Philosophy and Literature

Jean-Paul Sartre's surprising biographies of Tintoretto, Calder, Giacometti, Baudelaire, Gide, Camus, and Genet mirror his own autobiography, The Words. The structures of these still-life portraits express Sartre's primary philosophical preoccupations: bad faith and the flight from time, radical freedom and the sense of one's own emptiness, and embodiment and identification with the look of the Other. Although these biographies are told as narratives of choice and creativity, the formative agents in these lives are Time and Chance.