Jean-Paul Sartre

A few works of the famous Bulgarian writer Yordan Radichkov (1929-2004) are interpreted philosophically. What is investigated is the availability and inovation of well-known ideas of Western philosophy in them. The great literature refers to human life and being: thus, it shares many topics with philosophy.

The famous Bulgariann writer Yordan Radichkov's works are interpreted philosophically. The genre of philosophical and literary criticism is utilized. Any great writer referring to considerable questions of human life and being, and thus, philosophical. A few short stories, plays, and novels of Radichkov (1929-2004) are interpreted accordingly their philosophical content.

This essay utilizes the work of the comedy group, Monty Python, as a means of introducing basic concepts in Existentialism, especially as it pertains to the writings of Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus.

The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between revolution and violence in Marxism and in a series of texts drawing on Marxian theory. Part 1 outlines the basic normative frameworks which determine the outer limits of permissible violence in Marxism. Part 2 presents a critical analysis of a series of later discussions - by Sorel, Fanon and Žižek - which transformed the terms in which violence was discussed by developing one particular aspect of Marxist thought. By teasing (...) out the implications of revolutionary theory for the commission and permission of violence, it is possible to specify those points at which it tends towards excess. This in turn points towards limits that an adequate normative theory of revolutionary violence should establish. (shrink)

Phenomenology's central insight is that affectivity is not an inconsequential or contingent characteristic of human existence. Emotions, moods, sentiments, and feelings are not accidents of human existence. They do not happen to happen to us. Rather, we exist the way we do because of and through our affective experiences. Phenomenology thus acknowledges the centrality and ubiquity of affectivity by noting the multitude of ways in which our existence is permeated by our various affective experiences. Yet, it also insists that such (...) experiences are both revealing and constitutive of human nature. It is precisely this last point that marks an important distinction between a phenomenological study of affectivity and perhaps all others. For phenomenology, one cannot understand the nature of human existence without coming to terms with the character of affectivity and at the same time, one cannot come to terms with the character of affectivity without understanding the nature of human existence. Practical and social engagements, scientific endeavors, familial and political interactions are all predicted on the fact that we are beings who are capable of being affectively attuned to ourselves, to the world, and to others. In this entry, we discuss Martin Heidegger's and Jean-Paul Sartre's respective accounts of affectivity. In the first section, we present Heidegger's understanding of affective existence. In this context, we discuss the significance of moods and offer an analysis of the affective phenomena of fear, anxiety, and boredom. In the second section, we present an overview of Sartre's account of emotions and advance a Sartrean interpretation of fear and boredom. We conclude by raising some brief concerns with both accounts. (shrink)

The aim of this article is twofold. First, I want to offer an introduction of and a comparison between three accounts of philistinism. Secondly, I show how the phenomenon of philistinism, a failure to speak for oneself, helps to develop an original perspective on Wittgenstein’s moral thought. It is often claimed that Wittgenstein’s personal ethics were quite unorthodox because he repeatedly seems to have supported destruction, war and slavery. I argue that, in the light of my discussion of philistinism, the (...) remarks upon which such conclusions are based should be read differently. (shrink)

A review of Butler's first book. An English version has been posted.

The basic entity in phenomenology is the phenomenon. Knowing the phenomenon is another issue. The phenomenon has been described as the real natural object or the appearance directly perceived in phenomenology and analytic philosophy of perception. Within both traditions, philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Russell and Wittgenstein have considered that perceptual experience demonstrates what a phenomenon is on the line between the mind and the external world. Therefore, conceptualizing the phenomenon is based on the perceptual evidence. However, if the (...) belief that perception is “theory-laden” is true, then perception can also be “philosophy-laden.” These philosophers have not noticed whether perceptual knowledge is independent of philosophies. If perceptual knowledge is not independent of philosophies, a philosopher’s background philosophy can influence what he or she claims to know about the phenomenon. For Husserl, experience is direct evidence of what exists. The textual evidence shows that Sartre rejects the distinction between appearance and reality based on the assumption of the phenomenon. By examining Husserl’s Ideas and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness I conclude that these philosophers’ philosophical languages influence their perceptual knowledge. Philosophical traditions affect the thoughts of perception. (shrink)

This article explores the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality for his early theories of existence and expression. The holistic, social, and plural nature of expressive human behavior, which is elaborated in The Structure of Behavior, is used to argue against criticisms that his early works remain stuck in naturalism. Upon this theory of expression and through a close reading of 'Le corps comme être sexué' chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception, many classic criticisms of his phenomenology of sexuality are (...) challenged. Sexuality is ultimately identified with the most fundamental form of corporeal existence and is shown to be the ambiguous setting within which social and personal meaning emerges. The accounts of expression and sexuality are then used to criticize Sartre’s interpretation of bad faith. (shrink)

This thesis aims to explain why art is the ideal agent for overcoming the absurdity and the meaninglessness of existence. The focus is Camus’ Rebellion in conjunction with Sartre’s notion of Authenticity. Together they provide an adequate answer to the fundamental questions of human existence. Together Camus’ rebellion and Sartre’s authenticity provide the necessary foundations for the overall authenticity of art, facilitating the emergence of purpose from the abyss of absurdity.

Beginning with a study of need and its relationship to violence in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, this paper argues that need, in the midst of scarcity, can both be a catalyst for violence and a force in the service of love. It warns against an antagonistic view of need and of ethics that emerges in Sartre’s Critique, drawing on Sartre’s own ongoing commitments to existentialism and also on the work of Primo Levi. In particular, it warns against the danger (...) of reducing an ethics of need to one of Manichean violence. It also introduces the concept of ‘second-person needs’, which include needs of one’s own for the needs of others to be met. This concept is resonant with the idea of authentic love introduced in Sartre’s earlier, unfinished Notebooks for an Ethics, with the suggestions concerning a concrete, material ethics offered in Sartre’s Rome Lecture of 1964, as well as with Sartre’s concept of the fused group in the Critique itself. (shrink)

According to philosopher Paul Woodruff, reverent awe is a feeling of being limited or dwarfed by something larger than the human, usually accompanied by feelings of respect for fellow human beings. Drawing from Jean-Paul Sartre’s early philosophy, this article responds positively to the title question, showing how reverent awe is in bad faith yet is similar to anguish, and unique with respect to both. Especially remarkable in reverent awe is the feeling of connectedness to humankind. In section two, building on (...) this section one framework of how Sartrean consciousness can be reverent, the article explores how being-in-itself can be an object of reverent awe. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of racism as rooted in social structural processes. Using Sartre, I attempt to give a general analysis of what I refer to as the “structures” of our social world, namely the practico-inert, serial collectives, and social groups. I then apply this analysis to expose and elucidate “racist structures,” specifically those that are oftentimes assumed to be ‘race neutral’. By highlighting structures of racial oppression and domination, I aim to justify: 1) the imperative of creating conditions (...) free from oppression and domination, over the adherence to ‘ideal’ principles which perpetuate racial injustice; 2) the shared responsibility we have collectively to resist and transform social structural processes that continue to produce racial injustice. (shrink)

Alfred Betschart has claimed that the project of existential Marxism is a contradiction in terms, but this argument, even when supported by many experts and quotes from Sartre’s 1975 interview, misses the point of my Boston Review article, “The Philosophy of Our Time.” I believe the important argument today is not about whether we can prove that Sartre ever became a full-fledged Marxist, but rather about the political and philosophical possibility, and importance today, of existentialist Marxism.

Sartre’s scattered commentaries and remarks on theater, published in a variety of media outlets, as well as in the most unlikely of essays, were finally assembled late in Sartre’s career and published in one volume, Un Théâtre de situations, put together by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka in 1973. Inevitably, a number of later or missing theatrical documents then came to light, and an updated edition of Un Théâtre de situations appeared in 1992. There still remained, however, other documents on (...) theater which for one reason or another were not included in the later volume. Two of these documents are published interviews that Sartre gave to the Russian theater journal, Teatr, in 1956 and 1962. It is those virtually unknown interviews by Sartre on theater that we are pleased to publish here for the first time in English translation. (shrink)

Ronald Aronson praises Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism in an essay in the Boston Review. I argue that existential Marxism is a case of a contradictio in adiecto. Sartre was never recognized as a Marxist by his contemporaries. He not only failed to show any interest in the question of economic exploitation, but most of the answers he gave in the Critique even contradicted Marxist theory. His expression of Marxism as the philosophy of our time seems to have rather been more (...) an act of courtesy than the expression of deep conviction. As Sartre himself later said, Marxism and existentialism are quite separate philosophies. (shrink)

Heidegger and Sartre developed the projects of their fundamental ontologies within the framework of the phenomenological approach. The traditional view of reality is based on dualistic oppositions of ideal and material, spirit and body, reality and possibility, and visibility and essence. It is phenomenology that enables elimination of the above-mentioned dualisms and restoration of the world’s ontological unity on a reliable foundation. Though Sartre’s existentialism was exposed to criticism both from right, and from the left intellectuals, and is not a (...) “fashionable” current at present, and the fundamental ontology of Heidegger was estimated by Levinas as ontology of the power subject-centred line, nevertheless the author considers that attention which is paid in these concepts to such phenomena as the voice of conscience, care and freedom represents the most urgent philosophical value nowadays; the author in this regard points to insufficient validity of modern criticism of approaches of Heidegger and Sartre, in particular–reproaches in a subject-centred line from adherents of “ontology of the Other”. (shrink)

Scattered skeptical remarks and a general austerity that infused his writings have given Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes a reputation as some type of nihilist. Noted commentators such as Richard Posner and Albert Alschuler have claimed as much. This article seeks to correct this misunderstanding. Holmes was not a nihilist in the sense of being melancholy due to a belief that the world has no absolute moral values or gods. Instead, Holmes was a pragmatist in the spirit of William James and (...) John Dewey. While Holmes had doubts about moral truth and deities, he ultimately thought that their existence (or non-existence) should have no bearing on our behavior or the law. We must, through our collective efforts, find values that work for us. (shrink)

I discuss how criticism of social sciences taken up in Sartre's ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’ is conditioned by Sartre’s own assumptions concerning nature, the mind-matter relationship, human beings’ bodily dimension. Although he looked at Husserl’s ‘Crisis of the European Sciences’ as a model for his own criticism of the social sciences, he didn't consider the criticism of the concept of nature undertaken by Husserl himself. Such criticism eventually leads to overcome Cartesian dualism. Sartre, on the contrary, superposes phenomenological ways of (...) thinking to an unavowed Cartesian ontology which he never challenged. The consequence is that he looks at the subject and the object, or mind and matter, as radically opposite. Sartre's own vindication of methodological dualism between natural and social sciences – closely following Lukacs – is flawed by heavily relying on an uncritically presupposed ontological dualism. (shrink)

Cutting out all reference to the popular and polemical, psychological and ideological resonances evoked in and by Sartre, this study takes up the challenge of considering the impressive work of Sartre as the latest metamorphosis of the Western philosophical heritage. As Professor Hartmann explains, he has included sufficient exposition of Sartre’s views to enable the reader without extensive knowledge of Sartre to follow the interpretation, but expects him to be conversant with Hegel and, to a lesser extent, with Husserl and (...) Heidegger. If this does not suit the generality of English-speaking students of philosophy who usually know of Sartre, Heidegger, Husserl and Hegel in that order of detail, nevertheless the Hegelian bias of the lengthy critical exposition gives us a new, incisive, and it seems to me, definitive treatment of Sartre which will benefit those who have come to him through phenomenology. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz identified two different approaches to the problem of intersubjectivity. The first is the transcendental, which maintains the primacy of subjectivity, and identifies the problem of the other as a transcendental problem. For example, in Husserl’s phenomenological idealism, all meaning is relative to a transcendental constituting subject. Hence the “problem of intersubjectivity” is to show how the other comes to be constituted, comes to be meant as a sense. The difficulty with such an approach is that if the other (...) is a meaning relative to and analogous to the constituting subject, the transcendence and irreducibility of the other to consciousness seem to be undermined. Transcendental idealism never reaches the “other” because the other is precisely what I do not constitute, but can only encounter. The recognition of the inadequacy of the transcendental approach leads to a second, namely, the other is encountered on the basis and background of the natural attitude and/or life-world. When the transcendental approach is abandoned, the “problem of the other” turns into a series of descriptions of either encounters or social situations. Ontology is replaced by critical theory of society. In either case, an ontology of intersubjectivity seems to be excluded. (shrink)

This early study is a key work, along with several other preliminary essays, for understanding the genesis of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Well translated and with an excellent introduction and notes, the book contains the critical thesis that former theories of the imagination confused perception with imagination, and that imagination was properly recognized first by Husserl and was subsequently further clarified by Sartre in his notion of the nihilating consciousness. --E. S. C.

In his biography of Jean Genet, Sartre says his aim is ‘to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality’. Building on my reading of Being and Nothingness in Sartre on Sin, I examine the compatibility of Sartrean freedom and love in Saint Genet. Sartre’s account of Genet’s person is largely a loveless one in which there is no reciprocity, others are ‘empty shells’ and love is ‘only the lofty name which [Genet] gives to onanism’. I (...) use Saint Genet to suggest Genet’s lovelessness is the direct result of locating the totality of personhood in freedom. This location results in a lonely experience of subjectivity as ‘master, slave and merciless struggle’ – never lover or beloved, whether on the divine plane or the human. (shrink)

In the Critique of Dialectical Reason and in many interviews, Sartre upheld the proletariat’s attempts at emancipation in Western societies and their revolts in the developing world. In these texts, counter-violence is considered the only way to exercise concrete engagement, and a classless society is presented as the only possibility of reducing social inequalities. However, this radical point of view was not the only perspective he tried to develop. He also sought to elaborate an existentialist ethics, which does not correspond (...) to the Marxist theory. This article aims to show that Sartre evoked Notebooks’ ideas in his last interview, Hope Now, in which he envisaged a different typology of democracy and society. This article will examine this new and last direction of Sartre’s political thought. (shrink)

In this article, we explore Beauvoir’s account of what she claims is an alienated relation to our ageing bodies. This body can inhibit an active engagement with the world, which marks our humanity. Her claims rest on the binary between the body-for-itself and the body-in-itself. She shares this binary with Sartre, but a perceptive phenomenology of the affective body can also be found, which works against this binary and allows her thought to be brought into conversation with Levinas. For Levinas, (...) the susceptibility of the body is constitutive of our subjectivity, rather than a source of alienation. If we develop Beauvoir’s thought in the direction of his, an ontological structure is suggested, distinct from Sartre – a structure which makes room for her pervasive attention to affectivity. (shrink)

En 1927, Sartre dépose à l’Ecole normale supérieure un mémoire sur l’image, qui vient enfin d’être publié. Il y défend déjà une des thèses centrales de L’Imagination et de L’Imaginaire, à savoir que l’image mentale n’est pas un tableau intérieur, la reproduction de sensations anciennes : c’est une création, un acte de liberté. Dans son mémoire, Sartre inscrit l’image dans la vie du corps et de l’esprit, d’une manière encore hésitante mais aussi très inventive, qui éclaire ses livres ultérieurs sur (...) l’image sans s’y laisser réduire.In 1927, Sartre submitted a dissertation to the Ecole normale supérieure about the Image, that has been published recently. Already in this work he outlines one of the central theses of L’Imagination and L’Imaginaire, namely that a mental image is neither an internal image, nor the reproduction of previously known sensations, but is a pure act of creation. In his dissertation, Sartre sets down in writing the image in the life of the body and the mind, in a hesitant yet very inventive manner. It helps us to understand his subsequent books concerning image without detracting from their originality. (shrink)

This article attempts to wed together two supposedly disparate works of Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination and Critique of Dialectical Reason in order to construct a theory of the imagination that will aid progressive political theory in its pursuit of perpetual ‘mediated reciprocity’. Often assumed incapable of providing a viable theory of positive intersubjective relations, this article asserts that Sartre’s work does in fact have the resources for such an endeavor. Through the continual creation of ‘images’, the group-in-fusion (...) is shown to be able to sustain a perpetual project of negating original negation throughout the milieu of scarcity. Although ‘images’ themselves are incapable of creating novelty, they do have use insofar as they are able to reproduce affective impressions that can motivate group praxis, which in turn creates new situations of exigence from which apocalyptic moments might arise. Therefore, by tethering the balance between the real and the imaginary, a novel social theory emerges that is both faithful to the work of Sartre and that also pushes it into new, fruitful directions. (shrink)

The most original discovery in Beauvoir’s book is one more Columbus’s egg, namely that it is far from obvious that a woman is a woman. That is, her discovery is that a woman is the result of a process that made so that she is like she is. The paper discusses two aspects of the, so-to-say ‘ideology’ inspiring the work. The first is its ideology in the proper, Marxian, sense. My claim is that the work still pays a heavy price (...) to the dominating ideology in the sense of leaving unquestioned still too much of what was assumed at the time, in 1949, as obvious, necessary and unchanging. This ballast depends firstly on the inherited prevailing climate of opinion, corresponding to a situation of alienation, producing two distorted views of the male and female gender. On the other hand it depends on an unquestioned legacy from the modern episteme (in Foucault’s sense of the word) carrying some kind of presupposed Cartesian dualism. The other side of the work’s ideology, that is, the positive program presented or better the utopia it formulates is less innovative than it could be, In a few passages, where she seems to make use of suggestions from Merleau-Ponty, she points at a view where the bodily and emotional dimension is rescued from its negation in the male-dominated Capitalist society, but these suggestions are forgotten in the bulk of the work. -/- The making of a philosophical work does not depend just on the kind of philosophical influences behind it. A book is also the produce of an author with a story living in one society at a given time of social history. In this case, the book was written in the after war when women were being pushed again back home from the wartime labour market, when several of the goals reached by the first phase of feminist movements had gone lost in several European countries under Fascist or semi-Fascist regimes and were being eroded in America by the reactionary climate of Maccartism. It was a book written by an intellectual young woman in almost total isolation. This accounts for some more naïve suggestions from the work: for ex., the idea that the alternative to the strategy once adopted by nineteenth-century emancipationist movements should be an individual inner process of transformation confined within the boundaries of one woman’s consciousness, or also, the idea that the goal of women’s liberation should be to bring all women to a condition similar of Simone de Beauvoir herself who, as an educated woman, earning her life by her own work, and living in an allegedly equal condition with an enlightened man (Jean-Paul Sartre!) in a relationship free from constraints (an unmarried couple!), was already exemplifying what a liberated woman’s life would be. The reconstruction of the idea of femininity is still the most fruitful part of the work. It rejects the idea of femininity as an essence, depending on biology or other factors and explores the idea of a making of this image as a result of a factual condition made of social and economic state of affairs but as revived and actively mirrored through and by the consciousness of the very subjects suffering an oppressive situation. And the main novelty is the ‘discovery’ of asymmetry between the self-image of the male and the (self)-image of the woman, an asymmetry depending on the fact that the woman sees herself through the other’s eyes. Later feminist writers, for ex. Shulamit Firestone, remarked that the Second Sex was heavily conditioned by key-ideas from Sartre existential ontology. One crucial aspect is accepting the mind-body dualistic framework without any suspicion that such dualism could have been itself a projection of the basic experience of the male-female duality. I suggest that the philosophical legacy inherited from Sartre is on occasion an asset for Beauvoir’s innovative existential analysis of the feminine ‘condition’ but on several occasions it creates unnecessary obstacles for her project of a new comprehension of the feminine ‘situation’, aimed at rescuing women from an 'inauthentic' self-definition. The first among these poisoned gifts is Sartre’s idea of the individual as pure freedom and project. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism is well-known: Sartre draws a picture of the world as containing no more than ‘human beings and things’, thus denying any substance to social relations, institutions and culture. The second is Sartre’s reconstruction of dialectics, understood as a dialectic without a synthesis. This is an enlightening tool when used to describe conflicts, in so far as it accounts for emergence of the ‘other’ as what is excluded. But is becomes a boomerang when it is used to interpret any kind of relationship, leading to equate inter-subjectivity with conflict. Suggestions coming from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach would tend to admit that the bodily dimension as such has positive value, and hence the feminine bodily dimension is not just indifferent, but rather gives women a point of view on the world different from the male point of view. These suggestions, yet, are evoked here and there but never fully spelled out. The most shocking consequence of acceptance of the Cartesian or Sartrean dualist view is an almost total de-evaluation of sexuality, understood as an activity involving just one tiny part of the human body, going with the idea that overcoming the oppression of women implies de-empathizing bodily differences that are after all tiny and devoid of value. and Beauvoir falls back into the trap of grounding claims of equality between men and women on the assumption that bodily differences are of limited relevance. The eventual reason for such step back is the distorting Cartesian mirror into which Beauvoir still looks in the vain hope of discovering a disembodied self as the (Cartesian) subject of an impossible kind of liberation. (shrink)

Sartre presented ‘Existentialism and Humanism’ to a popular audience in Paris late in 1945. As he implies in the discussion which is appended to the text of the lecture , he was here simplifying his views so as to make them intelligible to a wide audience. In this he succeeded only too well; the lecture has become exceedingly well known and has been regarded as a definitive presentation not only of Sartre's philosophy at the time, but also of ‘existentialism’. One (...) thing I hope to show in this essay is that this is not a sensible view to take; Sartre's text requires a good deal of interpretation and qualification in the light of his other writings of the period, and what emerges is a position which is uniquely his own. One way in which this can be seen is by considering Heidegger's ‘Letter on Humanism’ of 1947 which is a response to Sartre's lecture and is, indeed, Heidegger's only direct response to Sartre's work. In the lecture Sartre had associated Heidegger with himself as an ‘existential atheist’ , but in his letter Heidegger emphatically dissociates himself both from atheism and from existentialism as characterized by Sartre, and goes on to criticize the position advanced by Sartre in the lecture. Yet despite the popular exaggeration of the significance of Sartre's lecture, it is certainly worth studying; for not only is it short and accessible, though in some respects misleading, it is also one of Sartre's few indications of the positive ethical theory which so many of his writings require but do not supply. (shrink)

Sont intervenus dans la rédaction du C.É.C. majoritairement des évêques : ceux de la Commission directrice, ceux du Comité de rédaction qui en ont rédigé les trois premières parties, le tiers de l’Épiscopat qui a proposé de multiples amendements et le pape lui-même. D’autres membres de l’Église ont aussi joué un rôle important : le rédacteur de la quatrième partie et le secrétaire de rédaction et tous les experts qui ont été consultés à diverses étapes de son élaboration. De schéma (...) en schéma, l’exposé initialement prévu en trois parties s’affine, se complète par un prologue et finit par devenir quadripartite comme le Catéchisme tridentin de 1566. L’évolution de sa structure donne déjà quelqu’idée de la manière dont certains enseignements de Vatican II ont été "reçus". (shrink)

The Critique of Dialectical Reason was first published in France twenty years ago, in 1960. The book, we know from Simone de Beauvoir, was flung together in a hurry, written virtually without correction during the height of the Algerian war, a period, for Sartre, of stress and anxious stock-taking of his position as a Marxist and a long-term non-joiner of the Communist Party. The whole sense in which, in 1960, Sartre was a Marxist, the question of precisely how eccentric his (...) kind of Marxism was, is centred on his theory of historical explanation. I do not propose to raise many detailed questions about the relation of Sartre's views on history to those of Marx himself, still less to those of other Marxists. Ignorance alone would rule out such a course. I would like if I can, however, to consider Sartre's own view of historical explanation as it appears in the Critique , and leave it to others if they wish to fit it into the Marxist tradition, or exclude it. In order to perform this relatively modest expository task, it will be necessary for me to refer, from time to time, to Sartre's earlier philosophical views. But this will come in incidentally. (shrink)

Late in his career, Sartre told us that “subjectivity is not what it is for me now,” but I do not think that this should be understood as simple rejection. Rather, I think that his notion of the “spiral” best expresses his meaning. The development of his thought progressed through levels of integrating new experience with the past and, in the process, refigured the past. Sartre was, all along, a philosopher protective of subjectivity and freedom, but these notionsunderwent transformation over (...) time, preserved and modified in their surpassing. Sartre’s philosophical itinerary follows the model of the spiral, and in that way, he is his own best commentator. (shrink)

This essay examines Albert Camus's considerable debt to Antonin Artaud. Camus was not only a dramatist, but he also employed dramaturgical techniques in his more famous fiction and essays. In this regard, Artaud's ideas on social reconstitution through aesthetic terror were crucial to the development of many of Camus's most famous works, written both in Algeria and in France before and after World War II. This article considers the ways in which aesthetic–political techniques adapted from Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty were (...) employed to challenge fascism in Algeria and France, by simultaneously summoning Algerian settler myths of exile, destitution and regeneration. Camus's considerable sophistication in the use of these techniques, and the colonial context in which they were initially applied, have often been missed by scholars and critics who have sought to unproblematically situate his works within debates about the Cold War and more recently the “War against Terror”. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Sartre's seminal 1945 talk, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” and the stakes of the humanism debate in France by looking at the immediate political context that has been overlooked in previous discussions of the text. It analyses the political discussion of the term “humanism” during the French national elections of 1945 and the rumbling debate over Sartre's philosophy that culminated in his presentation to the Club Maintenant, just one week after France went to the polls. A consideration of (...) this context helps explain both the rise, and later the decline, of existentialism in France, when, in the changing political climate, humanism lost its centrality, setting the stage for new antihumanist criticisms of Sartre's work. (shrink)

The chapter titled “The Body” in Being and Nothingness offers a groundbreaking, if somewhat neglected, philosophical analysis of embodiment. As part of his “es- say on phenomenological ontology,” he is proposing a new multi-dimensional ontological approach to the body. Sartre’s chapter offers a radical approach to the body and to the ‘flesh’. However, it has not been fully appreciated. Sartre offers three ontological dimensions to embodiment. The first “ontological dimension” addresses the way, as Sartre puts it, “I exist my body.” (...) The second dimension is the manner in which my body is experienced and utilized by the other. This includes my ready-to-hand equipmental engagement with the world and my body as the “tool of tools.” The third dimension is the manner in which “I exist for myself as a body known by the other.” In this paper, I explore Sartre’s original analysis and suggest comparisons with Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment. I shall suggest that Sartre offers more discussion on intercorporeality than Merleau-Ponty. -/- . (shrink)

Kant’s and Sartre’s theories of freedom are both famous and controversial. Kant requires the subject to be both in time and not in time in order to be fully free, while Sartre seemingly requires that the subject continually reinvent itself each moment. I argue that these peculiarities stem from the similar way each thinker conceives of the relationship between freedom and time. A full and meaningful account of human freedom requires both continuity and rupture in the flow of time, and (...) the paradoxes in both philosophers’ theories of freedom originate in their attempt to satisfy both of these temporal requirements. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article shows how the “problem of moral luck” and Sartre's concept of “bad faith” are mutually illuminating, since both have to do with confusions about how much we control, or are controlled by, our situations. I agree with three recent proposals that the problem of moral luck results from certain epistemic malfunctions. However, I argue that the problem cannot be dissolved by overcoming these malfunctions because they are rooted in bad faith. Against the currently dominant interpretation, I argue (...) that bad faith is an inescapable condition of human being because, while we are both free and factical, we can only exist as one or the other at once, thus always keeping an aspect of our nature hidden from ourselves. (shrink)