Sartre Studies International

Freedom and, more specifically, the role of the Other in the quest for authentic living, is at the heart of three of the pieces in the cur- rent issue. Karsten Harries asks the questions: ‘What does it mean to live responsibly?’ and ‘What would it mean to exist authentically?’ It has often been pointed out that Sartre was more adept, both in his theoretical and his fictional works, in flushing out examples of inauthentic living than in providing positive examples.

‘What can one know about a man, today?’ When Sartre poses this question on the opening page of the first volume of L’Idiot de la famille, he encapsulates a huge project with teasing casualness. He brings together two of the four fundamental questions of philosophy formulated by Kant, ‘What can I know’ and ‘What is the human being’; and whilst the final word, today, indicates that our knowledge of others is bound to our own historical moment, for Sartre understanding others also necessarily entails attempting to under- stand their relation to history.

The importance of freedom in Sartre’s philosophy cannot be overestimated, and the understanding of Sartre’s account of freedom is necessary for the understanding of Sartre’s philosophy as a whole. In this article, I will show that there are two distinct, but related, notions of freedom used in Being and Nothingness, and will suggest that a clarification of the two notions will open the possibility of grounding Sartre’s demand that each individual should promote the freedom of all Others.

The phrase ‘Spirit of Revenge’ is taken from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it names the deepest source of human self-alienation. In Sartre – but perhaps I should be more precise and say in Being and Nothingness – as I will try to show, the spirit of revenge finds paradigmatic expression.

According to Harries, ‘Sartre ... has to reject whatever belongs to facticity as binding my freedom in an essential way.’1 Indeed, he argues that Sartre’s commitment to such a radical freedom results in a profound misinterpretation of the human condition that places consciousness at odds with its own embodiment, ultimately demonising the sensuous. This misinterpretation is exacerbated by Sartre’s insistence that human freedom is destined to the futile task of producing the missing synthesis of consciousness and being, a destiny that sends consciousness on the impossible quest of providing its own foundation.

The theory of the gaze elaborated in L’Etre et le Néant has long been a classic, used, quoted and criticised by a plethora of writers, Lacan among them. There are at least ten references to Sartre’s gaze in Lacan’s Séminaires from 1954 to 1964. In an essay entitled ‘A Lacanian Elucidation of Sartre’, in which I used Lacan’s terminology on neurosis, I called the gaze the first phobia of the neurotic. I viewed it and the other two phobias I discerned in L’Etre et le Néant (le trouble and the viscous) as forming a link in the chain of Sartre’s autoanalytical writings (from La Nausée through L’Etre et le Néant, Baudelaire, Saint Genet, to L’Idiot de la famille).

Nicholas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism. Cambridge: Polity, 2003, 221 pp. ISBN 0-7456-2182-1 Review by Ian Birchall

Ingrid Galster, Le Théâtre de Jean-Paul Sartre devant ses premiers critiques. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 394 pp. ISBN 2-7475-0715-7.