Sartre Studies International

The first issue of volume four of Sartre Studies International exemplifies the full range of Sartre’s intellectual output: literary, philosophical and political. Three articles by Colin Davis, Edward Greenwood and Paul Reed are centred on the multiple interactions in Sartre’s work between philosophy and literature. In a penetrating analysis of Sartre’s Le Mur, Colin Davis explores the complex relationship between ethics and fiction, between Moral Law and jouissance. ‘The lie of Sartre’s narrator in “Le Mur”’, contends Davis, ‘represents a way of sharing the pain of his/her powerlessness and mortality’, and is coincidental with ‘an assault through fiction on the reader whose power to judge and comprehend is wrested away’.

Philosophers, especially moral philosophers, repeatedly turn to examples to show their principles in action, or to put them to the test, or to refine them. But examples are also a distrusted resource; narrative (even a minimal narrative such as a philosophical example) may have a semantic waywardness which makes it an uncertain ally in philosophical discussion. What is at stake here is the extent to which stories can be contained within clearly delineated conceptual frames. To put it bluntly,

At the close of the Second World War and in the years following, two key figures of modern French thought, Jean-Paul Sartre and Georges Bataille, became engaged in a debate concerning the status of literature. At stake in their argument was both a conception of the mode of being of the literary work of art and a projection of the purpose or end to which literature should be assigned.

Whenever Daniel has been the focus of critical attention, he has invariably been seen within an ontological framework, in terms of a desire to ‘be’, in the Sartrean sense. It has now come to be regarded as a truism that Daniel’s attempts at self-punishment signify such a desire. The interpretation originates with Iris Murdoch who, quoting an extract from Le Sursis, in which Daniel expresses a desire ‘to be a pederast, as an oaktree is an oaktree’, concludes that ‘[Daniel] is never able to experience a pure coincidence with his vice; he remains detached from it, an observer, a possibility. His attempts to achieve coincidence take the form of self-punishment’.

Gregory McCulloch’s recent book Using Sartre has the laudable aim of treating Being and Nothingness ‘analytically’.1 But, I think, he falls short of fulfilling this aim, and I want to try to bring this out in respect of his interpretation of Sartre’s treatment of the question of the existence of Others. McCulloch’s idea of ‘treating Sartre analytically’ is treating him as ‘one of us’ (US x), by which he says that he means ‘applying analytical techniques and standards of rigour to Sartre’ (Ibid.). ‘Bravo,’ one might say; but in practice, McCulloch slips into a more ordinary use of the expression ‘treating Sartre as one of us’.

Hope Now, Benny Lévy’s interviews with Sartre, conveys Sartre’s thoughts during the years immediately before his death. Published in March 1980, a month before Sartre died, the work was intended as the outline of the Sartre-Lévy book ‘Power and Freedom’. The Conversations between Sartre and Beauvoir were tape-recorded in 1974, but were not published until a year after Sartre’s death in 1981.

Walter Redfern, Sartre: ‘Huis clos’ and ‘Les Séquestrés d’Altona’, Grant & Cutler, ‘Critical Guides to French Texts’, no. 111, 1995, 81 pp. ISBN 0-7293-0383 7. Review by Benedict O'Donohoe

Sartre on the World Wide Web: A Brief Review by Terry Keefe

The Notice Board editors will be pleased to publicize events relating to Sartre scholarship, specifically higher degrees, seminars, and conference papers, as well as publications. They will also be pleased to publish conference reports.

Notes on contributors