Sartre Studies International

Beginning with this issue, we are looking forward to presenting previously unpublished or untranslated pieces by Sartre. We are pleased to open this issue with the first translation of “Paris sous l’occupation,” Sartre’s fascinating reflection on life in France between 1940 and 1944. We would like to thank Michel Rybalka for the idea of making this a regular feature of SSI; just as we would like to wish him well in his retirement even if, happily for SSI, he is not retiring from his position of editor of the Notice Board.

Upon arriving in Paris, many Englishmen and Americans were surprised that we were not as thin as they had expected. They saw women wearing elegant dresses that appeared new and men in jackets that, from afar, still looked good; they rarely encountered that facial pallor, that physiological misery that is usually proof of starvation. Concern that is disappointed turns into rancor. I am afraid that they were a little annoyed with us because we didn’t conform completely to the pathetic image that they had previously formed of us. Perhaps some of them wondered in the depth of their heart if the occupation had been quite so terrible after all and if France shouldn’t consider the defeat as a lucky break that would allow her to regain its place as a great power without having deserved it through great sacrifices; perhaps they thought as did the Daily Express that, in comparison to the English, the French didn’t fare so badly during these four years.

Since any autobiography is necessarily personal and since I have recently written one, I will rephrase the question in my title: “Who is the subject of my autobiography?” If I say, “Hazel Barnes,” the answer is unchallengeable but not illuminating. If I say, “I am,” we fall into a morass. To critique that “I am” would be to take on all of the problems of postmodernism. I wish that I had added a subtitle so that the whole would read, “Who is the Subject of Autobiography? A Sartrean Response.” Or better, “The Response of a Sartrean.” This way I would be on firmer ground, though many interesting questions would remain. Let us assume that I have done so.

“I think that to watch others in their solitude grappling with what comes to them, making it into themselves, and giving it back to the world as something that was not there before is to see the very image of what each of us is. It is to experience the least common denominator of our inwardness” (xvi). These observations, drawn from the “apologia” with which Hazel Barnes begins her venture, encapsulate her vision of existentialism, as well as her views on the purposes of autobiography and literature more broadly. Her vision is, of course, indebted to the philosophy of Sartre, but is not identical to his. For Barnes gives Sartre’s existentialism back to the world with her own distinctive mark on it, as less agonistic and more concerned with human connectivity.

As the North American team of Sartre Studies International was preparing the following symposium on Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, our British colleagues surprised us by publishing Shlomit Schuster’s “Revisiting Hope Now with Benny Lévy: A Note on the 1996 English Edition of Hope Now” in Sartre Studies International 4:1. Based on a 1996 interview with Lévy, the article functions in some sense as Lévy’s own review of “Sartre’s Last Words?” – my introduction to the English version of Hope Now.

The book, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, as re-translated by me and introduced by Ronald Aronson, is not identical to the interviews that appeared in French in Le Nouvel Observateur or in English translation in Dissent and in Telos. Benny Lévy added a seven-page “Presentation” and a twelve-page “The Final Word” to the book; he also divided the interviews in twelve sections and provided each with a heading.

In 1992, I published Sartre médiatique: La place de l’interview dans son oeuvre,1 a study of Sartre’s interviews and how they complement his written works. In discussing the 1970s, especially after the onset of Sartre’s partial blindness and his avowal to Michel Contat in the famous interview “Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans” that he could no longer write,2 it was apparent that Sartre had intentionally committed himself to what he was to call “plural thought,” first with one or two interviewers who were specialists in his work, and later and most significantly with Benny Lévy, a positive choice rather than a necessary substitute.

By this time, most of us are only too familiar with the vehement denunciations of Benny Lévy and his allegedly manipulative, even pernicious, influence on Sartre during Sartre’s last ten years. In her biography of Sartre, Sartre: A Life, Annie Cohen-Solal highlights some of the attacks on Lévy: Roland Castro indicted him as “the least humanist of all leftists, a monster of cynicism and mysticism”; Olivier Todd charged him with the “corruption of an old man”; an ex-Maoist comrade characterized him as “a moralistic fool … capable of turning … an audience around with his perfect speeches and crushing intelligence.”

Linda Bell’s article “Different Oppressions”1 makes a useful contribution to the study of Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive (1946).2 She raises the difficult question of the comparability and specificity of different forms of oppression, and in particular she recounts how the text encouraged her in challenging her own oppression as a woman. Surely Sartre himself would have asked for nothing better of the works that survived him than that they should inspire others struggling against oppression in all its forms.

In responding to my article “Different Oppressions: A Feminist Exploration of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew,” Ian H. Birchall accuses me of seriously misreading Sartre but offers little indication of what he thinks would be more adequate.

Debra B. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities, SUNY Series in Feminist Philosophy, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997, 250 pp. ISBN 0-7914-3151-7, $54.50 (cloth) Review by Eleanore Holveck

Kathleen V. Wider, The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1997, 207 pp., ISBN 0-8014-8502-9, $15.95 (paper). Review by Elizabeth Murray Morelli

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