative and creative ideal of the Overman. I will
address this in more detail in a coming section.
Sartre's handling of the problem is similar to that of Nietzsche's,
although in his case the artistic justification persists somewhat longer. In
Nausea, Roquentin finds meaning in his decision to become an artist. 18 He
understands that the creative artistic act is the only act that can redeem
human existence and give it a justification. Otherwise, an individual is
purely contingent in an absurd world. In his Notebooks, Sartre revisits the
problem of the meaning of life and now addresses it in terms of the human
being as project. The human's coming to the world is both a creative and
an interpretive event. By his uttering "il y a", "there is", the human sheds a
layer of meaning on the in-itself, making it a human world. Sartre explains
that "it is not in contemplation that Being will be unveiled as having a
meaning: it is in effort so that man has a meaning, that is, in action [...]. To
True enough, the ending of Nausea does not give the reader a clear indication
that Roquentin will take up that newly-found project. Nevertheless, his decision, as
well as the rationale he comes up with to adopt this artistic stance, is revealing of
Sartre's position at this point regarding the question of meaning.

Sartre and Nietzsche: Brothers in Arms 63
act is to posit that Being has a meaning." This is posited as the human
being's duty. Further, Sartre adds the dimension of the Other: I create
meaning for myself and interpret the world in which I act; however, only
through the intervention of the Other can I make my presence in the world
necessary.
Although Sartre is very close to Nietzsche in his dealings with the
question of the meaning of life, this is one aspect that distinguishes him. In
Nietzsche, there is no appeal to the Other. Both however agree that life can
be made meaningful through the creative act of the human being.
Questions of Ethics 1: The Ideal Type
The nihilism of Nietzsche and Sartre opens up the way to a humanistic
ethics. Their ethics are humanistic insofar as they both focus on the
individual and her flourishing. Such ethical developments would have
been impossible under the yoke of an alienating worldview such as that of
the metaphysical-religious tradition. Now that they both have rejected it
and proposed the human as meaning-provider, they are free to adopt a
humanistic stance. 20
Nietzsche's ethics is to be found in three key concepts: the will to
power, the eternal return, and the Overman. Nietzsche conceives of the
human being as a creature that embodies the will to power. Wille zur
Macht is a surpassing or overcoming principle that can be interpreted as a
driving force that pushes beings forwards toward growth. Nietzsche
defines "power" as the feeling of growth. Human beings are motivated by
the will to power just as the whole world is driven by the will to power.
The human being and life are the will to power. This view of the human
being rests at the base of Nietzsche's ethical concept of the Overman. In
Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche says that "We are responsible to
ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true
helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a
Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 486.
20 By "Humanism" here I understand a theory or philosophical viewpoint that
focuses on the human being, its potential and flourishing and has faith in such. I
understand that both Nietzsche and Sartre are critical of humanism as it was
expressed in certain philosophies. However, if they are critical of certain
philosophical viewpoints that claim to be humanist it is, most of the time, because
they consider that these fail in providing the human with a worldview that leaves
room for the human's free development. In that sense, their humanism is more
demanding and requires that no restraints be imposed on the human being (be they
religious or moral).

64 Chapter Five
mindless act of chance." In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Overman is this
figure who is successful in being his own master, the true helmsman of his
own existence. He is an over-man, that is, more than a human being. 22
This Ubermensch is thus a human being who is both human and more than
human. She is the human being who has overcome the fragmentation we
find in the metaphysical-religious tradition. She is a reunited being, a
human being who has decided to fully live what she is. She is a human
being who knows that life is will to power, of which she is a particular
instance. She wishes to incarnate and materialize this will to power in
herself. By doing so, she saves herself from alienation and re-affirms her
whole being. Further, she accepts the hypothesis of the eternal return. She
is ready to suppose that her actions, her decisions, and her entire life will
eternally return, repeating every single moment in the exact same way.
The change that occurs between man and the Overman is enormous. This
is why we cannot speak of an elevation to the status of Overman, but must
speak instead of a transfiguration. Even the highest type of man that we
find in Nietzsche is much lower than the Overman. In fact, as Nietzsche
has it, the higher men would call the Overman a devil! 23
The figure of the Overman must be understood in terms of a moral
ideal. It is meant as an emulative figure that illustrates human potential.
Only a human being who would decide on being her own creator, i.e. an
individual who would fully embody the will to power that she is, could
possibly become such an Overman. One may ask whether or not this ideal
type, the Overman, is a state that can be reached by striving human beings.
However, I do not think this is the case. Nietzsche leaves the question
open as to whether there will ever actually be Overmen. When he
announces the coming of superior men, he is not in fact announcing the
coming of the Overman (as these are very distinct figures in his
philosophy). 24 1 think it is more fruitful to think of the Overman as a nonfixed
state of being, or as a state of constant becoming. Indeed, as an
Overman would accept and conceive of life and herself as instances of the
will to power, she would be in this state of becoming. As an embodied will
to power, she would be seeking to grow beyond and to overcome herself,
thus we would find her only in a constant state of flux, a state of perpetual
21 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 128.
22 We must bear in mind that the German term is gender neutral. "Ubermensch"
literally means "over-human being". Had Nietzsche wanted to restrict this
possibility to men, he could have used the term "Ubermann", but he never did.
See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "Of Manly Prudence".
24 See the multiple warnings against so-called "higher men" in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra.

Sartre and Nietzsche: Brothers in Arms 65
becoming. This is the meaning of the "over" of "Overman". Furthermore,
the individual must aim at this constant state of becoming in order to live
in accordance with what she really is, i.e. a will to power. This is the key
to the Nietzchean formula found in The Gay Science: ''What Saith thy
Conscience!—Thou shalt become what thou art." 25 In order to achieve
this, the notions that concern the creation of oneself and the creation of
values must come into play.
It is imperative that the individual be her own creator if she is to be on
the path to the Overman. Nietzsche advocates a morality of self-mastery
where the individual makes her own rules. The meaning of the "master
morality" is to be found therein. It has often been misunderstood to refer to
a morality of powerful masters who would keep weaker individuals under
their yoke (as Sartre understood it). However, what Nietzsche has in mind
is in fact quite different. Following the death of God, the individual who is
left only to herself would consequently face an ethical void. No values are
left to stand after nihilism has come to fruition. Nietzsche insists that it
would be a mistake for the individual to proceed by finding another
transcendent being or realm on which to ground her values: the past
experience of Christian morality indicates that any such re-adoption is
likely to result only in the re-alienation of the individual. Instead, the postnihilistic
individual must rely on herself as the ground for values. Only an
ethics that regards the human being as an embodied will to power can
allow for the complete flourishing of the human being.
These descriptions of the human being as becoming or overcoming
itself towards the Overman will sound familiar to Sartreans, who are used
to dealing with the human being as a project in Sartre's works. In fact, the
notion of overcoming seems to be appropriate when the time comes to talk
about the for-itself in the world. If Nietzschean ethics revolves around the
notions of the will to power, the eternal return, and the Overman, that of
Sartre revolves around the notions of freedom and authenticity.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes the for-itself and all of its
structures. Therein he explains how the for-itself constantly strives to be
an in-itself. Of course, so long as we are living beings, this project will
always necessarily fail. Only in death can one achieve this. However, this
does not prevent the for-itself from constantly striving towards this
impossible goal; Sartre himself regards the for-itself as a "futile passion".
At a more fundamental ontological level, one can say that the
intentionality of consciousness has made it so that the for-itself is always a
projection of itself, i.e. a projecting of itself in the world that also lets
Nietzsche, Gay Science, 270.

66 Chapter Five
oneself be affected by its being-in-the-world. The for-itself is a potential
being that must aim toward a possible that it will never attain. Again, this
is very close to the Nietzschean descriptions of overcoming. The Overman
is not a fixed goal but it is a constant striving.
Let us recall what the human being as project is striving towards. In the
Notebooks, Sartre says that the individual strives for authenticity by
aiming to be the creator of being and holding her own freedom as the
foundation of herself and the world. By an act of will, freedom makes its
aims essential to its own project. The authentic being is the one who
knows that she is the creator of herself, of the world, and of values. It is
the being that also accepts the responsibility that ensues. The authentic
person gives meaning and value to her life in accepting and affirming
herself as the free creator of a meaningful world. She is a contingent and
free creator. Here we come full circle, since it seems that authenticity is
simply the affirmation of one's own way of being. However, the for-itself
is necessarily a creative being. Authenticity requires that one recognises
and accepts this creative endeavour. Again, we are very close to Nietzsche.
The Overman is the person who recognises and accepts that her being is
the manifestation of the will to power and its dynamic of overcoming.
In both cases then, we are dealing with an ethics that is humanistic in
that it favours the flourishing of the individual above all else. The
individual must strive to be what she is, by embodying the will to power
for one, or freedom for the other. Both ethics thus have as an aim to
actualise the true being of the human rather than some sort of
transcendental ideal. It is in each case an immanent, humanistic ethics.
Questions of Ethics 2: Ethical Rules
Both thinkers have proposed certain rules in order to help the human
being attain either Overman-status or authenticity. In Nietzsche, we are
dealing with vitalism and the eternal return, whereas in Sartre, we are
talking in terms of freedom.
The vitalism of Nietzsche's philosophy is founded upon the will to
power: life is good in itself as will to power. As something that is
intrinsically good, life itself can serve as an ethical standard. Life as will to
power then, is that standard by which the value of everything will be
determined. Nietzsche explains this:
What is good?— All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power,
power itself in man.
What is bad?— All that proceeds from weakness.

Sartre and Nietzsche: Brothers in Arms 67
What is happiness?— The feeling that power increases — that a resistance
is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war, not virtue, but
proficiency (virtue in the Renaissance style, virtu, virtue free of moralic
acid). 26
Given the passage above, we can formulate the fundamental moral
principle of Nietzsche's ethics as: All that affirms, creates and promotes
life as will to power is good. Individuals must make use of this criterion in
choosing their values. Individuals should pursue the goods that are
conducive to the promotion of life as will to power. In doing this,
individuals will also be promoting their own being as will to power. This,
for Nietzsche, is the way of authenticity and human flourishing. Because,
ultimately, this is Nietzsche's fundamental concern, we can here say that
his ethics of the Overman is truly a humanistic ethics.
Before turning our attention towards Sartre's own ethical proposals, it
is necessary to look into the role played by the eternal return in
Nietzsche's ethical realm. It is important to state immediately that this
notion is not meant as an ontological description of how the world actually
is or how it evolves. That is, Nietzsche is not advocating a cyclical theory
of time and the universe. When he advances the eternal return, it is as a
thought experiment that individuals can use as a guide for their actions,
similar in function to a "categorical imperative". 27 We must then
understand the eternal return as an ethical hypothesis. In the section of the
Gay Science entitled "The Greatest Weight" (or "The Heaviest Burden" as
it has also been translated), the eternal return is presented in the
conditional formulation of "what if...?" This hypothesis is used to validate
every choice. The text has it that one is followed by a demon that unveils
the "truth" of the eternal return of the same. The question is then: How
would you act, knowing that your deed will eternally return? How would
you react to such an announcement? 28 Hence, the key to practical
deliberation lies in asking oneself whether the deed that one is about to
commit is something that one wishes to see eternally return. Individuals
26 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §2, 125-26.
27 It should be noted that every attempt to "prove" the eternal return is to be found
only in the unpublished part of his work. In the published material, the eternal
return is always formulated in the conditional mode. This, of course, would make it
a "hypothetical imperative" in Kantian terms and not a "categorical" one as I state
above. When I refer to the eternal return as something akin to Kant's categorical
imperative, I mean that it can serve the same role: when faced with a decision, one
can take the formula and weigh options according to it.
28 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §341, 273-74.

68 Chapter Five
must choose now as if even this choice was to recur indefinitely. Only a
choice or a deed that contributes to human flourishing is a choice or deed
that one will wish to see eternally recur.
Will to power and eternal return are articulated together as ethical
guidelines. A choice is good if it promotes life as will to power. It is also
good if one wants it to recur eternally which, consequently, will be the
case only if the choice serves to promote life as will to power. The goal
being to realise oneself as embodied will to power, that is, to lead a
flourishing human life as involving both the constant overcoming of
oneself and the creation of oneself, the will to power and eternal return can
assist us in making the right choices, which are, according to Nietzsche,
life-promoting choices.
If we were to formulate a Sartrean fundamental moral principle it
would read like this: All that affirms, respects and promotes freedom is
good; all that negates and destroys it is bad. Human beings must make
their choices in view of the promotion of their own freedom, since they
can strive towards authenticity only by promoting themselves as the free
beings that they truly are. In the Sartrean scheme, there is no room for a
device like the eternal return. In fact, he was very critical of it in his Saint
Genet. 29 His reasons for being so critical, however, are misplaced. He
understands the eternal return as a nihilistic attitude. He also takes
Nietzsche to mean it literally, that is, as a cyclical theory of time or
ontological model of the universe. Accordingly, his reading of the notion
of the eternal return is basically ill-founded. That being said, this does not
mean that Sartre would have adopted such an ethical device, had he read
Nietzsche properly. Nonetheless, the ethical rule that he does propose is
very close to that of Nietzsche. In fact, it can be read as being essentially
the same if one looks closely at the relationship between the will to power
and freedom.
Nietzsche conceives of freedom as "something one has and does not
have, something one wants, something one conquers 99 . 30 This formula
from Twilight of the Idols is reminiscent of Sartre's description of the foritself
as freedom and as the being that is what he is not and is not what he
is. 31 For Nietzsche, freedom is something within the human being 32 that
See Sartre, Saint Genet Actor and Martyr, 346-50.
30
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, §38,103.
31
See Being and Nothingness for numerous instances of this formula describing
the for-itself.
32
Could it be that there lies the ultimate difference between the two? Freedom is
something one has for Nietzsche whereas freedom is something one is in Sartre.
The very being of the human being is freedom in Sartrean philosophy. For

Sartre and Nietzsche: Brothers in Arms 69
one must assume and actualise, something that one must will, just like in
Sartre. Peter Caws's description of Sartrean freedom reveals how close
this concept is to that of the will to power. He says: "What Sartre calls
'original freedom' is, therefore, nothing other than the presuppositionless
and undetermined upsurge of the for-itself in every moment of my life", 33
just like the Nietzschean will to power.
For some time I have conceived of the fundamental divergence
between Nietzsche and Sartre in the following terms: in the end, will to
power and freedom can be conceived of as referring to the same
fundamental human drive. What differs from Nietzsche to Sartre is that
Nietzsche says that this will to power is also active in the world outside of
human beings, while Sartre speaks of freedom only in relation to the
human being. For example, Zarathustra exclaims that wherever he finds
life, he finds will to power at work. 34 This has been interpreted to mean
that human beings, animals, plants, and even the world itself as a living
and evolving organism, are all expressions of the will to power. The will
to power would thus be a force at play beyond the human being,
something that Sartrean freedom is not.
However, this divergence might not withstand scrutiny. If one
interprets Nietzsche as a proto-phenomenologist, we could find the same
ontological setting as that which we find in Being and Nothingness, i.e. a
phenomenological ontology that revolves around the notion of an
intentional consciousness. 35 Simply and very briefly put, it could be that,
when Nietzsche claims that "This world is the will to power—and nothing
besides", 36 —he could be referring to the same thing as the circuit of
selfness that Sartre describes in Being and Nothingness, Nietzsche talks
about being itself as being irrelevant for humans; what really matters is the
world as it exists for us. In this case, the world is necessarily the world of
Nietzsche, the being of the human being is will to power. Is will to power
freedom? As I will argue now, the answer is yes.
33 Caws, Sartre, 115.
34 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 137.
35 Granted, it is difficult to equate Sartrean consciousness with Nietzschean
consciousness, but I do not think the task is impossible. As a suggestive
experiment, compare the multi-layered, labyrinthine self described by Nietzsche in
different texts (particularly Daybreak and The Gay Science), with the complex
consciousness described by Sartre in the Transcendence of the Ego.
36 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §1067, 550. This is the most famous utterance of
this idea. However, it stems from the Nachlass. Its corresponding published
aphorism states it somewhat differently: "The world viewed from inside, the world
defined and determined according to its 'intelligible character'—it would be 'will
to power' and nothing else" (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §36,48).

70 Chapter Five
the will to power. Since human beings are fundamentally an embodiment
of will to power and since they make the world in accordance with
themselves, the world is necessarily a world of will to power. If this is the
case, we would be dealing with the same ontological setting in both
Nietzsche's and Sartre's philosophy. Hence, what I had previously
identified as a fundamental divergence would vanish, revealing that they
are in fact much closer than I had initially thought. Whatever the case may
be, even if the divergence were to persist, one would still have to
recognize that their ethical proposals are very much akin.
Conclusion: Brothers in Arms
I have shown that the philosophies of Nietzsche and Sartre stand very
close together in the realm of ethics. They both share the same nihilism
and both propose the same solution to it, namely a solution that is
elaborated through a positive and optimistic answer to the question of the
meaning of existence. The ethics founded upon their respective ontologies
present an ideal of authenticity that, in each case, urges the human being to
strive towards self-actualisation. This is the meaning shared between the
Nietzschean Overman and Sartre's notion of authenticity. My claim is that
the Overman is essentially a Sartrean authentic person and vice versa.
One is still left to question whether or not there remains any
divergence between the two (especially now that I contend that the
divergence pertaining to the will to power as worldly phenomenon does
not hold). However, I think there is still a divergence, particularly in the
ethical realm. Nietzsche's ethics is humanistic, but, perhaps above all, it
remains individualistic. There is little opening to the Other in his ethical
philosophising and when Nietzsche does address relationships among
humans, he slips into a messy political talk that is difficult to reconcile
with his ethical views. 37 In contrast, Sartre explicitly presents an opening
to the Other. It could be a failed one, as some have argued, but at least
there is the attempt along with the recognition that one cannot be ethical
without the Other. 38
I have discussed this tension in my "Nietzsche: Virtue Ethics... Virtue Politics?"
In this article, I argue that Nietzsche's ethics is akin to virtue ethics. I then discuss
how the aristocratic politics clashes with an ethics that favours the flourishing of
all and conclude that in order to be coherent, Nietzsche must stand for a "virtue
politics", i.e. a politics that would favour the flourishing of all in the group.
More often than not, commentators take the failed opening to the Other as the
backbone of their argument for the abandonment of the Notebooks for an Ethics.
Some have argued that Sartre's opening is successful only when he seriously

Sartre and Nietzsche: Brothers in Arms 71
That being said, I have shown that in the ethical realm, Nietzsche and
Sartre are really fighting the same battle despite the fact that they express
their ethical views differently. They want to liberate the human being from
the yoke of an alienating worldview in order for her to be capable of
ethical growth in her striving towards Sartrean authenticity and
Nietzschean overcoming. Theirs is thus truly a humanistic ethics.
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Beauvoir, Simone de. Adieux. A Farewell to Sartre (trans. Patrick
O'Brian). New York: Random House, 1984.
Bergoffen, Debra. "Nietzsche's Existential Signatures", International
Studies in Philosophy, 34, no. 3 (2002), 83-93.
Caws, Peter. Sartre. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.
Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre 1905-1980. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.
Daigle, Christine. Le Nihilisme est-il un humanisme? Etude sur Nietzsche
et Sartre. Sainte-Foy: Presses de l'Universite Laval, 2005.
—. "Nietzsche: Virtue Ethics...Virtue Politics?" Journal of Nietzsche
Studies, 32 (2006), 1-21.
—. "Sartre and Nietzsche", Sartre Studies International, 10, no. 2 (2004),
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—. "The Ambiguous Ethics of Beauvoir", in Existentialist Thinkers and
Ethics (ed. Christine Daigle), 120-41. Montreal: McGill / Queen's
University Press, 2006.
Louette, J.-F. Sartre contra Nietzsche ("Les Mouches", "Huis Clos", u Les
Mots"). Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1996.
Montinari, Mazzion. "La Volonte de puissance" n f existe pas (ed. P.
DTorio). Paris: Editions de l'Eclat, 1996.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil (trans. W. Kaufmann). New
York: Vintage Books, 1966.
tackles Marxism in his Marxistic treatise, Critique of Dialectical Reason. For my
part, I remain sceptical of the Sartrean success. As I have said earlier, I am
concerned with Sartre's existentialist philosophy. The conflictual relationships he
has so strongly delineated in Being and Nothingness defeat in advance any attempt
to resolve the said conflicts. It is also not true that Simone de Beauvoir is
successful in that matter. If she is indeed successful in elaborating an ethics in
Ethics of Ambiguity, it is because she does not develop it on the basis of the
Sartrean ontology as has been claimed, but rather upon her own understanding of
human reality as ambiguous and upon her own understanding of interpersonal
relationships. She sees these as potentially conflictual, but not irremediably so. A
way out of conflict is possible. See my "The Ambiguous Ethics of Beauvoir".

72 Chapter Five
—. Daybreak (trans. R. J. Hollingdale). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997.
—. The Gay Science (trans. W. Kaufmann). New York: Vintage Books,
1974.
—. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. R. J. Hollingdale). New York: Penguin
Books, 1969.
—. The Will to Power (trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale). New
York: Vintage Books, 1968.
—. Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist (trans. R. J. Hollingdale). New
York: Penguin Books, 1968.
—. Untimely Meditations (trans. R. J. Hollingdale). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983.
Rybalka, Michel, Oreste F. Pucciani and Susan Gruenheck. "An Interview
with Jean-Paul Sartre on May 12 and 19, 1975", in The Philosophy of
Jean-Paul Sartre (ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp). La Salle (Illinois): Open
Court, 1981.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness (trans. H. E. Barnes). New York:
Philosophical Library, 1956.
—. Merits de jeunesse (eds Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka). Paris:
Gallimard, 1990.
—. Notebooks for an Ethics (trans. D. Pellauer). Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1992.
—. Saint Genet Actor and Martyr (trans. B. Frechtman). New York:
George Braziller, 1963.

CHAPTER SIX
1945-2005:
EXISTENTIALISM AND HUMANISM
SIXTY YEARS ON
DEBORAH EVANS
In his seminal work, Le Siecle de Sartre (Sartre, Philosopher of the
Twentieth Century) published in 2000, Bernard-Henri L6vy states that
Sartre "is not a humanist". In this opinion he is joined by the Communist
Jean Kanapa, one of Sartre's former pupils, who wrote a work in 1947
entitled VExistentialisme n'est pas un humanisme (Existentialism is not a
Humanism). So the question I want to address is this: is Sartrean philosophy
a humanist philosophy and what, specifically, should we understand
by Sartre's use of the term "humanist"? What relevance does his humanism
have for us today? 1
In Sartre's La Nausee (Nausea, 1938), Antoine Roquentin laments of
the humanist: "Alas, I've known so many!" He attacks the radical humanist,
the so-called "left-wing" humanist, the implicit humanism of the
communist writer, the Catholic humanist, the humanist philosopher, the
"joyful humanist" and even (foreshadowing later attacks on Sartre's own
philosophy) the "sombre humanist". Sartre also appears to parody a certain
type of humanism, which takes man as an end in himself, through the
character of the self-taught man, the Autodidact. Antoine Roquentin, the
protagonist who wants to avoid being labelled at all costs, finally
1 A draft of this chapter was given at the special conference of the UK Sartre
Society, commemorating Sartre's centenary, at the Institut Frangais, London, in
March 2005.
2 "H&as, j'en ai tant connu!" (Sartre, La Nausee, 165). All translations from
French are my own.

74 Chapter Six
declares in these well-known words: "I'm not stupid enough to call myself
an 'anti-humanist'. I'm not a humanist, that's all."
However, Sartre is more than Roquentin. The Second World War
proved a decisive catalyst in the development of the thinking of the young
philosopher. Sartre's experiences of capture, internment, and finally
liberation left an indelible mark on the evolution of his thought, marking a
rite of passage from youth to maturity. In a letter to Simone de Beauvoir,
dated 4 September 1939, Sartre writes: "[W]e heard that war had been
declared and it's as if a wall was erected behind me to cut me off from my
past life." In October 1945, he gave a lecture at the Club Maintenant in
Paris entitled "L'Existentialisme est un humanisme" ("Existentialism is a
Humanism"). This relatively short expose of existential thought was
destined to change forever the course of twentieth-century philosophy. The
lecture had two main aims. One was to popularise certain aspects of
existential philosophy contained in Sartre's recently published magnum
opus: Uiltre et le neant (Being and Nothingness, 1943). However, the
lecture was simultaneously an attempt by Sartre to stave off numerous
potentially damaging allegations made against existentialism, specifically
as a humanist philosophy. To be an existentialist, Sartre claimed, had
become such an abused term that it had come to signify nothing at all.
Sartrean existentialism was not short of its critics. Pope Pius XII
condemned its "terrifying nihilism" and censured Sartre's work by placing
it on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of forbidden books) in
1948, where he joined such illustrious names as Nietzsche, Sterne,
Voltaire, Defoe and Balzac. But existentialism was no less pilloried by
secular critics who charged it with being a philosophy of isolation,
pessimism, despair, anarchy, vulgarity, baseness, and even ugliness. Not
least, existentialism was charged with amorality because Sartre, restating
the position of Dostoyevsky, affirmed the humanistic starting-point of
existentialism: "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted." 5 If
there are no universal values, no God whose commandments we must
obey, we can all behave exactly as we like. We cannot judge the actions of
others since all actions are equally valid. In this scenario, how can Sartre,
seizing on the opportunity to popularise existential philosophy and to
3 "[J]e ne commettrai pas la sottise de me dire 'anti-humaniste'. Je ne suis pas
humaniste, voila tout" (ibid., 167).
4 "[0]n a appris la declaration de guerre et c'&ait comme si un mur se dressait
derriere moi pour me couper de ma vie passee" (Sartre, Lettres au Castor, I, 278-
79).
5 "Si Dieu n'existait pas, tout serait permis" (Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un
humanisme, 36).

1945-2005: Existentialism and Humanism Sixty Years On 75
sketch some of its ethical implications, avoid the twin pitfalls of anarchy
and social amorality, implied in Dostoyevsky's statement?
A further problem area of Sartre's thought, in both L'Etre et le neant
and L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, concerns his alleged startingpoint
of the Cartesian cogito. The maitrise (dominion) of the "I think" as
the isolated presence of a pure subjectivity was considered by both
Communist and Christian critics alike to preclude any form of concrete
action in, or social solidarity with, the outside world. The existentialist was
considered to live in a Kierkegaardian world of "inwardness of thought".
To certain Communist critics, singled out for particular attention by Sartre,
existentialism appeared nothing more than an abstract bourgeois ideology.
How could such a misunderstanding have arisen? Sartre's reply to the
various charges of anarchy, amorality, pessimistic nihilism and despair is
definitive. He does not set out to prove the non-existence of God, but
merely affirms that, even if God did exist, nothing would be changed. We
are delaisses (abandoned), "thrown" into the world. But far from
engendering a humanistic philosophy of despair and pessimism, this very
abandonment is the source of metaphysical optimism since human beings
now become the source of all values and meanings. To illustrate this point,
Sartre cites the example of the student who asks his advice as to whether
he should stay with his dependent mother or abandon his mother and go
off to war. Of course, Sartre cannot give a ready-made answer to this
moral problem; there is no a priori moral stance which can justify either
course of action: "[Y]ou are free, [so] choose, that is to say, invent." 6 In
this sense, existential philosophy is a direct correlate of a metaphysical
humanism which seeks in the human subject an absolute foundation for all
knowledge and values. But in this knowledge and in these values lies
anguish. We are alone, without excuse. There is no justification for our
existence. None whatsoever. As Sartre famously puts it, "man is condemned
to be free". 7 More than this, however, we are precisely the sum
total of our freely-chosen actions in any given situation. A coward "is"
not—if we wish, we can even place that "is" in Husserlian parentheses, by
literally "suspending" its meaning—because each coward is nothing more
than a coward by virtue of their own particular actions: each is responsible
for his or her own cowardice. In other words, we "create" ourselves. There
is no a priori determinism, no in-built "character"; we are never the
hapless victims of our own passions. In a word we are not only free, we
incarnate freedom itself, we are freedom, and it is this non-essentialist
concept of freedom that Levy prizes above all as Sartre's legacy to the
"[V]ous etes libre, choisissez, c'est-a-dire inventez" (ibid., 47).
7 "[L]'homme est condamne' a §tre libre" (ibid., 37).

76 Chapter Six
twentieth century. However, perhaps a non-essentialist view of the human
being is not totally incompatible with a certain humanist tradition which
places "Man", as a generic category, at the centre of philosophic enquiry.
As Sartre famously remarked: "[W]e are in a world where there are only
men." 8
What would Nietzsche have made of Sartre's conception of freedom?
In Beyond Good and Evil, he states:
For the desire for "freedom of will" in that metaphysical superlative sense
which is unfortunately still dominant in the minds of the half-educated, the
desire to bear the whole and sole responsibility for one's actions, and to
absolve God, world, ancestors, chance, society from responsibility for
them, is nothing less than the desire to be that causa sui and with more
than Munchhausen temerity, to pull oneself into existence out of the
swamp of nothingness by one's own hair. 9
The charge of the isolated subjectivity of the existentialist was to prove
difficult to refute. The alleged Cartesian origin of Sartre's thought,
beginning with the pure subjectivity of the "I think", has provoked over
the course of the last half century a vast amount of critical attention,
particularly from Anglo-Saxon commentators. In this context I think it
would be helpful to maintain the distinction which Sartre maintains
throughout his lecture between, on the one hand, Cartesian philosophy
and, on the other, the philosophy of Descartes. Cartesian philosophy is
concerned with the rationalistic analysis of the structures of individual
human thought or consciousness, as is L'Etre et le neant, As Sartre
remarks in this work: "[T]he only possible starting-point was the Cartesian
cogito" 10 He takes up this theme again, this time with a humanist
emphasis, in L'Existentialisme est un humanisme:
Our starting-point is in fact the subjectivity of the individual [...] because
we want a doctrine based on truth, [...]. There can be no other truth at the
outset than this: / think therefore I am, this is the absolute truth of
consciousness attaining itself. [...] this theory is the only one which gives a
dignity to man, the only one which does not make him into an object. 11
"[N]ous sommes sur un plan ou il y a seulement des hommes" (ibid., 36).
9
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 51
10
"[L]e seul depart possible gtait le cogito cartesien" (Sartre, Ufctre et le neant,
290).
11
"Notre point de depart est en effet la subjectivity de Tindividu, [...] parce que
nous voulons une doctrine basee sur la ve*ritd, [...]. II ne peut pas y avoir de v&ite'
autre, au point de depart, que celle-ci: je pense done je suis, e'est la la ve'rite'

1945-2005: Existentialism and Humanism Sixty Years On 77
However, Sartre is never content merely to follow. As Nik Farrell Fox
states in his excellent book, The New Sartre, "Sartre's attachment to the
Cartesian cogito in his early work is never a complete or exhaustive
one". 12 The later Sartre tries to distance himself from an overtly Cartesian
emphasis on his early work, and his comments made during the 1960s
seemed to resonate with the times when he said it was never his intention
to reiterate Cartesianism. But what exactly do we understand by this term
"Cartesianism", specifically from a humanistic perspective? Sartre avoids
the substantiality of the subject by creating the pre-reflective cogito as the
foundation to its Cartesian counterpart. As he puts it very succinctly in
VEtre et le neant: "[T]here is a pre-reflective cogito which is the
condition of the Cartesian cogito." 13
First described in La Transcendance de VEgo {The Transcendence of
the Ego, 1936), the pre-reflective cogito challenges some fundamental
assumptions made by Descartes. For Sartre, Descartes assumes the
subjective, isolated presence of the cogito which exists at a specific
moment in time: the instant or now. And it is this aspect of the Cartesian
cogito which Sartre is, of course, anxious to challenge. He does this in two
main ways. Firstly, in order to get outside this problem of instantaneity,
the pour-soi (for-itself) is constructed as a non-material, temporal being. It
is itself this process of temporalisation by which the past and present
ecstasies are continually transcended towards an "open" future. Secondly,
to refute the charge of subjectivity, while at the same time distancing
himself somewhat from his erstwhile mentor, Husserl, the ego is made
transcendent to consciousness. It does not "inhabit" the pour-soi. Then, in
a further radical move for phenomenology, the Sartrean cogito is called
into question by the presence of the Other. The existence of the Other is as
certain as our own existence, and a condition of it. In this way, the charge
of subjective "isolation" implied in the Cartesian cogito is counterbalanced
by Sartre with Hegel's intuition of the Other. In other words, it is
counterbalanced by the ontological significance of alterity. Only the Other
has power to confer value to my own subjectivity. I may consider myself
to be good, bad, cunning, out-going, generous, etc., but I cannot confer
these values on myself outside of the presence of others.
absolue de la conscience s'atteignant elle-m§me. [...] cette thdorie est la seule a
donner une dignitd a rhomme, c'est la seule qui n'en fasse pas un objet" (Sartre,
VExistentialisme est un humanisme, 63-64, 65).
12 Farrell Fox, The New Sartre, 14.
13 "[I]l y a un cogito prgrgflexif qui est la condition du cogito carte'sien" (Sartre,
L'fore et le neant, 19).

78 Chapter Six
Nevertheless, Simone de Beauvoir was clearly unhappy with critics'
understanding of Ufctre et le neant, particularly in connection with
Sartre's use of the term "useless passion" to describe the pour-soi: the
knowingly futile attempt of self-consciousness to become its own
foundation. One of the principal aims of her 1947 essay, Pour une Morale
de Vambiguite (The Ethics of Ambiguity), is precisely to re-examine the
term "useful", opening it up to the fundamental ambiguity of existential
meaning: "[A]t the level of description where Being and Nothingness is
situated, the word useful has not yet been given any meaning [...]. In the
original abandonment where man rises up, nothing is useful, nothing is
useless." 14 In a parallel trajectory to Sartre's lecture, then, the aim of
Beauvoir's essay was to give a lively defence of certain allegations made
against existentialism, in particular that it was a philosophy of the absurd,
that it gave rise to a "sterile anguish" and an "empty subjectivity". These
charges are, in Beauvoir's typically brusque manner, publicly rebuffed.
Although Sartre's relationship to the Cartesian tradition has long been
the object of much critical scrutiny, it is Sartre's relationship to Heidegger
which, over the course of the last sixty years or so, has arguably caused the
most controversy. Sartre places himself squarely in the tradition of
atheistic existentialist thinkers, and further implicates Heidegger in his
"humanist" project. Levy rightly asserts that "Sartre is not a French
Heidegger". 15 However, Sartre's relationship to Heidegger is fundamentally
problematic. It begins with his implicit acceptance of Henri Corbin's
translation of Dasein (meaning literally "There-being") as "human
reality". Jacques Derrida famously denounced "human reality" as a
"monstrous translation" of Dasein in his essay "Les Fins de l'homme"
("The Ends of Man"), and a symptom of a false anthropological reading of
Heidegger's Being and Time. 16 Heidegger would, of course, refute any
suggestion that the ontology contained in his Sein und Zeit (Being and
Time) is humanistic: his well-known "Letter on Humanism", published in
1947, was his reply to Sartre's UExistentialisme est un humanisme: "[...]
—isms", writes Heidegger, "have for a long time now been suspect". 17
Non-metaphysical, non subject-based, post-structuralist theorists throughout
the 1960s and 70s—Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, amongst others—
have taken this aspect of Heidegger's thought through to its logical
14 "[A]u niveau de description ou se situe Ufctre et le Neant, le mot utile n'a pas
encore regu de sens [...]. Dans le delaissement originel ou l'homme surgit, rien
n'est utile, rien n'est inutile" (Beauvoir, Pour une Morale de Vambiguite, 17).
15 "Sartre n'est pas le Heidegger frangais" (B.-H. Le\y, Le Siecle de Sartre, 171).
16 Derrida, "Les Fins de rhomme", in Marges de la philosophic 131-64.
17 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 219.

1945-2005: Existentialism and Humanism Sixty Years On 79
conclusion: literally the "de-struction" of the subject, or what we could
call, in Derridean terms, the "dis-placement" of the subject.
Heidegger in particular criticises what he perceives to be Sartre's
philosophical starting-point, Cartesian subjectivity, for failing to address
adequately the question of Being. He writes: "Da-sein ist je meines" ("D

80 Chapter Six
Sartre a philosopher of freedom rather than a humanist, in the sense that
man is not taken as an end in himself.
However, as always when reading philosophy, Sartre reads Heidegger
with the eye of a literary writer as much as with the eye of a philosopher.
The neat formula—"existence precedes essence"—immediately provides
him with a basis for a phenomenological ethics: "If, in fact, existence
precedes essence [...] man is free, man is freedom." 19 Sartre seizes on the
opportunity to oppose a long line of literary and philosophical figures such
as Diderot, Voltaire and Kant, who argue that "essence precedes
existence" since, according to these thinkers, we all possess a universal
human nature. Sartre inverts the term, and we need to remember here that
this idea of a human nature does not just refer to a type of nineteenthcentury
cultural tombstone. Today for example, Noam Chomsky advocates
that scientific knowledge, without reference to a type of "human nature",
would be impossible. 20 However, for Sartre, the attraction of turning
several hundred years of philosophical enquiry on its head must have been
enormous. And then, what could be more readily comprehensible to the
general public than to associate the notion of the "authentic" and "inauthentic",
taken from Heidegger, with both "existence" and "essence"?
The "inauthentic", on this reading, would be associated with an
"essentialist" reading of human subjectivity, whilst the "authentic" would
be a correlate of that raw, nauseating experience of human existence,
tinged with anguish, describing that fundamental existential state of
"being-in-question" found in La Nausee, Les Chemins de la Liberte
{Roads to Freedom, 1945), and in certain sections of L'&re et le neant.
Authentic existence is based on freedom of choice, responsibility, the
perpetual transcendence of consciousness in the project of being, the
perpetual mise-en-question (bringing into question, or interrogation) of our
being. Inauthentic existence is based on a denial of choice, responsibility
and human freedom. It is rooted in stagnation and immanence and conveys
all the characteristics of the en-soi (in-itself). Like the salauds (bastards)
of La Nausee, the mauvaisefoi (bad faith) of inauthentic existence means
openly embracing the formula "essence precedes existence".
For Sartre, on the contrary, we are "not" what we are: we "make
ourselves" to be. An understanding of the concept of the continual
"becoming" of consciousness, that is, the time of authentic existence, is
"Si, en effet, Fexistence precede l'essence [...] rhomme est libre, l'homme est
liberty" (Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, 36-37).
20 Noam Chomsky in a personal e-mail to the author dated 9 March 2005. Human
nature, for Chomsky, is our unique biological endowment which distinguishes us
from other mammals.

1945-2005: Existentialism and Humanism Sixty Years On 81
crucial to an understanding of Sartre's humanistic project. This "becoming
time" of existence finds an echo in the work of three major philosophers:
Kierkegaard, Bergson and Hegel, yet only one of the three, Hegel, is an
acknowledged source in L'fctre et le neant. Although Sartre begins to
incorporate certain aspects of Hegelian dialectical temporality into the
structures of the pour-soi, a fuller exploration is found in the dialectic of
Les Chemins de la liberte, in the Critique de la raison dialectique, I (The
Critique of Dialectical Reason, I, 1960) and in the posthumously
published, Cahiers pour une morale (Notebooks for an Ethics, 1983).
However, for Sartre at this largely individualistic stage, as for Kierkegaard
in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, "subjective thinking invests
everything in the process of becoming". Bergson gives a similar view in
L'Evolution creatrice (Creative Evolution, 1907). In particular, Bergson's
insistence on the future as a possibility of being was to become a crucial
concept in Sartre's re-appropriation of Heidegger.
For Sartre, Man "is" what he makes himself in the pro-jection of
himself towards the sum of possibilities that he is. In this way he is no
longer bounded by finitude and death. Heidegger, on the contrary,
emphasises both our "freedom-towards-death" (Freiheit-zum-Tode) and
our "Being-towards-death" (Sein-zum-Tode). 21 The "authentic future"
given through "resolute anticipation" is a "coming-towards". That is, "Zukunft"
(the future) is interpreted as "zukommen auf': a coming-towards or
coming-up-to. This is an inverse relation to the temporalisation of the
pour-soi. However, Heidegger also states that Dasein is always "ahead of
itself ("sich vorweg") and Corbin—with characteristic artistic licence—
interestingly translates this aspect of Dasein as Man's being "un §tre des
lointains": a being who is distant, far-away or remote. Sartre uncritically
takes on board this translation, perhaps again as it appeals to him by
appearing to reinforce his idea of an always "open future". In
L Existentialisme est un humanisme, he goes one step further and refers to
the "virgin" future which awaits man and which he "makes". 22 For Sartre,
it is the perpetual "becoming time" of the present (as neant) which gives
the future its possibility of being. Arguably, it is only an "always open"
future that can provide Sartre with an absolute basis for a philosophy of
freedom, at the time so desperately needed by so many people under the
21 "Being-towards-death" may be understood existentially as both inauthentic
(waiting for, dwelling on), and authentic in the sense of anticipating death as our
"ownmost possibility of being". In being "free-for-death", Dasein is thrown back
on itself, experiencing the authentic finitude of existence (see Heidegger, Being
and Time, 290-311,435).
22 See Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, 39.

82 Chapter Six
German occupation. Metaphysics and political history embrace one
another—that is to say, a metaphysics shaped, at least in part, by political
forces. If, for Sartre's generation, the idea of the future is confused, that is
because the war has taught them that it is unpredictable. The future carries
within it a perpetual "lack" of being, or what Valery termed "un creux
toujours futur" ("an always future hollow").
Sartre's approach to the question of human freedom in his lecture is
later mirrored in his biographical writing, and we shall now briefly
compare the "authentic" future with Sartre's brilliant depiction of its
antithesis in his study of Baudelaire (1947). The poete maudit, "cursed"
by an "original choice", decides in a particular situation what he will be
and who he is: "Feeling of solitude, from my childhood. In spite of
family—and in the midst of friends, especially—the feeling of an eternally
solitary destiny." 23 Although these lines may strike us with their quasiautobiographical
tone for Sartre, nevertheless, Baudelaire's action is of
course, for Sartre, a supreme act of bad faith because the poet has decided
on his own destiny: not only to live in isolation from others, but also to see
himself as an "Other", to look on himself through the eyes of a stranger. In
other words, Baudelaire's future has become cut off from the project of
human transcendence. Later, the scenario is repeated in Sartre's study of
Jean Genet, the man whose "original choice" is to label himself a "thief.
However, Sartre emphasises that the original choice of one man never
affects just one individual. The morality of existentialism is that in
choosing for himself, man chooses for the whole human race. In this
context, Simone de Beauvoir cites Dostoyevsky as the preface to her
second novel, Le Sang des autres {The Blood of Others, 1945): "Each one
of us is responsible for everything and to every human being." 24
Arguably, this epigraph could equally well apply to recent events in
Iraq, where clearly the original choices and actions of individual men have
had worldwide media coverage and global repercussions. In choosing to
go to war, for whatever the reason, President Bush and Prime Minister
Blair have chosen for the whole of humanity, and a new generation is
discovering the meaning of Sartre's humanistic emphasis on the
interrelated existential terms of "anguish", "despair" and "abandonment".
These terms underlie the relevance of existential humanism today, because
we shall always live in a "human" universe. We could modify Sartre's
"Sentiment de solitude, des mon enfance. Malgre* la famille—et au milieu des
camarades, surtout—sentiment de destine*e dternellement solitaire" (Sartre,
Baudelaire, 19).
24 "Chacun est responsable de tout devant tous" (epigraph to Simone de Beauvoir's
Le Sang des autres).

1945-2005: Existentialism and Humanism Sixty Years On 83
comments in UExistentialisme est un humanisme to read: "We are still in a
world where there are only men."
What of philosophy today? Edward Said wrote, shortly before his
death in September 2003, that there is "always something radically
incomplete, insufficient, provisional, disputable and arguable about
humanistic knowledge that gives the whole idea of humanism a tragic flaw
that is constitutive to it and cannot be removed." 25 With Said, it could be
argued that the word "humanist" has, over the course of the last halfcentury
become so over-used that it has literally become ab-used. The
metaphysical horizon of "Humanism" indicates the semantic chain:
"humanity", the "humane", the human, the being and "name" of "Man"
(homme, homo), "Man" as the truth of being, "Man" as disclosing the truth
of being. Although, for Sartre, the subject is continually called into
question, perpetually deferred and fissured, the philosopher's interest, the
writer's interest, is still this incomplete but totally human subject who, as a
presence in the world, bears witness to the world. Even in Questions de
Methode {Search for a Method), when Sartre affirms that he does not like
to speak of existentialism—which he describes in quite scathing terms as
"this idealistic protest against idealism" 26 —his overriding concern is still
to examine the nature of existence in a human universe. Rejecting an
idealistic humanism, what attracts Sartre to Marxism is precisely an
examination of "the reality of Marxism, the heavy presence, on my
horizon, of the working masses, the enormous and sombre body which
lived Marxism". 27 Sartre never lost sight of the "human" in humanism.
What of politics, today? The future as a possibility of being still holds
a profound moral and ethical value as a source of human freedom. The
terrorist attacks of the new millennium, the invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq mean that we have all recently felt the pressure of history just as
surely—albeit less intensely—as did Sartre when he wrote UEtre et le
neant, or later when he wrote about the Soviet labour camps, the Soviet
suppression of the Hungarian uprising, or the Algerian war: "We are
alone, without excuse." We ourselves and our leaders are "condemned to
be free", alone, unjustified: we are never free not to choose; to choose not
to act may, in certain situations, carry even greater weight than the choice
to act Both Bush and Blair have focused on the need to "liberate" Iraq and
Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 12.
26 "[C]ette protestation ide*aliste contre riddalisme" (Sartre, Critique de la raison
dialectique, I, 26).
27 "[L]a realite du marxisme, la lourde presence, a mon horizon, des masses
ouvrieres, corps enorme et sombre qui vivait le marxisme" (Sartre's emphases,
ibid., 28).

84 Chapter Six
Afghanistan. Both need to remember the history lesson that Sartre has
taught us, that liberty is a process and not a commodity.
"The freedom genie is out of the bottle in the Middle East", ran a
headline in a US newspaper in March 2005. Certainly, we are living in
historic times: the prospect of women being given the vote in Saudi
Arabia, the prospect of Syria's withdrawal from a part of Lebanon, the
prospect of free elections in Egypt, and—perhaps most surprisingly—we
witnessed a large turnout in the first post-invasion elections to be held in
Iraq. Each of those Iraqi voters had been faced with perhaps the ultimate
existential situation-limite (extreme situation). Their original choice to
vote must have been accompanied by fear and anguish in the ever-present
threat of death. From an existential perspective, hope for their future—
which is also hope for our future—lies in a commitment to furthering the
cause of human freedom: a freedom expressed not just through the ballot
box, but in re-affirming each and every individual's right to freedom of
speech and social justice. Will the Iraqi voters of today experience history
as alienation, or as the affirmation of individual choice? In exercising our
freedom of choice, we need to remember, with Sartre, that there is no
freedom without responsibility, and that our freedom engages the whole of
humanity in the future course of world politics.
Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone de. Le Sang des autres. Paris: Gallimard, 1945.
—. Pour une Morale de Vambiguite. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
Bergson, Henri. UEvolution creatrice. Paris: PUF, 1962.
Derrida, Jacques. Marges de la philosophic Paris: Editions de Minuit,
1972.
Farrell Fox, Nicholas. The New Sartre. London: Continuum, 2003.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings (ed. David Farrell Krell). London:
Routledge, 2000.
Kanapa, Jean. UExistentialisme n'est pas un humanisme. Paris: Editions
sociales, 1947.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. New York:
Princeton University Press, 1941.
Levy, Bernard-Henri. Le Siecle de Sartre. Paris: Grasset, 2000.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. London: Penguin, 1990.
Said, Edward. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Baudelaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
—. Critique de la raison dialectique, I. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.

1945-2005: Existentialism and Humanism Sixty Years On 85
—. La Nausee. Paris: Gallimard, 1938.
—. La Transcendance de VEgo. Paris: Vrin, 1992.
—. L'£tre et le neant. Paris: Gallimard, 1943 (Collection 'TEL', 1995).
—. Lettres au Castor, I. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.
—. L'Existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Nagel, 1964.

CHAPTER SEVEN
SARTRE, INTENTIONALITY AND PRAXIS 1
ROY ELVETON
In January, 1939, one year after the death of Edmund Husserl, Sartre
published a very brief essay entitled "Husserl's Central Idea". 2 In the
space of a few paragraphs, Sartre rejects the epistemology of Descartes
and the neo-Kantians and their view of consciousness's relationship to the
world. Consciousness is not related to the world by virtue of a series of
mental representations and acts of mental syntheses that combine such
representations to provide us with our knowledge of the external world.
Husserl's intentional theory of consciousness provides the only acceptable
alternative: "Consciousness and the world are immediately given together:
the world, essentially external to consciousness, is essentially related to
it." 3 The only appropriate image for intentionality and our knowing
relationship to the world is that of an "explosion": "to know is to 'explode'
toward" an object in the world, an object "beyond oneself, over there [...]
towards that which is not oneself [...] out of oneself'. 4
Sartre's account captures an important aspect of Husserl's theory of
intentionality by insisting upon the essential nature of intentionality:
consciousness is always a consciousness of an object, be it a real object, an
imagined object, a memory or an emotion.
While the ontological realism of Sartre's account of the nature of
consciousness's intentional relationship to the world (the being-in-itself of
transcendent objects is not created or constituted by consciousness)
A draft of this chapter was presented to the special conference of the UK Sartre
Society at the Institut Frangais, London, commemorating the centenary of Sartre's
birth, 18-19 March 2005.
2 Sartre," Une id6e fondamentale de la phdnom£nologie de Husserl: rintentionnalit£ ".
3 "La conscience et le monde sont donnas d'un meme coup: ext^rieur par essence h
la conscience, le monde est, par essence, relatif h elle" ("Une Id£e fondamentale de
Husserl", 32). All translations from French are my own.
4 Ibid.

Sartre, Intentionality and Praxis 87
deviates from the form of idealism Husserl adopts in his Ideas, /, and
Cartesian Meditations, Sartre's reading of intentionality is not at all
foreign in spirit to the early group of phenomenologists in Munich
influenced by Husserl. Rejecting Husserl's idealism, philosophers such as
Adolph Reinach, advocated a form of phenomenology closer in spirit to
Husserl's pre-transcendental writings, and pursued a radically descriptive
approach to the study of consciousness. It is in a similar spirit that Sartre
writes the 1936 essay, La Transcendance de L'Ego: Equisse d*une
description phenomenologique? In mistranslating the essay's title
(properly, "outline of a descriptive phenomenology"), the English
translation prefers the glory of the term "existentialism" to the clear
indebtedness Sartre wished to maintain in the original title with respect to
his Husserlian roots. Husserl's mistake, and the error leading to his form
of phenomenology as a transcendental idealism, is the failure to
understand that the very exercise of Husserl's transcendental reflection
reifies, and thus distorts, the intentional nature of experience rather than
disclosing it. In Sartre's view, Husserlian idealism involves a relationship
between two consciousnesses: the reflecting consciousness and the
consciousness reflected upon. However, for Sartre, reflecting consciousness
is incapable of adequately grasping the consciousness reflected upon
because it has the latter as its object. The consciousness reflected upon
[...] must not be posited as an object of a reflection. On the contrary, I must
direct my attention to the revived objects, but without losing sight of the
unreflected consciousness, by joining in a sort of conspiracy with it and by
drawing up an inventory of its content in a non-positional manner. 6
It is clear that there is a fundamental difference between Husserl and
Sartre on the question of the identity of the reflecting and reflected-upon
consciousnesses. For Husserl, transcendent objects are constituted by the
transcendental ego by means of complex acts of synthesis, beginning with
the kinesthetic dimensions of my perceptual experience as an embodied
consciousness and advancing to the eidetic structures that make my
experience an experience of a tree and not of a table. Phenomenological
analysis thus discloses the anonymous acts of a spontaneously constitutive
consciousness and remains equally responsive to the world just as it is
experienced. For Sartre, however, consciousness is, one might say, a pure
spontaneity that does not "act" anonymously in Husserl's sense. I am an
5 Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness
6 Transcendence, 46.

88 Chapter Seven
unreflected consciousness of "Peter-having-to-be-helped." 7 The correct
phenomenological description of this event cannot be arrived at by
postulating a prior "unreflected pitying consciousness" 8 that would
provide an anonymous unreflected-upon content of my awareness of Peter.
Only the detailed description of Peter as the object of my intentional
experience can succeed in offering a genuine phenomenological insight
into the nature of intentional consciousness.
This perspective appears to have already informed Sartre's earlier
celebrated passages in Nausea concerning the radically superfluous nature
of the world of the in-itself. On such occasions, we are overwhelmed by
the in-itself and its obscene givenness. The experience of nausea signals
the indescribability of the in-itself in its purity. If not directly describable,
such experiences can nevertheless be approached as a kind of thoughtexperiment.
Imagine that things refuse to play the conceptual roles we
have assigned to them. Imagine not the harmonious flow of experience in
which our attention is directed first to this object and then to another, but
the very inability of our attending to gain traction in the face of the initself.
What we might be left with is a sense of the radically contingent
character of things in the world:
This moment was extraordinary. I was there, motionless and icy, plunged
in a horrible ecstasy. But something fresh had just appeared in the very
heart of this ecstasy; I understood the Nausea, I possessed it. To tell the
truth, I did not formulate the discoveries to myself. But I think that it
would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential thing is
contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist
is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered. 9
How distant are these elaborations of being-in-itself from Sartre's
Husserlian roots? Since synthetic unities of experience are the defining
characteristics of the stream of consciousness for Husserl, it would appear
that Sartre has transformed Husserlian descriptive phenomenology into its
radical opposite. Perhaps Sartre entertained such a transformation of
phenomenology with profound delight. We need only recall the opening
pages of Being and Nothingness where Sartre painstakingly dissects
Husserl's idealism and its identification of transcendent objects with
syntheses performed by the transcendental ego in order to replace it by his
own phenomenological ontology.
7 Ibid., 56.
8 Ibid., 57.
9 Sartre, Nausea, 131.

Sartre, Intentionality and Praxis 89
Husserl's own version of transcendental idealism does not preclude the
affirmation of an important contingency in our experience of the world of
transcendent objects. Nevertheless, it is the de facto harmony of
experience that represents the central focus of Husserlian phenomenology
and that serves to justify the rigorous and "scientific" study of
consciousness that is the distinctive feature of his transcendental
philosophy.
Additional episodes in Nausea concern the failure of language.
Roquentin murmurs, "It's a seat":
But the word stays on my lips; it refuses to go and put itself on the thing
[...]. Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque,
headstrong, gigantic and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say
anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things.
Alone, without words, defenceless [...]. 10
Such an account has affinities with the collapse of language that is
depicted in Hugo von Hoffmansthal's "The Letter of Lord Chandos". 11
While the early Sartre argues that Husserl's preoccupation with the eidetic
structures of experience—structures that prefigure the essential and
harmonious structures of experience—remains at a distance from an
important stratum of intentional experience, we will note below a later,
important revision made by Sartre regarding the role of language in
consciousness's intentional life. Roquentin's paralysing "Chandos"
experience will give way to an authentically intersubjective experience of
language.
Dialectical Phenomenology
The radical givenness of the in-itself persists as a major theme of
Sartre's reflections throughout his writings. Yet, whereas for the early
Sartre consciousness literally exhausted itself in its intentional relation to
the givenness of things, in Being and Nothingness the relationship between
the in-itself and the for-itself becomes more complex. We might even say
that, in its details, the intentional ontology of Being and Nothingness
betrays significant duress and contortion.
We are told in Being and Nothingness that the for-itself is the negation
of the objects of consciousness's awareness. Yet Being and Nothingness
addresses several dimensions of experience in which consciousness's
10 Nausea, 125.
11 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, 133f.

90 Chapter Seven
intentional object has the capacity to modify the very substance of
consciousness itself. This result hardly appears to be compatible with the
nature of the for-itself as being the negation of its objects, for different
kinds of beings "in-themselves" have the power to define the for-itself
differentially.
Hegel's shadow looms heavily over the play of Sartre's dialectical
phenomenology. At whatever level we engage the Hegelian system, we
encounter a complicity between the in-itself and the for-itself that answers
to the fact that neither can be understood apart from the other: their
apparent dialectical independence is to be superseded by their dialectical
resolution. However, for Sartre, the genuinely dialectical irreducibility of
the in-itself to the for-itself requires a dialectical relationship that is
endless and strictly irresolvable. In the process, Husserl's "fundamental
idea" undergoes a complex reworking.
The for-itself cannot exist without the in-itself, but neither can it be
synthetically conjoined with it. This, of course, yields an endless alteration
of dialectical scenarios. Let us consider, for example, the dialectic of the
for-itself and the other. In Sartre's account of "the look", the other
objectifies me. Initially, my world is given as centered about me: it is my
field of consciousness and I constitute its centre. The arrival of the "other"
disintegrates the unity of this perceptual field. I now surrender my
perceptual centre of gravity to the other. I become an object perceived
within the other's perceptual field. As a result, my own being escapes me.
Imprisoned within the look of the other, my projects of existence are
arrested, my freedom is lost and the original orientation of my being as a
being-for-itself becomes dis-oriented and dis-placed.
There is reason to ask why this is so. Surely my being as something
for-itself intentionally directs me toward the objects of my experience?
Indeed, as Nausea suggests, I can surrender myself to the "other" in a sort
of total abandon and still not lose myself in the other. For what I am is just
this transcending toward the other. However, Being and Nothingness adds
a critically new element to this dialectical structure. The otherness of the
other should be revealed to me as a new dimension of the in-itselfness of
what is given to me as "other" (for example, its intersubjective nature).
And so it is. The "look" reveals to me the givenness of another
consciousness within the world. Yet Sartre's dialectic of the self and other
cannot rest with this givenness. Just as the other's freedom constitutes not
only a threat but a successful suppression of my own, so, in turn, I must be
able to imprison the other in my "look".
Modifications of the being of two consciousnesses emerge that echo
the life-and-death struggle in Hegel's Phenomenology. However, more

Sartre, Intentionality and Praxis 91
significantly, they dramatically exceed the relationship of self and other
outlined in Sartre's initial delineation of Husserl's idea of intentionality. If,
originally, my intentional being consisted solely in my (negative) relation
to the object of my awareness, now this relationship is itself understood as
being within the power of the object of which I am aware because my
being is subject to an essential modification by the other.
A reasonable inference from this experience of the other's look is that
the ontology of intentionality conceals aspects that extend beyond my
intentional relationship to transcendent objects that I am not. Despite the
language of the ontological phenomenology of Being and Nothingness, the
nothingness that is the for-itself has "being" just in the sense that it is
subject to essential modifications. The "purity" of the for-itself (the purity
of its not-being what it is) is a misleading abstraction.
Sartre's own language betrays this dilemma. In the experience of the
look of the other, "I am suddenly affected in my being (which means that)
essential modifications appear in my structure—reflections which I can
apprehend and fix conceptually by means of the reflective cogito" 12 One
of these "essential" modifications is revealed in the experience of shame.
If the other looks at me, imprisoning me into a shameful situation, then I
also experience my identity with my shameful situation: "I am this
(shamed) being. I do not for an instant think of denying it; my shame is a
confession." 13 Sartre's text is quite clear on this point. There is something
of the in-itself in my very being: "Behold, now I am somebody". 14
What I "am" in the face of another for-itself involves at least two
important and corollary dimensions. First, since what I "am" is my beingseen
by the other, I can only be "seen" because I am an embodied
consciousness (just as the other is only able to look at me by virtue of the
other's embodiment). Hence, part of what I am in the look of the other is
"my body". Second, the other not only sees my body, but sees my body as
situated. In my freedom, my situation is a Gestalt within which I freely
project myself toward my possibilities. Under the other's look, however,
this Gestalt of freedom becomes the alienation of my possibilities: "A
given synthesis is there of which I am the essential structure, and this
structure at once possesses both ecstatic cohesion and the character of the
in-itself." 15 The "ecstatic cohesion" is the result of the other's seeing my
purpose within the context of my situation (I caught you spying on Pierre),
12 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 260.
13 Ibid., 261.
14 Ibid., 263.
15 Ibid., 266.

92 Chapter Seven
and the character of the in-itself refers to the death of my projects when
they are simply defined by the situation as perceived by the other.
As we shall see, Sartre's later Critique of Dialectical Reason witnesses
to an effort to remove the abstractness of this account of the self and other.
Something will have to be added to the pre-reflective spontaneity of beingfor-itself
in order to make it possible for the for-itself to become mutually
engaged by and with the other and not simply juxtaposed in opposition.
Finally, a further comparison with Husserl sheds useful light on this
feature of Being and Nothingness. In addition to the thoughts of Hegel and
Heidegger on the nature of the other, Sartre criticises Husserl's account of
the other as presented in Husserl's Cartesian Meditations. For Sartre, the
Husserl of the "Fifth" of the Cartesian Meditations and its "deduction" of
the existence of the Other, based as it is on Husserl's reliance upon the
infamous phenomenological reduction, relates only to the subject's
"knowledge" of the Other. 16 Sartre acknowledges that for Husserl the
Other is always "with" me and is immediately given within the very
structure of my perception of the world. 17 But this basis is insufficient to
account for the Other-as-a-look, for this phenomenon cannot be "derived"
from me, "for it is neither a knowledge nor a projection of my being nor a
form of unification nor a category". 18 However, Husserl's account of
intersubjectivity and the "otherness" of the Other is more complex than
Sartre allows. Merleau-Ponty, acquainted, as Sartre was not, with
Husserl's more sustained reflections on a phenomenological account of the
other (for example, the analysis of the other in Ideas II) will later elaborate
in detail a more positive account of intersubjectivity in the spirit of
Husserl. 19 It must suffice here to note that for Husserl the horizon of the
Other's alterity can only be unfolded as a possibility with the horizon of
co-subjectivity. This is the realm of empathy, in which the other and his
primordial being is originally given to me. 20 It would appear that, apart
from a more detailed explication of all of the various dimensions of
intersubjectivity itself, Sartre's attempt in Being and Nothingness to base
his account of the Other upon the single dimension of the Other-as-look
strains his ontological phenomenology. As we shall see, his later works
Being and Nothingness, 233.
17 Ibid., 272.
18 Ibid.
19 For a recent discussion critical of Sartre's account of the nature of alterity from
the perspectives of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, see Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness
and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation, Chapter 9.
20 Husserl, Ziir Phanomenologie der Intersubjectivitdt.

Sartre, Intentionality and Praxis 93
abandon the abstract ontology of Being and Nothingness for the sake of
just such an enriched perspective.
While Sartre has little to say about the historicity of being-for-itself in
Being and Nothingness, a theme that will become central in The Critique
of Dialectical Reason, he does have a great deal to say about time.
Following Heidegger, Sartre defines time "ecstatically" as the for-itself s
relationship to the past, present and future. The past is the mode of beingfor-itself
as a "no longer having to be the past that I was". The future is the
mode of being-for-itself as "what I have to be insofar as I cannot be it". 21
Thus, both the past and the future are viewed as belonging to the province
of being-in-itself. As instances of the in-itself, they are subject to the
negative relation that defines the for-itself in relation to the in-itself. What,
then, is the present? The present is the presence of the for-itself to
something in the mode of being its own "witness" to the coexistence of
itself and being-in-itself. 22 It is also the present that turns my past into the
past. But even if I am now not my past, it is still my past that has been
transformed in this way, just as it was revealed to have been my situation
that is transcended and negated by the other. Time allows me to become
the other to myself. Given the modifications of my being brought about by
temporality, I appear to be involved with a substantive self-modification
(of my present into my past) that represents something no less significant
than the modification of my being brought about by the other. Similar
considerations apply to my dialectical relationship to my future.
As in the case of Sartre's analysis of intersubjectivity, we must ask
whether temporality also points to a dimension of human experience that
reveals something essential about the very nature of being-for-itself
beyond "pure nothingness". The analysis of temporality as a mode in
which the for-itself simply transforms the dimensions of past and future
into surrogates of being-in-itself appears to overlook the radical
temporality constituting the stream of consciousness so emphatically noted
by Husserl. Perhaps by declining to follow Heidegger, whose Being and
Time privileges the future over the past and the present, Sartre's emphasis
upon the centrality of the present suggests a leveling down of the temporal
flow in our experience of the world. The insight that consciousness is
essentially temporal, as both Husserl and Heidegger claim, encompasses a
dynamic that a pure nothingness, as the negation of being-in-itself, may be
incapable of recognising.
21 Being and Nothingness, 125.
22 Ibid., 121.

94 Chapter Seven
Praxis and History
Early interpretations of Heidegger's Being and Time closely associated
this work with the "existentialist" writings of Sartre. Heidegger's
"authentic" Dasein was understood as another version of Sartre's account
of the free projection of the for-itself into the future. That Sartre endorsed
Heidegger's formula—that the "essence" of Dasein is its "existence"—
made it indeed appear as if Sartre and Heidegger were pursuing a shared
programme, an impression strengthened by Sartre's own high regard for
the Heidegger of Being and Time.
Sartre's later turn to Marx's philosophy would appear to constitute a
repudiation of this earlier existentialist affiliation with Heidegger's work.
However, the Sartre of The Critique of Dialectical Reason is much closer
to the Heidegger of Being and Time than one might first imagine. As we
shall see, the Sartre of The Critique is involved with themes that now
occupy an increasingly central position in current philosophical
discussions. It is not the "existentialist" Heidegger that preoccupies our
attention today. Rather it is the Heidegger whose analyses of the structures
of social, institutional and pragmatic agency now make it possible for us to
begin to grapple with the profound importance of Sartre's later Marxinspired
"existentialism".
In Search for a Method, Sartre announces a new interpretation of the
relationship between being-in-itself and being-for-itself:
I cannot describe here the true dialectic of the subjective and the objective.
One would have to demonstrate the joint necessity of the 'internalisation of
the external' and 'the externalisation of the internal.' Praxis, indeed, is a
passage from objective to objective through internalisation. The project, as
the subjective surpassing of objectivity toward objectivity, and stretched
between the objective conditions of the environment and the objective
structure of the field of possibles, represents in itself the moving unity of
subjectivity and objectivity, those cardinal components of activity [...] the
subjective contains within itself the objective, which it denies and which it
surpasses toward a new objectivity; and this new objectivity by virtue of
objectification externalises the internality of the project as an objectified
subjectivity. 23
Human agency as the externalisation of an objectified subject is clearly
adopted from the Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. It
is also a dramatically different formula from that expressing the human
subject understood as a nihilating transcendence of being-in-itself. We
Sartre, Search for a Method, 91 f.

Sartre, Intentionality and Praxis 95
must now grasp the human subject in its historically determined situation
as a radically embedded spontaneity that accomplishes the rebirth of its
inherited world in its own self-projection, an embedded spontaneity whose
"objectification" must be understood as its substantial "truth": "[T]he
objectified subjective must be considered as the only truth of the
subjective." 24
It is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter to treat Sartre's various
nuanced treatments of the "objectified subjective", spanning, as they do,
recently published manuscripts as well as major late works such as Search
for a Method (1960), The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) and the
multi-volume work on Flaubert, The Family Idiot. However, an insightful
and compelling path into Sartre's later thought is provided by an example
that Sartre himself offered in 1966, an example that responds to our
culture's almost obsessive preoccupation with language:
There was a time when thought was defined independently of language, as
something intangible and ineffable that pre-exists expression. Today
people fall into the opposite error. They would have us believe that thought
is only language, as if language itself were not spoken.
In reality, there are two levels. On the first level, language presents
itself, in effect, as an autonomous system, which reflects social unification.
Language is an element of the 'practico-inert', a sonorous substance
unified by a set of practices. The linguist takes this totality of relations as
an object of study, and he has a right to do this because it is already
constituted. This is the stage of structure, in which the totality appears as a
thing without man [...]. But this thing without man is at the same time
matter worked by man, bearing the trace of man [...]. If you admit the
existence of such a system, you must also admit that language exists only
as spoken, in other words in act. Each element of the system refers to a
whole, but this whole is dead if nobody takes it up for his own purposes,
makes it work. 25
Peter Caws writes that "the (concept of the) practico-inert strikes me as
one of the most useful additions to the conceptual repertoire of social
philosophy in the last century". 26 This may well be true. For the moment, I
will suggest that Sartre's various comments on spoken language, today
largely unappreciated, yield valuable illustrations of the meaning and
significance of the "practico-inert".
Ibid., 98.
Sartre, L'Arc, no. 30,88-89, cited in Peter Caws, "Sartrean Structuralism?", 299.
Caws, 309.

96 Chapter Seven
The hegemony of Chomsky's linguistic theory and its emphasis upon
the formal aspects of the grammar of natural languages stops short, in
Chomsky's own words, before the mystery of the creative use of language.
Even before Chomsky, the writings of Frege, Russell and the early
Wittgenstein focused upon language as a formal-logical system. However,
we are beginning to see the collapse of the dominance of the formal
analysis of the written over the dynamics of spoken language. Although
writing with specific reference to Saussure and Chomsky, Pierre Bourdieu,
hardly one of Sartre's most ardent defenders, surreptitiously restates
Sartre's insight into the importance of spoken language:
To posit, as Saussure does, that the true medium of communication is not
speech, a datum immediately considered in its observable materiality, but
language, a system of objective relations that makes possible both the
production and decoding of discourse, is to perform a complete reversal of
appearances by subordinating the very substance of communication, which
presents itself as the most visible and real aspect, to a pure construct of
which there is no sense experience. [...] It would be no doubt worthwhile
to try to set out the whole set of theoretical postulates implied in adopting
this viewpoint, such as the primacy of logic and structure, apprehended
synchronically, over individual and collective history (that is, the learning
of the language and, as Marx might have said, "the historical movement
that gave birth to it") [...]. 27
Sartre would certainly not only agree that language is a material object,
but that it also has a history and that speech has its historical
embeddedness. As dimensions of the practico-inert, language and culture
clearly pre-exist the speaking individual. By infusing this pre-existent
universe with the individual's own purposive action and spontaneity, the
Sartrean subject achieves an objectification that, no sooner than it is
achieved, reintroduces the subject into the material flow of human
purpose, action and intersubjectivity. The subject inhabits language
without being exhausted by it. If there is a transcendence of language, it is
not the adoption of the "impartial spectator" view of language rejected by
Bourdieu, but the subject's existing in the "further" and future of the world
of others and practical tasks (the horizon of the future). Sartre's discursive
task is to maintain a perilous balance between the dynamics of the
subject's transcendence and the world of the ready-made that makes up the
individual's historical embodiment. The notion of the practico-inert
signifies a unity of the subject and the subject's world that can never be
collapsed into an inert totality or identity:
27 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 30f.

Sartre, Intentionality and Praxis 97
Words are matter. They carry the projects of the Other into me and they
carry my projects into the Other. Language might well be studied along the
same lines as money: as a circulating, inert materiality, which unifies
dispersal. [...] There can be no doubt that in one sense language is an inert
materiality. But this materiality is also a constantly developing organic
totalisation [...] it is obvious that a person's every word must depend, in its
present meaning, on its references to the total system of interiority and that
it must be the object of an incommunicable comprehension. But this
incommunicability—in so far as it exists—can have meaning only in terms
of a more fundamental communication, that is to say, when based on
mutual recognition and on a permanent project to communicate [...]. Every
word is in fact unique, external to everyone; it lives outside, as a public
institution; and speaking does not consist in inserting a vocable into a brain
through an ear, but in using sounds to direct the interlocutors's attention to
this vocable as public exterior property. [...] To speak is to modify each
vocable by all the others against the common background of the word;
language contains every word and every word is to be understood in terms
of language as a whole; it contains the whole of language and reaffirms it
[...] language as the practical relation of one man to another is praxis, and
praxis is always language [...]. Languages are the product of History; as
such they have all the exteriority and unity of separation. 28
How distant is this from the Sartre of the Transcendence of the Ego and its
radicalisation of Husserlian intentionality? What remains is the dialectical
relationship of the inseparable moments of an indissoluble relationship.
What has changed is the introduction of a third medium that now embeds
the for-itself/in-itself opposition. This medium makes me available to the
other in the form of the omnipresence and priority of an intersubjective
community. It is by virtue of an intersubjective praxis that we in the
present inhabit together our future and redeem our past.
Thomas Flynn, partly quoting Sartre, emphasises a most important
feature of the Sartre of the Critique:
When two or more for-itselfs enter into relationship, Sartre argues, there is
a reciprocity that is an existential modification of each. Exhibiting the
kinds of thinking that will remain through the Critique, Sartre urges that
such reciprocity [...] presumes a prior unity. [... Sartre asks, is there not]
"an existence proper to the reciprocal existentialist modification, an
existence that would pose itself in terms neither of the for-itself nor of the
for-others" (CDR, 252). The answer, he implies, lies in that special in-itself
of the for-others, which he will soon call the "event" (363). This would be
the locus of historical facticity. [...] Consider a conversation between two
Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, I, 98.

98 Chapter Seven
people. Besides the respective fact that each happens to be talking, there is
the mutuality that we call the conversation itself that exists beyond the
being-for-itself of each participant, though not independent of the individuals
involved. 29
Sartre alludes to two aspects of language that are of increasing interest to
current research. Spoken language, involving the speakers' co-presence
and interaction,
defines a property that can be called situatedness—the closeness language
has to the immediate physical and social situation in which it is produced
and received. The nature of conversational language and conversational
consciousness is dependent on their situatedness. 30
In addition to this dimension of situatedness or historical facticity, situated
discourse is framed by structures of intersubjectivity. At this point,
Sartre's thought in the Critique comes closer to Husserl's reflections on
the encompassing structures of intersubjectivity in consciousness's
experience of the world:
The most important factor to be stressed is that community is not a mere
collection of individuals and that communal existence and common
achievements are not simply collections of individual lives and individual
achievements. On the contrary, all individual existence and individual life
is thoroughly informed by a unity of existence, grounded, to be sure, in
individual lives, but a unity penetrating and transcending the private
worlds of individuals [...]. 31
Although Husserl goes on to make reference to "forms of life, work and
cultural configurations" and their corresponding "norms", his analyses are
composed of largely incomplete and programmatic texts. I have elsewhere
referred to these and other aspects of Husserl's views on intersubjectivity
and the relevance of perceptual, embodied experience to the understanding
of language as "envoiced subjectivity". 32
We may usefully engage Sartre's suggestion that language illustrates
important aspects of the practico-inert by considering specific aspects of
the envoiced subject. Envoiced subjectivity incorporates Husserl's account
29 Thomas Flynn, "Sartre and the Poetics of History", 216f.
30 Wallace Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and
Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing, 44f.
31 Husserl, Aufsatze und Vortrage, 48.
32 See Elveton, 'Tolerance, Envoiced Subjecivity and the Lifeworld."

Sartre, Intentionality and Praxis 99
of the structures of the embodied, experiencing and perceiving subject
given in his analysis of the "lifeworld". Primary among these structures
are those involving kinesthetic processes, an implicit awareness of the
world-horizon and, as noted above, the communalisation of experience.
The first of these features refers to the fact that even perceptual
experience is a matter of an embodied "I can" and "I move" that forms the
core of what Husserl terms the "living body". Communicative speech
represents what might be the most distinctive accomplishment of the living
body, encompassing not only its gestural expressivity, but also the full
range of the rhythm and sonority of spoken and sung language. The
substance of speech is both its meaning and its necessary material
embodiment. When Sartre thinks of the practico-inert as a materiality in
which words as matter "carry the projects of the Other into me", he is
clearly thinking of the embodied materiality of speech.
Husserl's account of the world-horizon primarily refers to the fact that
our perceptual experience of the world occurs against the background of
an open-ended horizon within which individual experiences form a stream
of future-directed, presumptive, and, for the most part, harmoniously
conjoined perceptions. Communicative, situated discourse is fully
immersed in this stream of experience in at least two respects. First,
envoiced subjects are embedded in conversational time. Spoken discourse
has both a material and a temporal thickness that is situated within an
awareness of the more encompassing unfolding of the temporality of the
world-horizon. Second, discourse carries its own presumptive horizon and
is borne by presumptions that are both pragmatically and culturally shaped
and which implicitly, and often overtly, directly structure the flow of
conversation. The horizonality of discourse is formed by both its historical
situation and its temporal dynamic.
Finally, the communalisation of experience represents Husserl's understanding
of the inseparability of perception and intersubjectivity. To
perceive is to perceive a world that is also experienced by others. As the
two immediately previous Sartre quotations show, this is an irreducibly
central feature of the practico-inert. While Husserl's manuscripts propose
a complex interplay of a variety of different forms that the intersubjective
unity of existence may assume, Sartre's attempts in the Critique and The
Family Idiot to understand intersubjectivity as a "unity" that is always
partial, "in play" and never completed, extends this aspect of Husserl's
treatment of the lifeworld in an enriched manner.
However, it is not only the materiality of language that exemplifies the
nature of the practico-inert. Speech and language are, as Sartre noted
above, the products of history. As such, Sartre argues, they have a certain

100 Chapter Seven
"exteriority". To say that human agency finds itself embedded in this form
of exteriority is not only to say that human agency is suspended in its
historical situation, but that a certain kind of exteriority is in fact
constitutive of the historical subject itself. Many of the obscurities and
difficulties of Sartre's later philosophical language can perhaps be traced
back to the effort needed to reconcile the "interiority" of the for-itself s
freedom and the "exteriority" of language and history. Regardless of the
assessment that might be offered regarding the success or failure of
Sartre's efforts, it is important to emphasise that issues strongly analogous
to Sartre's are being increasingly emphasised in much current philosophy
of mind and language, and in a range of related disciplines broadly
devoted to the study of human cognition in recognising that the mind is
more "extended", "external" and "institutional" than much philosophy,
psychology and anthropology had taken it to be—indeed, more central
than the Sartre of Being and Nothingness was able to allow.
Here we briefly note examples of this emphasis. In analytical
philosophy, the thought of the later Wittgenstein has been said to move in
this direction, as is most recently argued in the work of Meredith
Williams. 33 The understanding of mind and language as social, public and
institutional presented in Williams's work contributes a non-Sartrean
vocabulary to the issue of materiality and exteriority in Sartre's sense of
the practico-inert.
Foucault has also exercised a strong influence on analytical thought.
Ian Hacking's recent Historical Ontology, explicitly indebted to Foucault,
is an additional important contribution to understanding the role of history
for language and the "publicness" of the human mind. 34
Recent trends in continental-inspired thought, driven in part by a
renewed interest in Hegelian and neo-Hegelian accounts of mind and truth
as "communal", as reflected in the recent work of Michael Forster and
Terry Pinkard, 35 also provide a non-Sartrean vocabulary focusing on issues
analogous to those raised in Sartre's later philosophy. Finally, similar
themes are reflected in the work of Robert Brandom and its concern with
institutional-cognitive structures, 36 and in Robert Brandom's and John
Haugeland's neo-pragmatic interpretation of the work of Heidegger, 37
Meredith Williams, Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning: Toward a Social
Conception of Mind.
34 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology.
35 Michael Forster, Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit; Terry Pinkard,
Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason.
36 Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit.
37 John Haugeland, "Dasein's Disclosedness".

Sartre, Intentionality and Praxis 101
which develops a reading of Being and Time, not as an existentialist
treatise, but as an important statement of an institutional-social theory of
mind and language.
Conclusion
Over the course of Sartre's long and prolific career, we have seen an
increasing complexity appear in his treatment of intentionality, Husserl's
"fundamental idea". The interplay between human praxis and world
becomes inspired by detailed descriptions of historical events and
individuals, such as Gustave Flaubert and Jean Genet. Sartre's ontology of
praxis becomes overlaid by attempts to do full justice to the particularity
of individual freedom and the details of the individual's "exterior" and
historical situation.
It was Chomsky who wrote that a central goal of the study of language
"is to determine the meaning of a word [...] in a 'shared public' language,
a notion that remains to be formulated in some coherent terms". 38 It is
arguably just such a project Sartre may be said to have undertaken. We are
perhaps only beginning to understand the importance of Sartre's
contribution to such an endeavour. Perhaps his most important legacy in
this regard is the claim that language as public can only be understood
within the context of a more encompassing view of human action, history
and spontaneity. Although Sartre has reinterpreted Hegel's dictum that
true history is the history of freedom in Marxist terms, Sartre's conception
of freedom and praxis signals his continuing legacy as a philosopher of
freedom. "Possibility", Sartre states, "lies at the very heart of the particular
action, (it is) the presence of the future as that which is lacking and that
which, by its very absence, reveals reality." 39 But since it is an embedded
freedom that is at stake, a freedom embedded within the public world of
the practico-inert, perhaps at this point it is Nietzsche who deserves the
last word:
What does commonness really mean? Words are acoustic signs for
concepts; concepts, however, are more or less precise figurative signs for
frequently recurring and simultaneous sensations, for groups of sensations.
Using the same words is not enough to ensure mutual understanding: we
must also use the same words for the same category of inner experiences;
ultimately, we must have the same experiences in common [...] when
people have lived together for a long time under similar conditions of
Noam Chomsky, New Horizons, 148.
Sartre, Search for a Method, 94.

102 Chapter Seven
climate, soil, danger, necessity, work, then something comes into being as
a result, something that "goes without saying" [...]. 40
Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice (trans. Richard Nice). Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1990.
Brandom, Robert. Making it Explicit. Boston: Harvard University Press,
1994.
Caws, Peter. "Sartrean Structuralism?", in The Cambridge Companion to
Sartre (ed. Christina Howells). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992
Chafe, Wallace. Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and
Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Chomsky, Noam. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Elveton, Roy. "Tolerance, Envoiced Subjectivity and the Lifeworld", in
Interpretando la experiencia de la tolerancia / Interpreting the
Experience of Tolerance, II (ed. Rosemary Rizo-Patron de Lerner).
Lima: Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru, 2006.
Flynn, Thomas. "Sartre and the Poetics of History", in The Cambridge
Companion to Sartre (ed. Christina Howells). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992.
Forster, Michael. Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2002.
Haugeland, John. "Dasein's Disclosedness", in Heidegger: A Critical
Reader (ed. H. L. Dreyfus and H. Hall). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1992.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. Selected Prose. New York: Pantheon Books,
1952.
Husserl, Edmund. Aufsatze und Vortrage (1922-1937). Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1989.
—. Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenologischen
Philosophic. Zweites Buck The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952.
—. Zur Phanomenologie der Intersubjectivitat: Dritter Teil (1929-1935).
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 163.

Sartre, Intentionality and Praxis 103
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Marion Faber).
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Pinkard, Terry. HegeVs Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Jean-Paul Sartre repond", UArc, no. 30, "Sartre
Aujourd'hui", 1966, 87-96.
—. Being and Nothingness (trans. H. E. Barnes). New York: Philosophical
Library, 1956.
—. Critique of Dialectical Reason, /(trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith). London:
Verso, 2004.
—. Nausea (trans. Lloyd Alexander). New York: New Directions, 1967.
—. The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert (1821-1857), I (trans. Carol
Cosman). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
—. Search for a Method. New York: Knopf, 1963.
—. The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of
Consciousness (trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick). New
York: The Noonday Press, 1957.
—. "Une id£e fondamentale de la phenome'nologie de Husserl:
Fintentionnalite", in Situations, I. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
Williams, Meredith. Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning: Towards a Social
Conception of Mind. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Zahavi, Dan. Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological
Investigation. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999.

CHAPTER EIGHT
THE NEW SARTRE:
A POSTMODERN PROGENITOR?
NICHOLAS FARRELL FOX
"[...] for every thought one must expect a strange tomorrow." 1
In the eyes of many, Sartre was the foremost intellectual of the
twentieth century, a master thinker of freedom whose diverse literary
talents earned him notoriety as a philosopher, playwright, novelist and
polemicist. And yet, he is often seen as a philosopher of a world that has
passed, a child and relic of modernity whose voice rang out amidst the
alienations and horrors of the twentieth century, but which is now scarcely
detectable in the soundwaves of our contemporary postmodern condition.
After all, history has it that the Sartrean corpse was laid to rest not only in
the cemetery at Montparnasse, upon the event of his death in April 1980,
but also twenty years or so earlier when a (post)structuralist revolt—
organised by Foucault, Derrida and others—overthrew the monarchical
Sartrean regime and buried its humanist entrails in the ground. 2 So, what
relevance, it might be asked, does Sartre's work hold for postmodernism? 3
Sartre and the (Post)structuralists
In some respects, it is not altogether surprising that standard interpretations
have cited Sartrean existentialism as the principal target for the
(post)structuralist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. An initial sense of
hostility between Sartre and the (post)structuralists found expression in a
1 Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 99.
2 "(Post)structuralism" is used here to denote both structuralist and poststructuralist
theory, whereas "poststructuralism" refers only to poststructuralist theory.
3 An earlier draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the Centenary Conference
of the UK Sartre Society at the Institut Fran^ais, London, in March 2005.

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? 105
series of polemical exchanges that took place in the 1960s between Sartre
and L6vi-Strauss, Foucault and others. They criticised Sartre for relying on
a humanist and idealist theory of the subject, while Sartre criticised
(post)structuralism in turn for dissolving human freedom by holding
history hostage to the play of impersonal forces. As Foucault describes it,
the (post)structuralist attack on Sartre arose "from a dissatisfaction with
the phenomenological theory of the subject" and "involved different
escapades, subterfuges, breakthroughs [...] in the direction of linguistics,
psychoanalysis or Nietzsche". 4 It was a matter, as he states elsewhere, "of
calling this theme of the subject into question once again, that great
fundamental postulate which French philosophy, from Descartes until our
own time, had never abandoned". 5
This polemic between Sartre and Foucault perhaps reached its greatest
point of intensity in 1966 when, in an article in La Quinzaine litteraire,
Foucault identified Sartre's philosophy with a bygone era, cursorily
dismissing Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as "courageous and generous men"
who were animated by a spirit that had passed from the intellectual scene.
In response, Sartre acknowledged the importance of Foucault's Les Mots
et les choses {Words and Things), but criticised him for avoiding the
question of history (i.e. how one episteme is supplanted by another),
arguing that Foucault effectively "replace[s] movies with a magic lantern,
movement with a sequence of immobile images". 6
Since Sartre's death in 1980, however, interpretations of his work have
begun to probe the underbelly of this standard account. In recent years the
phenomenon of "the new Sartre" has been gradually emerging out of the
ashes of his philosophical oeuvre, pointing to a fundamental reappraisal of
Sartre's work in its relation to poststructuralism and, in a wider sense, to
postmodernism. In Christina Howells's words, this idea of "the new
Sartre" presents him as:
[...] a figure whose diversity was far from being mastered, who could not,
without distortion or impoverishment, be identified with the "classical
existentialism" of the 1940s, and whose relationship to Structuralism and
Post-Structuralism, as well as to psychoanalysis, Marxism, and literary
theory, was far more complex than ha[s] generally been supposed. 7
4 InRaulet, Telos, 55,199.
5 Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 56.
6 Quoted in Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History, 5
7 Howells, "Introduction", in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, 1.

106 Chapter Eight
In this respect, traditional accounts of post-war intellectual history in
France can be said to have pitted Sartre as a theoretical adversary against
poststructuralists such as Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze and Derrida, far too
readily. Moreover, standard interpretations of Sartre's work can be seen to
rely too heavily on certain themes, or on particular passages in his "classic
existentialist" works of the 1940s, to the serious neglect of other elements
in his work of this period and, indeed, in the wider trajectory of his work
as a whole. Howells makes the further claim that since Sartre's two main
works of philosophy, Being and Nothingness and The Critique of
Dialectical Reason, /, predate the main wave of poststructuralist texts in
the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, they can be seen, in effect, to prefigure many
key poststructuralist themes, such as:
[...] the decentred subject, the rejection of a metaphysics of presence, the
critique of bourgeois humanism and individualism, the concept of the
reader as producer of the text's multiple meanings, the recognition of
language and thought structures as masters rather than mastered in most
acts of discourse and thinking, [and] a materialist philosophy of history as
detotalised and fragmented. 8
These themes, she argues, are not "the inventions of Lacan, Foucault,
Ldvi-Strauss and Derrida", but can "be found in Sartre's later works" and
are "present from the outset" even in his early work, which dates from The
Transcendence of the Ego (1936). 9 Taken together, they serve to contradict
the simple identification of Sartre with the usual image of a classic
intellectual steeped in a Cartesian tradition of modern philosophy which is,
by implication, a form of philosophy diametrically opposed to the
postmodernising strategies of the poststructuralists.
Until now, Sartre has been a marginal and mainly absent figure in
discussions of postmodernism, which have tended to focus upon critiques
of modernism put forward by the French poststructuralists, notably Michel
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques
Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. When Sartre is included, it is usually as no
more than the target for these critiques. In contrast to this, I would suggest
that it is time to bring him into the heart of the postmodern debate, and to
trace the strands of opposition and convergence between Sartre's work and
postmodernist theory. In so doing, we see the image of "the new Sartre"
gradually emerge—one that recasts his popular image from that of an
archetypal and classic modernist thinker, to that of a thinker who has a
8 Ibid., 2.
9 Ibid.

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? 107
complex and multifaceted relationship with the postmodern ethos. This
will, I hope, highlight the contemporary relevance and value of Sartre's
work by helping to cut through the mist of our present postmodern
condition. Much of this value derives from the way in which Sartre's work
occupies a transitional space between modernist and postmodernist
categories, integrating elements of each into a constellated and synthetic
whole. Sometimes this has the effect of catapulting the Sartrean system
into contradiction and antinomy, but for the most part it serves to form it
as a window through which we are better placed to view, and to reflect
upon, the inadequacies and revelations of postmodernist theory, and its
trenchant critique of modernity.
In this respect, one can cite Roland Barthes who has located the special
value of Sartre's work in its "divided" or "transitional" nature. 10 In an
interview in 1976 with Jacques Chancel, Barthes put forward the view that
Sartre can be seen as the exemplary intellectual of his period because he
was situated at the crossroads of two cultures—at the point of division
between the disintegration of the old and the birth of the new. This was
evident in the way that Sartre managed to straddle both pre-war and postwar
ideological and political currents in France, thus marking him out,
according to Barthes, as a uniquely important transitional figure.
Following Barthes's observation, I suggest that Sartre's philosophy can be
situated in a transitional space that straddles the divide and creates a
sometimes uneasy tension between a postmodern sense of despair,
plurality, fragmentation and indeterminacy, and a modernist longing for
comprehension, meaning, constructivism and totality.
Sartre and Postmodernism
In recent years, the idea of postmodernism has dominated academic
dialogue in the humanities and the social sciences. Although the term
"postmodernism" has long been in use, in one form or another, to describe
developments in literary theory, architecture and art, which attack the
dominant modernist paradigm, it has become associated more recently
with theories of cultural, political, economic and philosophical change,
taking its inspiration from critiques of modernist theory found in the work
of the French poststructuralists. In general terms, it is the radical
questioning, or "unmasking", of modern assumptions and modes of
understanding that, as Ihab Hassan points out, can be said to define the
postmodern movement:
See Chancel, "Radioscopie: Roland Barthes", 255.

108 Chapter Eight
It is an antinomian moment that assumes a vast unmasking of the Western
mind—what Michel Foucault might call the postmodern episteme. I say
"unmasking", though other terms are now de rigueur. for instance,
deconstruction, decentering, disappearance, demystification, discontinuity,
differance, dispersion, etc. Such terms express an ontological rejection of
the traditional full subject, the Cogito of Western philosophy. They
express, too, an epistemological obsession with fragments, and a
corresponding commitment to minorities in politics, sex and language. To
think well, to feel well, to act well, to read well according to the episteme
of unmasking, is to refuse the tyranny of wholes: totalization in human
endeavor is potentially totalitarian. 11
In The Dismemberment of Orpheus, Hassan constructs an interesting
and authoritative shorthand list that enables us to contrast clearly the main
differences between modernism and postmodernism. Below is an abridged
version of this: 12
Modernism Postmodernism
Purpose Play
Presence Absence
Transcendence Immanence
Centring Dispersal
Synthesis Antithesis
Art object/Finished work Process/Happening
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy
Distance Participation
If we apply this list to Sartre's work, his postmodernist markings come
readily into view. In Sartre's early philosophy, transcendence is a
dominant motif that finds expression in an idealist theory of freedom.
Although Sartre never abandons his notion of the possibility of "going
beyond existing circumstances", the concept of immanence assumes a far
greater prominence in his post-war philosophy, culminating in an
encumbered subject which, like the decentred subject theorised by the
French poststructuralists, is shot through with social, historical, linguistic
and semiotic codes. Even in his early philosophy, the Sartrean subject is
marked by the features of dispersal and absence—consciousness is, Sartre
insists, "diasporic", "non-identical", and has "its being outside it, before it
11 Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, 37.
12 See Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus, Chapter 1.

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? 109
and behind". Purpose and play both appear as important themes at
different times in Sartre's philosophy, the former being most evident in the
Critique, where he adopts a praxis-based model of agency, and the latter in
his earlier existentialist texts where he assumes a more aestheticist leaning.
Despite the strong Marxist colouration of Sartre's social philosophy in
the Critique, the concepts of process and antithesis capture well the
essence and features of the Sartrean dialectic. The concept of totalisation
that looms large in Sartre's dialectic involves synthesis insofar as it
consists in drawing disparate elements into a meaningful totality but is
always, as William McBride notes, a "process word" denoting activity,
performance and happening, and so does not refer to a rigorously
completed or definable entity. 14 Similarly, in contrast to the Hegelian
dialectic, the Sartrean dialectic invokes no ultimate synthesis of its
constituent parts (pour-soi and ensoi, "for-itself" and "in-itself f ) that
proceeds towards a state of perfected human consciousness or the "end of
history". Sartre's theory of history conceives the historical process in
terms of contingency, chance, negation and circularity, criticising linear
accounts that give history a progressivist telos or intrinsic pattern of
design. 15
The political logic of Sartre's work also displays a discernibly
postmodern ethos insofar as it is premised on the eradication of hierarchy
and distance. This blossoms into a form of political activism that drew him
towards political Marxism in the 1940s and 1950s, but eventually drove
him away following May 1968. Sartre's archetype of the group-in-fusion
can be seen alongside Deleuze's and Guattari's idea of the subject group
as guiding theoretical models for a new form of political practice that
emerged out of the student revolts of 1968. Unlike the hierarchical,
authoritarian structures of modern political practice, this involves fluid,
egalitarian, anarchic, reciprocal and participatory forms of political
organisation. Although Sartre did not explicitly adopt the dialogue of
"micropolitics" advocated by Foucault, Lyotard and others, his political
project, both before and after the war, is generally consistent with it,
moving beyond the traditional focus of Marxist theory to uncover and
contest wider sources of power and domination in the social field: these
extend beyond the productive order and serve to "jeopardise the exploited
classes to the extent that they intrude into each individual from without
13 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 182,713,179.
14 McBride, "Existential Marxism and Postmodernism", 332.
15 See, for instance, Critique, 33-35.

110 Chapter Eight
and impose themselves in the memory as ramparts against any coming to
awareness". 16
These similarities that span across the broad theoretical range of the
subject, social theory, history and politics, clearly mark a determinate and
significant postmodern element in Sartre's thinking that is present from the
outset in the 1930s and intensifies as his work evolves. They point
unequivocally to a "new", postmodern Sartre, and to an urgent need to
reposition his traditional place among the standard-bearers of modern
philosophy.
In the trajectory of Sartre's work from the 1930s to the 1970s, the
modern and postmodern elements of his thought can at times intensify or
recede according to a particular text or to a specific emphasis within a
single text. The Critique, for instance, contains both modern and
postmodern themes, utilising, developing, clarifying and reinvigorating
Marxist theory as it simultaneously probes its weaknesses and calls into
question its basic methods. Similarly, although Being and Nothingness
reproduces features of a Cartesian framework, there are other significant
elements in this work that move beyond this framework and connect with
later postmodernist themes—in particular, Sartre's critique, as Foucault
noted, of "the idea of the self as something which is given to us". 17
Changing intensities and emphases can also be found in postmodernists
like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, whose work incorporates a mixture of
postmodern and modern elements. In the passage from Foucault's
archaeology to genealogy, for example, his focus changes significantly
from showing how the subject is fundamentally constructed, to a form of
analysis that seeks to draw out the political consequences of subjectification
in order to help form resistances to subjectifying practices. In the transition
from genealogy to ethics, Foucault replaces subjectivity in the confined
body with the constitution of subjectivity in the self-consciousness of
desire, and switches, in this sense, from impersonal explanations of why
people act as they do to the reflective practices whereby individuals train
themselves. In this later ethical period, Foucault even returns to Kant (a
previous target of his critique of modernity in Les Mots et les choses) as a
critical means of identifying "that thread that may connect us with the
Enlightenment". 18 This can be seen too in the case of Lyotard, who begins
in the 1960s with a radical anti-modernist Nietzscheanism, but ends up in
the 1980s echoing the mantra of Kant's critical Enlightenment project. 19
Sartre, U Idiot de lafamille, III, 47 (my translation).
17 Foucault, "How we Behave", 64.
18 In Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 42.
19 See, for instance, Lyotard, "Rewriting Modernity", in Substance, 1987.

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? Ill
To clarify the complexity of this modern / postmodern constellation in
the work of the French poststructuralists, it is useful to employ the
distinction between affirmative and sceptical forms of postmodernism, in
order to contrast those who reconfigure, rework and transform modernist
categories such as the subject, freedom and reason, with those who tend to
dissolve them as sceptics do. It is the way in which the more extreme,
sceptical forms of postmodernism dissolve completely these modernist
categories that has prompted some affirmatives, like Guattari, to distance
themselves from postmodern discourse. Despite agreeing with postmodernism
in general that a "certain idea of progress and of modernity has
gone bankrupt", in his essay "The Postmodern Dead End" (1986), 20 for
instance, Guattari identifies the popular discourse of postmodernism as a
cynical and reactionary fad which engenders an ethics of non-commitment
that paralyses affirmative political action when social repression and
ecological crises are escalating. In the 1980s, both Lyotard and Foucault
similarly distanced themselves from some of the fashionable bons mots of
the postmodern discourse.
In spite of these "constellated similarities" between Sartrean and some
forms of affirmative postmodern theory, there is nonetheless a greater
intensity and gravity towards the modern in Sartre's work than in the work
of Foucault, Deleuze and other poststructuralists. In the area of the subject,
Sartre maintains a consistent attachment to some forth of humanism and
freedom that contrasts with the anti-humanist dialogue sometimes taken up
by the French poststructuralists, even though he prefigures many of the
themes of the "decentred subject" which they later adopt. In this respect,
Sartre's assiduous efforts to probe the complex dimensions of (subjective)
freedom and his endeavour to resurrect a theory of autonomy in the face of
its progressive alienation through "bad faith" {Being and Nothingness), or
through the determining force of the "practico-inert" {Critique of
Dialectical Reason), contrast favourably with the extreme anti-humanism
of the 1960s, in which Foucault and others were proclaiming the "death of
the subject" and the eclipse of meaningful agency.
Without doubt, the humanist insignia of Sartre's work is something
that generally sits uncomfortably with the postmodern outlook. According
to Derrida, for instance, by making "man'' into a supreme value or
measure, "humanism" is essentially a form of exclusion and racism since it
excludes women, children and animals and defines "humanity" according
to specific cultural norms. 21 This critique of humanism links up with Levi-
20 Guattari, "The Postmodern Dead End", 40.
21 See Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, 62, 70.

112 Chapter Eight
Strauss's criticisms of Sartre in The Savage Mind, where Sartre's Critique
is seen as ethnocentric since, as Levi-Strauss observes, it excludes from
the "properly human" all previous, supposedly "ahistorical", societies of
"repetition". 22
Although Sartre is consistently vitriolic towards forms of humanism
associated with bourgeois individualism, there is nonetheless a discernible
anthropocentric bias in his work that places him much closer to the
modernist paradigm. This is evident most of all in the way he consistently
distinguishes the human realm from the rest of nature in his work,
valorising the former as pour-soi, active and transformational, and
associating the latter with the brute, inert, en-soi qualities of matter. As
Boundas points out, this demonstrates a noticeable difference between "the
Sartrean prose of the is and is not" and "the poststructuralist, minoritarian
discourse of the and'? 3 Indeed, Sartre's Cartesian theorisation of nature
clearly estranges him from the postmodern quest to re-enchant nature and
to resurrect it from the denuding, utilitarian and analytical logic of modern
science.
This is, however, at least partially offset by other elements in his
work—in particular, his notion of dialectical reason—which inveigh
against the analytical reason of modern science and move beyond a
simplified Cartesianism. Although Sartre clearly elevates the human above
the non-human throughout his work, he does reject forms of humanism
that serve to exclude and subordinate, arguing in the Critique (in tones
redolent of Derrida) that "humanism is the obverse of racism: it is a
practice of exclusion". 24 Thus, in the third volume of U Idiot de lafamille
(The Family Idiot), he is quick to dismiss abstract notions of "humanity":
Humanity is not and corresponds diachronically to no concept; what exists
is an infinite series whose principle is recurrence, defined precisely by
these terms: man is the son of man. For this reason history is perpetually
finished, that is to say composed of broken-off sequences each of which is
the divergent continuation (not mechanically but dialectically) of the
preceding one and also its transcendence toward the same and different
ends (which assumes that it is at once distorted and conserved). 25
The complex constellation of modern and postmodern themes in
Sartre's work can also be seen in the area of social theory and historical
See Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 324-57.
Boundas, "Foreclosure of the Other", 339-40.
Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, I, 702.
Sartre, VIdiot de lafamille, III, 346-47 (my translation).

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? 113
explanation. Central to Sartre's socio-historical theory is the concept of
totalisation which, at the outset, does not square readily with the
postmodern preference for detotalisation. As a synthesising activity that
draws together disparate elements into a meaningful whole, Sartre's
concept of totalisation contrasts with postmodernist attempts to fragment,
splinter and pluralise the social field. Sartre does at times emphasise the
poly valence of meanings and the detotalised nature of all alleged totalities,
but his intention elsewhere is to give history a single, unitary meaning. 26
Whether one ascribes greater emphasis to the element of detotalisation in
Sartre's work, or fixes instead on his attempts to unify history and provide
a single meaning, it is clear that his socio-historical outlook incorporates
both these elements that intensify and recede as his emphasis changes.
Sartre, however, is not the only one who equivocates between totalisation
and detotalisation in this way, for it is possible to glimpse a similar
equivocation in Foucault and other poststructuralists, who utilise totalising
methods and concepts as they simultaneously prohibit and condemn
them. 27
This complex blend of the modern and the postmodern can also be
found in Sartre's political outlook, which gravitates towards the
postmodern search for new forms of politicisation and political practice,
while retaining key modernist notions such as the categories of need,
political freedom, commitment and agency. Sartre shows none of the
suspicion that postmodernists like Baudrillard exhibit towards the category
of need, making it the starting-point of his investigation in the Critique'.
"Everything is to be explained through need; need is the first totalising
relation between the material man, and the material ensemble of which he
is a part." 28 The difficulty with Sartre's account of need in the Critique, I
have argued, is not so much the way he invokes it as a central point of
departure, but the way in which he tends to equate need with material need
alone, thus reproducing standard Marxist interpretations (reflected, above
all, in his consistent emphasis on the necessity of material abundance as a
prerequisite for the possibility of a communist society, and his consequent
preoccupation with eradicating scarcity). In spite of this, however, Sartre
does begin to probe the dynamic of solidarity through the category of
need, which creates a shared human condition, and so goes some way
See Sartre, Search for a Method, 90, and Critique of Dialectical Reason, II, 20.
27 Habermas refers to this as a "performative contradiction" in Foucault's work.
See The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Chapter 1.
28 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, I, 80.

114 Chapter Eight
towards constructing an account of intersubjectivity that is largely absent
from the postmodernist narrative. 29
In the years that followed the Critique up to his death, Sartre
developed this idea of need further, integrating it centrally into the
framework of a "Third Ethics" which he outlined in dialogue with Benny
L£vy in the 1970s, and which he had initially proposed in The Rome
Lecture given at the Gramsci Institute in May, 1964. In The Rome Lecture,
Sartre states that "[t]he root of morality is in need". Radical, unalienated
needs, he argues, are those that humans possess, as members of the human
species, and belong to "nude man" irrespective of class, system or culture.
They constitute a form of "human reality" which is "common to men" and
allow us to define humanity as "belonging to a species". 30 In his sketch of
a "Third Ethics", Sartre insists that, in contrast to his previous ethics, this
one is "une morale du NOUS" ("a morality of the WE"). 31 Although he
had previously theorised intersubjectivity and communality in the Critique
and in Cahiers pour une morale (Notebooks for an Ethics), he had insisted
that union between individuals is fragile, ephemeral, and purely practical,
and not constituted in any other, deeper way. In an interview with Michel
Sicard shortly before his death, however, Sartre moves beyond this
position and posits the existence of an internal ontological bond between
human beings:
[O]ntologically, consciousnesses are not isolated, there are planes where
they enter into one another—planes common to two or to n consciousnesses.
[... humans'] perceptions or their thought are in relation one with
others, not only by exposure to the other, but because there are
penetrations between consciousnesses. 32
Although Sartre's communally-based "Third Ethics" remains a
provisional sketch rather than a fully elaborated model, it is indicative of a
progressive trajectory in his work towards a more positive account of
sociality and intersubjectivity in which "one must try to learn that one can
only seek one's being, one's life, in living for others". 33 This movement
towards intersubjectivity in Sartre's later work reveals him as a
philosopher of change, who is able to leave behind previous categorial
29 See Farrell Fox, The New Sartre, 42-53.
30 Sartre, The Rome Lecture, 100, 88 (my translation).
31 Sartre, "Entretien [avec Michel Sicard]", Obliques, 15.
32 Ibid, (my translation).
33 Sartre, "Man muss fur sich selbst und fur die anderen leben", 1221-22 (my
translation).

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? 115
assumptions by turning his critical vision towards complexity and
constellation rather than stasis and univocity.
Another significant respect in which Sartre's political outlook contrasts
with the postmodernist view is his search for a primary political agent
which, as Pontalis has noted, changes as Sartre's political trajectory
evolves. In his early political period this agent is the individual, in his
middle phase the Communist Party (PCF), and in his later period, the
youth. This clashes directly with the postmodern project to pluralise
political agency (or to dissolve it altogether, as in the case of Baudrillard)
in order to prevent the imposition of the viewpoint of a single hegemonic
group. Postmodernists decentre the importance of the proletariat as a
primary political agent, favouring instead a kind of patchwork alliance
between different and disparate discourses, knowledges and groups. By
contrast, in Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre argues for the prime historical
importance and status of the proletariat, arguing that it is not merely one
oppressed group among several, but a "universal class" which holds the
key to the liquidation of oppression:
The reason why the revolutionary adopts the standpoint of the proletariat is
first of all because this is his own class, then because it is oppressed,
because it is by far the most numerous, so that its fate tends to merge with
that of humanity, and finally because the consequences of its victory
necessarily entail the suppression of classes. 34
Sartre steadily distances himself from this Marxist viewpoint as his
work evolves, turning instead, in his final political period, to the youth and
to student groups as a prime focus for progressive political change.
However, although the object of his focus changes as his work evolves, his
political project consistently inclines towards unity embodied in his idea of
a prime political agent—an idea that postmodernist political thinking
rejects (following Lyotard) as terroristic and exclusionary.
This tension between Sartre's universalising and unifying political
aims and the postmodern preference for multiplicity, difference,
fragmentation and plurality can be seen in part in the changing role of the
intellectual following 1968 in France, which led Sartre to question and
revise his own status as a classic intellectual. This came most notably into
focus in 1969 when, addressing a meeting of student groups at the
Mutualite, he was given the instruction "Sartre, sois bref—"Sartre, be
brief'. 35 This small incident was representative of a wider shift in the role
34 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 72.
35 For a description of this incident see Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, 780-81.

116 Chapter Eight
and aims of the intellectual that followed 1968. In Foucault's view, this
involved a shift away from the "general" (modern) intellectual, who
speaks on behalf of all oppressed groups, towards the (postmodern)
"specific" intellectual, who acts as an advisor within a particular group or
form of struggle. In opposition to the unifying aims of the general or
classic intellectual, the specific intellectual, Foucault argues, helps to
ensure the autonomy of local struggles by recovering "subjugated" and
"disqualified" knowledges from the hegemony of positivistic sciences,
hierarchical political parties, and master-narratives. While it is clear that
Sartre's abiding search for a totalising consciousness and primary political
agent would seem to contravene the pluralist discourse of the specific
intellectual that Foucault and other postmodernists advocate, it is also the
case that 1968 precipitated a change in Sartre's outlook. The events of
1968 made him realise the limitations of his privileged classic intellectual
status, and changed his view of the intellectual's role which, he now
argued in line with Foucault, must be to serve the masses:
Today I have finally understood that the intellectual [...] must resolve his
own problem—or, if you like, negate his intellectual moment in order to
achieve a new popular status. 36
Sartre Old and New
In the course of this essay, I have endeavoured to sketch a picture in
which two Sartres can be seen to emerge alongside each other: the Old
Sartre—assertive and totalistic, Cartesian and classic, modernist and
Marxist, an optimist and grand-thinker—and a New postmodern Sartre
who is changing and plural, aestheticised and splintered, aporetic and
anarchistic, a pessimist and arch-deconstructionist. Like two pugilists in a
boxing-ring (an image central to Sartre's investigation in the second
volume of the Critique), they shadow one another, join together, clash,
contend and struggle for primacy within individual texts and in his work
taken as a whole. However, there is no clear resolution or victorious endpoint
to this fight but an ongoing agonism of differences and emphases
that rise and fall as Sartre's critical perspective shifts.
In standard interpretations of Sartre, only the face of the Old classical
Sartre is recognised—that is, the humanist Sartre resolutely opposed to the
postmodern trickeries of the French poststructuralists. This view still bears
a strong influence and is evident, for instance, in Andrew Dobson's book,
Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, 227.

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? 117
Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason, where Sartre is presented as a
Master Constructionist impelled by an Enlightenment animus that is
distinctly anti-postmodern. Against this view, I would argue that there are
strong postmodern elements in Sartre's work that span the broad
theoretical range, from his analysis of the subject through his theory of
history to his understanding of political life, making him, to use Frederic
Jameson's phrase, a "hidden origin" of important theoretical manoeuvres in
postmodernist theory. 37
In general terms, I present Sartre as a schizophrenic thinker whose
critical consciousness is split between the modern and the postmodern.
Indeed, I think that much of the originality and dynamism of his work lies
precisely in this tense relationship between modern and postmodern
elements. Sartre's relation to modernism is not straightforward but
complex, vacillating between a project to overturn, break open and move
beyond modernist modes of understanding and an underlying impetus to
hold on to certain modernist ideas and categories. This tension is reflected
in the final years of his life, which he divided between a political activism
that struggled desperately to overthrow the social conditions of capitalist
modernity and a classic, academic study of the bourgeois Flaubert that was
far removed from this activist impulse. Thus, although Sartre was unable
to transcend fully his starting-points, he was able, as Ronald Aronson has
pointed out, to think—and live—them to their limits, while immersing
himself in our world and its most powerful cross-currents. 38
Undoubtedly, there are several respects in which Sartre was unable to
transcend the limitations imposed on him by the philosophical, social,
historical and political situation of his time. On a theoretical level, this
manifests itself in his inability to get beyond some of the theoretical
limitations of the (modernist) outlook he inherited from Descartes, Husserl
and Marx. On a political level, this came into view in the early 1950s,
where Sartre's allegiance to the PCF was strongly influenced by the
ideological polarities of the Cold War environment. In this sense, although
Sartre stretched the parameters of modernism to their limits, articulating
new perspectives that prefigured many important themes taken up later by
postmodernists like Foucault, Guattari and Derrida, in other respects he
was unable to progress fully beyond these limits, reproducing some of the
basic assumptions which form the modernist outlook and the classical
French tradition of which he was a part.
37 Frederic Jameson, "The Sartrean Origin", 19.
38 Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World, 353.

118 Chapter Eight
Despite these limitations, it is worthwhile in overall terms to
emphasise the positive value of Sartre's work in understanding and
navigating our contemporary postmodern situation. Like postmodernists
such as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Lyotard and Baudrillard,
Sartre offers a trenchant critique of the condition of modernity and a deep,
searching scepticism towards the project of the Enlightenment. More
importantly, however, his work acts as a kind of critical searchlight that
shines through the cracks and exposes the fragile foundations of both
modern and postmodern excesses. Thus, there are clearly aspects of
postmodernism that are anathema to Sartre's theoretical sensibilities.
Beneath the elements of change and evolution in his philosophical
outlook, there is a deep and consistent attachment to the idea of human
freedom and of transforming the world to bring this about. In the 1960s,
this brought Sartre into conflict with (post)structuralists like Foucault,
Derrida and Althusser who were intent at the time on consigning the figure
of "Man" to the dustbin of history. In the late 1960s and the 1970s,
Foucault and others severed their links with structuralism and moved on to
the (Sartrean) project of resurrecting the subject and articulating a vision
of freedom, relinquishing their hostility and adopting a more positive
attitude towards the value of Sartre's work. In an interview in 1968 for
instance, Foucault pays homage to Sartre's contribution to intellectual
thought in France and views his own work as "minor" in relation to the
"immensity" of Sartre's:
I think the immense work and political action of Sartre defines an era. [...]
I would never accept a comparison—even for the sake of a contrast—of
the minor work of historical and methodological spadework that I do with
a body of work like his. 39
In an article devoted to Sartre, entitled "II a 6t6 mon maitre",
published in a special 1964 issue of the periodical, Arts, Deleuze also
expresses his admiration for "the private thinker [who] introduced new
themes, a new style, a new polemic and a new way of raising problems as
well as a hatred for all modes of 'representation'". 40 He reiterates this
tribute in a series of interviews with Claire Parnet, published as Dialogues
in 1977, where he speaks enthusiastically of his respect for Sartre:
Foucault, in La Quinzaine litteraire, no. 46 (1968), 20, cited in Poster, Foucault,
Marxism and History, 5.
40 Deleuze, "II a 6l€ mon maitre", 1208-09 (my translation).

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? 119
Fortunately there was Sartre. Sartre was our Outside, he was really the
breath of fresh air from the backyard [...]. And Sartre has never stopped
being that, not a model, a method or an example, but a little fresh air—a
gust of air even when he had just been to the Cafe* Flore—an intellectual
who singularly changed the situation of the intellectual. 41
Similarly, despite his previous criticisms of Sartre in the 1960s and
1970s, in the lead article for the commemorative fiftieth anniversary issue
of Les Temps modernes, Derrida expresses the "boundless gratitude" and
acknowledges the "immense debt" he and others owe to Sartre. He
confesses that in previous years he "wouldn't have dared" admit his
affection for Sartre and Les Temps modernes, but that he is now moved to
"do justice" to them and recognise the value of Sartre's philosophical
ceuvre. 42 Even Baudrillard, the arch-sceptic of postmodernity, acknowledges
the enormity of Sartre's influence on post-war French intellectual
life and how the "theory of commitment through Sartre in the 1960s [...]
had been more or less the point of departure for intellectuals". 43
Since his death in 1980, however, commitment has seemingly died
with Sartre. The postmodern condition presented by Baudrillard and others
is one in which apathy, nihilism, melancholy and withdrawal are seen as
appropriate responses to a prevailing situation characterised by meaninglessness,
simulation, hyperconformity and the absence of grand-narratives
that claim a better future for human society. In contrast with Baudrillard's
asemic political vision, that celebrates the death of meaning and the futility
of political action and engagement, Sartre's political itinerary is an
evolving story of progressive radicalisation, a ceaseless journey to explore
the radical possibilities and complex dimensions of freedom, with a view
to making the world a less alienating and oppressive home. Shortly before
his death, in the course of interviews with Benny Le\y (published in
March 1980 as VEspoir maintenant [Hope Now]), Sartre identifies hope
as a means of overcoming the malaise of apathy and despair that
characterises the postmodern world of the late twentieth century:
What with the third world war that can break out at any day, and the
wretched mess our planet has become, despair has come back to tempt me
with the idea that there is no end to it all, that there is no goal, that there
are only small, individual objectives that we fight for. We make small
revolutions, but there's no human end, there's nothing of concern to human
beings, there's only disorder [...]. In any event, the world seems ugly, evil,
41 Deleuze, Dialogues, 12.
42 Derrida, "II courait mort", 44,40 (my translations).
43 In Gane, Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory, 17.

120 Chapter Eight
and hopeless. Such is the calm despair of an old man who will die in that
despair. But the point is, I'm resisting, and I know I shall die in hope. But
this hope must be grounded. We must try to explain why the world of
today, which is horrible, is only one moment in a long historical
development, that hope has always been one of the dominant forces of
revolutions and insurrections, and how I still feel that hope is my
conception of the future. 44
Whether the future conforms to Sartre's hope-full conception remains
to be seen, marked as it is, of course, by the feature of contingency that
Sartre theorised so effectively throughout his work. In any case, his critical
spirit, philosophical guile and gift of dialectical understanding provide us
with the inspiration and the means to recover a sense of the authentically
human in an increasingly inhuman and cybernetic postmodern world. In
the context of Deleuze's remark, in Negotiations, that "[a] thought's logic
is like a wind blowing on us, a series of gusts and jolts", Sartre's
thinking can be likened to a gust of freedom which blows away
constricting webs that bind and entrap. This shines through in the focus of
his work, which grapples constantly with the problematic of freedom, as
well as in his personal life, where his activism and struggle against
oppression thrust him into the forefront of ideological and political
controversy in post-war France. Somewhat diminutive and corpulent,
physically enfeebled and almost blind in his later years, Sartre stood
defiantly as a resolute defender of the marginalised and downtrodden
against the strong arm of the Goliath capitalist state. This made him an
object of vitriolic hatred for the French state, which threatened on
numerous occasions to imprison him; for pro-colonial groupings on the
Right, who threatened and ultimately attempted to kill him; and even for
those on the Left, such as the orthodox guardians of the Communist faith,
who demonised and excommunicated him as a heretic. Through all this,
Sartre continued, in his own inimitable way, to articulate and to refine his
telling discourse of freedom. It remains to be seen how this will be taken
up and articulated by others in the postmodern configuration of the
twenty-first century.
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45 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, 94.

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Poster, Mark. Foucault, Marxism and History: Mode of Production versus
Mode of Information. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984.
Rabinow, Paul (ed.). The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Raulet, Gerard. "Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview with
Michel Foucault" (trans. J. Harding), Telos, no. 55, Spring 1983, 195-
211.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological
Ontology (trans. H. E. Barnes). London: Philosophical Library, 1956.
—. The Rome Lecture (at the Gramsci Institute), 1964: available at the
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
—. Anti-Semite and Jew (trans. G. Becker). New York: Schocken Books,
1965.
—. Between Existentialism and Marxism (trans. J. Mathews). New York:
Pantheon, 1974.
—. VIdiotde lafamilley III. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.
—. The Critique of Dialectical Reason, I: Theory of Practical Ensembles
(trans. A. Sheridan-Smith). London: New Left Books, 1976.
—. The Critique of Dialectical Reason, II: The Intelligibility of History
(trans. A. Sheridan-Smith). London: Verso, 1985.
—. Cahiers pour une morale. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.
—. "J.-P. Sartre et M. Sicard: Entretien", in Obliques, no. 18-19, 1979, 9-
29.
—. "Man muss fur sich selbst und fur die anderen leben", Merkur,
December 1979.
—. Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews (trans. Adrian van den Hoven).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

CHAPTER NINE
A SURREPTITIOUS ROMANTIC?
READING SARTRE WITH VICTOR HUGO
BRADLEY STEPHENS
"A seismographic and prophetic Sartre, the man of the century, organ
blasts a la Hugo, podiums, voice of the oriflamme and grand
commitments." 1 Bernard-Henri Levy's picture of Sartre in relation to
Victor Hugo flags a connection between these two cultural icons that is
widely acknowledged. The two become automatically linked as
practitioners of the traditional moral-political stance of French engagement
(commitment). Sartre indeed is held to be the most recent—maybe even
the last—member of a prestigious lineage comprising Voltaire, Hugo and
Zola. They are the tireless men of letters, the ecrivains engages, those
French writers who committed themselves to the Revolution's principles
of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Hugo and Sartre, in particular, have
come to be seen as the foremost representatives of this tradition in their
respective times, with each of their energetic lives almost perfectly
spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, centuries which came to
be known as theirs. 2
The historical similarities between the two are stark. Born in 1802,
Hugo would strike a chord with his time by demanding that art free not
only content, but also form, from the regimen of Classicism. Campaigning
for French Romanticism, he privileged the boundless human imagination
rather than a reasoned intellect. Only then could the artist truly become a
part of the century's quest for democracy, liberating both his world and his
work from constraint. Preferring exile to empire, he was the conscience of
a nation, ensuring that Emperor Louis-Napoleon would forever be known
as "Napoleon le Petit". He defied social convention, amassing one wife,
1 L6vy, Sartre, 32.
2 An earlier draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the Centenary Conference
of the UK Sartre Society at the Institut Fran^ais, London, in March 2005.

124 Chapter Nine
one long-term mistress, and countless sexual encounters that amazingly
escalated in number the older he got. He became an inspiration to Dickens,
Tolstoy, Van Gogh and Tennyson, to name but a handful, and some two
million people descended upon Paris for his funeral in 1885, itself a State
event attended by dignitaries and drunks alike. Death did little to slow
down Hugo's ascent to superstardom as the "Elvis or Madonna" of his
day. 3 His enduring universal appeal is perhaps best indicated by the
unprecedented popularity of the stage version of Les Miserables, which
became the first Western musical to be granted performance in communist
China in June 2002.
Such impressive credentials are not unfamiliar to Sartre. From 1945
onwards, he graced the pages of Vogue, Time, even Playboy, becoming so
internationally recognised that Charles de Gaulle famously refused to
place him under arrest. Revealing the indeterminate and Godless nature of
existence, Sartrean Existentialism articulated not only the despair of an
entire generation forced to live in the age of the atomic bomb, but also its
hope that human creativity could be used more positively to remake a
better world. Criss-crossing the world, he met with Castro, drank with
Cocteau, and dined with Chaplin, refusing to conform to any social status
quo. Long before the summer of love sizzled in 1967, he made no secret of
his virtual open marriage with Simone de Beauvoir, nor of his affairs. 4 At
least 50,000 people followed his coffin in 1980, with the Left Bank today
remaining the breeding ground for aspiring intellectuals. His willingness to
philosophise every corner of modern living, from politics to jazz, has since
helped thinkers broaden both their subject matter and their audience,
"opening-out" rather than "dumbing-down".
Faced with such immense cultural standing, it is hardly surprising that
references thus far to Hugo within Sartre studies have been more anecdotal
than analytical. The brightness of their respective stars seems to blind the
critical eye and prevent scholars from looking any closer. These giants are
frequently linked only by their place in history and their will to speak out,
without questioning whether their thinking or writing could be connected
in a more substantial way. What has arguably hindered any attempt to
pursue this matter is the unease and even resentment that many writers and
academics have displayed towards Hugo since his death. Andre Gide's
notorious "Helas!" ("Alas!"), when confirming Hugo as his choice of the
greatest French poet of the nineteenth century, 5 reflects a discomfort
3
Grossman, "From Classic to Pop Icon".
4
Both Sartre's and Hugo's galanterie is notorious: see Rowley, Tete-a-Tete, and
Decker, Hugo.
5
Replying to a survey in L'Ermitage, February 1902,109.

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 125
widely felt in a new age when Romantic sensibility was no longer in
vogue, given the growing anguish of the modern period. That literary
successors to Hugo have felt the need to eclipse him also owes some debt
to an anxiety usually associated with childhood, whereby youth seeks to
remove the father figure and determine a new identity. As Flaubert attested
in 1859, "it is hopeless to write after such a man [...] this colossal poet". 6
Sartre himself was the victim of such an "Oedipal reaction" from a
younger generation of thinkers in the 1960s eager to make their own mark,
although Hugo's fate has been more protracted. Hugo's "Romantic taste
for grandiose visions and myth-making", along with his glorification, led
to his imprisonment "in the display case of an anthology", trapped in the
caricature of an impractical dreamer. 7
In my discussion here, I want to cut through the cultural agendas and
suggest that a consideration of Hugo alongside Sartre can go beyond
biographical detail. Starting with Iris Murdoch's portrait of Sartre in 1953
as a "Romantic Rationalist", I will show that connecting Sartre to the
Romantic movement yields a fresh but telling reading that complements
current criticism in studies of both Sartre and indeed Hugo. Furthermore, I
will refer to overlooked comments made by Sartre himself that not only
nominate Hugo as a specific interlocutor, but also suggest the nature that
their dialogue should take. Sartre's reflections imply that the "High Priest"
of French Romanticism and the "Pope" of Existentialism are singing from
the same hymn sheet, albeit in different tones. I will compare and contrast
both men's philosophies, relating their strategies of being to the wider
issue of engagement that each has become synonymous with, and which
has become integral to French cultural identity. Hugo may not often be
thought of in philosophical terms, but his relevance as a thinker of the
human condition will become apparent nonetheless. 8 Within the confines
of the present chapter, I do not of course intend to provide an exhaustive
6 "[I]l est d&espdrant d'e'crire apres un pareil homme [...] ce colossal poete"
(Correspondence, 376). All translations from French are my own.
7 Brombert, Victor Hugo, 3-5.
8 Hugo certainly fits into the nineteenth-century tradition of French spiritualist
philosophy after Francois Maine de Biran, who had argued against the "reductions
of mental life to the flow of passing sense impressions" practised by Condillac and
the Ideologues (see Gary Gutting, French Philosophy, 3-25). Hugo's own thoughts
focus however on artists and writers rather than strictly philosophers, demonstrating
his more Romantic tastes. Nonetheless, for Charles Renouvier, the
neocritical philosopher who exerted a tremendous influence on William James and
many of the Dreyfusards, Hugo was arguably one of the most insightful French
thinkers of the period: see his 1900 study Victor Hugo, le philosophe, as well as
Maurel, Victor Hugo, philosophe.

126
Chapter Nine
reading of the connection between Sartre and Hugo. Rather, I will mark
the parameters of what is an original and exciting area in which future
studies of Sartre might develop. 9
The "New" Sartre
Since Sartre's death over 25 years ago, the image of an almost
schizophrenic thinker has increasingly come into focus: a "new" Sartre, as
Christina Howells put it, in constant yet productive tension with his own
positions. 10 "[His] diversity was far from being mastered" by the coy
stereotype of an outdated thinker that had been successfully circulated by
the Structuralists. 11 The most comprehensive look at this "new" Sartre is
offered by Nik Farrell Fox, whose thorough study reads Sartre's work as a
site of "complexity and constellation rather than stasis and univocity". 12
Farrell Fox picks up on Roland Barthes's image of Sartre straddling a
cultural crossroads between pre-war and post-war trends, reiterated in
Levy's presentation of "un double Sartre". Levy likewise sees an earlier,
rebellious Sartre, full of moral sensitivity and literary output, who reckons
with a later, almost totalitarian Sartre, loaded with political conviction. 13
Farrell Fox is however careful to insist that this divide is less an
historical rupture than a philosophical necessity that can be traced back to
the outset of Sartre's thinking. 14 He asks us to accept a "transitional"
Sartre who refuses to enclose a meaningless existence within the human
desire for meaning, but who craves understanding nevertheless. This
Sartre slides between a postmodern awareness of disintegration and a
modernist longing for constructivism. On repeated occasions, Howells
9
In his entry in Noudelmann and Philippe (eds), Dictionnaire Sartre, Bruno
Cldment suggests that there are many justifications for a tandem study of Sartre
and Hugo (226). I explored in particular the philosophical and literary similarities
between the two in my doctoral thesis, which I am currently preparing for a book
publication entitled Sartre, Hugo, and the Liability of Liberty.
The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, 1.
11
See L£vi-Strauss, La Pensee sauvage, and "L'homme, est-il mort?: un entretien
avec Michel Foucault", Arts et Loisirs, 38,15 June 1966, for the best examples.
12
Farrell Fox, New Sartre, 157.
13
Sartre, 460.
14
Here Farrell Fox echoes Jacques Derrida's tribute for the fiftieth anniversary of
Les Temps modernes. Derrida found an affinity with Sartre's own internal conflict
as a thinker caught between the humanism of his desire to make sense of the world
through writing, and the anti-humanism of existential man's nausea at existence—
both of which are in operation before his political adventures post-1945: see "II
courait mort", 32.

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 127
herself has emphasised that Sartre's sometimes uneven thinking cannot
and should not be assimilated into a kind of Hegelian synthesis. Instead,
his emphasis is on "maintaining in tension the dual poles of a dialectic of
paradox". This tenacity "necessarily led him to reject the one-sided nature
of the so-called 'death of the Subject', even though he welcomed the antiindividualism
of the Structuralist endeavour in so far as it was conceived
as an antidote to bourgeois humanism." 15
This ongoing effort to expose and explore the plurality inherent in
Sartre's thinking is seemingly anticipated by Iris Murdoch in 1953.
Writing just before the onslaught of postmodernism, the English moral
philosopher uses different poles in which to figure Sartre's duality.
Sartre's emphasis on analytical understanding is countered in her eyes by
his exuberant imagination, bringing tangible fact and emotive feeling into
a turbulent interaction: the "Romantic Rationalist". She makes her point
by citing a familiar dilemma of Sartrean philosophy: if man is a nonessential
and therefore free being, what fundamental purpose could he ever
have? Sartre may have ardently attended both to the notion of individual
liberty and to its everyday practice, but he could not square one with the
other into an integrated ethical framework of social conduct. For Murdoch,
the devil is in the detail. Existence may precede essence for Sartre, but this
binary sequence crucially depends on both. Doing and becoming are the
key focus as the actions which bring us into existence, but they carry with
them an element of being that cannot be fully erased. Sartre throws the
individual into a to-and-fro, or va-et-vient as he puts it, always yearning
for an absolute state of being and yet encountering an indeterminism
which thwarts that desire.
Sartre's metaphysical distinction between being and nothingness had in
fact foregrounded a paradoxical duality in his philosophy. To summarise:
"Consciousness is rupture, it is able to spring out of unreflective thing-like
conditions—but it is also projet, it aspires towards a wholeness which
forever haunts its partial state." 16 Human consciousness is insubstantial:
self-reflexive being-for-itself, rather than self-present and in-itself. It
ruptures us out of the material "thing-ness" of the world, but we are thus
left trying to shape in the emptiness of that consciousness a world we can
call our own. Sartre in turn finds himself exercising a balancing act
between the conscious mind and the physical world, whereby each weighs
upon the other back and forth in a fraught equilibrium. Under Sartre's
supervision of this existential "see-saw", conscious being and objective
15 Howells, Sartre, the Necessity of Freedom, 115.
16 Murdoch, Romantic Rationalist, 92.

128 Chapter Nine
being can never be released from the to-and-fro movement, or flight
toward being, that distinguishes man from thing and lends him his
freedom:
The being of human reality is originally not a substance but a lived relation
[...]. We should not say that man is at all: he is what he is not and he is not
what he is; he is the annihilation of the contingent In-itself in so far as the
self of this annihilation is its flight ahead toward the In-itself as selfcause.
17
"[T]he Sartrean subject is not just a thinking, rationalising consciousness
which gives meaning to things, but is also engaged—an actor immersed in
the world of things. In this sense it incorporates both freedom and
necessity, transcendence and facticity." 18 It is in praxis, as Sartre says, by
getting involved in the world to change or confirm a course of action, that
man "situates" his freedom as if he could pin himself down into pure
being. But his indeterminism will still prise him loose from the situations
he enters into. Man cannot escape his "facticity": the simple fact that he
has to be something in his world. But nor can he escape the contingency of
that same world: he is not free not to be free, as it were, and has to choose
as well as interpret roles to play. Man is neither complete being nor
absolute nothingness, but an unstable hybrid of the two. His freedom
emancipates him from any determinate state, then compels him to try and
retrieve such solidity, only to repeat this to-and-fro thereafter, forever
"beyond what I am, about to come to myself'. 19
Using this paradox, Murdoch notes that Sartre figures man as striving
for, but crucially never attaining, an impossible reconciliation of
opposites: a being in-itself-for-itself. Sartre's insistence that human consciousness
situates its freedom risks aggrandising the human condition by
positing an essential mode of being just beyond our reach. He had found
his taste for concrete or actual human experience uneasily diluted by the
idealism associated with Romantic writing. This cocktail is necessarily
volatile, since in experiencing himself as a lack of being, "we lose
ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion": 20 without direction, yet
"[L']§tre de la rgalitd humaine est originellement non une substance mais un
rapport v£cu [...]. L'homme n'est point: il est ce qu'il n'est pas et n'est pas ce
qu'il est, il est la ne'antisation de l'En-soi contingent en tant que le soi de cette
ndantisation est sa fuite en avant vers l'En-soi cause de soi" (L'fore et le neant,
664).
18 Farrell Fox, The New Sartre, 35.
19 "[P]ar dela ce que je suis, a venir a moi-m§me" (L'fore et le neant, 242).
20 "[N]ous nous perdons en vain: l'homme est une passion inutile" (ibid., 708).

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 129
driving towards purpose. "The general impression of Sartre's work is
certainly that of a powerful but abstract model of a hopeless dilemma,
coloured by a surreptitious romanticism which embraces the hopelessness."
21
The Surreptitious Romantic
Murdoch's reference is an intriguing one. It allows us to look at Sartre
from an angle that highlights rather than obscures idealist humanism,
without overlooking existential indeterminism. She gestures to a
worldview that is structurally similar to Existentialism. Romanticism's
different emphasis can help us examine Sartre's idealist leanings more
closely so as to confirm such aspirations to be themselves anguished, not
forthright. Romanticism identifies the same discrepancy between the
transcendent and the material that is found in Existentialist thought. The
Romantic temperament was not only stirred by the harshness of everyday
life but also enticed by the escapes offered through the imagination. The
vital difference between the two mindsets is one of perspective, not effect.
Whereas Existentialism reaches for a totality of being, Romanticism sees
existence as part of an infinity of being, often a divine entity, whose
endless creativity is at the heart of nature. Touching on nuances already
broached by Emmanuel Ldvinas, totality implies a recuperation of
fragmented parts into one fixed whole, whereas infinity multiplies that
fragmentation into an incomprehensible and interminable whole. Rather
than start with man's alienation and his yearning to integrate with his
world, the Romantic senses an intangible harmony, whose eternal essence
is intuited in a temporal world of matter and substance. The result is
similarly tense. Much like the blank page allowed the writer to give free
rein to his imaginative powers, so could the physical world become a work
of art to be crafted by man and claimed as his own. But that claim is never
sovereign, for nature's unending creation shapes an ever-changing
existence of which man is but one element.
This incompletion is no coincidence. Since both modes of thinking
thrive on human freedom and self-determination, they must each prise
open the kind of dialectic that Murdoch marks. In order to safeguard
existence as a dynamic rather than static condition, Sartrean alienation
cannot entirely do away with the notion of a fully unified mode of being
for us to pursue. Conversely, the Romantic vision of a supreme or
supernatural order is complicated by malaise and uncertainty in the here-
Murdoch, Romantic Rationalist, 111.

130 Chapter Nine
and-now, so that the imagination remains key. It would be unfair to say
that the French Romantics were naive in any way. They were neither
theologians with a blind faith in a mystical being, nor pedantic
philosophers bogged down in actual fact. Rebecca Comay makes an
especially crucial observation in this context:
From the time of Fichte and Schlegel, the fractured subject is said to
"resist" its own inevitable dispersal by generating the "necessary illusion"
of a self-coincident self. Unity is therefore postulated, but as a fiction
which knows itself as a fiction: such a simultaneous positing and
undermining of belief indeed constitutes the essence of Romantic irony. 22
This Romantic irony seemingly mirrors the Existentialist paradox of being.
Both underpin yet undermine an impossible desire to integrate with and
thereby know our world completely. To recall Chateaubriand: "My soul,
which no passion had yet satiated, searched for something that could pin it
down. But I realised that I was striving for more than I would find." 23
This connection is prised open further by Sartre himself when
discussing the nineteenth-century literary scene in his study of Flaubert.
Sartre dispels any idea of Romanticism as a simple optimism that could
will our estranged world into some divine fantasy. Romanticism is rather
an immense friction between man's hopes for a harmonious world and his
anguish at the ruinous reality he occupies: "[These poets], unsure of
themselves and victims of an agnosticism to which they are not resigned,
replace the idea of a supreme Being with the sorrow of having lost Him as
the inspiration for their poems." 24 They may cling to a notion of God, but
their own emphasis on man's isolation exposes that deity as a speculative
and logically inconceivable presence. They are drawn towards an ideal of
perfection that lies beyond the indeterminism to which mankind has been
exiled. This pure state, or essence, can only be imagined and fleeting,
never realised or fixed in place, lest man's creative freedom be neutered.
As such, to align Hugo's faith in an absolute Being with Sartre's alienated
world, in which "totality escapes us" and man must "always draw near,
never arrive", is not as rash as it might at first appear.
22 "Benjamin", 138.
23 "Mon &me, qu'aucune passion n'avait encore usde, cherchait un objet qui put
l'attacher; mais je m'apergus que je donnais plus que je ne recevais" {Rene, 154-
55).
24 "[Ces poetes] incertains, victimes d'un agnosticisme auquel ils ne se rdsignent
pas, remplacent l'Etre supreme, a la source de leurs poemes, par la douleur de
l'avoir perdu" (L'Idiotde lafamille, //, 1960).

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 131
This undertaking becomes considerably smoother by acknowledging
that the citations here come not from Sartre but from Hugo himself,
immediately hinting at the latter's own perturbations. 25 More fascinating
still, Sartre uncannily talks of Hugo in the same discordant tone as the
"new" Sartreans speak of Sartre. His attraction towards Hugo is clearly
hesitant, no doubt informed by that Flaubertian apprehension towards
Hugo's stature, but it is also undeniable, commendable even, for the
critical balance that it puts in place vis-a-vis the Hugolian stereotype.
During an interview in 1975, Michel Contat reminds Sartre that he had
once admitted to an admiration for Hugo. Nearly three decades earlier,
Sartre had indeed praised Hugo for his cultivation of writing as a form of
commitment. In Sartre's eyes, Hugo was equally committed to the
ideological liberties that appealed to the bourgeois sensibility as he was to
the material liberties that the proletariat was clamouring for. In other
words, Hugo did not allow the intuitive world of his imagination to
overtake the immediate world of his reality. His determination to address
the key principle of freedom from both an aesthetic and a social
perspective connected his work to a mass audience: "He was one of the
only, perhaps the only, one of our writers who was truly popular." 26
Sartre's knee-jerk reaction to Contat's reminder is to tone down his
admiration:
Oh, only a little. I can't give you any precise feeling toward Victor Hugo.
There are many things to reproach him for, and others which are really
quite wonderful. My feelings are confused and jumbled, so I would get out
of this by saying that I admired him. But in truth, I don't admire him any
more than I do anyone else. 27
But Sartre quickly reinstates his attraction nevertheless, concluding that
these sentiments are more a question of esteem than admiration.
Sartre had in part elucidated this esteem in his account of Flaubert's
literary background in L'Idiot de la famille. In the second volume, and
more particularly in the third, Sartre touches upon a philosophical tension
"Le total echappe [...] approcher toujours, n'arriver jamais" (Le Droit et la loi>
41,42).
26 "C'est un des seuls, peut-6tre le seul de nos ecrivains qui soit vraiment
populaire" ("Qu'est-ce que la literature?", 126).
"Oh, bien peu. Je ne peux pas vous dormer de sentiment exact pour Victor Hugo.
II y a beaucoup de choses a bl&mer en lui, et d'autres qui sont vraiment tres belles.
C'est confus et m§le\ alors je m'en tirerais en disant que je l'admirais. Mais, en
ventd, je ne 1'admire pas plus qu'un autre" ("Autoportrait a soixante-dix ans",
195).

132
Chapter Nine
in Hugo surprisingly similar to his own, although his focus on Flaubert
keeps him from reflecting in more detail on this similarity. Flaubert's
grand crocodile represents for Sartre a sort of chameleon, able to flicker
between "enlightened order" and "a tumultuous and inexplicable
disorder": 28
Hugo, optimism incarnate, the vatic poet, recognised by God as the only
worthy interlocutor, the courageous defender of the Communards [...], this
bard of the poor, [...] this astonishing man, half priest and half anarchist,
incontestable sovereign of the century. 29
Here he identifies two Hugos, contradictory and yet cohabiting, both of
whom are strikingly similar to the "new", double Sartre of uniformity and
multiplicity. Even though Hugo thrives off divine inspiration, he still
believes himself imperfect since he is human after all, subject to alienation
and loss. God speaks, but what Hugo hears are whispers from an uncertain
space that lies beyond this world, outside of all reason. We are thus
brothers with an absent father. Whilst mortal, man must find his own way,
exercising his creativity to make something of this existence: "He has no
cause to die to this world: on the contrary, he must live in it and engage
with it." 30 Hugo resolves to make sense of a senseless world in the
immediate absence of God, exercising the human inventiveness which
foregrounds Sartrean self-determination, as well its lack of fixity.
Sartre's observations actually anticipate a strand of nineteenth-century
studies that has promoted the idea of Hugo as a distinctly complex figure.
These readings bear considerable resemblance to those found in Sartre
scholarship, emphasising dialectic, not unity. Alongside Hugo's "longing
for order", Victor Brombert notes the "surprisingly modern nature of his
fiction-making, which undermines and decentres the subject". 31 Kathryn
Grossman likewise describes his "fundamental playfulness, an element all
too ignored in Hugo", whereby "opposites mix rather than confuse". 32 To
"La lumiere d'ordre", and "un desordre tumultueux et inexplicable" {L*Idiot, III,
123).
29 "Hugo, Foptimisme incarnd, le poete-'vates', reconnu par Dieu comme seul
interlocuteur valable, le ddfenseur courageux des Communards [...], ce chantre des
pauvres, [...] cet homme dtonnant, moide* pretre et moide* anar, incontestable
souverain du siecle" (ibid., 383).
30 "[I]l n'a pas besoin de mourir au monde: il faut qu'il y vive au contraire et qu'il
s'y engage" (L'Idiot, II, 1968).
31 Hugo, 1-5.
32 The Early Novels, 16,197.

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 133
these voices I myself have added Walter Benjamin's favourable appraisals,
which have mostly fallen off the critical radar:
Hugo reflected the superficial views of the day as well as a blind faith in
the future, but he also had a profound vision of the life that was forming in
the womb of nature and of the people. Hugo never succeeded in fashioning
a bridge between the two. He saw no need for such a bridge. 33
Benjamin outlines how Hugo never denied the lure of our fantasy for a
total sense of being, rather the possibility of its realisation. As a poet, he
acknowledged both the imaginary and the real, but refused to assimilate
the two into some mythic truth that could pretend to validate our existence.
The "Rules" of Engagement
Like Sartre, Hugo believes that the human condition moves between
both the immediate and the transcendent as part of an existence
characterised by its elasticity. Reading their thinking alongside each
other's, we see that the notion of totalisation which earned Sartre so much
Structuralist criticism cannot be neatly dismissed as naive idealism. The
concept of an essential mode of being as elusive is vital. To forward the
idea of man as a free yet responsible being, Sartre's philosophy has to
point to the metaphysical quicksand on which it treads. We must not
overlook how, within their differing points of origin, Sartre and Hugo
therefore construct the makings of both an imaginary release from
alienation, and an immediate apprehension of its material reality. Elements
of both bad faith and acute self-awareness abound, as man forever tries to
fit with his world like the missing piece of a puzzle. This ambiguity is
evident in the ways in which both men's thinking inevitably sits atop the
flipside that the other represents. The Romantic ideal of man and world in
unison, and the existential reality of alienation, prove themselves two
poles within a similar philosophical structure of human being that
necessarily attract as much as they repel. Pivotally, Sartre's and Hugo's
different choices of precedence do not prevent either from crossing paths
in this double-bind and making strikingly similar demands of engagement
on their fellow man. It is to these demands, in light of the duality which
attracted Sartre to Hugo, that I now wish to turn in the closing section of
this chapter.
Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 65. See my article "Reading Walter Benjamin's
Concept of the Ruin in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris", French Studies, LXI,
2, April 2007,155-66.

134 Chapter Nine
Indeed, s*engager (to commit oneself, or to be committed) is for both
men an exercise of freedom that occurs at the most basic levels of
existence, revealing our actions—and our inactions—to be a matter of
human choice, not natural design. Their characteristic intellectual
commitment to freedom and integrity emerges out of their ever-shifting
mindsets, requiring alternation as much as uniformity. Once again, we can
make reference to the arguably crude concept of a see-saw of being,
comparing Sartre's "to-and-fro" of existence with Hugo's "flux and
reflux" of experience. 34 For Sartre, the world is a space of Tetre et le
neant", whereas for Hugo it is a meeting of "le Nil et l'Ens". 35 These
reversed orders in the presentation of "being and nothingness" highlight
the differences at work. Sartre begins with material reality, and the
anguish we feel in experiencing our existence as a lack: "We do not
simply apprehend the fact that the possibilities we project are perpetually
eroded away by our freedom to come; in addition, we apprehend our
choice, that is to say ourselves, as unjustifiable" 3 ^ And so our reality is a
"perpetual surpassing toward a coincidence with itself which is never
given", 37 and which signals our coming into existence. Consciousness is
quite simply an appeal for being that goes unanswered. Like the donkey
being led by the carrot, "We run toward ourselves and we are, due to this
fact, the being which cannot be reunited with itself'. 38 Responsibility for
our world therefore lies squarely with us: "Responsible for everything,
indeed, except for my very responsibility, since I am not the foundation of
my being." 39
In the Proses philosophiques des annees 1860-65—an expansive but
abandoned preface to Les Miserables—Hugo would anticipate this view of
man as autonomous but not absolute, albeit in a less analytical and more
poetic way. The for-itself and the in-itself can be observed in what he calls
34 These terms are prevalent in Sartre's Vttre et le neant and Hugo's William
Shakespeare (1864), although variations can be found across their work.
35 From the Proses philosophiques in (Euvres completes: Critique, 709.
36 "Nous ne saisissons pas simplement le fait que les possibles que nous projetons
sont perpe'tuellement ronges par notre liberte* a venir, nous apprghendons en outre
notre choix, c'est-a-dire nous-mSmes, comme injustifiable" (L'fore et le neant,
542).
37 "[...] un depassement perp&uel vers une coincidence avec soi qui n'est jamais
donneV' (ibid., 132).
38 "Nous courons vers nous-mdmes et nous sommes, de ce fait, l'etre qui ne peut
pas se rejoindre" (ibid., 250).
"Responsable de tout, en effet, sauf de ma responsabilite' meme car je ne suis pas
le fondement de mon etre" (ibid., 641).

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 135
"this necessary and indisputable meeting of ideas with matter",
elsewhere termed la vision of human imagination and la vue afforded by
reality. All nature is an exchange between these twin faculties of insight
and sight, perception and picture, which will forever be "necessarily
unequal". 41 Thus, no ambition realises itself fully in this world: "This
flame which is in me, which warms me and which enlightens me and
which sets me alight, and which thinks and hopes and loves" can ignite
"my material self of flesh and emptiness", but not consume it. 42
Nonetheless, "what is missing from us attracts us", hence: "We are at once
points of arrival and points of departure. Every being is a centre of the
world." 43 The sovereignty of the individual that is so crucial to Sartrean
freedom is likewise affirmed by Hugo as man's endlessly imaginative
productivity, for which he alone is responsible: "Freedom implies
responsibility. [...] Responsibility starts with choice. To choose is to act:
to choose is to react." 44 Similarly, Hugo pre-echoes Sartre's accent on
"doing" over "being". But whereas Sartre argues that there is no essential
human reality accessible to us in our contingent world, Hugo sees that
ideal of being as remaining hidden within that same supposed contingency.
Such wholeness is the trace of the divine for Hugo, an anchor of
being from which we have been cut loose. As a result, Sartre's initial
portrait of man is untouched by bad faith in any essential meaning to our
lives, whilst Hugo's is on the contrary laden with it.
However, in order for man to enter into the to-and-fro of subjectivity
and objectivity that they mark as the free human condition, both Sartre and
Hugo will have to slide over to and through the other's position. The
Sartrean course will have to smuggle a clandestine amount of bad faith
along for the ride, since for the for-itself to come into existence, it is
condemned to seek an impossible fulfilment of being. In this respect,
Sartre's ethical investment in a Judaic spirituality that based its fraternity
on religious as much as social values, as expressed in his controversial
"Cette rencontre n£cessaire et incontestable de l'idee et de la matiere" (Proses
philosophiques, 493).
41 "Ndcessairement inegal" (ibid., 680).
42 "Cette flamme qui est en moi, qui me chauffe et qui m'eclaire et qui me brGle, et
qui pense et qui espere et qui aime [...] mon moi matenel de la viande et du n6ant"
(ibid., 527).
43 "Nous sommes en meme temps points d'arrivee et points de depart. Tout &re est
un centre du monde" (ibid., 685).
44 "Libertd implique responsabilitd. [...] La responsabilite' commence au choix.
Choisir, c'est agir; choisir, c'est r£pondre" (ibid., 512).

136 Chapter Nine
1980 interviews, 45 is not as shocking as various members of the so-called
"Sartre family" have tried to make out. He had explained to Beauvoir
herself six years earlier that, even though the idea of a sovereign creator
contradicted many of his other notions, "it is in there, as a vague
presence". 46 Hugo's portrait of himself in his poem Les Mages, hearing the
audible but faint footsteps of a being in the beyond, surely casts the
shadow of the new Romantic across Sartre's work here. But Hugo's
trajectory conversely has to acknowledge the impossibility of harmony, so
as not to confuse his individual being with that of the world entire; to do
so would lay claim to an incorporation that only God can provide once the
mortal coil is done with. The notion of a supreme form of being that is but
an echo or spectre admonishes as much as advocates the idea of an essence
to human life, since this totalisation is "the clarity we do not see": "God
the incomprehensible, the evidently invisible", who gives no guarantee of
his existence and leaves the responsibility for our choices to us. 47 This
being so, and in light of his own deep mistrust of the dogmas of
institutionalised religion, Hugo has before him a perpetual vision of a
better world that is just that: an ever-receding horizon of closure "across
the shadows of this life". 48
Consequently, Sartre encounters a "bad faith", whilst Hugo must
discount it, only for each position to pass once more through its original
point of departure. To borrow Sartre's terminology: "There must be a
duality at the heart of freedom. And this duality is precisely what we call
detotalised totality." 49 Hugo articulates this duality best in his beloved
definition of himself as the poet-philosopher, itself a potential forerunner
to Murdoch's Romantic Rationalist: "He must leave, but he must come
back. He must have wings to soar endlessly above, but he must have feet
to tread the earth, and after seeing him ascend, we must see him wander.
He must return to being a man after transcending that state." 50 On the one
hand, consciousness is intentionality: a flight toward being suffering from
See UEspoir maintenant.
46 "[...] elle est la, vague" (in Beauvoir, La Ceremonie des adieux, 616).
47 "[...] la clartd qu'on ne voit pas"; "[...] Dieu 1'incomprehensible, l'invisible
Evident" (Proses philosophiques, 527, 529).
48 "[...] a travers les tdnebres de cette vie" (Le Droit et la hi, 232).
49 "II faut une duality au coeur de la liberty. Et cette duality est precisdment ce que
nous nommons totality d&otalisee" (Cahiers pour une morale, I, 345).
50 "Qu'il parte, mais qu'il revienne. Qu'il ait des ailes pour l'infini, mais qu'il ait
des pieds pour la terre, et qu'apres Favoir vu voler, on le voie marcher. Qu'il rentre
dans rhomme apres en §tre sorti" (William Shakespeare, in (Euvres completes:
Critique, 402).

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 137
a thirst for the absolute that is as undeniable as it is unquenchable. When
looking back on his search for an ethics, Sartre indeed points out: "It's
what I wanted myself. Naturally you can't have it all, but you must want it
all." 51 Equally, both Hugo and Sartre recognise that this suffering is the
unavoidable consequence of being separated from any absolute. Hugo
explains: "Anguish, we deeply believe, is the law of the world, until the
new divine order. To suffer is the foundation of human life, itself
mysterious." 52
It is this interaction of man and world that enables both Sartre and
Hugo to call for the individual to engage with such duality, rather than
retreat from its dilemmas or claim to have mastered them. For both, liberty
implies a kind of liability that can stall our endeavours as easily as enable
them. Freedom is pointless without purpose, the aims of which could
however lock the individual in a fixity that would be contrary to his
indeterminism. Sartre thus responds to this burden by arguing: "Nothing
remains for the for-itself other than to re-enter the circle and allow itself to
be indefinitely tossed from one to the other of the two fundamental
attitudes". 53 Meanwhile, Hugo reminds us that "classification and negation
are hand in hand. Neither 'Yes' nor 'No' should be used too much.
Idolatry is the centripetal force; nihilism is the centrifugal force." 54 With
regard to this demanding approach, Henri Pena-Ruiz's and Jean-Paul
Scot's placing of Hugo between materialism and romanticism in "a double
sentiment of proximity and estrangement" is of special note. They see
Hugo embracing a philosophy of freedom in action, in other words "in
situation, as Sartre would say, with the insertion of all action into the
profundity of a personal history which itself succeeds a social history." 55
The validity of such a claim should now be clear, particularly as Sartre
51 "C'est ce que j'ai voulu moi-m§me. Naturellement on n'arrive pas a tout, mais il
faut vouloir tout" ("Autoportrait", 186).
52 "La douleur, nous le croyons profonde'ment, est la loi terrestre, jusqu'a nouvel
ordre divin. Souffrir est le fond de rhomme, fond inconnu" (Proses
philosophiques, 552-58).
"II ne reste plus au pour-soi qu'a rentrer dans le cercle et a se laisser
indeTiniment ballotter de Tune a l'autre des deux attitudes fondamentales" (L'£tre
et le neanu 484).
54 "Classification et negation, c'est deux. II ne faut ni trop de Oui ni trop de Non.
L'idolatrie est la force centripete; le nihilisme est la force centrifuge" (Proses
philosophiques, 699).
"Un double sentiment de proximity et d'&rangetd [...] en situation, comme dirait
Sartre, avec Inscription de toute action dans la profondeur d'une histoire
personnelle qui elle-meme relaie une histoire sociale" (Un Po&te en politique, 395,
403).

138 Chapter Nine
uses the concept of situated freedom as the direct basis for the to-and-fro
of existence that both he and Hugo confront: "And so we begin to catch a
glimpse of the paradox of freedom: there is freedom only in a situation,
and there is a situation only through freedom." 56 Therein also lies an
opportunity to take up Ronald Santoni's exciting suggestion that there is a
difference between living in bad faith and acting in it:
[B]oth Sartre and Sartrean scholarship would read and fare better if a
distinction were drawn more sharply between the original bad faith of the
human being's original pre-reflective project or "natural attitude" of
attaining self-coincidence or in-itself-for-itself [...], and the bad faith of
more specific "acts", "choices", "behaviours" and "ways of living". 57
Whilst the former could be construed as a total loss of (or indeed total
immersion in) consciousness, the latter is a more reflective gesture: a kind
of "knowing" bad faith that does not eliminate the possibility of a return of
self-awareness, and would be aptly suited to propel Sartre and Hugo on
their existential see-saw. Sartre hints at such a conception when comparing
bad faith to a dreamlike state: "You put yourself in bad faith as you would
lull yourself to sleep, and you are in bad faith as you would be asleep in a
dream." 58 Sticking with this analogy of sleep, it is possible to split that
dreamlike state. If we take pre-reflective bad faith to be akin to a dream,
then reflective bad faith could be seen as a daydream. The latter occurs at
specific intervals, puncturing our conscious state as opposed to suspending
it. As such, consciousness is compromised but not overwhelmed by this
deception, in the same way as a daydream subdues our self-awareness
without sending us into deep sleep. Such a metaphor in fact corresponds
exactly to how Hugo figures the problematic of living an existence that
absurdly tries to stabilise our turbulent condition, of believing in an
essence to our lives that we know is, according to reason, ridiculous:
"Each morning, everyone picks up their bundle of daydreams and leaves
for a faraway California. [...] All of us follow a path." 59
The dialogue that I have set up here amplifies critical discourses on the
identity of the French "engaged writer" as a necessarily oppositional one
"Ainsi commengons-nous a entrevoir le paradoxe de la libertd: il n'y a de liberty
qu'en situation et il n'y a de situation que par la liberte"' (L'&tre et le neant, 569-
70).
57 Santoni, Bad Faith, 183.
58 "On se met de mauvaise foi comme on s'endort et on est de mauvaise foi comme
on reve" (L'fitre et le neant, 109).
59 "Tous les matins chacun fait son paquet de reveries et part pour la Californie des
songes. [...] Tous suivent une piste" (Proses philosophiques, 663).

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 139
whose gestures are more involving than simplistic political activism.
Sartre's and Hugo's philosophies figure and refigure visionary imagination
and rational thought onto one another in a dialectic that must remain
engaged with itself if freedom is to survive. They tackle the crisis of how
to live in a modern age in which man is, as Marx famously argued, both
producer and product of his world. They stress engagement (commitment)
as the pursuit of a meaningful and unconditional way of life, but never its
firm attainment—a mode of being that is always constructed, never done
with. Their massive ceuvres of novels, plays, essays, and political
commentaries were not merely self-indulgent exercises of their creative
imaginations, nor militant crusades of social action, but a richly tense
interaction of the two. To be engaged is to accept a necessary contradiction,
and to be caught between independence from ideological agendas
and involvement in those same domains. Steve Fuller reminds us:
The intellectual, like the superhero, lives in a dualistic universe. [...] For
intellectuals and superheroes, social structures are disposable sites for the
ongoing struggle between Good and Evil: what embodies Good one week
may embody Evil the next. The heroic intellectual never gives up on the
chase. 60
A paternal or vertical system of thinking that demands a hierarchy of
meaning is turned on its side by the fraternal impulse for both Sartre and
Hugo. Here again we have the analogy of the see-saw, whereby any rigidly
categorical thinking has to be pushed aside in favour of a more circular
mindset that respects the slippage between subject and object. To cite
Sartre: "The truth always remains to be discovered, because it is
immeasurable; which is not to say that you don't obtain truths in the plural
sense." 61 Hence Hugo's succinct aim: "Authority transfigured into
freedom." 62 As a result, the Sartre-Hugo dialogue begins to reaffirm the
modern French cultural tradition—and, importantly, Sartrean ethics—as a
site not of resolution or resignation, but of revolution, in the strictest
sense: of a continued engagement with a contingent world.
60 The Intellectual 36-37.
61 "La ventd reste toujours a trouver, parce qu'elle est infinie. Ce qui ne veut pas
dire qu'on n'obtienne pas des venteV ("Autoportrait", 148).
62 "L'autorite' transfigure en liberte"' (Le Droit et la hi, 399).

140 Chapter Nine
Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone de. La Ceremonie des adieux, suivi de Entretiens avec
Jean-Paul Sartre, aout-septembre 1974. Paris: Gallimard, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism (trans. Harry Zohn). London: NLB, 1973.
Brombert, Victor. Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel. Harvard
University Press, 1984.
Chateaubriand, Frangois-Rene' de. Rene (1802). Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
Comay, Rebecca. "Benjamin and the Ambiguities of Romanticism", in
The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (ed. David S. Ferris).
Cambridge University Press, 2004,134-51.
Decker, Michel de. Hugo: Victor pour ces Dames. Paris: Belfond, 2002.
Derrida, Jacques. "II courait mort: Salut, salut", Les Temps modernes, 587,
Spring 1996,7-54.
Farrell Fox, Nicholas. The New Sartre: Explorations in Postmodernism.
London: Continuum, 2003.
Flaubert, Gustave. Correspondance. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.
Fuller, Steve. The Intellectual: The Positive Power of Negative Thinking.
Cambridge: Icon, 2005.
Grossman, Kathryn. The Early Novels of Victor Hugo: Towards a Poetics
of Harmony. Geneva: Librairie Droz SA, 1986.
—. "From Classic to Pop Icon: Popularising Hugo", The French Review,
vol. 74, no. 3, February 2001,482-95.
Gutting, Gary. French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge
University Press, 2001.
Howells, Christina. Sartre, the Necessity of Freedom. Cambridge
University Press, 1988.
—. "Introduction", in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. Cambridge
University Press, 1992.
Hugo, Victor. GEuvres completes: Critique (ed. Jean-Pierre Reynaud).
Paris: Laffont, 1985.
—. Le Droit et la hi et autres textes citoyens. Paris: Editions 10/18, 2002.
L£vi-Strauss, Claude. La Pensee sauvage. Paris: Plon, 1962.
Le\y, Bernard-Henri. Sartre, the Philosopher of the Twentieth Century
(trans. Andrew Brown). Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
Maurel, Jean. Victor Hugo, philosophe. Paris: P.U.F., 1985.
Murdoch, Iris. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953). London: Vintage,
1999.
Noudelmann, Francois and Gilles Philippe (eds). Dictionnaire Sartre.
Paris: Honord Champion, 2004.

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 141
Pena-Ruiz, Henri and Jean-Paul Scot. Un Poete en politique: les combats
de Victor Hugo. Paris: Flammarion, 2002.
Rowley, Hazel. Tete-a-Tete: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir
and Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Harper Collins, 2005.
Santoni, Ronald. Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre*s
Early Philosophy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. U&tre et le neant. Paris: Gallimard, 1943.
—. "Qu'est-ce que la litterature?", in Situations, II. Paris: Gallimard, 1948.
—. Uldiotde lafamille, MIL Paris: Gallimard, 1971-72.
—. "Autoportrait a soixante-dix ans", in Situations, X. Paris: Gallimard,
1976.
—. Cahiers pour une morale, /-//. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.
—. (avec Benny Levy), VEspoir maintenant: les entretiens de 1980.
Lagrasse: Verdier, 1991.

CHAPTER TEN
HIDDEN WORDPLAY IN THE WORKS
OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
PETER ROYLE
Le Mur {The Wall) is a collection of five short stories, the first four of
which point to what Sartre calls "limit-situations" {"situations-limites"):
death, madness and the impossibility of being another person while
remaining oneself, the impossibility for a human being of becoming
inhuman or transcending the human condition, and the necessity of having
a body. 1 But in the longest of these stories, "L'Enfance d'un chef ("The
Childhood of a Leader"), there is no limit-situation (although there have
been various attempts to conjure one up): there is instead a hidden play on
words. Each limit-situation may be seen as constituting a wall. But where
is the wall in "L'Enfance d'un chef? Is it not the arbitrary wall that
Lucien Fleurier, the budding community leader, erects around himself by
means of his antisemitic views, in order to protect himself and make
himself feared? Also the wall against which he and his racist comrades of
the brasserie Polder (an example of wordplay 2 ) corner and beat up a
"m&eque" ("wog") to try to prevent their country from being swamped by
foreigners? At the same time there are several allusions to their maturity:
Lemordant [...] was mature; but he didn't appear to have acquired this
maturity, like Lucien, through multiple painful experiences: he was an
adult by birth. 3
An earlier draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the Centenary Conference
of the UK Sartre Society at the Institut Frangais, London, in March 2005.
2 "Polder" is a Dutch word adopted by both French and English, meaning a piece
of low-lying land protected by dykes from submersion by the sea.
3 "Lemordant [...] dtait mur; mais il ne paraissait pas avoir acquis, comme Lucien,
cette maturity h travers de multiples et pdnibles experiences: c'&ait un adulte de

Hidden Wordplay in the Works of Jean-Paul Sartre 143
They were adults and several of them wore beards.
He highly appreciated this odd mixture of obstinate earnestness and
turbulence which gave this mature look to the youngest of them and this
impish appearance to the oldest.
At the beginning of the story there is a wall beyond which the infant
Lucien is not allowed to venture; but now he is mature he can go where he
likes and do what he likes; and on maturing he has elected to turn himself
into a wall. The wall in "L'Enfance d'un chef is not only un mur: it is,
ironically, un mur.
Is this play on words deliberate? Naturally one cannot be sure, but
there are grounds for believing it is. There is, for example, a passage in Le
Sursis {The Reprieve), the second volume of Les Chemins de la liberte
{The Roads to Freedom), where the verb murir (to mature) is closely
associated with "two high walls" ("deux hauts murs"):
Years and years of future peace had settled on things in advance and had
matured them, gilded them; to take one's watch, a door handle, a woman's
hand was to take peace in one's hands. The postwar years were a
beginning. The beginning of peace [...]. 'Time and peace were the same
thing. Now this future is here, at my feet, dead. It was a false future, an
imposture." He beheld these twenty years he had lived becalmed, bathed in
sunlight, a flat sea, and he saw them now as they had been: a finite number
of days squeezed between two high walls without hope, a period with a
label, with a beginning and an end, which would appear in the history
books as the Interwar Years. 6
naissance" (Sartre, "L'Enfance d'un chef, in Le Mur, 366). All translations from
the French are my own.
4 "[Cl'&aient des adultes et plusieurs portaient la barbe" (ibid., 374).
5 "II goutait vivement ce melange original de gravity tdtue et de turbulence qui
donnait aux plus jeunes cet air mur et aux plus age's cette allure de diablotins"
(ibid., 375).
6 "Des annees et des annees de paix future s'dtaient de'posees par avance sur les
choses et les avaient muries, dordes; prendre sa montre, la poignee d'une porte, une
main de femme, c'e'tait prendre la paix entre ses mains. L'apres-guerre £tait un
commencement. Le commencement de la paix [...]. 'Le temps, la paix, c'e'tait la
m§me chose. A present cet avenir est la, a mes pieds, mort. C'6tait un faux avenir,
une imposture.' II regardait ces vingt annees qu'il avait vecues Stales, ensoleillees,
une plaine marine et il les voyait a present comme elles avaient 6t&. un nombre fini
de journees comprimees entre deux hauts murs sans espoir, une peYiode
cataloguee, avec un de'but et une fin, qui figurerait dans les manuels d'histoire sous
le nom d'Entre-deux-guerres" {Le Sursis, in (Euvres romanesques, 807).

144 Chapter Ten
And what is L'Age de raison {The Age of Reason), the title of the first
volume of this same unfinished tetralogy, if not a virtual synonym of l'age
murl And is this title not meant to apply, ironically, both to Mathieu
Delarue, the main character, and the age itself? Puns are not rare in
Sartre's work: Walter Redfern points out, as Sartre himself explains in Les
Mots {Words), that he had been, like Flaubert, his "enemy brother",
addicted to punning from early childhood. 7 But whereas a postmodernist
like Derrida will flaunt his puns, Sartre on the whole prefers to keep his
hidden. Thus, instead of calling his novel VAge mur, which would, it is
true, have lost perhaps somewhat in irony, he calls it VAge de raison. It is
true also that L'Age mur would have been awkwardly reminiscent of Le
Mur, and would have risked drawing attention to its hidden wordplay.
Let us look at some of Sartre's proper names. There are some,
certainly, which contain plays on words which are immediately obvious:
Frantz, for example, in Les Sequestres d'Altona {The Condemned of
Altona), symbolises France, as the author has confirmed; Genet becomes
Saint Genet, comedien et martyr because he bears the name of the patron
saint of martyred actors; Sartre bestows on Simone de Beauvoir the
nickname le Castor not only because she is industrious, but also because
her name resembles the English word "beaver"; Bouville, the name of a
real place not far from Le Havre, which is where La Nausee {Nausea) is in
fact situated, becomes the fictional scene of the novel because of its name,
with its evocation of mud {boue, in French, plus ville, town), and the
distaste that the port of Le Havre arouses in the hero, Roquentin. 8 But
there are also other linguistic games that, while not hidden, are less
obvious. The three "inseparables" of Huis clos {In Camera or No Exit),
Garcin, Ines, and Estelle, have names that interlock {GarcInEstelle). The
role of Goetz, in Le Diable et le bon Dieu {The Devil and the Good Lord),
is no doubt based on the actions of the historical Gotz, who had inspired
daydreams in the infant Sartre. 9 But could not Sartre have chosen this
name partly because Gbtze in German, a language he knew, means "idol"
and thus "diabolical god"? Other proper names involving wordplay are the
7 See Redfern, "Applying the Tourniquet".
8 Roquentin's name may also involve a play on words. Various theories have been
advanced about its meaning, but it appears to me to have affinities with rouquin
(redhead or ginger nut), which is what Roquentin is proud to be. Whereas the word
marron, as we shall see, has sinister overtones for Sartre, roux and roussi, which
are used to describe any number of "red" things (houses, wood, light, cats, bushes,
mountains, plains, smells, moustaches, cities, wine, onions, and so forth), generally
have a positive sense.
9 See Sartre, Les Mots, 126.

Hidden Wordplay in the Works of Jean-Paul Sartre 145
aforementioned Delarue (literally, "of the street"), Sartre's quasi-
Doppelgdnger in Les Chemins de la liberte (Sartre often said he was and
wished to be "n'importe qui", "anyone at all"); Latex, a minor character in
Les Chemins de la liberte, who is encountered appropriating a little girl's
rubber ball; Achille—this is ironic, as Monsieur Achille, in La Nausee, is
an obvious lacked a coward; and Schalom—another irony, as this Jewish
character of Le Sursis, whose name means "peace", is, unlike most of
those surrounding him and for good reasons, in favour of war with
Germany during the Munich crisis of 1938. Sereno, the surname of Daniel,
the tormented homosexual of Les Chemins de la liberte, who is anything
but "serene", provides yet another irony; and Lemordant (literally, "the
biter", or "the biting one") who, as we have seen, is one of Lucien's
"biting", more aggressive friends in "L'Enfance d'un chef," has a bitingly
appropriate name.
A more cryptic example is to be found in the name of the character
Schneider, whose real name turns out to be Vicarios. It will be observed
that Schneider is German for "tailor", and, lo and behold, Sartre is "tailor"
in old French. So, should we infer that Schneider/Vicarios—we naturally
think of "vicarious" in English—is to be identified with Sartre himself? It
is more subtle than this. As Michel Contat points out, 11 what happens to
Vicarios in Les Chemins de la liberte is essentially what happened in real
life to Sartre's friend Nizan, who left the Communist party on the occasion
of the Soviet-German pact, and was unjustly denounced by his former
comrades as a police agent. Schneider/Vicarios is the incarnation of the
political uncertainties of both Sartre and Nizan, with whom Sartre had une
drole d'amitie (a peculiar friendship), and for whose rehabilitation he
worked after Nizan's death in the war. Finally, before we leave the subject
of proper names, let us note that there are a number of (no doubt) tonguein-cheek
references to the Swiss, and that Sartre's mother and her family
were Schweitzers. 12
In Les Mouches (The Flies), a title reminiscent of such plays as The
Wasps, The Birds, and The Frogs by Aristophanes, we have a triple play
on words, two that are obvious—les mouches mordent (flies bite), les
Cf. Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un hwnanisme, 84.
11 CEuvres romanesques, 2107.
12 E.g.: "Tout le monde n'a pas la chance d'etre Suisse" ["It's not everyone who
has the good luck to be Swiss"] (Le Sursis, 1033); "Tu es sur que ta montre
marche?' Le sergent sourit et regarde sa montre avec complaisance. 'C'est une
montre suisse,' dit-il simplement" ["'You're sure your watch is going?'" The
sergeant smiled and looked at his watch complacently. 'It's a Swiss watch' was all
he said"] (La Mort dans Vame, 1415).

146 Chapter Ten
remords (remorse), les morts (the dead)—and one that is, for necessary
reasons, semi-submerged. An older meaning of the word mouche is "spy",
"informer", corresponding to the modern mouchard, and insofar as the
play can be taken as an allegory of the German occupation of France,
supported as it was by deplorable numbers of citizens ready and
sometimes eager to denounce their neighbours, that is what the flies—
loyal to Egisthe but able to be called off by Jupiter—represent.
In Les Mots, Sartre tells us that as a child he believed words to be the
quintessence of things, "la quintessence des choses", 13 and "having
discovered the world through language, for a long time I took language to
be the world". 14 He also tells us of a sinister chestnut tree, un marronnier,
about which he had read in the newspaper Le Matin; 15 and his work bears
witness to what appears to have been a protracted obsession with chestnut
trees. The most famous reference is, of course, to be found in the passage
in La Nausee where Roquentin sits hypnotised before a chestnut root; and
it is here, precisely, that he comes to the understanding that reality lies
beneath words, that words are, in a sense, impostors, and that we are
simply deceived by them. Now, one of the French words for "impostor",
which also designates the victim of an imposture as well as a clout or a
thump, is marron (chestnut), as in un medecin marron (an unqualified or
fake doctor), tu es marron (you've been had or duped), and recevoir un
marron (to get thumped). And the word marron evokes other words such
as marrant, of which Sartre seems particularly fond, and one of the senses
of which is "odd" or "peculiar". In La Mort dans Vdme {Iron in the Soul),
the situation of Mathieu and his soldier colleagues during the French
defeat in June 1940 is described by them as "marrant"; but it is also false
as in many ways it appears and is (at least at that stage of the fighting)
unreal. In any case, they are totally depressed, "Us en ont marre", and,
perhaps surprisingly, they all roar with hysterical laughter: "Us se
marrent". 16 Mathieu then begins to carve his name in a chestnut tree, only
to discover, like Lucien in "The Childhood of a Leader"—who proclaims
for that reason that the chestnut tree he hates and insults is en bois (made
of wood)—that the tree is resistant to words. So far, it would seem that the
13 Les Mots, 121.
14 "Pour avoir ddcouvert le monde h travers le langage, je pris longtemps le
langage pour le monde" (ibid., 154).
15 Ibid., 128.
16 Incidentally, marre comes from the Spanish word for "sea", mar, and en avoir
marre (to be thoroughly fed-up) means, etymologically, to be sea-sick, i.e. avoir la
nausee.

Hidden Wordplay in the Works of Jean-Paul Sartre 147
phonemic sequence "m-vowel-r"—marre, mort / mord, mur / mur—
exerted a certain fascination on Sartre. 17
There are in Sartre's work several word clusters that could be seen as
based on puns: for example, rond, gris, colloquial terms for "tipsy", and
the proper names Ramon Gris and Steinbock. The latter—a German name
meaning "ibex"—which can be broken down into Stein and Bock, both
redolent of beer, is allocated by Sartre to an Irishman! Both these names,
occurring in the first, eponymous story of Le Mur, might well be intended
to evoke the intoxication with death expressed in the Spanish civil war
slogan, /Viva la muerte! (Long live death!). But there is one such cluster
that stands right at the heart of Sartre's conception of humankind, and the
pun at its centre lies fairly deeply buried.
It is well known that Sartre had a horror of crustaceans, and in
particular crabs, which figure abundantly in his work. For example:
It wasn't the miserable look of this fellow that scared us, nor the tumour he
had on his neck which rubbed against the edge of his detachable collar: but
we sensed that his head was full of crab or crayfish thoughts. And that
terrorized us [...]. 18
Suddenly I lost my human appearance and they saw a crab escaping
backwards from this room that was so human. 19
But the most flagrant instance of this fixation is to be found in Les
Sequestres d'Altona where, in the unhinged mind of Frantz, the men of the
thirtieth century have become "crabs", "decapods" sitting in judgment
over the men of our generation. The crustaceans which in La Nausee are
presented as the antithesis of humankind are now themselves men. But,
truth to tell, they always have been, and the fact that Roquentin sees
himself at certain moments as a crab shows to what an extent Sartre, while
distancing himself from them, is prepared to acknowledge his kinship with
them. This obsession with crabs, crayfish, and lobsters, by which he felt
Lucien is not the only character to be compared to un mur, a wall (see for
example, Le Sursis, 904, "vous Stes un mur"; and 948, "comme si j'&ais un mur").
Also, one of the three prisoners awaiting execution in Le Mur is Mirbal (mur-balle,
"wall-bullet": death by firing squad?).
18 "Ce n'est pas l'air miserable de ce type qui nous faisait peur, ni la tumeur qu'il
avait au cou et qui frottait contre le bord de son faux col: mais nous sentions qu'il
formait dans sa tSte des pensdes de crabe ou de langouste. Et ga nous terrorisait
[...]" (La Nausee, 14).
19 "Tout d'un coup, j'ai perdu mon apparence d'homme et ils ont vu un crabe qui
s'£chappait h reculons de cette salle si humaine" (ibid., 146).

148 Chapter Ten
himself persecuted, has been explained as an effect of Sartre's short-lived
experimentation with mescaline. But it is clear also, as different doctors
affirmed—so Simone de Beauvoir tells us in La Force de Vage {The
Prime of Life)—that it comes from further afield. In Les Mots, Sartre
recounts the following anecdote:
I nearly fainted one day in the train to Limoges as I leafed through the
Hachette almanac: I had happened upon a hair-raising engraving: a quayside
in the moonlight, a long, rough claw coming out of the water and
seizing a drunkard, dragging him down to the bottom of the dock [...]. I
was scared of water, scared of crabs and trees. Scared above all of books: I
cursed the torturers who peopled their stories with these atrocious images.
Nevertheless I imitated them [...]. What then fell from my pen—octopus
with flaming eyes, twenty-ton shellfish, giant talking spider-crab—was
myself, a child monster, it was my dissatisfaction with life, my fear of
death, my insipidity and my perversity [...].
If mescaline did indeed induce hallucinations in the adult Sartre, why,
we may ask, the ones which find expression in his work? The answer is
easy: they go back to his glossolatrous (language-worshipping) childhood.
So would it be unreasonable to suggest that his fixation on crustaceans
springs from the fact that the word for lobster, homard, not to write
hommard, could be taken to mean, with a little imagination, homme
primitif (primitive man) or homme degenere (degenerate man)? Naturally,
just as Flaubert refrains from spelling "Hommet" the name of his stupid
humanist Monsieur Homais, which would point too obviously to the way
we are meant to think of him, Sartre resists the temptation openly to call
human beings homards, a term which would be manifestly pejorative, like
roublard (crafty devil), froussard (coward), vantard (braggart), pleurard
(whiner) and, indeed, mouchard (sneak), not to speak of a host of other
words ending in -ard. So he uses instead the term crabe.
It is in Les Sequestres d'Altona, as I have intimated, that the
resemblance between human beings and crabs is best elucidated. Frantz
"Je pensai m'£vanouir un jour, dans le train de Limoges, en feuilletant
Talmanach Hachette: j'&ais tomb£ sur une gravure a faire dresser les cheveux: un
quai sous la lune, une longue pince rugueuse sortait de l'eau, accrochait un
ivrogne, Tentrainait au fond du bassin [...]. .Feus peur de l'eau, peur des crabes et
des arbres. Peur des livres surtout: je maudis les bourreaux qui peuplaient leurs
rdcits de ces figures atroces. Pourtant je les imitai [...]. Ce qui venait alors sous ma
plume—pieuvre aux yeux de feu, crustac£ de vingt tonnes, araignde g£ante et qui
parlait—c'dtait moi-meme, monstre enfantin, c'&ait mon ennui de vivre, ma peur
de mourir, ma fadeur et ma perversity" (ibid., 129-30).

Hidden Wordplay in the Works of Jean-Paul Sartre 149
von Gerlach, who has tortured Russian prisoners during the Second World
War and who feels intolerably guilty in consequence, sequesters himself in
an upstairs room of the large family house in Altona, which is a suburb of
Hamburg. He is still there, although officially dead, in 1959. His sister
Leni, with whom he has an incestuous relationship, brings him food. His
remorse has driven him completely mad. He believes himself to be
persecuted, as a man who embodies the entire twentieth century, by a
Tribunal of Crabs sitting in the thirtieth. The crabs are decapods who
"understand nothing", and he is a man who regards himself as a crab. But
as he says to his sister, he is defending his century before magistrates
whom he has not the pleasure of knowing. But who exactly are these
magistrates? When Johanna, his sister-in-law, who manages to violate his
solitude, speaks to him of crabs, he replies:
What Crabs? Are you mad? What Crabs? Ah! Yes. Well, yes... The Crabs
are men. What, you say? Where did I get that idea from? [...] Real men,
fine and good, on all the balconies of the centuries. As for me, I was
crawling in the courtyard; I thought I could hear them: "Brother, what's
that I see?" That was me... Me the Crab... Well, I said no: my time will
not be judged by men. What will they be, after all? The sons of our sons.
Do we allow brats to condemn their grandfathers? I turned the tables on
them; I yelled: "Here is man; after me the flood; after the flood, Crabs,
you\" Unmasked, all of them! The balconies were swarming with arthropods.
21
The Tribunal of Crustaceans consists then, after all, of men. Naturally
Frantz is in bad faith; and it is clear that he knows very well that it is he
himself who is judging himself when he says: "The defendant bears
witness for himself... I am Man, Johanna; I am every man and the whole
of Man, I am the Century, like absolutely anyone." 22 Judge and defendant,
he is also witness for the defence. So why does he not find himself guilty
21 "Quels Crabes? fites-vous folle? Quels Crabes? Ah! oui. Eh bien, oui... Les
Crabes sont des hommes. Hein, quoi? Oil ai-je 6t6 chercher cela? [...] De vrais
hommes, bons et beaux, h tous les balcons des si&cles. Moi, je rampais dans la
cour; je croyais les entendre: 'Fr&re, qu'est-ce que c'est que ga?' Qa, c'&ait moi...
Moi le Crabe... Eh bien, j'ai dit non: des hommes ne jugeront pas mon temps. Que
seront-ils, apr£s tout? Les fils de nos fils. Est-ce qu'on permet aux marmots de
condamner leurs grands-pfcres? J'ai retournd la situation; j'ai crte: 'Void l'homme;
apr&s moi, le deluge; apr&s le deluge, les Crabes, vousV D6masqu£s, tous! les
balcons grouillaient d'arthropodes" {Les Sequestres d'Altona, in Theatre, 838-39).
22 "L'accusd tdmoigne pour lui-meme... Je suis l'Homme, Johanna; je suis tout
homme et tout l'Homme, je suis le Sfecle comme n'importe qui" (ibid., 839).

150 Chapter Ten
and put it all behind him? Because he is or pretends to be convinced that
Germany is still in ruins, and that it would have been better for the whole
of humanity if his country had won the war; and perhaps, he thinks, if he
had been even more cruel and ruthless than he was, his country would
have been victorious. Are then the Crabs hard men judging soft ones, or
soft men condemning brutes? Dur (hard) and mou (soft) are adjectives that
constantly recur throughout Sartre's work, and it is to be observed that
crustaceans are hard on the outside and soft within. And are these
particular so-called crustaceans more advanced than we or, on the
contrary, are they homards, degenerate men?
For Sartre, who describes his anti-humanist humanism as an optimistic
hardness, "une durete optimiste", 23 and whose judgments are often hard,
the answer to these questions is clear: the Crabs reflect Frantz, and Frantz,
like Lucien the anti-Semite in "L'Enfance d'un chef, is a soft man who
has tried to fashion an independent personality by making himself hard.
He is a mou who has become dur, just as Lucien (with compliments to Dr
Spooner) is a doux (sweet, gentle) who becomes mur (mature). It is the
hard Frantz who condemns the soft one, and the soft one who judges the
brute. There is, too, a hidden play on words that lies at the heart of the
drama, and that possibly even inspired it: Frantz eats oysters; the
crustacean is eating himself, eating himself, that is, in a metaphorical sense
of the verb "to eat", manger, i.e. to torture, that is quite common in Sartre.
// se met a la question: he is questioning himself, i.e., in the traditional
euphemism, torturing himself—and that shortly after the publication of La
Question, the book in which Henri Alleg denounces France's use of torture
in the Algerian war, apropos of which Sartre wrote his controversial article
"UneVictoire". 24
But not all men are homards, and not all homards are brutes. There are
men of whom Sartre naturally approves, and who aspire to be des hommes
parmi les hommes, free men among equals. Furthermore, there is another
play on words to which, when considering the nature of his humanism, we
must pay attention. In their notes on La Nausee, Michel Contat and Michel
Rybalka write that, whereas the in-itself, the en-soi, is conceived in terms
of "black", noir, and "matter", mati&re, and the for-itself, the pour-soi, in
terms of "white", blanc, and "light", lumiere, human reality, la realite
humaine, often equated with the Heideggerian Dasein, is described in
L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, 58.
24 [First published in L'Express, 6 March 1958 (seized by the authorities as a
consequence), subsequently published as a postface to Alleg's book and collected
in Situations, V—Eds.]

Hidden Wordplay in the Works of Jean-Paul Sartre 151
terms of "grey", gris, and "shadow", ombre. But just as a person can, for
Sartre, not only encounter a wall but can actually become one, so can one
not only be in shadow but also be a shadow. Examples of this abound in
Sartre's work:
A couple of shadows got up, slipped between the tables and made off.
Mathieu remained alone outside the cafe. 26
A man alone, forgotten, eaten by shadow, in the face of this perishable
eternity [...]. There had once been a gentle, timorous man who loved and
walked about in Paris. The man was dead. 27
All human lives melted into the shadow. 28
Shadows came and went in the white light of a cafe [...]. This to-ing and
fro-ing of the shadows continued [...]. Some shadows stopped and he saw
men coming towards him. 29
These passages are taken from Le Sursis and relate to the effect on the
French people of the Munich crisis in 1938. The following passage comes
from La Mort dans Vame, where Mathieu and his soldier colleagues await
their fate in the face of a German advance, about which they have been
kept in ignorance. They are wondering whether further resistance is
possible:
Everything is asking us our opinion. Everything. A great interrogation
surrounds us: it's a farce. We are asked the question as if we were men;
they want to make us believe that we are still men. But no. No. No. What a
farce, this shadow of a question put by a shadow of war to semblances of
men. 30
See (Euvres romanesques, 1676.
26 "Un couple d'ombres se leva, glissa entre les tables et s'en fut. Mathieu restait
seul a la terrasse" {Le Sursis, 1046).
27 "Un homme tout seul, oublte, mangg par 1'ombre en face de cette gternife
p&issable [...]. II y avait eu un homme tendre et timord qui aimait Paris et qui s'y
promenait. L'homme dtait mort" (ibid.).
"[T]outes les vies humaines se fondirent dans l'ombre" (ibid., 1047).
29 "[D]es ombres passaient et repassaient dans la lumifcre blanche d'un cafe [...].
[C]e va-et-vient des ombres continua [...]. Quelques ombres s'arr§t£rent et il vit
des hommes qui venaient vers lui" (ibid., 1061).
30 "Tout nous demande notre avis. Tout. Une grande interrogation nous cerne: c'est
une farce. On nous pose la question comme a des hommes; on veut nous faire
croire que nous sommes encore des hommes. Mais non. Non. Non. Quelle farce,

152 Chapter Ten
Is it not clear that shadows (and Sartre naturally avoids the word here
to describe these semblances of men) are men who have been dehumanized
and rendered ludicrous? Shadow may well be the element of all human
reality, but it is also the reality of those particular human beings
transformed into something else, possibly lobsters or crabs, by themselves
or others. In the same way as we have salauds (bastards) and laches
(cowards), Dr Rog6 and Monsieur Achille, so we have guilty homards,
and homards who are soft but hardly guilty at all. And it is difficult to
avoid the suspicion that the New York scene with which La Mort dans
Vame begins—in which the Spanish fighter Gomez encounters the
indifference of the American population to a defeated Spanish republican
cause fought in the name of "man", and in which, having uttered the mild
expletive hombre! (man!), he complains of the extreme heat and lack of
ombre (shade)—is inspired at some level by a play on words. If true, it
would mean that, for him at least, "shadow" relates to a humanist, as
opposed to idealist, conception of man, akin to that of Hoederer in Les
Mains sales (Dirty Hands), and not to its travesty.
Other marine creatures that figure in Sartre's work are shrimps
(crevettes) and jellyfish (meduses). The word meduse is one of the
contemptuous terms by which Lucien denotes Jews and foreigners, the socalled
meteques (wogs). There is nothing softer, it will be conceded, than a
jellyfish, but Medusa is also the name of the Gorgon who turns to stone all
those who look at her. In "The Childhood of a Leader", this metaphor is
highly ironic: Sartre often compares the look of the Other to the look of
Medusa; but Lucien does not need to be petrified: he has petrified himself
by choosing for himself the stupid hardness of stone. Besides the apparent
metaphor, we have, it seems, a play on words and a hidden metaphor one
of whose terms, Medusa, is endowed with lethal qualities which are the
opposite of the inoffensive and contemptible attributes to which Lucien
gives the name. Whereas Medusa turns people to stone, here we have a
"stone" who reduces them to meduses, a guilty homard and creatures of
the sea that are not necessarily guilty of anything at all.
As for crevette, this is a word used by Daniel, the so-called archangel
and would-be homosexual seducer, to describe one of his young boyfriends,
3129 as well as by Lucien of his erstwhile friend Berliac, who has
been seduced by the homosexual writer Bergere. 32 It is a word which
could well be the feminine diminutive of crabe\ and indeed one of the
cette ombre de question posde par une ombre de guerre & des apparences
d'homines" (La Mort dans Vame, 1183).
31 See L'Age de raison, 556.
32 See "L'Enfance d'un chef \ in he Mur, 359.

Hidden Wordplay in the Works of Jean-Paul Sartre 153
German words for "shrimp" is Krabbe. There is here, in Lucien's rejection
of Berliac's crustaceousness, a direct link between words, the words he
has used, and crustaceans: "He had spoken forcefully but the words rolled
out of him like empty shells." 33 As he grows older, Lucien—like the little
Poulou himself—is gradually cured of his inordinate love of language; but
unlike Sartre, and in terms which seem to foreshadow those used by
Daniel after his decision not to kill his beloved cats, he fails to commit
himself to any worthwhile human goal
Regarding Daniel's cats—which clearly represent a homosexual self of
which he would like to be rid, and which he ends by reluctantly letting out
of the basket in which he has planned to drown them—one may well ask
whether this whole richly revealing episode (showing as it does Daniel's
hesitations about coming out of a closet in which he has been stifling), was
not inspired by the German equivalent—Sartre never learnt English
properly—of the English expression "to let the cat out of the bag", die
Katze aus dem Sack lassen.
Be that as it may, various questions remain. Is Sartre conscious of his
plays on words? And if he is not, can one even use the term? After all,
some of them are fairly commonplace, and some are built into the
language itself: thus, consciousness and reflection are very frequently
compared with a mirror, as in Sartre, and biting and remorse have obvious
affinities. And could there be unconscious puns of a subjective nature?
This is what he writes on the subject of Lacanian psychology:
Lacan says that the unconscious is structured like a language. I would
rather say that the language that expresses the unconscious has the
structure of a dream. In other words, understanding of the unconscious, in
the majority of cases, never finds its clear expression. 34
Whether Sartre is fully aware of his more cryptic wordplay or not, we are
therefore, I believe, justified in claiming, in conformity with his own
ideas, that it has its source in a hidden trope. Either it is a case of hide-andseek,
prompted perhaps by the literary craftsman's desire to keep hidden at
least some of the nuts and bolts of his work—but as children playing this
game (to which there are frequent references in Sartre's work) very well
"II avait parld avec force mais les mots roul&rent hors de lui comme des
coquilles vides" (ibid., 361).
34 "Lacan dit que l'inconscient est structure comme un langage. Je dirais plutdt que
le langage qui exprime l'inconscient a la structure d'un r§ve. Autrement dit, la
comprehension de l'inconscient, dans la plupart des cas, ne trouve jamais son
expression claire" ("Sartre par Sartre", in Situations, IX, 111).

154 Chapter Ten
understand, there would be no fun in hiding so effectively that seekers
would have no chance at all of finding them—or it is the unconscious
game that Freud claims criminals who leave behind incriminating clues
often play with the police. It would be invidious to claim that Sartre, of all
people, was unconscious of what he was doing; but there could indeed be a
psychological reason for these pun burials. Being well on the way to
curing himself of the illusion that words were the quintessence of things,
Sartre had nevertheless to acknowledge that literature, his chosen
vocation, was words, and that his inspiration often came from fortuitous
homonymic collisions. Of this inspiration, while not yet repudiating it
entirely, he might well—like Schiller, who deplored the musical origin of
his own writing, and unlike the punning Derridas of this world—have felt
just a little ashamed.
Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone de. La Force de Vage. Paris: Gallimard, 1981.
Redfern, Walter. "Applying the Tourniquet: Sartre and Punning", French
Studies, vol. XXXIX, no. 3, July 1985, 298-304.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. L'Existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Nagel, 1965.
—. LesMots. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
—. Les Mouches, Huis clos, he Diable et le bon Dieu, Les Sequestres
d'Altona, in Theatre. Paris: Gallimard, 1962.
—. Le Mur ("Le Mur", "La Chambre", "Erostrate", "Intimite",
"L'Enfance d'un chef"), La Nausee, Les Chemins de la liberte
(L'Age de raison, Le Sursis, La Mort dans Uame, Une drole d'amitie),
in (Euvres romanesques (edition &ablie par Michel Contat et Michel
Rybalka). Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pl&ade, 1981.
—. Saint Genet, comedien et martyr. Paris: Gallimard, 1952.
—. Situations, V: Colonialisme et neo-colonialisme. Paris: Gallimard,
1964.
—. Situations, IX: Melanges. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
DESTABILISING IDENTITIES
AND DISTINCTIONS:
THE LITERARY-PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERIENCE
OF HOPE NOW
IAN RHOAD
The title of this chapter might seem strange at first glance. 1 Why bring
up the notion of a "literary experience" with regard to Hope Now! After
all, the text in question is not one of Sartre's novels or plays. Hope Now is
a set of interviews between Sartre and his secretary, Benny Levy, that
purports an undeniably philosophical aim: to sketch out an ethics for the
political left. Published a month before he died, Hope Now was Sartre's
last attempt to make good, at least partially, on the promise he had made at
the end of Being and Nothingness: to put forth an ethics. As such, it
engages with a project—a specifically philosophical project—that Sartre
had kept with him for almost four decades. Thus, it might be thought that I
am doing Sartre a disservice by subordinating his philosophy to his
literature. That is not my intention.
The aim of this essay is simply to appreciate the unique project of
Hope Now and to argue that the way it has been studied has not taken into
account a certain literary element therein. This literary element is not
something imposed on the text from the outside, but rather inherent in the
text itself, and can be identified by using Sartre's own criteria (not my
own) for separating his philosophy and his literature. Far from privileging
Sartre's literature over his philosophy, then, my aim is to show that the
1 1 am indebted to Craig Vasey, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mary
Washington, Virginia, for challenging me to develop many of the ideas I present in
this essay; all conclusions are of course my own. A previous draft was given as a
paper at the 15 th Biennial Conference of the North American Sartre Society at
Fordham University, Manhattan, New York City, 27-29 October 2006.

156 Chapter Eleven
very distinction between the two categories is provocatively deconstructed
in Hope Now. Thought of in this way, Hope Now occupies an especially
interesting position in Sartre's ceuvre—not simply because it was his final
publication, but because it points to an explicit convergence of his
philosophical and literary ambitions, which he had for so long insisted
were distinct.
It is, of course, difficult to discuss Hope Now without letting the
controversy surrounding the text obstruct our analysis. After forty years in
the public eye, Jean-Paul Sartre appeared to reinvent himself just before
his death in 1980. In a set of interviews between Sartre and Levy,
published in Le Nouvel Observateur only weeks before Sartre's death,
Sartre came curiously close to embracing a Jewish messianic attitude and
he shockingly dismissed many of his earlier ideas. In the aftermath of the
publication, an outraged Simone de Beauvoir accused Benny Levy of
manipulating the aged Sartre while others chided her in turn for betraying
Sartre's final wishes. The stakes of the debate were high because the
legacy of a great philosopher was in question. It is understandable,
therefore, that the controversy has dominated most discussion of the text.
However, since it has now been more than a quarter of a century since the
controversy first erupted, I am going to ask that the reader of this chapter
momentarily look past the intrigue for the sake of doing justice to the text
itself. To borrow a phrase from Husserl, I suggest that we "bracket off the
question of Sartre's possible conversion to Judaism or his manipulation at
the hands of Benny Levy. 2 To be sure, that does not mean the murkiness
will disappear entirely. We should not approach the text as if it were
written by Sartre in his prime, for it was indeed published shortly before
he died. Sartre was blind, debilitated, and in many ways dependent on
L6vy when it was composed. Our knowledge of that should and inevitably
does condition our experience of it, but let us treat it as one determining
factor of the work and not as the be-all and end-all of the discussion.
Proceeding in this manner, I shall argue two basic points. First, I will
show that Sartre's distinction between imaging and signifying
consciousnesses is key for understanding how he separated his
philosophical works from his literary endeavours. Then, I will show how
this distinction ultimately fails when we apply it to Hope Now. Sartre's
Accordingly, I have not included a discussion of the controversy in the present
essay. For a comprehensive account, see Ronald Aronson, "Sartre's Last Words".
Aronson's introduction to the interviews remains the most exhaustive treatment of
the subject to date. For readers interested in a more biographical account of the
Sartre-Levy friendship, a good place to start is Annie Cohen-Solal's Sartre: A Life.

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 157
final project was something altogether different, regardless of the exact
motivations for its publication.
Our point of entry is a passage from The Imaginary, written in the mid-
1930s by a young, unknown Sartre who was just beginning to find his
philosophical voice. In this passage, Sartre tells us what it is like to
observe an impersonator on a stage:
On the stage of a music hall, Franconay is "doing some imitations"; I
recognise the artist she is imitating: it is Maurice Chevalier. I assess the
imitation: "It is really him", or else: "It is lacking". What is going on in my
consciousness? 3
Seventy years later, we might describe the experience of reading Hope
Now in a similar way. With the interviews compiled in book-form and
accompanied by Ronald Aronson's introduction and Benny Levy's essays,
any reader of Hope Now is put in the presence of the controversy the
moment he or she opens the book. Aware of the complexity of the
situation, we ask ourselves: is that really Sartre talking about the Messiah?
We try to situate his new ideas so they fit within his earlier philosophy. In
the same way that Sartre tries to reconcile the "essence" of Maurice
Chevalier and the physical attributes of the impersonator, we too look for a
way to smooth over the tension that exists between the "essence" of
Sartre—his true self that we claim to know—and this peculiar
manifestation of it. Once again, the appropriate phenomenological
question is: what is going on in my consciousness? Sartre's answer in The
Imaginary is revealingly similar to our own experience:
It quite often happens that the synthesis is not entirely made: the face and
the body of the imitator do not lose all their individuality; yet the
expressive nature "Maurice Chevalier" nevertheless appears on that face,
on that female body. A hybrid state follows, neither fully perception nor
fully image, which should be described for itself. These states without
equilibrium and that do not endure are evidently, for the spectator, what is
most pleasant in the imitation. 4
Similar hybrid states without equilibrium, which Sartre calls
"metastable", 5 are brought about in Hope Now. Sartre's initials appear on
3
Sartre, The Imaginary, 25.
4
Ibid., 29.
5
The term "metastable" is used by Sartre in Being and Nothingness. However, as
Robert Cumming has shown, we can retroactively apply the term to the "states
without equilibrium" that Sartre described a few years prior in The Imaginary. See

158 Chapter Eleven
the page in bold, laying claim to subsequent words and ideas. The
expressive nature of "Jean-Paul Sartre" appears in this way much as
"Maurice Chevalier" appears on the face and body of the female
impersonator. Levy's comments are likewise claimed by his name,
although for most readers he is an unfamiliar character, shrouded in
mystery and controversy. Thus, we create a fictitious identity for Levy
which takes ownership over the words that follow his initials. But while
this takes place, the content of the Sartre-Levy discussion contradicts the
gesture of its supposedly straightforward form. We watch as Sartre, a
lifelong atheist, adopts a younger man's religious vocabulary in order to
think with him. Sartre petitions us, the reader, to understand the
importance of their collaboration. Unlike a traditional interview where two
individuals exchange ideas back and forth, Hope Now is an effort to create
"plural thoughts". We witness an experiment in a way of thinking and
doing philosophy. Still, this experiment takes place on a page that visually
maintains the traditional interview format, and thus a white space
continues to separate the initials of the interlocutors, as if to say: "We may
be thinking together, but each of us deserves our own voice." The political
and ethical analogies here are numerous, and Sartre delights in using them
to full effect.
The result is a unique literary and philosophical experience that
destabilises the traditional concept of the interview. These metastable
states without equilibrium are the subject of my investigation. After all,
our experience of Hope Now is obviously not reducible to that of an
impersonation. Let us, then, attempt to grasp the text in all its uniqueness
and see whether it brings us any new insights. Before doing this, however,
we need to dive more deeply into Sartre's own thoughts on the difference
between philosophy and literature.
Sartre's Distinction between Literature and Philosophy
In the course of an interview given in May 1975, Sartre stated that he
had never had a stylistic ambition for philosophy, defining style as "first of
all, economy [...] making sentences in which several meanings co-exist
and in which the words are taken as allusions, as objects rather than as
concepts." 6 He says unequivocally: "In philosophy a word must signify a
Cumming's excellent article, "Role-Playing: Sartre's transformation of Husserl's
phenomenology".
"An interview with Jean-Paul Sartre", with Michael Rybalka, et al. I first
encountered this quotation in Jonathan Webber, "Notes on the Translation". For
his part, Webber uses the passage to justify the consistency with which he

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 159
concept and that one only.' The important point here is not that style is
necessarily completely absent in a philosophical text, but that style is not
the goal, the ambition, of the work itself. A work of philosophy is meant to
clarify concepts, not indulge in a play on words. As a result, the
experience of a philosophical work is different from that of a literary
work. In The Imaginary, Sartre discussed the issue in terms of the types of
consciousnesses produced when we read philosophy versus those
produced when we read literature. He argued that reading an academic text
produces a signifying consciousness, whereas reading a work of literature
involves an imaging consciousness.
In both signifying and imaging consciousnesses, an absent object is
aimed at through another object. However, in imaging consciousness the
intermediary object fulfils consciousness in place of the object that is
being aimed at, thus functioning as what Sartre calls an "analogon". 8 In
The Imaginary, Sartre tells us that when we read a formal report about
property owners in Paris, we are given the absent object "building", but
not in the same way as a novel gives it to us when a character is described
as running down a flight of stairs. It is not the content of our knowledge
that changes—in each case we are given "building"—but the way in which
it is known that distinguishes our experiences. In the case of the novel,
"building" is given to us in the manner of an entire plot inside an entire
world, which Sartre describes as "irreal":
If we are reading a scholarly work, we produce a consciousness in which
the intention adheres to the sign at every instant. Our thought, our
knowledge slip into the words and we become conscious of it on the
words, as an objective property of the words. Naturally these objective
properties do not remain separated but fuse from one word to another, one
phrase to another, one page to another: hardly have we opened a book and
we are faced with an objective sphere of signification [...]. But if the book
is a novel, everything changes: the sphere of objective signification
becomes an irreal world. To read a novel is to take a general attitude of
translates certain distinct terms into English. For my part, the source text—the
interview itself—was well worth a look, as it was conducted only a few years prior
to Sartre's discussions with Benny L£vy, and in it Sartre reaffirms his conception
of the imagination that he laid out in The Imaginary. Sartre remarks: "It seems to
me that if I had to write on the imaginary, I would write what I wrote previously"
(14). For my own purposes, therefore, it is extremely useful since it justifies
approaching Hope Now through a discussion of The Imaginary, which had been
written some forty years earlier.
7 Ibid., 11.
8 Sartre, The Imaginary, 83.

160 Chapter Eleven
consciousness: this attitude largely resembles that of a spectator who, in
the theatre, sees the curtain rising. It is preparing to discover a whole
world, which is not that of perception, but neither is that of mental images.
To be present at a play is to apprehend the characters on the actors, the
forest of As You Like It on the cardboard trees. To read is to realise contact
with the irreal world on the signs. 9
We can extract from this passage that it is the experience of a text,
determined by the type of consciousness involved, which decides a text's
character as dramatic or academic. It is possible, therefore, that a person
could have dramatic experiences throughout the course of reading an
academic text if his or her consciousness approached the words as things
inside a world. It is up to the author to try and elicit his or her desired
response in the reader. Thus, I propose that the primary way to
differentiate Sartre*s literary endeavours from his academic projects is to
look for stylistic techniques that appear to aim at putting us in the
presence of a world.
Before showing how this differentiation ultimately fails when applied
to Hope Now, there are three nuances regarding this distinction worth
addressing. These nuances will allow us to see why Sartre's strict
distinction between philosophy and literature, although ultimately
untenable, is useful for understanding our everyday experiences of
different types of texts. Also, from a purely biographical perspective, these
observations can help us to understand something of Sartre's own literary
objectives and methodology. They are, first, how the presence of an irreal
world in Sartre's literature assigns to the reader the role of judge; next, the
felt duration established in all literary works; and, third, the desirable
ambiguity and ineffability that are possible in and through literature.
First, let us consider the role of the reader. In the presence of one of
Sartre's imaginary worlds, the reader engages with the given work
differently from when he or she reads one of Sartre's philosophical essays.
Presented with characters inside a plot, the reader makes qualitative
judgments about specific actions and events that take place. 10 Obviously,
we can make judgments when we read academic works: a person can read
a philosophical treatise on capital punishment and formulate a passionate
stance on the idea. However, if that same person sees the issue worked out
9 Ibid., 64.
10 James Edie has shown how Sartre's theatrical works, in particular, encourage the
audience to adopt the position of judge: "In Sartre's own plays, especially the
important ones [...] the action is frequently ambiguous and can only be judged by
those who stand outside the agon itself, namely the audience, us" (Edie, 436).

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 161
on a stage with characters and plotlines, they will take it in as a lived
reality. When watching a play, we do not just judge the idea: we judge the
particular. In most cases it is up to us to formulate the idea from the
particular rather than the other way around.
At this point, one might raise the objection that the same could be said
about news reports or essays on particular events. A Sartrean response, I
believe, would remark, first, that these are not hard and fast distinctions,
some blurring is to be expected; and, secondly, that our experiences of
those other types of writing for the most part lack a certain temporal
quality that is characteristic of literary experiences—which brings us to
our second point: the felt duration of literary works. It is not until we read
Sartre's literature that we see his phenomenological insights take place in
time. Consider, for example, his play Dirty Hands (Les Mains sales,
1948). We watch the character Hugo slip into the identity of a communist
and become objectified throughout the course of the play. Now, in
Notebooks for an Ethics (Cahiers pour une morale, 1983), which Sartre
was working on at roughly the same time as he wrote Dirty Hands, we
find an abundance of passages in which he describes just such a
conversion phenomenologically. But the difference is that in Dirty Hands,
Hugo's conversion is not put forth as a simple event to be held in front of
consciousness, but rather as an entire mode of being and becoming that we
see, feel, and judge in time. Moreover, the felt duration of a literary work
establishes a relationship between the author and reader. In a set of
interviews with Simone de Beauvoir from 1974, later published as part of
Beauvoir's Adieux, Sartre described this relationship:
It is a question of aligning words that have a certain tension of their own
and that by this tension will bring into being the tension of the book, which
is a duration to which one commits oneself. When you begin a book you
enter into that duration. You cause your own duration to be determined in
such a manner that it now has a certain beginning, which is the beginning
of the book, and which will have an end. There exists therefore a certain
relation between the reader and a duration that is his own and that at the
same time is not his own, a relation that lasts from the moment he begins
the book until he finishes it. This supposes a complex relation between the
x l
author and the reader [...].
Sartre goes on to explain that the relationship between the author and
reader is one in which the author has to maintain this sense of duration in
the reader. Writing literature—at least, if it is to be any good—thus
Sartre, in Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux, 211.

162 Chapter Eleven
involves an obligation on the part of the writer. We will return to the
notion of obligation and, in particular, the importance of "beginnings and
ends" in shaping relationships (both between authors and readers and
between people in general) in our analysis of Hope Now.
Putting the reader in the presence of a temporal world discloses a truth
of its own. Writing, Sartre explained to Beauvoir in that same set of
interviews, "was an activity that produced a reality, not exactly the book,
but something beyond the book. The book belonged to the imaginary, but
beyond the book there was truth." 12 The use of "something" in this
quotation is significant because it shows that Sartre was not clear about the
exact nature of the truth found in literature. Earlier in their discussion,
Beauvoir picks up on this uncertainty and asks him: "You group words
and then all of a sudden, by some unknown magic, these words disclose
the world?" Sartre responds by saying: "Yes that's how it was. Some
unknown magic indeed, because I had no idea. It was faith in language." 13
We now see perhaps the most important reason behind Sartre's
adamant separation of philosophy and literature, and it also brings us to
the third nuance I set out to discuss: the desirable ambiguity and
ineffability of literature. Surely, Sartre's approach to philosophy was
descriptive, but as a philosopher he always attempted to put forth a clear
argument. It is evident from his comments to Beauvoir, in Adieux and
elsewhere, that Sartre did not want his readers to come away from one of
his philosophical works unsure of the nature of the truth suggested. In
other words, we are not supposed to read The Imaginary and conclude:
"Sartre is telling us something about the imaginary." It was, of course, in
his literary works that Sartre was able to take the time to play with
ambiguity and ineffable truths to his heart's content.
To conclude this first section, we have seen that the primary way to
distinguish Sartre's literary endeavours from his purely philosophical
projects is to look for a style that puts us in the presence of a world. Sartre
himself made this distinction many times over, often discussing the
difference in terms of signifying and imaging consciousnesses. However,
since this distinction is more or less subjective—the genre of a given text
is not strictly determined by a set of formal properties inside the text but
by how it is experienced when read—I have tried to identify a set of
experiential qualities that take place when we find ourselves confronted
with a literary world, namely: the role of the reader; the felt duration of the
literary work; and the desired ambiguity and ineffability that are possible
12 Ibid., 216, my italics.
13 Ibid., 140.

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 163
through literature. This set should not be taken as exhaustive, for it is
possible, and indeed likely, that there are many other nuances worth
discussing. However, these are three that, in my view, are especially useful
for analysing Hope Now. Let us therefore turn to the text itself.
Hope Now: Destabilising the Distinction
If we accept the basic guidelines I have proposed, then the first way to
decide whether Hope Now is a literary or a philosophical work, by Sartre's
own standards, is this: to determine whether it is a philosophical argument
that uses literary techniques for the sake of clarification or, conversely, it
is a presentation of a world that we are meant to experience and from
which we can then extract philosophical ideas. The first thing we can say
on this matter is that Sartre and L£vy are clearly attempting to build an
argument. Sartre tells L£vy: "I would like our discussion here both to
sketch out an ethics and to find a true guiding principle for the left." 14 We
see Sartre relying on his philosophical vocabulary, using such phrases as:
"try to clarify", "we have to define", and "develop your idea further".
Furthermore, the method he employs to identify the "true guiding
principle" is reminiscent of the eidetic analysis he had used for much of
his previous philosophical work. He focuses on various instances of
human solidarity in order to extract the essence of the experience of
solidarity itself, so that he can then construct ethical formulations.
Together with L£vy, Sartre compares and contrasts his ideas with those of
Kant, Marx, Plato, and, of course, famously with Judaism.
But it is impossible to ignore that Sartre offers Hope Now to the reader
as a demonstration. 15 Sartre brings up the nature of his project with Ldvy
directly after he puts forth his new opinion that consciousness is at every
moment conditioned by the other. He describes his collaboration with
Levy as "a thought created by two people" filled with "plural thoughts we
have formed together, which constantly yield me something new." 16
Moreover, he shows an explicit desire to have the reader understand the
true nature of their collaboration:
[A]s always when you are not alone with me, you stay a little in the
background, so that, in spite of everything, what one sees in this exchange
is an old man who has taken a very intelligent guy to work with him but
who nevertheless remains the essential figure. But that isn't what happens
14 Hope Now, 61.
15 See Aronson, "Sartre's Last Words", 12-13.
16 Hope Now, 73-74.

164 Chapter Eleven
between us. And it isn't what I want. We're two men—the difference in
our ages matters little—who know the history of philosophy and the
history of my own thought well and who are jointly working on ethics, an
ethics that will, furthermore, often be in contradiction with certain ideas
that I have had. That's not the problem. But the problem is that one doesn't
sense in our discussion your true importance in what we're doing. 17
We see here that the form of the interviews is crucially important. Because
of the form of Hope Now, the ethics Sartre hopes to sketch out is fulfilled
for the reader through an analogon. Sartre and Levy could easily have
presented their ideas as a co-authored essay, but they kept it in interview
form, ensuring that the reader would observe them shape ideas together.
But neither is Hope Now a simple transcript of a conversation. Sartre
carefully edited the dialogue and gave it a very specific title. It was
published in a particular form, and, as we see above, Sartre wants us to
understand what is happening. As with a literary work, all of this takes
place over time, which gives Hope Now a "felt" duration. Sartre and L6\y
thus create the inherent tension of literature—the tension we heard Sartre
describe to Beauvoir in Adieux, as helping to constitute a certain duration
for the reader that is both the reader's and not the reader's at the same
time 18 —while they sketch out ideas on how solidarity is possible inside
the more general tension of human coexistence.
At this point, I should clarify that when I claim that the text serves as
an analagon, or that our experience of the interviews is literary, I am not
suggesting that we consistently produce mental images when we read
Hope Now, We are not actually projecting images of Levy and Sartre
talking back and forth throughout the course of the book. But neither is
this the case when we read novels. Sartre tells us in The Imaginary that
reading is actually characterised by a "poverty of images". 19 It is only
when there is a break in the reading that we look back and imagine the
hero of the plot. Otherwise, we are engrossed in the act of reading. But
that does not mean that imaging consciousness is not at work. As readers,
we are still presented with an irreal world and that is why, according to
Sartre, we can become emotionally involved in the plot. 20 I would argue
that something similar happens with Hope Now. It presents a world to
us—indeed we feel something of the content through the text—but it is
only when we stop and think about what we have read that the images
17 Ibid., 74.
18 See Sartre, in Simone de Beauvoir, Adiewc, 211.
19 The Imaginary, 63.

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 165
become explicit. With that said, we must now look at the content of the
text. What is it exactly that, if I am right, we are supposed to be feeling
and comprehending in a literary way?
The central conclusion Sartre and Levy reach is that a leftist ethics
aims at a transhistorical ideal of man and is thus more fundamental than
politics. This conclusion will become clearer if we explain the basic terms
involved: ethics, man, and the left.
Ethics is specifically defined by Sartre in the fourth section of the
interviews: "By 'ethics' I mean that every consciousness, no matter whose,
has a dimension that I didn't study in my philosophical works and that few
people have studied, for that matter: the dimension of obligation." 21 Each
consciousness, Sartre explains, is dependent on all other consciousnesses
and thus has an inner constraint of obligation to every other consciousness.
The ethical conscience is a product of "the self considering itself as self
for the other". 22 This obligation, Sartre explains, does not come and go, for
we are "constantly in the presence of the other, even when we are going to
bed or falling asleep [...] my response, which isn't only my own response
but is also a response that has been conditioned by others from the
moment of my birth, is of an ethical nature." 23
Man refers to the ideal unification of all consciousnesses that would
allow every consciousness to exist together ethically. According to
Sartre's definition, this entails a community in which each self can truly be
for the other: "[0]ur goal is to arrive at a genuinely constituent body in
which each person would be a human being and collectivities would be
equally human." 24 This goal, as an ideal, is aimed at throughout history but
is transhistorical. Sartre states: "It appears in history but doesn't belong to
history." 25
The left is a reference to the hopeful effort of the masses to realise the
ideal of man. It is, in other words, the appearance of the transhistorical
ideal in history in the form of social movements. The individual goals of
these social movements are connected by a common radical intention,
which is necessarily hopeful. As historical circumstances change, the left
must adapt in order to continue operating as the hopeful vehicle by which
the ideal will be realised.
Obviously, the term "left" has a political connotation. It is not
surprising, therefore, that Ronald Aronson, in his introduction to Hope
21 Hope Now, 69.
22 Ibid., 71.
23 Ibid., 71.
24 Ibid., 67.
25 Ibid., 82.

166 Chapter Eleven
Now, describes Sartre's hope as "above all a political hope". While I do
not disagree with Aronson's statement, we do need to clarify what the
term "political" means in this context. 27 Indeed, a more commonplace
understanding of the term "political" will lead to a misunderstanding of
the text's overriding message. In Hope Now, Sartre tells us that he
considers democracy to be more than a form of government. He says to
L£vy: "[F]or me, and I believe for you, too, democracy seems to be not
only a form of government, or a way of granting power, but a life, a way
of life. One lives democratically, and in my view human beings should
live in that way and in no other." 28 Thus, we might say that Sartre's hope
is political only insofar as it demands through politics the realisation of a
pre-political existential desire for society.
Following this line of thought, the realisation of ethical life does not
need a traditional political vehicle. Instead, ethics has more to do with the
kind of thing Levy and Sartre are attempting: thinking together. Sartre
describes humanism as "the act of thinking about the relationship of man
to man in terms of the principles that prevail today", 29 and later says about
ethics:
We non-Jews are searching for an ethics, too. The question is to find the
ultimate end, the moment when ethics will be simply and truly the way in
which humans live in relations to each other. The rules-and-prescriptions
aspect of ethics that prevails today will probably no longer exist—as has
often been said, for that matter. Ethics will have to do with the way in
which men form their thoughts, their feelings [...]. 30
My intention here is not to dive into a thorough discussion of the exact
ethics proposed in Hope Now, but rather to point out the importance of the
act of thinking in whatever that ethics might be. Sartre's attempt to think
with Levy should not be seen as an interesting footnote, but should frame
the way we understand the text as a whole. The Sartre-Ldvy project is an
example, then, of the transhistorical ideal of man appearing in history in
the sense that they are internalising the ideal through their way of beingwith-one-another.
In his recent book on Sartre, Bernard-Henri Levy (no relation of Benny
L6vy) argues that the real importance of the Sartre-Levy interviews is that
"Sartre's Last Words", 29.
To be sure, Aronson makes this clarification in his introduction as well.
Hope Now, 83.
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 106-107.

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 167
they show that, at the end of his life, Sartre was beginning to think again
like a young man. 31 While his emphasis on the act of thinking is a
constructive move away from traditional critiques of Hope Now, I cannot
follow Bernard-Henri Levy to his conclusion that "this last Sartre was a
Levinassian". 32 1 cannot make this move because the very structure of such
a statement is incompatible with my opinion of what is taking place. If,
when studying an academic work, we agree to use a person's ideas as
representative of his or her identity (for example, we might say: "Sartre is
a Marxist in The Critique of Dialectical Reason"), then the very form of
Hope Now prohibits us of from describing Sartre as anything; we must say
that They are something, "They", here, being understood as the textual
voice of the collaboration between Sartre and L£vy. Thus, if Sartre had
conducted another investigation of this type with somebody else, even
during the same period of his life, then the identity of the They might have
been something quite different. What is important is not the identity of
Sartre himself, but his effort to shape thoughts with another person and
draw ethical conclusions from the process. Much like a jazz ensemble
where a lead saxophonist plays notes that only sound pleasant in relation
to the backing music played by musicians with different ideas, Sartre's
statements take on religious overtones because he is trying to think with
Levy and not against him. 33 To extend this music analogy a bit further, we
might say that Sartre and L£vy have decided to play in a common key.
They improvise off one another, but like a jazz group they do so with the
hope that the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts and that a They
will become manifest before the audience. Thought of in this way, Hope
Now is simultaneously a testament to, and an attack upon, the notion of
authorship. In Derridean terms, we might say that the text deconstructs
itself The question then becomes: should we therefore throw out Sartre's
distinction between literature and philosophy altogether? For my part, I
find Sartre's adamant separation of philosophy and literature highly
problematic, and indeed one aim of this essay has been to show that Hope
31 Sartre, 498-502.
32 Ibid., 495.
33 1 am using jazz as an example very deliberately. Thomas Larson has suggested
five guidelines for defining jazz: 1) Improvisation, 2) Rhythm, 3) Dissonance, 4)
Jazz Interpretation, and 5) Interaction. With the exception of point 4, which is
necessarily specific to jazz, I think we find all of these elements in one form of
another in Hope Now. For those who think analogically, a close attention to the
presence of these almost musical elements in Hope Now can yield some very
interesting observations and comparisons, (see Larson, History and Tradition of
Jazz, 3).

168 Chapter Eleven
Now destabilises his distinction. Notwithstanding, Sartre's work on the
imaginary, particularly his thoughts on the types of consciousness
involved in reading different kinds of texts, remains quite helpful. Sartre's
philosophy provides a way of accounting for our immediate experiences of
pre-deconstructed texts. Our experience watching a play or reading a
novel is certainly not the same as our experience reading a philosophical
treatise or, for that matter, skimming over the back of a cereal box. I
contend that there is no inconsistency in appreciating these differences or
in constructing basic categories such as "philosophy" and "literature" that
correspond to our immediate experiences while, nonetheless, also holding
that these very categories ultimately fail, in the final analysis, on account
of their internal auto-deconstructive logic
For people who are familiar with Sartre's general philosophical
positions, many of his statements in Hope Now will come as a surprise.
But surprise is only a bad thing if our goal is to ascertain the "true Sartre".
If we start off knowing full well that such a project is doomed to fail and
that only a metastable They can be found in the text, then the element of
surprise becomes extremely useful. These moments of surprise break up
the flow of reading and, as in the case of a novel, allow the latent images
of the text to rise to the surface. Furthermore, one of the lessons of Hope
Now may be that ethical collaboration is necessarily disconcerting, and so
it is exactly the disconcerting parts of the text that we should examine. We
should ask questions such as: what surprising vocabulary do they use and
how does it stretch our normal understanding of Sartre's philosophy?
What do Sartrean ideas look like in Jewish clothing and vice-versa? How
far will the two interlocutors go in order to think with one another?
These are literary considerations. We must recognise that there is a
stylistic ambition to Hope Now. In this work of philosophy, a word does
not mean one thing only. How, then, do we reconcile Hope Now's overt
stylistic ambition with Sartre's emphatic assertion, only a few years prior,
that he had never had a stylistic conception of philosophy? 34 We could
submit that Sartre simply failed to meet his own requirements, but we
could also, more interestingly, hypothesise that something in his final
years (perhaps his blindness, his inability to do philosophy alone, etc.) led
him to conceive of philosophical inquiry in a fundamentally different way.
Sartre suggests as much at one point in the dialogue by telling Levy that he
could only have considered their collaboration in his old age. 35
See notes 6 and 7, above.
Hope Now, 73.

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 169
Age is, in fact, important. For not only is Sartre dialoguing with L£vy,
but in a sense he is dialoguing with himself, thirty years prior, through
L6vy. In his blindness and old age Sartre cannot read or recall the details
of everything he wrote earlier in his career, and he remarks to L6vy: "[I]t
is important that you remind me from time to time of what I said in 1945
or 1950, and that you confront me with what there may be in my present
ideas that contradicts or reasserts my past ideas." 36 His conversation with
his past work, however, is not an attempt at consistency. Sartre makes it
clear that he is not concerned about contradicting himself. In fact, Hope
Now is an explicit risking of identity on Sartre's part for the sake of
continuing philosophy and thinking new thoughts. Indeed, throughout the
course of Hope Now, Sartre makes a number of criticisms about his past
work but perhaps none more appropriate for our purposes, than when he
says of Being and Nothingness: "I hadn't determined what I am trying to
determine today: the dependence of each individual on all other
individuals." 37
Whichever conclusion one draws concerning Sartre's intentions, I hope
to have made this much evident: there is, by Sartre's own standards, a
literary element to Hope Now and our approach to the text should take it
into account. In appreciating this literary element we need not lose sight of
the philosophical argument put forth by Sartre and Ldvy. Ideally, we
should be able to follow both the literary and philosophical aspects of
Hope Now and let each inform the other. Of course, the way in which a
reader engages with a literary-philosophical hybrid is quite individual and
any attempt to draw up guidelines for reading Hope Now is well beyond
the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, before concluding, I propose to
give an example of how one might approach the interviews in a way that
reopens them and attends to their literary character.
The final four sections of the interviews are in many ways the most
controversial. In these sections, Sartre surprisingly discusses the idea of a
common mother and Messiah that can unite all humanity. Neither one of
these ideas—the mother or the Messiah—is supposed to be taken literally.
In reference to the mother, he says that she "can just as well be a totemic
bird", 38 and about the Messiah he remarks: "[I]t's not the Name that has
36 Ibid., 74.
37 Ibid., 72.
38 Ibid., 89. To be clear, Sartre does seem to have an interest in "the mother" over
and beyond pure symbolism. In my view, however, this has more to do with the
actual physical dependence and connection between a mother and her child as a
sort of condition of possibility for the filial / fraternal feeling and obligation that

170 Chapter Eleven
any meaning for me. Bracketing off the debate over whether or not
Sartre experienced a personal conversion to Judaism, in Hope Now the
mother and the Messiah represent a common beginning and a common
end. They are symbols used to elucidate the notion of fraternity, which
Sartre defines in section nine: "We call the relationship of a man to his
neighbour fraternal because they feel they are of the same origin. They
have a common origin and, in the future, a common end—that's what
constitutes their fraternity." 40
Before using such religious terminology, Sartre and Levy had
discussed how fraternity informs their understanding of politics, ethics,
and their own project of creating plural thoughts. But when Sartre begins
to speak in terms of the mother and the Messiah, he employs a literary
technique that pushes the notion of fraternity to a level that we can all
grasp. The final four sections are the literary climax, the point at which
Sartre really starts to work within Levy's vocabulary. Here, we are no
longer talking about "the left", or about ethics as an abstract philosophical
enterprise: our subject is the fate of all humanity. Still more interesting is
that this macro-approach brings about a very particular realisation of the
subject at hand, for it makes manifest the notion of fraternity in the context
of the flow of the book. Starting in section one at a common beginning,
discussing Sartre's philosophy, which they both know well, and using
traditional Sartrean terminology (for-itself, consciousness, anguish, etc.),
and then ending the interviews with a discussion of Judaism—another
common interest, but this time in Levy's vocabulary—Sartre and Levy are
bound by a common beginning and a common end. Furthermore, the two
figures begin to take on characteristics of one another throughout this
process. Still, neither character loses his individuality entirely as a white
space continues to separate their initials. Sartre plays in Levy's vocabulary
and vice versa, and in doing so they challenge the reader to question her /
his prior conception of who "Sartre" really is, but the loaded name of the
great twentieth-century philosopher never for a moment disappears from
the page. Instead, what emerges between the book covers, over and above
the individual names of the interlocutors, is a metastable but intriguing
They. While the They is divided and works within multiple vocabularies, it
is unified by a single theme from start to finish: hope. As Aronson
obtain in every consciousness from birth (consider Sartre's earlier statements as
referenced by note 23, above).
39 Ibid., 105.
40 Ibid., 90.

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 171
observes in his introduction, the interviews open and end with discussions
of hope. 41
Consequently, when we read Hope Now these two philosophers appear
to us as persons inside a world—a world, moreover, that emerges from the
tension between the very words on the page (in all their varying
vocabularies), as well as between the metastable identities of the interlocutors,
with whom we share a particular duration from beginning to end.
As a result, we become part of the discussion as well. The They comes to
include the reader. It is we who decide whether Sartre is a Jew or an
atheist, a traditional Marxist or a disenchanted Maoist. Like the waiter in
Being and Nothingness, we are still playing and taking the specific
identities of the characters in our imaginary world a little too seriously. 42
But in the ebb and flow of this play, we experience that truthful
"something" that exists beyond the work itself, and which is given to us as
a particular so that we can, once again, play the role of the judge.
In the quarter-century since its publication, the two most common
verdicts handed down on Hope Now have been either to dismiss its
contents as an unsalvageable mess, or to celebrate it as a clear turn in
Sartre's thought towards Judaism or mysticism. Even Aronson, who tries
to find a middle ground in his introduction to the text, ultimately treats the
tensions in Hope Now as obstacles that we must overcome as readers. My
approach is the opposite. The confusion that Hope Now induces in us—
much like the kind that an impersonator of Chevalier once did for Sartre—
is ultimately what is most enjoyable about it. The most fruitful approach
we can take towards Sartre's last words is not to lament their peculiarity,
or to regret the friendship that produced them, but to consider them the
product of yet another way of discussing philosophical ideas and
disclosing ineffable, ambiguous, literary truths.
Perhaps the most appropriate way to end this chapter is by once again
immersing ourselves in Benny Levy's vocabulary, for our own purposes.
Indeed, one way to summarise the project of Hope Now is to borrow
Levy's thoughts on a different but related issue: the future of radical
politics. In section seven of the interviews, L6vy says to Sartre: "To be
radical, then, would be to pursue in a radical way the bringing together of
scattered intentions to the point where they achieve an adequate unity." To
this, Sartre answers: "Yes, insofar as it is possible." 43
41 Aronson, "Sartre's Last Words", 29.
42 See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 101-102.
43 Hope Now, 81.

172 Chapter Eleven
Works Cited
Aronson, Ronald. "Sartre's Last Words", in Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny
L6\y, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, 3-40. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (trans. Patrick
O'Brian). New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre: A Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
Cumming, Robert D. "Role-playing: Sartre's transformation of Husserl's
phenomenology", in Christina Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Sartre, 39-66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992.
Edie, James M. "The philosophical framework of Sartre's theory of the
theatre", Man and World, vol. 27, no. 4, October 1994,415-44.
Larson, Thomas. History and Tradition of Jazz. Dubuque: Kendall / Hunt
Publishing Company, 2002.
Ldvy, Bernard-Henri. Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century
(trans. Andrew Brown). Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
Rybalka, Michel, Oreste F. Pucciani and Susan Gruenheck. "An interview
with Jean-Paul Sartre" (trans. Susan Gruenheck), in Paul Arthur
Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1-51. La Salle:
Open Court, The Library of Living Philosophers, 1981.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness (trans. Hazel E. Barnes). New
York: Washington Square Press, 1984.
—. The Imaginary (trans. Jonathan Webber). New York: Routledge, 2004.
—. (with Benny Levy). Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews (trans. Adrian
Van den Hoven). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Webber, Jonathan. "Notes on the Translation", in Jean-Paul Sartre, The
Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2004.

CHAPTER TWELVE
CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES:
SARTRE, CLOONEY, MCCARTHY, MURAKAMI
BENEDICT O'DONOHOE
One of the most remarkable features of Sartre's work, in all genres, is
its uncanny knack of updating itself as time passes. This might be because
history tends to repeat itself, so that there are few really new situations
under the sun, and—since Sartre's project as a writer was unapologetically
comprehensive and totalising—therefore few situations to which Sartre
had not, at some time or other and in one guise or other, turned his incisive
attention. This no doubt explains why scholars engaged with his work tend
to sustain their interest over many years, frequently whole lifetimes,
without diverging much or flagging in their enthusiasm. This Sartrean
phenomenon of intuitive prescience coupled with universalist ambition is
particularly well brought out by the intellectual historian and philosopher,
Tom Flynn, in his centennial essay on Sartre and Foucault, and by the
philosopher and political scientist, Bill McBride, in his chapter on Sartre at
the "twilight of liberal democracy" in the same volume. 1 Sartre is a writer
for our times, and this is no less true in his theatre and fiction than in his
philosophy and political essays, as I propose to show. Thus, the first part
of this chapter is devoted to an unfinished play of Sartre's, whose belated
publication happily coincided with a significant American cinema release
in 2005, while the second part examines the contemporary legacy of
Sartre's most famous novel, La Nausee {Nausea, 1938), for Japan's most
fashionable novelist.
1 See Thomas R. Flynn and William L. McBride in Leak and Van den Hoven (eds),
Sartre Today.

174 Chapter Twelve
La Part dufeu and Good Night, and Good Luck 2
The Pleiade edition of Sartre's Theatre complet, published in his
centenary year 2005, includes substantial fragments of a hitherto unknown
and incomplete play, which the editors have titled La Part du feu (The
Devil's Portion)? In this project, Sartre set out to dramatise the true story
of the crisis of conscience suffered by his protagonist, Abraham Feller, a
UN official caught up in the destructive machinations of the communist
witch-hunter, Senator Joseph McCarthy. Set in 1952—the year in which
McCarthy's influence was at its height and Abraham Feller eventually
took his own life—Sartre's play proposed to explore the personal anguish
of this private individual enmeshed in a highly public debacle on the
American political scene.
That exploration was to take the form of Feller recounting his
experiences and concomitant anxieties to a psychotherapist, their dialogue
being interspersed with narrative-developing flashbacks. These interludes
refer in particular to Feller's relationship with his son, who has fallen
under the spell of McCarthy, who is also Feller's brother-in-law and,
therefore, the boy's sinister "Uncle Joe". It becomes clear that Feller's
anguish is at least as much affective and psychological as it is ethical or
political. Seemingly unable to reconcile himself either with his teenage
son or with the moral compromises he had latterly made in his diplomatic
career, Feller would finally commit suicide (as he apparently did, in fact,
along with other victims of McCarthyite persecution). Of the several
striking things about La Part dufeu, I want to consider two in particular:
first, its topicality in the recent period of renaissance for political cinema
in the US; next, its continuity with Sartrean theatrical themes and
techniques.
Drafted and abandoned in 1954, La Part du feu is set in the fervid
atmosphere created by the communist witch-hunt of Senator McCarthy's
chairmanship of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC).
This dark and embarrassing episode in American post-war domestic
politics was most famously satirised by Arthur Miller in his allegory of
Puritanical New England, The Crucible, from January 1953. And this
tragic satire on the literal witch-hunting purgations of supposed evil spirits
was, as it happens, adapted by Sartre in 1955 for the French movie screen
as Les Sorcieres de Salem (The Witches ofSalem)—hitherto, the only hard
2 An earlier draft of this section was given as an invited paper at the 15 th Biennial
Conference of the North American Sartre Society at Fordham University,
Manhattan, New York City, 27-29 October 2006.
3 In Sartre, Theatre complet, 1183-1214.

Contemporary Perspectives 175
evidence we had of Sartre's artistic commitment to an exposure of this
deplorable political scandal. According to Michel Contat's "Notice" in the
Pleiade volume, however, it was Miller's earlier drama, Death of a
Salesman (1949), that made the greater impact upon Sartre. 4 In Miller's
classic piece, the eponymous salesman, Willy Loman, having been made
redundant late in life, kills himself in order both to salvage some selfrespect
and to provide some future security (by way of life insurance) for
his wife and sons. At first glance, then, there is solid evidence for a
powerful Milleresque influence upon Sartre, even if the context, the
dynamics and the motivation of the fictional Loman's suicide are rather
different from those of the historical character Abraham Feller, Sartre's
doomed hero in La Part dufeu.
Reflecting upon these fragments of dialogue and sketches for possible
scenes, it seemed to me that George Clooney's 2005 picture, Good Night,
and Good Luck, fortuitously provides some interesting points of comparison
with Sartre's rediscovered and unfinished play. Most obviously, of
course, both are set amidst the hysterical anti-communism of the early-
1950s, and both focus upon (initially reticent) antagonists of McCarthy,
each of whose encounters with him would prove literally life-changing.
Clooney's hero, the eminent broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, was
to be canonised as the patron saint of American patriotism when he
exposed McCarthy's mendacity in his current affairs programme, See It
Now, in March 1954, thereby precipitating the Junior Senator's downfall.
By contrast, Sartre's hero, the equally real-life Abraham Feller—legal
counsel and chief policy adviser to the Secretary General of the United
Nations, Trygve Lie, and McCarthy's brother-in-law—was driven to
suicide.
Clooney's excellent film is surely one of the best in its genre since
Oliver Stone's JFK (1992), or even Alan J. Pakula's All the President's
Men (1976). I will not dwell here on the numerous merits of Good Night,
and Good Luck, but I want to consider two key aspects of its success by
way of a contrastive prelude to my consideration of Sartre's failure with
La Part dufeu. The first such element is the medium itself. By shooting a
movie, Clooney can take full advantage of all the facilities he needs in
order to recreate the location and the ambience of a national TV studio at
the beginning of the medium's heyday. This recreation is ingeniously
enhanced by Clooney's decision to shoot the whole thing in black and
white. This technique both provides a sympathetic context for the clips of
authentic archive footage, and subtly introduces a distancing effect that
4 See ibid., 1573-79.

176 Chapter Twelve
subliminally reminds us that we are witnessing historical events—a
message reinforced by the clever framing of the main action within the
bookends, so to speak, of Murrow's famous retirement address to the
American Broadcasting Association, couched naturally in his own words.
The second of these key aspects is the intensity of Clooney's thematic
focus. Setting his action almost entirely in the studio or its offices—there
are no exterior shots at all—Clooney zooms in on the relationship between
Fred Friendly and Ed Murrow, on the one hand, and the growing
animosity between Murrow and McCarthy, on the other. This nexus
achieves a symmetry and balance that create a compelling tension up to
the cathartic moment when Murrow becomes McCarthy's nemesis—a
moment of triumph marred only by the psychological disintegration of
Murrow's colleague and friend, Don Hollenbeck, who takes his own life
around the time of McCarthy's impeachment (this suicide providing
another tangential parallel with Sartre's play). For good measure, the
casting, the direction and the photography of Clooney's picture are all
brilliant, while the paranoid struggle against universal communist
infiltration naturally finds contemporary resonances with the equally
wrong-headed "global war on terror". But if Clooney found such success
with this subject in 2005, half-a-century after the events, why did Sartre
strive and fail to accomplish his comparable project just two years after the
central historical action in question, namely the suicide of Abraham
Feller?
First, let us consider the medium. Sartre, like Clooney, might have
been more comfortable in the cinema than the theatre, a medium of which
he had some experience thanks to his post-war contract with Pathe. In
order to let Feller tell his story and explore his angst, Sartre sets the action
in a psychiatrist's consulting room—an inherently static or (worse)
sedentary environment—from which the actor would move to other parts
of the set in order to re-enact scenes he is narrating on the couch. This
flashback technique is essentially cinematic and was used by Sartre to
good effect in the film Les Jeux sontfaits (The Chips Are Down, 1947), as
it would be again in his last original play, Les Sequestres d'Altona (The
Condemned ofAltona, I960). 5 Yet, even in the few fragments we have of
La Part du feu, this device is clearly not working: if anything, the effect
would be comic as the analysand climbs off the couch and wanders away
from the consulting space to engage in conversations with his son or his
colleagues at the UN. Moreover, this potentially useful narrative conceit
See my edition of his scenario, Les Jeux sont faits, and my chapter on Les
Sequestres d'Altona in Sartre's Theatre: Acts for Life.

Contemporary Perspectives 177
has the consequence of dispersing widely a focus that needs to home in
intensely on the moral agony of the central figure, for that surely is the
very stuff of the drama, the inner mental conflict that will lead Abraham
Feller to self-destruction.
For the same reason, the topicality of Sartre's enterprise is problematic.
Whereas Clooney is assisted by historical perspective in creating a period
piece—at one level, even a costume drama—most of whose protagonists
have themselves passed into history, Sartre is conversely impeded by the
temporal immediacy of his subject and subjects. For example, he planned
dialogues featuring Trygve Lie and Joe McCarthy, scenes unlikely to carry
conviction if only because both men were still alive and neither was prone
to express himself in French. Moreover, Feller himself had died less than
two years prior, and in bizarre, not to say suspicious, circumstances. An
anonymous article in Time magazine—"Death of an Idealist"—described
how his wife had tried to restrain him physically from leaping out of a
twelve-storey window, but to no avail. Feller's depression was, it seems,
too deep and overwhelming and, according to the Time report, chiefly
attributable to the recent intense scrutiny of UN personnel by a Federal
Grand Jury and the McCarran sub-committee:
Feller, under no suspicion himself, was the UN's legal adviser on the
subject. The hearings uncovered seventeen among the 200 Americans on
the UN staff who refused to say whether or not they have engaged in
subversive activities. [Former UN Secretary General Trygve] Lie angrily
charged that Abe Feller's suicide had been brought on by the extra strain of
defending Americans at [the] UN against "indiscriminate smears and
exaggerated charges". 6
Inspired by Marcel P6ju's article on the subject in Les Temps
modernes, 1 Sartre was evidently approaching a veritable minefield of
contention and controversy, a subject rich in themes that recur elsewhere
in his plays and scenarios, namely: the role of the intellectual and his
relations with institutions, the state, politics and history; the social and
political status of the Jew; the individual's place in, and fidelity or
treachery towards, the group; the functions and validity of professional
psychoanalysis; family relationships, especially those between father and
son; tribal and class struggles for political power and dominion; the
Time, 24 November 1952. Lie had resigned as Secretary General on 10
November 1952. Feller killed himself—if that is indeed what happened—three
days later, on 13 November.
7 See Pdju, Les Temps modernes.

178
Chapter Twelve
existential torment of the individual's tussle with his own moral
conscience; the merits or otherwise of suicide as an authentic action—and
so on. With such a cornucopia of dramatic material before him, why then
did Sartre abandon La Part dufeul
Considering this question, Michel Contat first dismisses possible
"external" causes—such as the difficulties of staging the play, the
potential problems of litigation, or the risk of displeasing the audience of
the Theatre Antoine with a political theme—and proffers instead the
following three "internal obstacles". 8 First, the antipathy of the hero:
"Sartre chooses to write his play against compassion. [... Feller's] death
does not touch us [...]: his existence was worthless." 9 Second, Sartre's
inability to find a suitable satirical tone: "One might even think that the
play was abandoned for want of finding that new satirical style that Sartre
was looking for." 10 Third, the unforeseen alteration of current circumstances:
[Sartre] had here all the elements of a contemporary political drama, of a
committed and even militant play. But the political world situation
changed. In November 1954, the threat of a nuclear conflict receded; Stalin
died [...]. All at once, the play became less urgent. 11
While not dissenting from any of this expert opinion, I want to consider a
fourth and possibly decisive "internal obstacle" to Sartre's completion of
La Part dufeu, namely what I shall call "thematic overload".
As Contat rightly observes, P6ju's article presented Sartre with "all the
ingredients of an existential and political drama", to which the playwright
then proposed to add "his own psychological interpretation [and] the
symbolic representative of the witch-hunt", McCarthy himself. 12 My
present hypothesis is simply that all of this was just too rich a mix. To
8 See Sartre, Theatre complet, 1577.
9 "Sartre choisit d'dcrire sa pi&ce contre la compassion. [...] sa mort ne nous
touche pas [...]: son existence &ait sans valeur" (ibid., 1578). All translations from
French are my own.
10 "On peut mSme penser que la pi&ce a €t€ abandonee faute d'avoir trouvd ce
style satirique nouveau que Sartre cherchait" (ibid.).
11 "[Sartre] a \k tous les 61dments d'un drame politique contemporain, d'une pifcce
engagde, et m§me militante. Mais la situation mondiale politique a change. En
novembre 1954, la menace d'un conflit nucteaire s'&oigne; Staline est mort [...].
Du coup, la pi&ce devient moins urgente" (ibid.).
12 "[...] tous les ingredients d'un drame existentiel et politique [...] sa propre
interpretation psychologique [et] le repr£sentant symbolique de la chasse aux
sorcifcres [...]" (ibid.).

Contemporary Perspectives 179
extend Contat's culinary metaphor, I suggest that Sartre must have realised
that he was over-egging the pudding, and that it would be much too heavy
in its texture and complex in its flavours ever to be consumed, even if he
managed to get it baked! To support this contention, I propose to analyse
only the first 'Tableau" of the published text, amounting to just ten pages
in the Pleiade volume, with a view to identifying each new topos as it
appears.
As he did in Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands, 1948), Sartre establishes
the historical time and place by means of a radio announcement: "Two
American aircraft shot down by Mig fighters." 13 These are the first words
spoken, setting the scene for the initial repartee between Feller and the
psychiatrist:
FELLER—I want to think out loud in front of you. [...] Should I lie down
here?
PSYCHIATRIST—If you like.
FELLER—Why?
PSYCHIATRIST—It's the custom.
FELLER—Perfect. Let's not ignore custom. That's what makes the world
go round, wouldn't you say? (He lies down.) 14
Within moments, therefore, we already have the Cold War and
psychoanalysis introduced as themes, the latter couched in a bantering and
facetious tone such as Sartre would perfect in his next play, Nekrassov
(1955), but which tends to elude him here, as Contat rightly points out.
Feller's demand: "I want to know what my life is worth", 15 raises the
central existential issue of the play: there is an ethical question at the heart
of this psychological crisis. And his ensuing abrupt self-introduction
ushers in a whole new cast of themes: family, money, class and, in
particular, political opinion and allegiance: "[I am] against the communists.
But I think the communists have the right to speak." 16
Feller's next significant speech includes the first instances of the
flashback technique. However, the intended interruption is so brief that it
13 "Deux avions amdricains abattus par des Migs" (ibid., 1183).
14 "FELLER—Je veux penser h haute voix devant vous. [...] II faut que je me
couche m? / LE PSYCHIATRE—Si vous voulez. / FELLER—Pourquoi? / LE
PSYCHIATRE—C'est l'habitude. / FELLER—Parfait. Ne renongons pas aux
habitudes. C'est elles qui font marcher le monde, n'est-ce pas? (7/ se couche.) 99
(ibid., 1183-84).
15 "Je veux savoir ce que vaut ma vie" (ibid., 1184).
16 "[Je suis] contre les communistes. Mais je pense que les communistes ont le
droit de parler" (ibid., 1184).

180
Chapter Twelve
is hard to imagine the actor's mobilisation (from couch to office, and back
to couch) as anything other than farcical. This is an impression that sits
uneasily alongside Feller's statement that—despite his material comfort
and professional commitment and satisfaction—he is "afraid", and wants
the doctor to help him find out why. Nor does it chime with the gravity of
the themes next introduced, themes familiar from one earlier and one later
play:
I am being put on trial, in the shadows. One day I shall be judged. [...] I
want to defend myself, to recover my life from their hands. [...] Who can
judge my life if God doesn't exist? Others? 17
Trial, persecution, self-defence, judgment at the hands of others: these are
very recognisable Sartrean preoccupations, not only from Huis clos {In
Camera, or No Exit, 1944) but also from Les Sequestres d'Altona, and it is
true to say that they suffuse the whole of Sartre's drama.
Then, almost in the same breath, Feller envisages the prospect of
nuclear annihilation:
War means the death of mankind. You know it does. The hydrogen bomb
will swallow up the earth's atmosphere. Will turn it in to a moon. Doesn't
it bother you to think of dying without mankind surviving? It terrifies me.
Mind you, there'd be an advantage: nobody would judge me. But it's like
dying twice. [...] Man is wicked. Mad and wicked. 18
Here there are resonant, almost verbatim pre-echoes of Sartre's last two
plays, Les Sequestres d'Altona and Les Troyennes {The Trojan Women,
1965): visions of Armageddon, the extinction of the species, the positive
need for judgment by one's peers, alongside the dread of it; preverberations
of Frantz von Gerlach's apologias and condemnations, and of
the dire prognostications of Euripides's Greek chorus.
And so the litany of familiar themes continues. In his very next
speech—and we are on only the third page of dialogue—Feller discloses
his affinity with Goetz von Berlichingen, hero of Le Diable et le bon Dieu
"[0]n me fait mon proems, dans 1'ombre. Un jour je serai jug£. [...] Je veux me
ddfendre, leur arracher ma vie des mains. [...] Qui peut juger ma vie si Dieu
n'existe pas? Les autres?" (ibid., 1185).
18 "La guerre, e'est la mort de l'homme. Vous le savez. La bombe k l'hydrogfcne
bouffera T atmosphere de la terre. En fera une lune. £a ne vous dit rien de mourir
sans que les hommes survivent? Moi $a me fait horreur. II y aurait int£r§t pourtant:
personne ne me jugerait. Mais e'est deux fois mourir. [...] L'homme est mdchant.
Fou et m£chant" (ibid.).

Contemporary Perspectives 181
(The Devil and the Good Lord, 1951), and indeed with Sartre himself,
when he evinces this ambition: "I'd like to be nobody special". 19
"N'importe qui", no-one in particular, that elusive identity of the authentic
existentialist hero, modest yet responsible, to which Sartre aspires in the
last lines of his autobiography, Les Mots (Words, 1964):
If I put impossible Salvation back in the props cupboard, what remains? A
whole man, made up of all men and who is worth any one of them and
whom any one of them is worth. 20
Also like Goetz and Sartre, Feller apparently has one mistress while
wanting another, a predicament familiar to Sartrean protagonists throughout
his fiction and theatre, as well as to the writer himself. The next snatch
of dialogue, in which Feller's maid tells him they have had a visit from the
police, both prefigures the Keystone Cops scenes of Sartre's next play,
Nekrassov (1956)—which are such a distinctive element in the comic
impact of that political farce—and establishes the fact that Feller himself
is possibly under suspicion in the all-embracing climate of fear that his
obsessive brother-in-law, Joe McCarthy, has created.
Another dimension of that climate is introduced by the visit of Mr
Goldschmitt, the high school teacher of Feller's fifteen-year-old son.
Goldschmitt tells us that the boy has fallen under the right-wing spell of
Uncle Joe, and has demonstrated in the streets demanding the death
sentence for the supposed traitors, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Here,
Sartre is opening up not one but two new thematic portals. First, implicit
in Goldschmitt's concern for the boy's political aberrations is a question
about the child's loyalty to his own Jewishness. The predominantly
Catholic McCarthyite machine was scarcely less anti-Semitic than it was
anti-communist. Yet, here is Goldschmitt's pupil and Feller's son baying
for the blood of the Jewish Bolcheviks, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg!
Clearly, as the tutor tells Feller, he "must talk to the boy", father to son:
GOLDSCHMITT—I want you to speak to him.
FELLER, sadly.—Speak to him? Could you speak to him?
GOLDSCHMITT—Me, no. But he loves you.
FELLER—You think he loves me?
GOLDSCHMITT—In his way, yes.
FELLER—OK. I'll speak to him. 21
"Je voudrais §tre n'importe qui" (ibid.).
20 "Si je range 1'impossible Salut au magasin des accessoires, que reste-t-il? Tout
un homme, fait de tous les hommes et qui les vaut tous et que vaut n'importe qui"
(Sartre, Les Mots, 213).

182 Chapter Twelve
This topos of the father / son relationship is central in Sartre's work and
life, and it is naturally a rich vein of psychological investigation. Consider
not only Les Mots, of course, but think also of Hugo's obsession with, and
continuous revolt against, his father in Les Mains sales; or Bariona's
protest against paternity (in Bariona, 1940), or Mathieu's phobia of fatherhood
in L'Age de raison {The Age of Reason, 1945); or, again, Oreste's
determination to avenge his father by assassinating his stepfather in Les
Mouches (The Flies, 1943). Above all, compare the pivotal part played by
the father / son dynamics in Les Sequestres d'Altona, where it is gradually
revealed to be not only the motor of Frantz's psychosis, but also the
motivation of old von Gerlach's manipulation of the family towards a
situation in which, eventually, he will both be reunited with his favourite
son and preserve the macabre status quo beyond his own death. Clearly,
these extant fragments of La Part dufeu adumbrate the subtle exploration
of the filial / paternal theme that characterises the later play.
The case of Feller and son is especially complicated. The anonymous
boy is McCarthy's nephew, so his mother was, like her brother, an Irish
Catholic. This being so, the boy is not strictly speaking Jewish since, in
orthodox Judaic tradition, Jewishness (however construed) is transmitted
by the maternal line. 22 This might explain why he is apparently unashamed
to denounce the Rosenbergs as "communists. And Jews". 23 By way of
aggravation, Sartre has Feller tell the psychiatrist that his late wife
(McCarthy's sister) was frigid, uncommunicative, and possibly "in love
with her brother". 24 So we have echoes again here of Les Mains sales and
Hugo's dispassionate, pseudo-sibling marriage to Jessica, and pre-echoes
of the phantasm of incest acted out by Frantz and Leni in Altona, and
mused upon by Sartre in Les Mots.
As if this pot-pourri of pungent themes and this cauldron of highlycharged
emotions were not yet a sufficiently explosive concoction, Sartre
supplements it with Feller's sense of alienation from his colleagues. A
well-intentioned leading figure who nevertheless becomes a focus of
21 "GOLDSCHMITT—Je veux que tu lui paries. / FELLER, tristement—Lui
parler? Tu pourrais lui parler, toi? / GOLDSCHMITT—Moi, non. Mais il t'aime. /
FELLER—Tu crois qu'il m'aime? / GOLDSCHMITT—A sa manifcre, oui. /
FELLER—ficoute. Je vais lui parler" (Theatre complet, 1187).
22 However, "according to the Reform movement, a person whose father is a Jew is
also a Jew" (http://www.jewfaq.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi?Keywords=mother). For an
opinion as to whether Jewishness should be construed as a religious affiliation or a
racial one, or both or neither, see http://www.jewfaq.org/judaism.htm.
23 "[D]es communistes. Et des juifs" (Theatre complet, 1188).
24 "[A]moureuse de son frfcre" (ibid., 1190).

Contemporary Perspectives 183
mistrust—compare Bariona, Oreste, Garcin, Pierre, Canoris or Hoederer—
Feller is suddenly feared and shunned by his subordinates. He retains the
trust and respect of his boss, Trygve Lie, but he in turn makes too many
enemies and resigns just three days before Feller's suicide. The two events
were surely affectively, if not quite causally, connected, in much the same
way as Don Hollenbeck's suicide in Good Night, and Good Luck is
precipitated, in part, by Murrow's refusal to take up the cudgels against
Hollenbeck's persecutors in the press. This is a sub-plot that is rightly
relegated to the background by Clooney, whereas a whole plethora of subplots
would, it seems, have been crowding into the foreground of Sartre's
play, La Part dufeu.
In short, I suggest that the incompleteness of Sartre's hitherto unknown
theatrical project is a case of "death by thematic overload". There is
further evidence of this syndrome, but we have seen, from an overview of
the first "Tableau" alone, that the sheer burden of the subject matter causes
the project to collapse under its own weight. From the outset, Sartre
introduced a host of potentially central themes in rapid succession, surely
too many to deal with in the course of Feller's psychoanalysis, the
trajectory of which would inevitably lead to his despairing suicide as the
dramatic climax and resolution. In a sense, the play takes its own life
before Feller gets a chance to take his, and Sartre was no doubt wise to redirect
his critical energies on this subject into his adaptation of Miller's
play for the big screen.
Sartrean Sources? Haruki Murakami's
"Nausea 1979" 2S
Browsing through Tobias Hill's review of Haruki Murakami's
collection of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, published in the
UK in 2006,1 was struck by one title in particular: "Nausea 1979". Why
not just "Nausea", I wondered, why the qualifying date? No doubt the
author was conscious of a precedent, a certain Nausea circa 1939 (actually
1938, to be precise). When I read that the story concerned the diary of a
young man with a passion for jazz, but afflicted by recurrent and
unexplained bouts of nausea, my curiosity was piqued. Could it be that
Japan's most fashionable contemporary writer—hailed by The Times, for
example, as a "post-modern Kafka, a literary David Lynch", 26 and author,
An earlier draft of this section was given as a paper at the 13 Conference of the
UK Sartre Society at the Institut Fran^ais, London, 21 October 2006.
26 See blurb on jacket front of Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

184 Chapter Twelve
indeed, of Kafka on the Shore, inter alia—was paying homage to, or at
least acknowledging a debt to, Jean-Paul Sartre? Having once established,
that the Japanese word for "nausea"—"6to"—was indeed the same in
Murakami's title as it is in Sartre's title when translated into Japanese, 27 1
felt sure that this was a question worth considering.
At first sight, there are startling differences: Sartre's Nausea is a fulllength
novel, while Murakami's is a ten-page novella. Sartre's protagonist,
Antoine Roquentin, is also the narrator of the book, which supposedly
consists of entries from his personal diary; Murakami's narrator is himself,
whilst his protagonist is his interlocutor. Chiefly perhaps, Roquentin's
nausea reflects a psychological and emotional response to the external
world, an essentially metaphysical condition which manifests itself as a
physical revulsion but which stops short of vomiting. By contrast,
Murakami's anonymous hero is afflicted by repeated bouts of actual
vomiting over a forty-day period, each one accompanied by anonymous
phone calls in which the caller speaks the hero's name (which we readers,
perversely, never learn). Finally, Roquentin has, at best, a desultory and
perfunctory interest in the opposite sex, whereas Murakami's protagonist
is virtually obsessed with seducing the wives and girlfriends of his male
acquaintances.
Taken together, these distinctions might lead one to suspect that
Murakami's title is a mere coincidence, and the date suffix, "1979", of no
real significance. However, given the extent of Sartre's fame, and even
popularity, in Japan, this seems improbable and indeed, on closer scrutiny,
parallels begin to emerge. 28 Antoine Roquentin is a writer, an academic
historian who develops, over time, the aspiration to write a novel.
Murakami's anonymous character is an artist and illustrator, but also a
meticulous diarist, and therefore also a writer. Moreover, we are told that
he became friends with the author, Murakami himself, when he illustrated
one of his short stories—which is, in one sense, what he is about to do
again. Equally, Roquentin, insofar as he was Sartre's alter ego, as we shall
see, "illustrated" Sartre's story of his own experience of contingency while
a philosophy teacher at the Lycee in Le Havre. Or again, while Roquentin
was haunted by a certain jazz song, Some of these Days, which becomes
both the theme tune and the panacea of his melancholia, Murakami's
Thanks are due to my colleague Simone Muller for this reassurance.
28 In 1966, when he and Beauvoir visited Japan for a month, "Sartre had more
readers in Japan than in any other country" (Rowley, 293; see also Asabuki). Forty
years on, there is a thriving Sartre Society in Japan, the acts of whose international
colloquium for Sartre's centenary (2005)—Sartre, penseur pour le XXIe siecle?
[Sartre, a Thinker for the 21 st Century?]—were published in Tokyo in 2007.

Contemporary Perspectives 185
character is a collector of "jazz from the 50s and early 60s", a mutual
interest shared with his creator and interlocutor. Moreover, their respective
experiences of "nausea", while different, mirror each other: Roquentin's is
a sensation of sickness without vomiting, whereas his Japanese
counterpart's involves real vomiting without the sensation of sickness.
Furthermore, Murakami's diarist reveals that his nausea lasts exactly forty
days—from 4 June to 14 July 1979—a period embracing almost at its midpoint
Sartre's birthday (21 June), as it happens, and concluding on Bastille
Day. Roquentin's diary, although less punctilious, covers a comparable
period from "early January 1932" 30 to approximately 18 February
(reckoned from the first dated page of "Monday 25 January 1932", 31 plus
twenty-four days, by my calculation). This period embraces the start of
Lent, indicated by the record of "Mardi gras", 32 a penitential phase in the
Christian calendar of forty days' fast and abstinence, commemorating
Jesus's exile in the desert—an association of which Murakami can hardly
have been unaware when he chose his hero's precise quarantine.
It remains to be seen, however, whether these structural resemblances
are more than merely superficial and coincidental. What significance, if
any, should we attach to the hypothetical time lapse in La Nausee, for
example? Is there, in fact, any more to this transcultural intertextuality
than meets the eye? I suspect there is, chiefly because Murakami appears
to have embedded, within a very small space, a number of other more
subtle and cryptic clues. For instance, like Roquentin—"Maybe, after all,
it was a brief bout of madness" 33 —Murakami's sick man fears for his
sanity: "When you start having thoughts like this, it's the first sign of
schizophrenia, you know". 34 Also, he shares with Sartre's Antoine a
profoundly solitary life:
The calls came only when I was alone. Same with the vomiting. So then I
began to wonder: how come I'm alone so much? In fact, I probably
average a little over twenty-three hours a day alone. 35
Another notable "Antoine" spent abundant time in solitude, namely Saint
Anthony, whose eremitical isolation and diabolical trials had been
29
Murakami, "Nausea 1979", in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, 143-53 (144).
30
"[...] vers le commencement de Janvier 1932" (Sartre, La Nausee, 3).
31
Ibid., 8.
32
Ibid., 72.
33
"Peut-etre bien, apr£s tout, que c'dtait une petite crise de folie" (ibid., 6).
34
Murakami, "Nausea 1979", 149.

186 Chapter Twelve
imaginatively recreated by Gustave Flaubert in his La Tentation de Saint
Antoine (1874). The archetypal nineteenth-century novelist was a life-long
preoccupation for Sartre—culminating in his monumental three-volume
critique of Flaubert, UIdiot de lafamille (1971-72)—a fact surely not lost
on Murakami, who amuses himself elsewhere in this collection with an
oblique and facetious allusion to Flaubert's masterpiece, Madame Bovary
(1857):
She gets married a virgin. And once she's somebody's wife she has an
affair. Sounds like some classic French novel. Minus any fancy-dress ball
or maids running around. 36
However that may be, there is less tenuous and tangential evidence of
an affinity between Sartre and Murakami, whether conscious or unwitting,
to be found in a single sentence just a few lines from the end of the latter's
disturbing little tale. The author is warning his nameless protagonist to
beware that his bizarre and unexplained malaise might just as inexplicably
return: "Next time it might not end in forty days. Things that start for no
reason end for no reason. And the opposite can be true." 37 That almost
poetically balanced phrase—"Things that start for no reason end for no
reason"—chimes conspicuously with one of Roquentin's most arresting
formulations: "Every existent starts life for no reason, persists out of
weakness and dies by accident." 38 Admittedly, Murakami might not have
had this very sentence of Sartre's novel in mind, nor is he saying exactly
the same thing. Nevertheless, Roquentin's ontological observation about
generic existence is here transposed to the more dynamic plane of a
personalised narrative history, and it is clear that Murakami is applying the
same principle as Sartre—namely that of contingency—even if he does not
use the term itself.
Such evidence of Murakami's affiliation with Sartre is strengthened by
the hypothesis that the author himself advances for his character's
condition, namely that his forty-day torment of vomiting and anonymous
phonecalls might in fact be psychosomatic manifestations of repressed
guilt for his promiscuous and treacherous seductions:
Murakami, "A Folklore for My Generation: A Prehistory of Late-Stage
Capitalism", in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, 74.
37 "Nausea 1979", 152.
38 'Tout existant nait sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par rencontre"
(Sartre, La Nausee, 158).

Contemporary Perspectives 187
"So, what you're telling me, Mr Murakami, is that my own guilt
feelings—feelings of which I myself was unaware—could have taken on
the form of nausea or made me hear things that were not there?"
"No, Vm not saying that", I corrected him. "You are." 39
Two things are worthy of note. First, Murakami's man speculates (in
classic Freudian fashion) that his physical dysfunction might be
symptomatic of his repressed and unconscious moral inner world. Contrast
this with Roquentin's nausea as symptomatic of his newly conscious
apprehension of the contingency of the external world. The former's gaze
is directed inwards to psychological and affective structures, the latter's
outwards to real material phenomena. It is as if Murakami has adopted
Sartre's concept of "nausea", then literally (and appositely, given the
physical effect of nausea) turned it inside-out.
Second, Murakami's rejoinder—"No, Vm not saying that [...] You are"
(and the emphases are his own)—is a disingenuous authorial sleight-ofhand
inviting the inference that he and his unnamed "friend" are, in effect,
one and the same person: symbiotic, indivisible alter egos. This
impression is reinforced by the fact that the unknown caller's last
telephonic intervention is unique: "His final call was different. First he
said my name. That was nothing new. But then he added, 'Do you know
my name?'". 40 The implication that the recipient ought to be able to guess
the identity of his caller—who might be nothing more nor less than a voice
inside his own head—is underpinned by the last line of the novella:
"Fortunately, neither he nor I have been visited by nausea or phone calls
so far." 41 The implied degree of identification between the nameless
character and his named creator is reminiscent of Sartre's explicit
reappropriation of Antoine Roquentin in Les Mots: "/ was Roquentin [...];
at the same time, I was me [...]". 42 Is it fanciful to suggest that Murakami's
nauseated artist stands in the same relationship to him as Sartre's sick-atheart
historian does to him? Are they both phantsamatic, empirical victims
of their creators' bipolar selves, the avatars of different nightmares
exteriorised in the relatively secure, cathartic and ultimately salutary
process of fictional projection?
For the time being, at least, such questions must be left hanging in the
air. But it is worth remarking that, elsewhere in this collection of short
39 "Nausea 1979", 152.
40 Ibid., 151.
41 Ibid., 153.
42 "J'etais Roquentin [...]; en meme temps j'&ais moi [...]" {Les Mots, 210,
Sartre's emphases).

188 Chapter Twelve
stories, there are further hints that Murakami, if not quite consciously
drawing upon "Sartrean sources", shares with his existentialist forebear a
number of preoccupations that bespeak similar perspectives and
interrogations. Let us consider a few examples. First, the anonymous firstperson
narrator of "The Mirror" 43 has a problem recognising himself in it:
My reflection in the mirror wasn't me. It looked exactly like me on the
outside, but it definitely was not me. No, that's not it. It was me, of course,
but another me. Another me that should never have been. 44
This disconcerting inability to comprehend one's own image as, in fact,
just that is powerfully reminiscent of the scene in which Roquentin suffers
the same frightening and sickening experience:
On the wall there is a white hole, the mirror. It's a trap. I know I'm going
to let myself get caught. That's it. The grey thing has just appeared in the
mirror. [...] it's the reflection of my face. [...] I understand nothing about
this face. Other people's have a meaning. Not mine. 45
For Murakami, this anomaly leads his narrator to banish mirrors from his
house and to conclude that "the most frightening thing in the world is our
own self', 46 a conclusion reached also by Sartre's trio of damned
characters in Huis clos, from whose hellish confines mirrors are equally
banished, so that they must rely entirely and agonisingly on each other's
gaze for their sense of self.
Next, we find the concept of the "wall" used by Murakami as a
metaphor of containment, limitation and frustration—"I'm going to be
surrounded by this thick wall for ever, never allowed to venture outside.
The rest of my insipid, pointless life" 47 —much as it is by Sartre in his
prize-winning collection of short stories, Le Mur (The Wall). 4 * Or again,
Murakami touches upon the contingency of human existence in another
place, telling us that a poor aunt's "existence is her reason. Just like us.
43
In Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, 55-59.
44
Ibid., 58.
45
"Au mur, il y a un trou blanc, la glace. C'est un pi&ge. Je sais que je vais m'y
laisser prendre. £a y est. La chose grise vient d'apparaitre dans la glace. [...] c'est
le reflet de mon visage. [...] je n'y comprends rien, a ce visage. Ceux des autres
ont un sens. Pas le mien" (La Nausee, 22).
46
'The Mirror", 59.
47
"A Folklore for My Generation", 71.
48
In (Euvres romanesques, 211-388; published in 1939 and awarded the Prix du
Roman Populiste in 1940.

Contemporary Perspectives 189
We exist here and now, without any particular reason or cause" —words
that might be taken verbatim from any one of Roquentin's perorations on
the subject, or indeed from UExistentialisme est un humanisme
(Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946). Finally (but not exhaustively),
Murakami evokes what we might call the "nauseous worldview" in a story
whose very title—"Crabs"—resonates with Sartrean obsessions about
crustaceans and all the menacing underworld of the submarine biosphere:
"The world felt out of kilter. He could hear as it creaked through this new
orbit. Something had happened, he thought, and the world had changed." 50
Compare this with Roquentin's anxiety at the outset of his journal, the
document that will be both the record of his anguish and the vehicle of his
enquiry into it: "It's an abstract change that settles on nothing. Is it I that
have changed? If not me, then it's this room, this town, this nature; I have
to choose." 51
It goes without saying that Sartre had no monopoly of reflection upon
appearance, image and reality; upon individual limitations and our sense
of futility; or upon existential contingency and the unnameable vertigo
entailed by our apprehension of it. Nor does it follow that any
contemporary writer who alludes to or meditates upon such things is either
deliberately paying tribute to Sartre or inadvertently disclosing his
influence. Nevertheless, initially intrigued by Haruki Murakami's
provocative plagiarism of one of the best-known titles in twentieth-century
world literature, I contend that there is sufficient prima facie evidence in
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman to justify further investigation into the
Sartrean influence that the author tacitly avows. This claim is yet another
indicator, therefore, that Sartre's thought and work remain sufficiently
vibrant and dynamic to be brought into dialogue with early twenty-firstcentury
artists in different genres—here, the cinema of George Clooney or
the prose fiction of Haruki Murakami—with mutual illumination and
profit.
49 "A Toor Aunt' Story", in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, 125-42 (136).
50 "Crabs", in ibid., 209-14 (213).
51 "C'est un changement abstrait qui ne se pose sur rien. Est-ce moi qui ai changd?
Si ce n'est pas moi, alors c'est cette chambre, cette ville, cette nature; il faut
choisir" (La Nausee, 9).

190 Chapter Twelve
Works Cited
Anon. "Death of an Idealist", Time, 24 November 1952, accessed
28/08/2006 @
www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,817355,00.html.
Asabuki Tomiko. Vingt-huit Jours au Japon avec Jean-Paul Sartre et
Simone de Beauvoir (trans. Claude Peronny and Tanaka Chiharu).
Paris: Langues et Mondes / L'Asiatheque, 1996.
Flynn, Thomas R. "Introduction: Sartre at One Hundred—a Man of the
Nineteenth Century Addressing the Twenty-First?", in Leak and van
den Hoven (eds), Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration, 1-14.
Hill, Tobias. "A Hole in the Middle of the Pacific: Haruki Murakami's
latest collection of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, is a
delight." The Guardian Review, Saturday 8 July 2006.
Leak, Andrew and Adrian van den Hoven (eds). Sartre Today: A
Centenary Celebration. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005. (Also
published as Sartre Studies International, vol. 11, no. 1/2, 2005.)
McBride, William L. "Sartre at the Twilight of Liberal Democracy as We
Have Known It", in Leak and van den Hoven (eds), Sartre Today: A
Centenary Celebration, 311-18.
Murakami Haruki. "Nausea 1979", in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
(trans. Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin). London: Harvill Seeker, 2006.
O'Donohoe, Benedict. Sartre's Theatre: Acts for Life. Bern: Peter Lang,
Modern French Identities, 34,2005.
Pdju, Marcel. "Abraham Feller, ou 'son propre bourreau'" ["Abraham
Feller, or 'his own executioner'"], Les Temps modernes, March 1953.
Rowley, Hazel. Tete-a-tete: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir
and Jean-Paul Sartre. London: Vintage Books, 2007.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Les Mots. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
—. La Nausee (1938), in (Euvres romanesques (Edition &ablie par Michel
Contat et Michel Rybalka), 1-210. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la
Pleiade, 1981.
—. Les Jeux sont faits (ed. B. P. O'Donohoe). London: Routledge,
Twentieth Century French Texts, 1990.
—. La Part dufeu, in Theatre complet (edition publiee sous la direction de
Michel Contat), 1183-1214. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la
Pleiade, 2005.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EXISTENTIALIST IMPACT
ON THE WRITINGS AND MOVIES
OF OSHIMA NAGISA
SIMONEMULLER
Introduction
Existentialism had an enormous impact on post-war Japanese
intellectual history. The works of existentialist philosophers such as
Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Albert Camus were analysed in great
detail in Japan. It was, however, Jean-Paul Sartre who was most closely
associated with existentialism. Sartre had an extraordinarily strong effect
on Japanese post-war literature and philosophy, as well as Japanese art and
politics. Sartre himself had a life-long fascination for Japan. In 1966 he
visited the country on a month-long lecture tour with Simone de Beauvoir.
His impact on Japanese post-war literature was high: the works of many
important Japanese authors of that time—among others Abe K6bo (1924-
1993) and the Nobel prize laureate 6e KenzaburS (born 1935)—are
strongly influenced by Sartre's philosophy of existence.
Sartre's existentialism had a great impact on Japanese movie directors
as well. Particularly Oshima Nagisa (born 1932), a leading figure of the
Japanese New Wave Cinema, known in the West for his controversial film
Ai no korrida (The Empire of the Senses, 1976) was strongly influenced by
Sartre's philosophy. Like many Japanese post-war intellectuals, Oshima
was attracted to Sartre's idea of the engaged intellectual. Moreover, many
of the things Oshima wrote and filmed, remind one of the phenomenological
analyses of Sartrean existentialism. In his theoretical writings
Oshima often quoted Sartre and his philosophy.
The extent of Sartre's impact on Oshima Nagisa becomes evident in
the following quotation from an interview on his film Koshikei (Death by
Hanging, 1968), in which Oshima called Sartre his favourite author and

192
Chapter Thirteen
explicitly declared that Sartre was the main reason why he had become a
movie director:
"Which author do you admire?"
Asked this question, my heart beat faster.
"Jean-Paul Sartre."
Answering, I felt how my eyes filled with tears. Hadn't I made movies
for ten years just to say this single phrase? All the efforts to become a
director, to make movies, weren't they just done for this instant? I
remembered the end of the first chapter of Troubled Sleep [La Mort dans
Vame\, the third part of The Roads to Freedom [Les Chemins de la liberte]:
"He approached the balustrade and started shooting, standing upright.
This was an enormous act of vengeance, each shot taking revenge on his
former scruples. One shot for Lola whom I didn't dare to rob, one shot for
Marcelle whom I should have broken up with, one shot for Odette whom I
didn't want to fuck. This one for the books I didn't dare to write, that one
for the travels I denied myself, this other one for all the people I wanted to
hate and tried to understand. He fired and laws blew apart in mid-air: thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, bang, right into that idiot's face; thou
shalt not kill, bang, at that bastard opposite."
Yes! My movies as well were single revenges against past hesitations.
Yes! I shoot! I continue to shoot! Bang, bang, bang. 2
As Mathieu fired upon his missed opportunities in an act of revenge, so
Oshima used his movies to express his unrealised wishes and dreams:
I can't recall who said that cinema is the visualisation of wishes and
desires. For me, cinema is the visualisation of the wishes and desires of the
movie director. 3
In this chapter, I will investigate how Sartre's philosophy is expressed
in Oshima Nagisa's theoretical writings and in his movies. I will examine
parallels of Sartre's and Oshima's conceptions of engagement, freedom,
1 "II s'approcha du parapet et se mit a tirer debout. C'e'tait une enorme revanche;
chaque coup de feu le vengeait d'un ancien scrupule. Un coup sur Lola que je n'ai
pas os6 voler, un coup sur Marcelle que j'aurais du plaquer, un coup sur Odette
que je n'ai pas voulu baiser. Celui-ci pour les livres que je n'ai pas ose* ecrire,
celui-la pour les voyages que je me suis refuses, cet autre sur tous les types, en
bloc, que j'avais envie de d&ester et que j'ai essays' de comprendre. II tirait, les
lois volaient en l'air, tu aimeras ton prochain comme toi-meme, pan dans cette
gueule de con, tu ne tueras point, pan sur le faux jeton d'en face" (Sartre, Les
Chemins de la liberte, III: La Mort dans Vame, 193). All translations are my own.
2 Hasegawa (2001), 26-27.
3 Oshima (1988), 181.

Existentialist Impact on 6shima Nagisa 193
shame and sexuality. And I intend to show how Oshima incorporated his
theoretical ideas into his movies by focussing on films such as Ai to kibd
no machi (A Town of Love and Hope, 1959), Koshikei {Death by Hanging,
1968), and Hakuchu no torima (Violence at Noon, 1966). 4
Oshima Nagisa: an engaged movie director
Just as Sartre was an engaged writer, so Oshima Nagisa can be called
an engaged movie director. Like the French philosopher, Oshima was
politically active and regularly discussed his opinions on political and
cultural matters before a broad public. Also like Sartre, Oshima considered
that everybody is responsible for the world and has the duty to get
involved in its affairs, and he thought about the potential to change the
present situation and to transcend the historic conditions of human society.
In an essay on Nihon no yoru to kiri (Night and Fog in Japan, 1960), a
film about the Japanese student movements triggered by the renewal of the
US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960, Oshima wrote as follows:
All people are responsible. Those who created this situation must change
it. You, who could be the real power behind these changes, but who
nevertheless persist with the given situation, as if paralysed and walled in;
you, who stood up a single time and who are so depressed by this single
failure that you are now waiting for a change from outside; you, who allow
this situation to continue, even though you believe that you are changing
it—this means you all! It is you whom I want to unmask together with your
failures, your corruption and your weaknesses. 5
Oshima Nagisa made movies that appealed to the audience in order to
change social and political conditions. Thus Oshima "used cinema as a
tool, a weapon in a cultural struggle". 6 As Sartre wanted to captivate his
readers, so Oshima wanted to fascinate his spectators. According to him,
this is only possible if the subjectivity of the film technician is set free:
The new cinema, above all, has to be a personal and subjective-active
cinema of the author. A dialogue between the author and his spectators can
only be established if the aeuvre is the subjective-active expression of the
author and has, in form of a tension with reality, a critical function. [...]
The expression of free subjectivity implies also that different methods are
4 An earlier draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the 13 th Conference of the
UK Sartre Society at the Institut Fran?ais, London, 21 October 2006.
5 6shima(1988), 127.
6 Desser, 3.

194 Chapter Thirteen
used to make each film. Otherwise, movies would merely be a moribund
schema, and there would no longer be any dialogue between author and
viewer. Subjectivity can be kept only through permanent self-negation. 7
In Oshima's postulation of the committed movie director, in his emphasis
upon the subjectivity of the author, in his claim for a permanent dialectical
exchange between author, spectator, oeuvre and reality, and in his demand
for a constant self-negation in the process of movie making, we find again
Sartre's literary theories as he expounded them in "Qu'est-ce que la
litterature?" ("What is Literature?", 1947). For comparison, consider this
extract from Sartre's essay:
[T]he author chooses to disclose the world, especially the human to other
humans, in order that they—in the light of the object thus exposed—
shoulder their whole responsibility. [...] Likewise it is the function of the
author to act such that nobody can ignore the world and call himself
innocent in it. 8
Oshima Nagisa criticises Japanese politics and society from different
perspectives. But the central theme of his movies, which he uses to express
his criticism, is oppression. 9 By exploring oppression, Oshima treats
political matters such as the Vietnam War, student protests and the death
penalty, as well as social matters such as poverty and racial discrimination.
In other words, the leitmotiv of Oshima's movies is the question: how can
human beings be really free and subjective? The struggle against
oppression was one of Sartre's central concerns as well:
If our wishes could be fulfilled, the author [...] would be read by the
oppressed as well as by the oppressor, would bear witness to the oppressed
against the oppressor, would reproach the oppressor with his own
reflection from inside, would become aware, with the oppressor and for
him, of the oppression and contribute to a constructive and revolutionary
ideology. 10
7 6shima(1988),34.
8 "[L]'6crivain a choisi de ddvoiler le monde et singuli&rement l'homme aux autres
hommes pour que ceux-ci prennent en face de l'objet ainsi mis a nu leur entfere
responsabilitd. [...] Pareillement la fonction de Tdcrivain est de faire en sorte que
nul ne puisse ignorer le monde et que nul ne s'en puisse dire innocent" ("Qu'est-ce
que la literature?", 74).
9 See Sat6,376.
10 Ibid., 141.

Existentialist Impact on 6shima Nagisa 195
In order to express oppression and the revolt against it, Oshima's
protagonists are often criminals. They are people with a repressed, deeply
rooted psychological aberration that manifests itself in incomprehensible,
often destructive, behaviour. Criminals are by definition combatants
against the system, thus fighting against political, social or personal
oppression. But not only his protagonists fight against the system:
Oshima's films themselves are an opposition to the Japanese system.
Oshima himself calls the fact that he makes movies a "crime". 11 Thus,
Oshima Nagisa can be called a highly political and critical film director.
Even in movies that at first glance do not seem to have any political
content, one can detect hidden political allegories.
Oshima Nagisa is not only comparable to Sartre by virtue of being an
engaged artist. His films obviously show existentialist traits, which derive
directly from influences of Sartre's writings—especially themes such as
shame, guilt, freedom or sexuality show parallels to Sartre's theories,
elaborated in u£tre et le neant {Being and Nothingness, 1943). I will now
investigate some of these traits through an analysis of some of Oshima's
films.
Ai to kibo no machi (A Town of Love and Hope, 1959):
Self-definition by the others
A second characteristic of Oshima's movies, which is revealed
especially in his films of the late 1960s, leads us back to Sartre,
specifically to Sartre's psychology of existence: the investigation of the
human psyche, and the analysis of human behaviour. Oshima describes
people who become revolutionaries against the system, not in the name of
an organisation, but simply for the realisation of their will: people who
resist, but who at the same time take responsibility for their resistance.
Already in Oshima's first film, Ai to kibo no machi, influences of
Sartre can be traced. The film is the story about a small boy whose poverty
makes him sell the same pigeon again and again to different people, since
the pigeon always escapes from the new owner and flies back to the boy.
The child is not consciously committing a crime. He becomes aware of his
crime only through the judgement of the adults, who call him a thief, thus
constituting his self-perception as a thief. If one wants to apply Sartre's
philosophy, then one may say that "the stealing that the boy did
unconsciously was discovered by adults who now blame him for being a
11 Ibid., 380.

196 Chapter Thirteen
thief. As a consequence, the boy becomes a conscious thief." 12 One is
reminded of the scene in Sartre's Saint Genet, comedien et martyr (Saint
Genet, Actor and Martyr, 1952), when Genet is caught while stealing, and
his being called a thief by the others henceforth becomes his Urwahl
(fundamental choice) to be a thief. Sartre's existential-psychoanalytical
critique of Jean Genet was translated into Japanese in 1958, one year
before the release of Ai to kibo no machi, and it is very likely that Oshima
was inspired by it in producing his film.
The small boy in Oshima's movie gains the consciousness of being a
thief but he resists being defined by others: that is to say, he declines to
adopt their moral judgment regarding his actions. Thus, this newly gained
self-perception does not lead him to give up selling the pigeon. Rather, he
takes responsibility for his actions, and in so doing he opposes society. 13
The movie Ai to kibo no machi therefore has a critical function: it serves as
a harsh and unsentimental realist document on the disparity of social class
and the inescapability of poverty. 14
Koshikei (Death by Hanging, 1968):
The question of guilt and identity
The topic of guilt and shame recurs in another of Oshima's films,
namely Koshikei. The film was inspired by the notorious, real-life
execution of a convicted murderer, Ri Chin'u, who had killed two Japanese
schoolgirls in 1958 and subsequently courted publicity for his crimes
through the newspapers and the police. The premise of Koshikei is that a
man, sentenced to death, is rendered amnesiac through a failed hanging
and thus made unconscious of his crime. He cannot be hanged again since,
according to Japanese law, a man who has no memory cannot be legally
punished. This creates a situation in which the embarrassed officials must
reawaken the convicted man's conscious knowledge of his identity, and
thus of his past and his guilt. 15 In this context, one recalls Kafka's novel
Der Prozess (The Trial, 1925). 16 Moreover, in Oshima's movie, Ri Chin'u
is called, in Kafkaesque manner, merely by his initial, R.
12 Ibid., 33.
13 Ibid., 335.
14 See http://www.filref.com/directors/dirpages/oshima.html.
15 See Turim, 65.
16 See ibid., 64.

Existentialist Impact on 6shima Nagisa 197
The movie as a whole clearly displays certain Brechtian devices, for
instance distanciation, strategically readjusted to cinematic form. 17 But
there are also features that lead us again to Sartre's theories. In Sartrean
fashion, Oshima analyses the circumstances which led to R's crime, and at
the same time he criticises Japanese society and the death penalty. R is a
Korean living in Japan. He is intelligent but, in order to escape
discrimination by the Japanese, he pretends to be Japanese. We might say
that he is in a state of "bad faith". R begins to escape into a world of
fantasy, which, in the end, he can no longer distinguish from reality.
Oshima describes R as a person who, being under extreme pressure,
develops an extreme imagination, which leads him to crime. He is finally
executed, but he shows no signs of remorse and denies the right of the
Japanese to execute him. The law defines the protagonist as a criminal but
the protagonist opposes that judgement, just as the protagonist of Ai to
kibo no machi does not consider himself a criminal, but a justified
malefactor. The film can thus be interpreted as a criticism of Japanese
society that discriminates against the Koreans. This theme of criminals
who reject definition as criminals by others must be considered in the
context of the 1960s. These artists belonged to a generation who wanted to
form their own opinions and were hostile to being told what to think. They
represented an opposition to a ruling £lite that says: because you are not
right you must criticise yourselves. 18 This was the newly gained freedom
of the post-war generation, which was expressed in the movies of the
1950s as well, but especially in those of the 1960s.
Oshima himself explained his frequent depiction of "righteous
criminals" in his films by the tendency of the Japanese to see themselves
as victims:
I do not want to negate in any way the sympathy for the victims. But if
people develop such a victim-complex, and if this is taken up as a theme
again and again, then I must decidedly oppose it. I have perfect sympathy
for victims, but I distance myself from the victim complex. Out of these
considerations, I tried to make movies. I wanted to develop characters that
do not nourish the victim complex. Characters that are not victims but
offenders. 19
Parallels between Sartre's existentialism and the case of Li Chin'u are also
stressed by the Sartre specialist Suzuki Michihiko. In a discussion with
17 See ibid., 62.
18 See Sat6,38.
19 Seehttp://www.3sat.de/3sat.php?http://www.3sat.de/ard/50268/index.html.

198 Chapter Thirteen
another specialist of Sartre, Takeuchi YoshirS on the occasion of Sartre's
visit to Japan in 1966, Suzuki points out that Li's murder was the action of
a man who finds himself in a situation in which the only way to regain
freedom is an escape into imagination. Suzuki thus interprets Li's case in
the manner of existentialist psychology as an interplay of historical
conditioning and personal freedom, which stands in connection with the
history between Korea and Japan and with the discriminated situation of
the Koreans in Japan. Thus, Li's murder may be seen as addressed to
Japan as a whole. If the case of Li had become literature and not reality,
Suzuki claims, it would have become Genet. 20
Hakuchu no torima (Violence at noon, 1966):
The feeling of shame
How fantasies can lead to committing a crime is shown again in
another film by Oshima Nagisa, made in 1966. The story of Hakuchu no
torima is based on a novel by the famous Japanese author Takeda Taijun
(1912-1976), whose writings were influenced by Sartre. The story is about
a poor serial killer who strangles women to death and rapes them. He does
not feel guilty since he does not see his victims as humans but as things.
The protagonist in the film says:
A dead person is not a human being. It is not a woman either. It is merely a
thing, an object. It doesn't mean anything, if one plays with it, or cuts it
into pieces. 21
Oshima describes his protagonist as a person with a high degree of shame.
Because of this shame he is not able to perform sexually with women in a
normal way. In order not to feel shame, he puts his victims into a state in
which they cannot see him. The feeling of shame emerges from being seen
by others. Thus, Oshima describes exactly the feeling of shame as Sartre
defined it in VP.tre et le neant.
In an article about his film, Oshima emphasises that the core topic of
Hakuchu no torima is shame. He also stresses that the feeling of shame is
an essentially masculine feeling:
In general, it is assumed that shame is a characteristic of women. I cannot
share that opinion. On the contrary—I believe that shame is rather a man's
business. It is a feeling that is innate to men, that essentially belongs to
20 See Suzuki, 77.
21 Sat6, 247.

Existentialist Impact on 6shima Nagisa 199
them; it can only very rarely be found in women. I would even claim that
women basically do not even know what shame is. 22
According to Oshima, men are shamefaced because they always have to
become a subject in sexual intercourse, they always have to play the active
part in sexual relations. They have to "perform" sexually while being
"seen". Thus arises the wish to transform the partner into an object:
It is safe to say that there are men who can only have sexual intercourse
with a bought body—a body that they have transformed into a "thing" by
the act of buying—who are freed from their shame and repression only
under this condition. It is possible to call such men "wimpy creatures" in a
time of total sexual liberation—but if we unveil the traditional prejudices,
we will find out that every man who has feelings of shame knows the
desire of this kind of sexual relations. Are there any men at all who are free
of this desire? 23
Shame is the fear of being defined by others whilst, at the same time,
rejecting that definition. Thus, here again, we can read the movie as an
allegory of social criticism. Society is constructed such that it makes
people constantly feel ashamed. Everybody appears to be equal but in
reality society is conceived as a stratification of classes. If people bear
their shame and try to gain freedom only in their hearts, then they become
fantasists, dreaming criminals.
Conclusion
Oshima Nagisa offers strong parallels with Sartre, both insofar as he
was a politically engaged movie director, and insofar as he displays
distinctively Sartrean existentialist traits in his movies. Oshima's films
express the individual's reaction to his oppression by society. He describes
highly sensitive people who are unable to adapt themselves to Japanese
society, and who—in dealing with well adapted people—place themselves
in the position of a superego. 24 One is forcefully reminded of the
protagonists of Sartre's existential biographies, namely Baudelaire, Genet
and Flaubert.
Oshima's essays and films are documents of the political culture of the
Japanese post-war period. They are witnesses of the far-reaching changes
22 Oshima (1988), 71.
23 Ibid., 75.
24 See Sato, 381.

200 Chapter Thirteen
in the way of life of a nation that almost paradigmatically represents the
process of modernisation. Oshima never devoted himself to the illusion of
a lost paradise of tradition. He advocated the new, the radical revolution,
and is therefore often compared to Jean-Luc Godard. 25 Oshima himself did
not consider himself to have much in common with Godard, though.
Asked about the subjects he shares with the French movie director,
Oshima answered in lapidary style: "One is politics and the other is
cinema." 26
By dealing with the subject of oppression, Oshima wanted to
investigate how freedom and subjectivity can be preserved in a world that
tries to restrain the freedom of people. In 1965, Oshima wrote an article
with the title "The Path of Freedom"—obviously an allusion to Sartre's
novelistic trilogy, Les Chemins de la liberte {The Roads to Freedom,
1945-47). In it he stresses, like Sartre, that freedom can only be gained
through acceptance of contingency:
If I was asked: which way did you go? I would answer: the way of
freedom. [...] I believe one must realize that there is neither freedom nor
joy in this world before one discovers the way to freedom, the way of joy
for oneself. Only if we know that there is no freedom, can we be free: this
staggering conclusion is the heavy burden that I have to carry with me day
by day. [...] In this moment, I intend to shoot movies constantly. I believe
that I am ready for it and that it is a good thing. It will be my way to
freedom. 27
Works Cited
Desser, David. Eros plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New
Wave Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Hasegawa Hiroshi. Dojidaijin Sarutoru [Sartre, a Contemporary], Tokyo:
Kddansha, 200L
Higuchi Naofumi. Oshima Nagisa no subete [All about Oshima Nagisa].
Tokyd: Kinema junpdsha, 2002.
Mellen, Joan. Voices from the Japanese Cinema. New York: Liveright,
1975.
6shima Nagisa. Sengo eiga—hakai to sozo [Post-war Cinema—
Destruction and Creation]. T6ky6: San'ichi shobd, 1963.
25 See 6shima (1988), "Preface" by Gertrud Koch, 9.
26 Mellen, 261.
27 Oshima (1988), 67.

Existentialist Impact on 6shima Nagisa 201
—. Koshikei. Oshima Nagisa sakuhinshu [Death by Hanging. Collected
Works of Oshima Nagisa], T6ky6: Shiseidd, 1968.
—. Oshima Nagisa hydronshu: kaitai to funshutsu [Collected Reviews of
Oshima Nagisa—Dismantling and Spouting]. T6ky6: H6ka shoten,
1970.
—. Taikenteki sengo eiga ron [Essays on Experienced Post-war Film
Portraits]. T6kyo: Asahi shinbunsha. (Asahi sensho 38), 1975.
—. Sekai no eiga sakka 6: Oshima Nagisa [Movie Writers of the World 6:
Oshima Nagisa]. T6ky6: Kinema junpdsha, 1978.
—. Die Ahnung der Freiheit [The Idea of Freedom] (trans. Grete
Osterwald and Uta Goridis). T6ky6: Fischer, 1988.
—. 7960. Tokyo: Nihon tosho senta. (Ningen no kiroku 137), 2001.
—. 1968. Tokyd: Seidosha, 2004.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Les Chemins de la liberte, /-///. Paris: Gallimard, 1945-
47.
—. Ufctre et le neant: Essai d*ontologie phenomenologique. Paris:
Gallimard, 1943.
—. "Qu'est-ce que la literature?", in Situations, II. Paris: Gallimard,
1948,55-330.
Sato Tadao. Oshima Nagisa no sekai [The World of Oshima Nagisa].
Tokyd: Asahi bunko, 1987.
Suzuki Michihiko, et al. "Sarutoru no shisd to nihon" ["Sartre's Thought
and Japan"], Gendai no me, 10, 1966, 64-77.
Tanaka Chiseko. Filmmakers, 9: Oshima Nagisa. T6ky6: Kinema
junpdsha, 1999.
Turim, Maureen. The Films of Oshima Nagisa. Images of a Japanese
Iconoclast. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SARTRE'S LEGACY IN AN ERA
OF OBSCURANTISM
WILLIE THOMPSON
Introduction
This chapter sets out to suggest why we should regard Sartre's work
and political example as continuing to be highly pertinent at the start of the
twenty-first century, as well as in the likely circumstances of the decades
to follow. 1
John Gerassi described Sartre as "the hated conscience of his
century", 2 and with good reason. He certainly made himself hated for the
positions he adopted on a great range of social and political issues, and
during his active years he disdained to conceal his own hatred of the
bourgeoisie. In consequence of his intellectual superstardom, his standpoints
counted for something; in France, certainly, during the Algerian
War, his outspoken opinions provoked assassination attempts by the OAS 3
and compelled him to go into hiding. Apart from being a philosopher of
the first rank, he was also a major novelist, biographer and autobiographer,
playwright and essayist as well as a political activist—and all this in
addition to the perpetual fascination that his highly unconventional
personal life exercised upon his contemporaries (and it continues to do so
1 A previous draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the UK Sartre Society's
Centenary Conference, Institut Fran^ais, London, 19-20 March 2005.
2 Gerassi, Hated Conscience,
3 Organisation de I'Armee Secrete, a supposedly clandestine grouping of serving
and retired French military officers and men, pledged to keeping Algeria French,
and therefore bitterly opposed to Sartre's de-colonising libertarianism.

Sartre's Legacy in an Era of Obscurantism 203
down to the present day). Indeed, in his or her own time, no thinker of the
twentieth century had such global impact and influence. 4
However, despite the very extensive academic territory of Sartre
studies, the more general consensus would appear to be that his
philosophical approach has been entirely superseded, while there is no
doubt at all that the political causes he represented are in total eclipse.
With the collapse of any significant left-wing presence throughout the
world, an entire cliff of social and political experience has fallen into the
sea. Marxism, "the only humanistic philosophy committed to realising
itself in the world" 5 to which Sartre himself was committed, 6 and which,
for a number of years and in a variety of guises, dominated the intellectual
landscape in both East and West during the second half of the century, is
generally treated now as totally discredited, at least in its political
manifestations.
The vacuum created by the disintegration of the Marxist universe has
provided room for the flourishing and proliferation of all manner of
obscurantist superstitions, which certainly have always been around,
surviving in the cultural undergrowth, but during most of the twentieth
century held in check by the prevailing climate of rationalist discourse,
Marxist or otherwise, which monopolised intellectual respectability. Such
phenomena include varieties of fundamentalist religion, occasionally
staging well-publicised displays; and popular superstitions which never
died out anywhere in the world, whether in the scientifically committed
West—where, among other instances, populist newspapers continue to
carry their astrology columns—or even in the formally atheist former
Eastern Bloc where they revived and blossomed speedily enough after
1989.
What room then remains for Sartre's legacy? My argument is that
Sartre's Marxism 7 does in fact provide a viable and intellectually credible
alternative to the versions which have so spectacularly fallen apart, but
that is by no means all: his pre-Marxist philosophy is important as well.
Sartre's positions are uncompromisingly rationalist and throughout his life
(except possibly in his final years, with weakening mental powers), he
4 Though the jury may still be out on whether Simone de Beauvoir might not
equally, or better, deserve that accolade.
5 Aronson, Sartre*s Second Critique, 7.
6 Towards the end of his life he denied that he was any longer a Marxist, but by
that time his powers were failing significantly.
7 The somewhat fuzzy category in which Sartre's Marxism is generally placed is
that of "Western Marxism", developed mostly, but by no means entirely, by
thinkers unattached to the Marxist political movements.

204 Chapter Fourteen
held unwaveringly to that standpoint. Moreover, there existed a consistency
in his thinking as it developed from the 1930s to the early 1970s,
which as a corpus constitutes an effective counter to contemporary
irrationality and obscurantism.
Obscurantism now
First, however, it is worth listing some of the more salient examples,
both new and revived, of the obscurantisms that afflict contemporary
culture, foregoing here the exploration of the tensions, contradictions and
socio-cultural antagonisms which exist within each of these categories.
Mainstream religion, particularly in its fundamentalist versions, and
especially in the evangelical Protestantism of the United States, is the most
immediately evident instance of the phenomenon: a determined, coordinated
attack against secularist rationalism is being mounted both in the
USA itself and abroad, with far-reaching social and cultural consequences.
It is entrenched at the centre of the state possessing the most overwhelming
military, economic and cultural power on the globe, afflicted for two terms
(2001-09) with a President who imagined that he was spoken to directly by
God, and whose predecessor in the 1980s (Ronald Reagan) consulted
astrologers. Beyond the borders of the USA, the concurrent upsurge of
faith-driven politics in Latin America, Eastern Europe, India and Africa—
not to speak of the Middle East—is a reality unprecedented since the time
of the Enlightenment. Some of the more trivial but symptomatic
consequences include the decision in the 1990s by the UK vehiclelicensing
agency to exclude the number 666 from registration plates, and
the refusal by house-builders to use the number 13. At the time of Sartre's
centenary, the example most in the news was the determined effort being
made on both sides of the Atlantic to reinstate, as part of the school
curriculum, Biblical accounts of the origins and development of life.
Divine creationism in these instances conceals itself under the cloak of
"intelligent design"—a concept which provided some amusing jokes at
George W. Bush's expense, but which is otherwise intellectually vacuous.
The emergence of New Age mystification and marginal religious cults
as a cultural phenomenon in the West goes back to the 1960s, but began to
thrive spectacularly from the 1980s onwards. Although wholly incoherent
and resembling nothing so much as a supermarket shelf of faith options,
their orientation in general terms is a re-enchantment of the material world
(a tendency present in some sections of the otherwise entirely commendable
environmental movement). In this they find common ground
with versions of mainstream religion, particularly, in the Christian context,

Sartre's Legacy in an Era of Obscurantism 205
Roman Catholicism, and elsewhere especially the Hindu culture, notably
its fundamentalist versions. New Ageism also parallels, much more
seriously, faith-driven versions of identity politics that repudiate rational
secular interpretations of the world in the name of ancient traditions, or
even of newly invented ones, such as those of Afrocentrism.
Religious belief has been and is a frequent marker of "identity
politics", though the latter also has much broader dimensions and is not
always necessarily obscurantist in character. Nationalism, originating in
reaction to the obscurantisms of dynastic traditionalism, is after all a form
of identity politics, but is not in any sense incompatible with a universalist,
scientifically orientated cultural outlook; 8 and there are, of course,
innumerable forms of harmless cultural self-identification. However, the
proclivities towards irrationalist forms of ethnic nationalism became all
too evident during the twentieth century, producing not merely
exterminatory fantasies but exterminatory projects. In the late twentieth
century, forms of identity politics, ethnically based and otherwise, have
combined readily with explicit and virulent versions of obscurantist
religion or even unapologetic superstition, demanding "respect" on the
basis of particular and peculiar versions of their own "truth". Sartre would
certainly have had no time for the notion that it is proper to "respect"
fantasies, no matter how bizarre and preposterous, because to call them
into question might "offend" their adherents. He would certainly have
agreed with the phrase from Marx that Edward Thompson was fond of
quoting: "To leave error unrefiited is intellectual immorality."
The collation of literary and ideological concepts termed
"postmodernism", though it could not be regarded as a superstition in the
strong sense, nevertheless fits well into the definition of obscurantism,
above all in the repudiation, explicit or implicit, of rationalism (or even
rationality) that is characteristic of the tendencies identified by this term. It
has served as the basis for the denunciation of reason on the grounds that it
is oppressive, male, Western, imperialist, or whatever. Although efforts
have been made to detect affinities between Sartre's writings and the
postmodern trend, 9 they carry little conviction. Sartre's positions are
always rationalist through and through, no less in his Marxist than in his
phenomenological phase.
A major theme of postmodernist endeavour has been to attack, or even
try to pervert, the scientific tradition. 10 What is known as the "strong
Tom Nairn distinguishes in this context between ethnic nationalism and civic
nationalism: see his "Breakwaters of 2000: From Ethnic to Civic Nationalism".
9 See, for example, Dominik La Carpa, A Preface to Sartre, 1979.
10 See Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures, 1998.

206 Chapter Fourteen
programme" in the sociology of science, associated particularly with a
group at Edinburgh University, claims no less than that all scientific
knowledge rests on nothing more than conventional agreement among
scientific practitioners and has no other basis in reality. It must certainly
be acknowledged that Sartre had a regrettable blind spot in regard to
science as usually conceived—possibly due to an aversion generated by
his stepfather's authoritarian efforts to teach him science and mathematics.
In her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir notes that he would pursue such a
line of thought to the extent sometimes of being, and knowing he was
being, silly. On one occasion he argued for the non-existence of microbes
and other entities invisible to the naked eye. 11 She explains his attitude
regarding science as being due to its necessary abstractions and general
laws, contradicting his project of philosophically grasping living reality
with "more imagination than logic". 12 On the face of things, this might
indeed appear to resonate with postmodern ideas. Later, however, she
insists that if he repudiated scientific rationalism, that was on behalf of a
more dialectical and humanly conceived version. 13
In a dialectical reversal which Sartre would have appreciated, an
ideology supposedly resting on the strictest of rational principles has
turned into one of the mainstays of contemporary obscurantism. A recently
published volume, Contesting Fundamentalisms, quite properly includes
economic neo-liberalism in the fundamentalist catalogue, and this—while
claiming to be based on impeccable scientific principles (though also
embraced by the religious Right)—may well be regarded as the most
rampant and hegemonic obscurantism of them all; certainly, it has the
worst and most devastating practical consequences.
Bad Faith
The importance of the entire range of Sartre's work and its pertinence
to the twenty-first century is most significant, I would argue, in relation to
these developments. It was a philosophy of and for the twentieth century,
driven by contemporary concerns, as Sartre himself would have been the
first to insist, yet its underlying themes have a permanent relevance. He
wrote the Critique of Dialectical Reason to try—single-handedly!—to
rescue Marxism from the sclerosis that had overtaken it at the hands of the
official Communist movement and the Trotskyist sects. But the concepts
11 See Simone de Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 42.
12 Ibid., 31.
13 Ibid., 131. The Critique makes this perfectly plain.

Sartre's Legacy in an Era of Obscurantism 207
developed there have a permanent relevance wherever socio-political
interaction occurs, while those of the pre-war and war-time years—
organised around the en-soi (in-itself) and the pour-soi (for-itself), even if
impossible to validate scientifically or sociologically—are, with their
emphasis on choice and decision without metaphysical props or excuses, a
suitable model for the understanding of subjectivity, of seeing it from the
inside, so to speak, as well as a meaningful guide to living. 14
However they also have significance for the theme of this paper: the
notions of bad faith and essentialism. All versions of obscurantism are no
less varieties of bad faith. The first principle of obscurantism—if one may
so put it—is a closed mind, an imperviousness to evidence, a procedure in
bad faith for the indefinite multiplication of subordinate hypotheses, so as
to manufacture reasons for dismissing and ignoring manifest realities. Or,
as Lewis Carroll expresses it somewhere, believing fifty impossible things
before breakfast. In other words, obscurantism is a means of throwing
responsibility for individualised judgment onto the essentialised properties
of things and relationships, whether essentialised by the pronouncement of
external sources or simply by tradition. 15
If the obscurantism is of a superstitious sort—whether mainstream or
exotic—then a further level of bad faith is involved. In this, the
responsibility for choice and decision has been alienated to an imaginary
supernatural entity, regardless of whether that is conceived as a personal
deity or an indifferent supernatural mechanism such as karma or its less
intellectualised equivalents. The individual adherents conceive themselves
the objects of imagined forces which they may hope to influence but
cannot control, and whose commandments or oracles they cannot contradict
but have to follow or suffer the consequences.
Being and Nothingness famously ends with a declaration disclaiming
the significance of its theory, at least as elaborated there, for social or
political commitment. Nevertheless, there may be a degree of disingenuousness
here (after all it was published under the Occupation). In any
consideration of bad faith and authenticity, it is perfectly clear from
Sartre's pre-war and war-time writings that the book's conclusion does not
reflect his own attitude and that the principal targets for Sartre's contempt
are individuals convinced of their own rectitude and entitlement to their
14 See O'Donohoe, "Why Sartre Matters". There is a problem, nonetheless, in
relating this approach to the mentally incompetent, as Simone de Beauvoir hints in
relation to the insane murderers she mentions in Prime of Life, 131.
15 For example, according to the early Victorian poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, in
"The Latest Decalogue": "Thou shalt not covet, but tradition Approves all forms of
competition."

208 Chapter Fourteen
superior place and status in the world. This was certainly intended to apply
to the bourgeoisie—and a fortiori to the fascists—of that particular time,
and would equally fit the apostles of global corporatism in the present. If
we are all in some degree prone to bad faith, such people are sure to be
particularly severely addicted, and if bad faith is to be deplored they are to
be especially condemned. To be sure, Brunet, the Communist militant in
The Roads to Freedom (of which the first volume appeared in 1945) is
also mired in dogmatic bad faith and yet is a relatively sympathetic
character; however, his project is to destroy the existing social universe,
not to assert his rightful place within it. Even setting aside the questions of
ethics and commitment, if found to be convincing and taken seriously,
Sartre's analysis of the cogito, consciousness, choice and responsibility,
leaves no room for any of the obscurantist fantasies noted above.
Political Legacy
Even those most appreciative of Sartre's life and writings are
constrained to admit the fallibility of some of his political judgments. His
commitment to political engagement, which he assumed in the mid-1940s,
was sometimes expressed in dubious fashion, for example, his degree of
identification with the Soviet bloc and the French Communist Party in the
early 1950s, and his embrace of the French Maoists in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Nevertheless, even when he was wrong, Sartre was, as the
phrase has it, "right to be wrong". If he chose highly contentious allies
with politically disreputable connections, he did so from the position that
it was necessary to decide between the available alternatives as they
actually existed, rather than to paralyse one's action on the pretext that an
imaginary perfection was not to be had. Sartre's primary and fundamental
commitment was to a project of emancipation: it is the thread that runs
through all his work from the early 1930s to the early 1970s.
From the mid-1940s, he correctly identified the principal threat to an
emancipatory programme as capitalism, and in particular American
capitalism and the imperial ambitions it generated in the US state system
(though never failing to appreciate the cultural attainments of American
society). In the context of the early twenty-first century, that insight
appears particularly prescient and well-founded, the more so when the
imperial project's ideological wrapping takes the form of market fundamentalism
and the kind of parliamentarianism that Sartre despised. No less
relevant is his intransigent denunciation of colonialism, a condemnation
which he expressed both in writing and in action, putting himself on the
line in both respects during the Algerian War. Once again, the relevance is

Sartre's Legacy in an Era of Obscurantism 209
not purely historical at a time when not only is imperial expansion a
present reality, but also the virtues of empire past and present are once
more being expounded in print and the broadcast media. 16
Marxism and the Dialectic
Sartre's reaction to the developments of the 1950s was the project of
reformulating Marxism, which became The Critique of Dialectical
Reason, the first volume published in 1960, the second volume remaining
unfinished and mostly unpublished during his lifetime. Certainly, the
circumstances of its composition were not encouraging, nor was the mode:
much was written when Sartre was maintaining his work-rate with wild
excesses of stimulant drugs, 17 not to speak of alcohol and tobacco. In the
words of Ronald Aronson, the text proved to be "awe inspiring and
chaotic, penetrating and sloppy to the point of incoherence" (although
much of it is also written with perfect clarity).
Does it matter? Marxism has been declared, on seemingly irrefutable
evidence, to be dead and buried, and no significant movement of the
present any longer claims to be inspired by it. 19 Aronson has a perceptive
insight, although his own volume was published as long ago as 1987:
"Sartre's failure opened the door for the current wave of post-Marxism."
This was even before the Soviet bloc fell, the direction of Chinese
development became fully apparent, and the political parties which
continued to use the "Communist" title or pretend to its inheritance
declared their allegiance to global markets and capitalist success. "Post-
Marxism" can of course mean many different things; it need not of
necessity be obscurantist, but the general discredit into which Marxism has
fallen has meant that, where previously it would have been grasped as an
explanation for oppression and a guide to action in resisting it, now all
manner of obscurantisms have come forward to present themselves as the
only effective explanation or alternative in an intolerable present.
For example, by the historian Niall Ferguson in Empire: How Britain Made the
Modern World. A group in the USA is republishing the works of the nineteenthcentury
author for boys, G. A. Henty, who wrote novels applauding imperialism.
Their objective is to enthuse American youth along similar lines.
17 The trade name was Corydrane. Sartre outrageously exceeded the stated dosage.
18 Aranson, Second Critique, 235.
19 The "Communist" Party which continues to enjoy support in Russia is a
nationalist formation with no relation even to the Stalinist version, let alone
anything nearer to Marx or Lenin. The Chinese regime, though still claiming
communist credentials, has abandoned all communist tenets.

210 Chapter Fourteen
Although the exposition of Sartre's argument in the Critique may
frequently appear confused, its essential outlines are clear enough. Perry
Anderson summarises them as follows:
The struggle against scarcity generated the division of labour and so the
struggle between classes: therewith man himself became the negation of
man. Violence, incessant oppression and exploitation of all recorded
societies, is thus internalised scarcity. The harsh domination of the natural
world over men and the divided antagonism of their efforts to transform it
to assure their lives typically give rise to serial collectivities—inhuman
ensembles of which each member is alien to each other and himself, and in
which the ends of all are confiscated in the total outcome of their actions.
Such series have always been the predominant form of social coexistence
in every mode of production to date. 20
By contrast, what Sartre terms a "fused group" is typified by a
revolutionary movement in the immediate hour of its victory, when what
up to that point have been serialised ensembles become a genuine
collective united in a common emancipatory endeavour. This state of
affairs is of necessity temporary and ephemeral: following the brief
interval of exaltation, circumstances—embodied in the collapse of
productive and distributive mechanisms, armed counter-revolution, foreign
aggression and similar emergencies—soon compel, if the revolution is to
survive, the establishment of institutionalised leadership, coercive
measures, bureaucracy; the quondam fused group is before long returned
to seriality and the cycle recommences, albeit of course in transformed
circumstances, not as simple repetition—an important point. It is easy
enough to discern equivalent processes at work in circumstances less
dramatic than those of revolutionary success and degeneration.
This account obviously oversimplifies, not only omitting important
elements of Sartre's conceptual apparatus, but also failing to mention the
specific examples he calls upon to sustain his case, most importantly the
French and Russian revolutions. The title of his text is not accidental—this
is a dialectical approach—and Sartre's method is defined as progressiveregressive
in its understanding, from the individual to the collective and
back form the collective to the individual, "the objective movement of
history through the historical individual and the mark made by the
individual on the historical movement". 21 Thus he sets out to rescue
Marxism from the reductionist and mechanistic understanding which
Anderson, Considerations, 86-87.
21 Sartre, in Situations, VII, quoted in Ian Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism, 180.

Sartre's Legacy in an Era of Obscurantism 211
plagued its institutional forms throughout most of its history. His aim is to
strengthen Marxist analyses with the insights of existentialism, once and
for all to dispose of its mechanistic variants.
The aim of the Critique is to re-evaluate and strengthen some of the
basic Marxian concepts and to utilise them as tools for understanding the
manner in which the history of the communist movement and the USSR
worked out, but it also provides clues and anticipatory insights as to why
the Marxist intellectual universe imploded near the end of the century.
Sartre's developed thoughts on this would have been most illuminating
had he lived long enough and remained well enough to express them.
What relevance does this have to contemporary affairs? The Critique
has in the past tended to be dismissed as an over-ambitious failure (even
from positions sympathetic to Sartre). However, as time has passed, its
merits have become more apparent; particularly in the light of the "new
world order" of the post-1989 era, it deserves a positive re-evaluation. The
analyses of individual/collective relationships that it elaborates hold
suggestive clues towards understanding the potentialities existing in the
current balance of forces within political and social relations today.
It is a perceptive remark on Perry Anderson's part that the Western
Marxist tradition—which can be dated from the aftermath of the First
World War and in which he positions Sartre (although others, e.g. Ronald
Aronson, dispute this)—has been distinguished by an outlook of historical
pessimism, in contrast to the optimism of Marxism's founders and
adherents (at different times) in both the Second and the Third Internationals.
This he attributes, on the one hand, to the conviction held by its
adherents of certain victory for the global working class in the decades
before 1914, and following the Bolshevik Revolution; and, on the other, to
the reality of defeat and capitalist ascendancy, in one form or another,
during most of the twentieth century.
By the twenty-first century, the triumph of global corporatism appears
to be complete, not only materially but ideologically as well. Francis
Fukuyama's notorious phrase regarding "the end of history" might be
deemed absurd at one level (and even included in the table of
obscurantisms) yet, in the narrower sense that global corporatism and its
attendant ideologies now no longer have any convincing competitors, he
might be judged to have had a point. This is not to say that there is not
plenty of anger and opposition directed at the global marketisation of
goods, services and labour (and the baleful consequences which follow),
but that, as yet, there is no convincing alternative to it—as its apologists

212 Chapter Fourteen
never fail to remind us. I would argue that if any such alternative ever
emerges, Sartre's work is likely to be intrinsic to its theoretical foundation.
However, for the moment we have sought to consider his philosophy in
relation to the infestation of contemporary obscurantisms. It surely
provides an invaluable basis for understanding "how mumbo-jumbo
conquered the world", to cite the title of Francis Wheen's recent volume, 23
as a prelude to this quotation from Aronson:
Whatever struggles may now occur, however fierce they may become, they
will take place within "the framework of retotalized retotalization." This is
the key to understanding the relationship between groups and masses in
history. But it is ignored by positivist historians [emphasis added] who see
only active forces acting on the passive masses—as if a physical force is
engaged in some "natural" process. Sartre's theme of "retotalization" on
the contrary allows us to grasp the intelligibility of this otherwise puzzling
phenomenon: "the action of action on action". The totalizing action of the
leaders (the totalization of directed retotalizations) depends on the action of
the led (retotalized totalizations) for its success. 24
Aronson is also the author of The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to
Hope. It was published over twenty years ago, when the menace of nuclear
war was still regarded as the most threatening planetary issue. Possibly it
would now be appropriate to reverse the terms of the title, and write
instead on the theme of: "The dialectic of hope: a preface to disaster"—
something which Sartre would have been admirably equipped to do. The
loss of the transcendent hope represented by socialism in its different
varieties (or its pale welfare equivalent in the USA), of the presumption
that a different order of things was possible from that of the commodification
of human relationships with the market as supreme arbiter, has
opened the door to the entry, on a mass scale, of ancient prejudices into the
public consciousness as ersatz substitutes. However, not in their ancient
form, 25 but subject to the dialectic of modernity, which is liable, if
anything, to render them not less obscurantist but, on the contrary, even
more so.
It is indicative that the anti-globalisation movements, whatever their merits,
concentrate on negative critique and do not propose an alternative economic order
that will stand up to scrutiny.
23
Wheen does not in fact explain how, but rather confines himself to describing
the species of mumbo-jumbo.
24
Aronson, Second Critique, 136.
25
See for example Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, 1992.

Sartre's Legacy in an Era of Obscurantism 213
The threatened environmental catastrophe, the overriding issue of the
present, could most usefully, with appropriate modifications, be subjected
to the kind of analysis that Sartre carried out on Soviet society in the
unfinished second volume of the Critique: "[T]he anti-social forces of the
practico-inert impose a negative unity of self-destruction on the society, by
usurping the unifying power of the praxis which produced them." 26 Indeed
it could almost be possible to imagine fancifully that the Critique might
have been written with this crisis specifically in mind. Consider, for
example, the following, as summarised by Aronson (Sartre was in this
instance discussing problems of industrialisation in the USSR):
For an example of "necessity" revealing praxis as its underside, Sartre
takes the inert synthetic relationship set up between two cities when
industrial expansion requires that their communications be improved [...].
If there is now a scarcity of transport between A and B, this situation
demands new investment of resources. But even this choice will only solve
the problem by posing new ones elsewhere, while retaining the original
practico-inert demands engendered by the original praxis. Necessity then is
"the temporary alienation of this praxis in its own practical field" by
creating new relations between elements of the field. 27
Conclusion
Obscurantist tendencies have always maintained an underground
survival, even in the most rationalist of cultures. The novelty of present
times is that they have flooded to the surface and, to change the metaphor,
are militantly on the march around the globe, and more worryingly still,
they have started to be taken seriously in areas of intellectual discourse. 28
What might be termed the positivist opposition to their penetration,
represented by writers like Francis Wheen or Richard Dawkins, is
handicapped by the lack of an effective philosophical foundation and an
adequate understanding of what has generated them; in other words, they
lack a dialectical comprehension of the processes at work. 29 The strength
of Sartre's approach is that it can supply just that: it is capable of totalising
the field under consideration. Sartre's philosophy and other writings, and
their engagement with the circumstances and dilemmas of his time, hold
Quoted in Aronson, Second Critique, 115.
27 Ibid., 126.
28 For example, in 2005, The Times Higher Education Supplement (as it then was)
conducted a seemingly serious discussion on the theme of "Intelligent Design".
29 Demonstrated in the dreadful final section of Wheen's otherwise admirable
volume.

214 Chapter Fourteen
numerous lessons for our present one. Overall, they provide an understanding
of human relationships much more valid than the alternatives,
based as those are on the variety of mysticisms currently on offer, or on
the rationalist perspectives which lack his dialectical insights.
Works Cited
Anderson, Perry. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: Verso,
1979.
Aronson, Ronald. The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope. London:
Verso, 1983.
—. Sartre*s Second Critique. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Prime of Life (trans. Peter Green).
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
Birchall, Ian. Sartre Against Stalinism. New York and Oxford: Berghahn,
2004.
Clough, Arthur Hugh. "The Latest Decalogue", in Victorian Poetry (ed. E.
K. Brown), 384. New York: The Ronald Press, 1942.
Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
Gellner, Ernest. Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Gerassi, John. Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of his Century.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989.
La Carpa, Dominik. A Preface to Sartre. London: Methuen, 1979.
Nairn, Tom. "Breakwaters of 2000: From Ethnic to Civic Nationalism",
New Left Review, 214, November / December 1995, 91-103.
O'Donohoe, Benedict. "Why Sartre Matters", Philosophy Now, November
/December 2005, 7-10.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness (trans. Hazel Barnes). London:
Methuen, 1969.
—. Critique of Dialectical Reason, I (trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith).
London: Verso, 2004.
Schick, Carol, JoAnn Jaffe and Alisa M. Watkinson (eds). Contesting
Fundamentalisms. Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2004.
Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont. Intellectual Impostures. London: Profile,
1998.
Wheen, Francis. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short
History of Modern Delusions. London: Fourth Estate, 2004.

CONTRIBUTORS
CAM CLAYTON
Cam Clayton wrote the paper included in this collection as a Masters
student in philosophy at Brock University, St Catharines, Ontario. He is
now a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Guelph, also
in Ontario.
CHRISTINE D AIGLE
Christine Daigle is the Director of the Centre for Women's Studies and
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brock University, St Catharines,
Ontario. She is also President of the North American Sartre Society. She is
the author of Le Nihilisme, est-il un humanisme? ttude sur Nietzsche et
Sartre (Presses de l'Universit£ Laval, 2005), and editor of Existentialist
Thinkers and Ethics (McGill/Queen's University Press, 2006). She has coedited
with Jacob Golomb the volume Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of
Influence (Indiana University Press, 2008), and has authored a book on
Sartre forthcoming in the Routledge Critical Thinkers Series (2009). She
has published articles in Sartre Studies International and the Journal of
Nietzsche Studies. Her research focuses on the works of Friedrich
Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and examines the
phenomenological, ethical and political import of their respective
philosophies.
DAVID DRAKE
David Drake is Maitre de conferences associe at the Institut d'Etudes
europ^ennes, University Paris VIII. He is a former Secretary and
President of the UK Sartre Society and is currently an Executive Editor
of Sartre Studies International. He has given conference papers on
Sartre in the UK, France, North America and China, and has published
on Sartre both in the UK and in France. He is the author of a biography
of Sartre—published in English by Haus in 2005, then in Spanish in
2006—and has also published widely on French intellectuals and
politics, notably: French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus
Affair to the Occupation (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005), and Intellectuals
and Politics in Post-War France (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002). He is a

216 Contributors
member of the Editorial Boards of Modern and Contemporary France and
of the Journal of War and Culture Studies.
ROYELVETON
Roy Elveton is Maxine H. and Winston R. Wallin Professor of Philosophy
and Cognitive Studies at Carleton College, Minnesota. He has published
The Phenomenology ofHusserl (Noesis Press, 2000) and numerous papers
on Husserl, phenomenology, phenomenology of language, Nietzsche and
cognitive science, and has edited Educating for Participatory Democracy:
Paradoxes in Globalizing Logic (Hampton Press, 2006).
DEBORAH EVANS
Deborah Evans is an independent scholar who has published articles on
Sartre in Sartre Studies International, and on Beauvoir in Simone de
Beauvoir Studies. She has also contributed an essay ("Sartre and Beauvoir
on Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic and the Question of the 'Look'") to the
collective volume, Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of Influence (eds
Christine Daigle and Joseph Golomb), forthcoming with Indiana
University Press. She is currently working on a monograph for Cambridge
Scholars Publishing entitled: Sartre and Beauvoir: Public Images, Private
Lives. Her research interests include Sartre, Beauvoir, Hegel, Heidegger,
Derrida and contemporary philosophy.
NICHOLAS FARRELL FOX
Nik Farrell Fox is an independent academic and writer who has taught
philosophy at the University of Bristol. In addition to a series of articles on
the subjects of music, philosophy and existentialism, he is currently
writing a book, The Fragmentation of Music in the Postmodern Age. His
first book, The New Sartre: Explorations in Postmodernism, was
published in 2003 by Continuum.
ALAIN FLAJOLIET
Alain Flajoliet studied phenomenology in the mid-1970s under Jean-
Toussaint Desanti and Paul Ricceur, and took his doctorate in 2000 with a
thesis on Sartre's first philosophy. He works on the relations between
anthropology, phenomenology and metaphysics. He has published a book,
La Premiere Philosophic de Sartre (Champion, 2008), as well as many
articles and papers on Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Heidegger. He
is currently a Board member of the Groupe d y etudes sartriennes and of the
French School of Daseinsanalyse. He is also a member of the Editorial
Advisory Board of the journal ttudes sartriennes.

Sartre's Second Century 217
SlMONE MULLER
Simone Muller is a Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow in Japanese
Studies at Zurich University, Switzerland. She focuses on Japanese
literature and history of ideas, and her publications include articles on
classical Japanese dream poetry and modern literary issues, such as the
writings of Serizawa Kqjird and Miyamoto Yuriko. She is currently
working on a postdoctoral thesis on the impact of Sartrean existentialism
on post-war Japanese literature and intellectual thought. Reflecting that
research, she has presented papers at various international conferences,
including those of the French, the UK, and the North American Sartre
Societies. Among her publications on Sartre are studies of his concept of
freedom in the writings of Noma Hiroshi, and of the influence of his
universalism in post-war Japan. Simone's latest article, considering the
impact of existentialism on the writings of Shiina Rinzo and 6e
Kenzaburo, is published in the German periodical Bochumer Jahrbuch zur
Ostasienforschung (Fall 2008).
BENEDICT O'DONOHOE
Ben O'Donohoe took his first degree in French and his doctorate at
Magdalen College, Oxford, and is now Head of Modern Languages at the
University of Sussex. He has published Sartre*s Theatre: Acts for Life
(Peter Lang, 2005) and a critical edition of Sartre's screenplay, Les Jeux
sontfaits (Routledge, 1990), plus a score of articles or chapters in the UK,
France, Canada, Japan, the USA and Australia. He has also given
numerous papers, notably around Sartre's centenary celebration in 2005,
to conferences in San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, Toronto, Bath,
Bristol, London, Leeds, Dublin and Paris. He is currently President of the
UK Sartre Society and UK-side Reviews Editor of the journal Sartre
Studies International
IANRHOAD
Ian Rhoad is a doctoral student in the Department of Philosophy at the
New School for Social Research in New York City, and Adjunct Instructor
of Philosophy at St Johns University. He has presented numerous papers at
academic conferences, most recently a paper entitled "The Politics of
Spectacle" at the Graduate Student Philosophy Conference at Emory
University. His current research focuses on twentieth-century French
thought and the idea of democracy.

218 Contributors
PETER ROYLE
Peter Royle is a Professor Emeritus at Trent University, Peterborough,
Ontario. He has published numerous articles on Sartre as well as three
books: UEnfer et la liberte: le theatre de Sartre (Presses de l'Universite
Laval, 1973); The Sartre-Camus Controversy: A Literary and Philosophical
Critique (University of Ottawa Press, 1982); L'Homme et le neant chez
Jean-Paul Sartre (Laval, 2005). He organized a major conference of the
North American Sartre Society at Trent University in May 1993, and has
given papers on guilt and responsibility, and on the Sartrean conception of
space, at annual conferences of the Groupe d*etudes sartriennes in Paris.
He has also given many other papers at conferences in Canada, the USA,
the UK, Ireland, and South Africa.
BRADLEY STEPHENS
Bradley Stephens is Lecturer in French at the University of Bristol, UK.
He is a member of the Executive Committees of both the UK Sartre
Society and BIRTHA (Bristol Institute for Research in The Humanities
and Arts). His research focuses on literary cultures of engagement in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he has published various articles
and book contributions in this field, including work on Sartre, Victor
Hugo, Walter Benjamin, Charles Renouvier, and John Steinbeck. He is
also the co-editor of Transmissions: Essays in French Literature, Thought
and Cinema (Peter Lang, 2007), and is currently preparing another book
that explores previously overlooked connections between Sartre and Hugo.
WILLIE THOMPSON
Willie Thompson was formerly Professor of Contemporary History at
Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland. He is currently retired and lives
in Sunderland.