Abstract

Among the shooting stars that have crossed the contemporary French cultural scene for fifteen years, aided by media sensationalism, we have yet to see a comet of some magnitude. The conspicuous absence of an influence like Sartre's raises many questions. Sartre and his times would seem a natural subject matter but, apart from Annie Cohen Solal's best-selling biography, Gallimard's constant stream of posthumous works has failed to turn Sartre into a media event. And yet, it now seems likely that Roland Barthes was right when, back in the seventies, he proposed that Sartre would be suddenly “rediscovered” and that it would happen “soon, in a completely natural way.”