Sartre Studies International

There is a great deal in this issue for serious Sartre scholars. Without initially intending to, we have put together an issue focussing on translation: a translation of Grégory Cormann's article that first appeared in 2021 in Études sartriennes 25 (‘Autour du mémoire sur l'image (1927)’), and one of Sartre's 1947 presentation to the Société Française de Philosophie, ‘Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi’ (‘Self-Awareness and Self-Knowledge’). We hope that these translations will make this material more available to a wider audience.

The study of the early manuscripts of the great authors most often becomes a process of monumentalising or (re)legitimising their work. The recent publication of two of Sartre's early manuscripts – first Empédocle (Empedocles) in 2016 and second, in 2018, his dissertation for his graduate diploma (diplôme d’études supérieures or DES), L'Image dans la vie psychologique (The Image in Psychological Life), both texts written in 1926–1927 – encourages us to propose another type of genetic reading that insists on the collective conditions of the production of knowledge, including philosophical knowledge. Such a collective genetics, applied to Sartre's intellectual formation during the interwar years, allows us to highlight some of the little-known forms of Parisian intellectual societies (the activities of the International Information Group of the École Normale Supérieure, the critical logic of the psychology journals, the regular meetings of the cenacles, and the literary and philosophical research groups). It also reveals, at the same time, the original relationship between Sartre's thought and the German literature and philosophy mediated to him by Bernard Groethuysen, Stefan Zweig and Alexandre Koyré.

This translation is of an article in the April–June 1948 issue of the Bulletin de la société française de philosophie (42, no. 3: 49–91). That article consists primarily of a lecture that Sartre had presented to La Société Française de Philosophie on 2 June 1947 in which he provided an overview of some of his main points in Being and Nothingness, with particular emphasis on its Introduction (especially its third section, ‘The Pre-Reflective Cogito and the Being of the Percipere’) as well as on the first chapter of its second part, that is, “The Immediate Structures of the For-Itself” (covering content in three of its five sub-sections: I, III and IV). The title of the lecture thus does not wholly encompass the subjects that are discussed in it, although it may well be said to reflect its central theme (even in a literal sense, as the positioning of the hypothetically demarcated ‘Section III’ in the Table of Contents above shows). In addition to the presentation, the article in the Bulletin is preceded by a brief introductory statement – seemingly written by Sartre himself¹ – which functions largely as a sort of ‘extended abstract’ for the talk (although not all the points in the introduction are covered in the presentation), and is followed by a transcript of the discussion that took place after the presentation between Sartre and some of the reputable scholars who were in attendance (i.e. a ‘question and answer’ session).

Oliver Gloag, Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 112pp. ISBN: 9780198792970. £8.99 (paperback).

Meryl Altman, Beauvoir in Time (Leiden: Brill, 2020), x + 570pp. ISBN: 9789004431201. €142.00 (hardback); ISBN: 9789004431218 (open-access e-book).

Alfred Betschart and Juliane Werner (eds), Sartre and the International Impact of Existentialism (London: Palgrave, 2020), 388pp. ISBN: 978-3-030-38481-4. $129.99 (hardback); ISBN: 9783030384845. $129.99 (paperback); 9783030384821. $99 (e-book).

Alfred Betschart, Andreas Urs Sommer and Paul Stephan, Nietzsche und der Französische Existenzialismus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 300pp., ISBN: 9783110760101. $126.99 (hardback); ISBN: 9783110760163. $126.99 (e-book).

Nik Farrell Fox, The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche: Ethics, Ontology and the Self (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 255 pp., ISBN: 9781350248168. $143.95 (hardback); ISBN: 9781350248205. $50.35 (paperback); ISBN: 9781350248175. $115.16 (e-book).