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, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or 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 ROY ELVETON AND BENEDICT O'DONOHOE

ix

CHAPTER ONE SARTRE: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH DAVID DRAKE

1

CHAPTER Two AUTOBIOGRAPHY, ONTOLOGY AND RESPONSIBILITY ROY ELVETON

17

CHAPTER THREE LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY IN SARTRE'S EARLY WRITINGS ALAIN FLAJOLIET

35

CHAPTER FOUR TEMPORALITY AND THE DEATH OF LUCIENNE IN NAUSEA CAM CLAYTON

46

CHAPTER FIVE SARTRE AND NIETZSCHE: BROTHERS IN ARMS CHRISTINE DAIGLE

56

CHAPTER SIX

73

1945 - 2005: EXISTENTIALISM AND HUMANISM SIXTY YEARS ON DEBORAH EVANS CHAPTER SEVEN SARTRE, INTENTIONALITY AND PRAXIS ROY ELVETON CHAPTER EIGHT THE NEW SARTRE: A POSTMODERN PROGENITOR? NICHOLAS FARRELL FOX

86

104

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CHAPTER NINE A SURREPTITIOUS ROMANTIC? READING SARTRE WITH VICTOR HUGO BRADLEY STEPHENS

123

CHAPTER TEN HIDDEN WORDPLAY IN THE WORKS OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE PETER ROYLE

142

CHAPTER ELEVEN DESTABILIZING IDENTITIES AND DISTINCTIONS: THE LITERARY-PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERIENCE OF HOPE NOW IANRHOAD

155

CHAPTER TWELVE CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES: SARTRE, CLOONEY, MCCARTHY, MURAKAMI BENEDICT O'DONOHOE

173

CHAPTER THIRTEEN SARTRE'S IMPACT ON THE WRITINGS AND MOVIES OF OSHIMA NAGISA SIMONEMULLER

191

CHAPTER FOURTEEN SARTRE'S LEGACY IN AN ERA OF OBSCURANTISM WILLIE THOMPSON

202

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.

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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,

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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 postEnlightenment 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—BernardHenri 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.

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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 hisrighteye. "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 14th 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".

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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.

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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 38th 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 FrancoSoviet 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 UIdiot 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".

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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 13th Annual Conference of the UK Sartre Society at the Institut Fran^ais, London.

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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

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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 for2

Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 483. 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. 3

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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.

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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. 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). 10

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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. Being and Nothingness, 498. 14 War Diaries, 2U.

13

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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. Ibid., 209. 17 Ibid. 18 Sartre, Notebooks, 121. 16

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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.

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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.

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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 thefirsttime 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.

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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. Heidegger, Being and Time, 351. 27 Ibid., 360. 28 James Phillips, Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry. 26

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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 existential9,30 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. Dasein1s 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. Being and Time, 168. 31 Heidegger's Volk, 199. 32 Ibid., 204. 30

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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. Heidegger, The Question of Technology, 17. 35 Ibid. 34

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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. Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art", in David Krell (ed.), Basic Writings, 170. 38 Ibid., 185. 37

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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.

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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

41

David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger and After, 230. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 7, 36.

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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, 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. 2

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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.

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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. Ibid., 641. 10 Ibid 11 Ibid., 640. 12 "Metaphysica est scientia prima cognitionis humanae principia continens" (Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 1739, § 1).

9

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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 likefishscales.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. 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. 14

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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. Being and Nothingness, 464. 23 Ibid., 501. 24 Ibid., 552, my emphasis. 22

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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. 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. 26

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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.

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"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. Ibid., 122. 33 Ibid., 153. 34 Ibid., 157. 32

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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).

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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.

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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 15th 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.

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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 6

Ibid., 96. Ibid., 95.

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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 o f f 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 8

Being and Nothingness, 161. Ibid., 161.

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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 amfrombehind.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 [.. .]. 1 3 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. Ibid., 102. 11 Being and Nothingness, 172. 12 Ibid., 174. 13 Ibid., 175. 10

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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 hasfled[...]. Iflee.The criminal hasfled[...]. [...] I walk, Iflee[...]. He runs toflee[...].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 perpetualflightin 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 aflightoutside 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. Ibid., 102. 16 Being and Nothingness, 285. 17 Ibid., 179. 15

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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 onlyfindthese 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 19

Nausea, 32. Being and Nothingness, 639.

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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 21

Ibid., 641-42. Ibid., 444.

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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. Ibid., 440. 24 Nausea, 79. 25 Being and Nothingness, 517. 26 Ibid., 340.

23

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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. Nausea, 178. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 28

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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.

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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

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(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,fccritsdejeunesse, 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).

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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).

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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. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, 2. 13 Nietzsche, Daybreak, §87, 88.

12

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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. 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). 15

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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.

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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. 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). 20

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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).241 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. 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. 22

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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.

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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.

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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. 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.

27

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must choose now as if even this choice was to recur indefinitely. Only a choice or a deed that contributes to humanflourishingis 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 conquers99.30 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 being32 that See Sartre, Saint Genet Actor and Martyr, 346-50. 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 30

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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).

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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 theflourishingof all and conclude that in order to be coherent, Nietzsche must stand for a "virtue politics", i.e. a politics that would favour theflourishingof 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

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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.

Works Cited 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), 195-210. —. "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", uLes Mots"). Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1996. Montinari, Mazzion. "La Volonte de puissance" nfexiste 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".

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—. 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.

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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, 27879). 5 "Si Dieu n'existait pas, tout serait permis" (Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, 36).

1945-2005: Existentialism and Humanism Sixty Years On 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

7

"[V]ous etes libre, choisissez, c'est-a-dire inventez" (ibid., 47). "[L]'homme est condamne' a §tre libre" (ibid., 37).

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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). 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'

9

1945-2005: Existentialism and Humanism Sixty Years On 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).

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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.

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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
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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 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.

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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).

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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. "[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). 26

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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 —. 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.

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CHAPTER SEVEN SARTRE, INTENTIONALITY AND PRAXIS1 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.

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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 6

Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness Transcendence, 46.

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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. Ibid., 57. 9 Sartre, Nausea, 131. 8

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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 seemsridiculousto 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 11

Nausea, 125. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, 133f.

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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

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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. Ibid., 261. 14 Ibid., 263. 15 Ibid., 266. 13

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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. 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. 17

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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 22

Being and Nothingness, 125. Ibid., 121.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 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." 30

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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

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"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".

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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 precisefigurativesigns 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.

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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.

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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. "(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. 2

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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: [...] afigurewhose 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. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 56. 6 Quoted in Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History, 5 7 Howells, "Introduction", in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, 1. 5

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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 9

Ibid., 2. Ibid.

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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.

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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 Purpose Presence Transcendence Centring Synthesis Art object/Finished work Design Hierarchy Distance

Postmodernism Play Absence Immanence Dispersal Antithesis Process/Happening Chance Anarchy 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 12

Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, 37. See Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus, Chapter 1.

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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-itselff) 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. McBride, "Existential Marxism and Postmodernism", 332. 15 See, for instance, Critique, 33-35. 14

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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, UIdiot de lafamille, III, 47 (my translation). Foucault, "How we Behave", 64. 18 In Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 42. 19 See, for instance, Lyotard, "Rewriting Modernity", in Substance, 1987. 17

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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 Levi20 21

Guattari, "The Postmodern Dead End", 40. See Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, 62, 70.

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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).

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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. 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. 27

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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. 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). 30

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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 35

Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 72. For a description of this incident see Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, 780-81.

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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.

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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 38

Frederic Jameson, "The Sartrean Origin", 19. Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World, 353.

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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).

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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. Derrida, "II courait mort", 44,40 (my translations). 43 In Gane, Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory, 17. 42

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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.

Works Cited Aronson, Ronald. Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World. London: New Left Books, 1980. 44 45

Sartre, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, 109-10. Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, 94.

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Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987. Boundas, Constantin. "Foreclosure of the Other: From Sartre to Deleuze", in W. McBride (ed.), Sartre's French Contemporaries and Enduring Influences. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. Chancel, Jacques. "Radioscopie: Roland Barthes", in Radioscopie, vol. 4, 1976,255-56. Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre: A Life. London: Heinemann, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. "II a ete mon maitre", Arts, November 1964,1207-27. —. Dialogues (trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habbersam). London: Athlone Press, 1987. —. Negotiations, 1972-1990 (trans. M. Joughin). New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. —. "'II courait mort: Salut, salut.' Notes pour un courrier aux Temps modernes", in Les Temps modernes, no. 587, 1996, 61-74. Dobson, Andrew. Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason: A Theory of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Farrell Fox, Nicholas. The New Sartre: Explorations in Postmodernism. London: Continuum, 2003. Foucault, Michel. Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori (trans. R. Goldstein and J. Cascaito). New York: Semiotext(e), 1991. —. Les Mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. —. "How we Behave", Vanity Fair, November 1983. Gane, Michael. Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory. London: Routledge, 1991. Guattari, Felix. "The Postmodern Dead End", Flash Art, no. 128, 1986, 40-41. Habermas, Jurgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. —. The Postmodern Turn. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987. Howells, Christina. "Introduction", in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (ed. C. Howells). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Jameson, Frederic. "The Sartrean Origin", Sartre Studies International, vol. 1, no. 1-2, Berghahn, 1995,1-20.

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Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "Rewriting Modernity", Substance, no. 54,1987. McBride, William. "Existential Marxism and Postmodernism at our Fin de Siecle", in W. McBride (ed.), Sartre's French Contemporaries and Enduring Influences. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. 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, 195211. 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, 929. —. "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. 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.

2

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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". 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 16

Howells, Sartre, the Necessity of Freedom, 115. Murdoch, Romantic Rationalist, 92.

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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).

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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 hereMurdoch, Romantic Rationalist, 111.

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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. "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, 15455). 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). 23

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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).

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"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).

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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. "[...] 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). 46

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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).

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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, 56970). 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).

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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. "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).

61

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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.

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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 c h e f ("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 c h e f ? 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 wordplay2) 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

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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 c h e f 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, quifigureraitdans les manuels d'histoire sous le nom d'Entre-deux-guerres" {Le Sursis, in (Euvres romanesques, 807).

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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". 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. 8

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aforementioned Delarue (literally, "of the street"), Sartre's quasiDoppelgdnger 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. 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). 11

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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. "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. 14

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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).

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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).

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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).

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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. [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.] 24

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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. "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, 26

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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.

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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).

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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 15th Biennial Conference of the North American Sartre Society at Fordham University, Manhattan, New York City, 27-29 October 2006.

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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.

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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 mid1930s 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. 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

4

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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

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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.

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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. 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). 10

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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 hefinishesit. This supposes a complex relation between the author and the reader [...].x l 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.

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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 13

Ibid., 216, my italics. Ibid., 140.

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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. See Aronson, "Sartre's Last Words", 12-13. 16 Hope Now, 73-74. 15

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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 time18—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. See Sartre, in Simone de Beauvoir, Adiewc, 211. 19 The Imaginary, 63.

18

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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. Ibid., 71. 23 Ibid., 71. 24 Ibid., 67. 25 Ibid., 82. 22

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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 tofindthe 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.

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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".321 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. 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). 32

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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.

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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. 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 thefilial/ fraternal feeling and obligation that 37

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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.

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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. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 101-102. 43 Hope Now, 81. 42

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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.

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La Part dufeu and Good Night, and Good Luck2 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 15th 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.

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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 early1950s, 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.

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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.

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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.

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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. "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.). 9

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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 Migfighters."13These 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). "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). 14

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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.).

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(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.). "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). 20

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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).

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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.

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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,271 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. 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 21st Century?]—were published in Tokyo in 2007. 28

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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). "[...] 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. 30

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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).

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"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. Ibid., 151. 41 Ibid., 153. 42 "J'etais Roquentin [...]; en meme temps j'&ais moi [...]" {Les Mots, 210, Sartre's emphases). 40

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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. 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.

44

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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). "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). 50

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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 (19241993) and the Nobel prize laureate 6 e 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

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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.

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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 13th Conference of the UK Sartre Society at the Institut Fran?ais, London, 21 October 2006. 5 6shima(1988), 127. 6 Desser, 3.

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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. "[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. 8

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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.

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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. Ibid., 335. 14 See http://www.filref.com/directors/dirpages/oshima.html. 15 See Turim, 65. 16 See ibid., 64. 13

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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. See Sat6,38. 19 Seehttp://www.3sat.de/3sat.php?http://www.3sat.de/ard/50268/index.html. 18

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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 21

See Suzuki, 77. Sat6, 247.

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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. Ibid., 75. 24 See Sato, 381. 23

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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. Mellen, 261. 27 Oshima (1988), 67. 26

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—. 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, 194547. —. 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 OAS3 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.

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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 Marxism7 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.

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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,

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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.

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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. Ibid., 31. 13 Ibid., 131. The Critique makes this perfectly plain. 12

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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."

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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

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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. "PostMarxism" 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.

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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

21

Anderson, Considerations, 86-87. Sartre, in Situations, VII, quoted in Ian Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism, 180.

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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

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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.

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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. 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.

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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 JeanToussaint 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 dyetudes 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 6 e 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.

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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.