Sartre Studies International

As the USA and the UK embark on a foreign adventure held by many to be not only illegal, but also deeply immoral, it is perhaps fit- ting that the current issue of SSI should have a distinctly ethical flavour to it. ‘... will freedom by taking itself for an end escape all situation?’ wondered Sartre at the end of Being and Nothingness, ‘or, on the contrary, will it remain situated? Or will it situate itself so much the more precisely and the more individually as it projects itself further in anguish as a conditioned freedom and accepts more fully its responsibility as an existant by whom the world comes into being?’ The answers to these questions, to be found ‘on the ethical plane’, were famously promised for a ‘future work’. That work never materialised, but the questions remain at the heart of all of Sartre’s ulterior work – whether it be the plays, the existential biographies, the unfinished Notebooks for an Ethics, or the equally unfinished Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Sartre’s account of freedom is still widely understood as a version of metaphysical libertarianism, a doctrine which asserts that the human being is completely and unconditionally free. This prevalent reading is largely due to the influence still held by Mary Warnock’s interpretation of his early texts and her privileging of the role of anguish in his thought. The true doctrine of Sartrean philosophy is, according to this position, the idea that man is absolutely and unconditionally free and that determinism is false.

In his book The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry,2 Harold Bloom presents several ‘revisionary ratios’, that is, several ways in which an author may critically refer to his predecessor in order to separate himself3 from the latter. The author’s criticism of his predecessor manifests an anxiety of influence insofar as it overstates the differences and neglects the similarities between his and his predecessor’s works. In this paper I shall show that some aspects of Sartre’s criticism of Kant’s moral theory in the Notebooks for an Ethics mani- fest an anxiety of influence.

As Paul Ricœur notes in L’Idéologie et l’utopie, the ascription of the characteristic of being ‘ideological’ to a set of ideas has traditionally had pejorative implications. One’s own ideas are not ideological, only those of one’s adversaries.1 The philosophical and critical writings of the early Sartre do not offer an explicit discussion of the concept of ideology. Even in Cahiers pour une morale, notable for the evidence they provide of Sartre’s increasing rapprochement with Marxism, ideology per se is never Sartre’s centre of interest.

In his 1938 review of Nizan’s La Conspiration Sartre enquired: ‘Can a Communist write a novel? I’m not convinced he can: he does not have the right to make himself the accomplice of his characters.’ As with so many of the questions posed in Sartre’s work, an adequate response would require a hefty volume – it would have to deal with not only Nizan himself, but such varied writers as Gorky, Babel, Sholokhov, Brecht, Seghers, Aragon, Martinet, Serge, Morris, Heinemann and many others. The following article will attempt to apply the question to one Communist novelist, a very minor figure in the history of literature, but one who crossed Sartre’s path on a number of occasions – Jean Kanapa.

Ringer, Loren. Saint Genet Decanonized: The Lucid Body in ‘Querelle’. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2001. x + 189 pp. ISBN 90 420 1586 1, C37; $37 (paper).

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Notes on contributors