Sartre Studies International

With this issue the Editorial Board of Sartre Studies International undergoes many changes. Michael Scriven has resigned his position of Executive editor in order to take up the position of Director of Academic Programmes at the European Business School, Regent’s College in London, England. It was Michael who laid the foundations of SSI and his hard work and attention to the practical workings of the journal will be sorely missed. He will be replaced by Andrew Leak, who teaches French at University College London.

Thanks to the kind cooperation of Mrs. Elise Harding-Davis, director of the North American Black Historical Museum and Cultural Centre, we are able to reproduce the score of this famous melody which features so prominently in Sartre’s Nausea. This museum is located in Amherstburg, Ontario, some thirty kilometers southwest of the Ambassador Bridge which links Detroit, Michigan with Windsor, Ontario. Shelton Brooks, who composed the melody in 1910, was a descendent of black slaves who made their way to freedom by way of “the underground railway” and settled in Southwestern Ontario.

In this article, I argue that Sartre’s biography of Jean Genet, Saint Genet Actor and Martyr, can serve as an instrument of liberation for pariahs living today. Like Sartre, I define the word “pariah” to mean people who have suffered trauma in their lives and who are internally and socially oppressed as a consequence. Saint Genet’s power to free us arises paradoxically out of the conservative aspects for which it has been criticized in the last few years.

Alain Finkelkraut has interrogated contemporary Jewish identity in terms of how a Jew reckons with the heavy impact of the Holocaust and in fact with the entire history of the Jewish people. Finkelkraut takes issue with Sartre’s 1947 essay, Anti-Semite and Jew, not for its content but the effect that it has had on him. “Let there be no misunderstanding: I am not attacking the book that Sartre wrote on the Jewish problem,” asserts the author in a footnote (JI 17, my translation). Instead, he shows how the philosopher aids in the creation of what Finkelkraut terms “the imaginary Jew.”

Readers of Sartre’s biographies often have the impression that they reveal more about Sartre than about Baudelaire, Flaubert or Genet. The reason for this is our awareness of Sartre’s philosophy which serves as an explicit paradigm for the construction and explicitation of his literary and his biographical works. We speak of a Sartrean play, a Sartrean biography, because they lay bare not only characteristic features of the genre but also of the author and this also is true of a Hegelian or Marxist history or a Freudian psychology. These writers have all invented their own paradigms and if one decides to use their paradigm one is considered a Hegelian, Marxist or Sartrean follower.

Since Kant, modern philosophy has reacted critically and most often dismissively to any theories or inquiries deemed “metaphysical.” The Critique of Pure Reason shows that although human beings naturally seek knowledge of things that are beyond the limits of all possible experience (i.e., metaphysical knowledge), the categories by means of which we are capable of knowledge are all restricted in their legitimate application to objects of possible experience.

“Je t’embrasse.” The philosopher ends the phone call and places the tiny Ericsson cell phone on the table next to his Ray Bans. He turns to his interviewers: “Where were we?”

Jon Stewart, ed., The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998, 634 pp. ISBN 0-8101-1532-8 (paper). Review by Debra Jackson

Sartre’s Radicalism and Oakeshott’s Conservatism: The Duplicity of Freedom. Anthon Review by David Detmer

Roger Frie, Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity in Modern Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: A Study of Sartre, Binswanger, Lacan, and Habermas. Lanham, MD, Boulder, New York and London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997, 227 pp., ISBN 0-8476-8415-6, $57.50 (cloth). Review by Kenneth L. Anderson

The Notice Board 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