Sartre's Second Century
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN: 1443866040
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Sartre's Second Century reflects the richness of Sartre's vision of the human condition, the diversity of the means he employed in grappling with it, and the lengthy trajectory of his itinerary, in a variety of wider cultural perspectives. Conferences of the UK and North American Sartre Societies, marking Sartre's centenary in 2005, were the primary occasions for most of the essays collected here. Invited to discuss central themes and key developments in Sartre's life and work, the multinational team of contributors - British, American, French, Canadian and Swiss - naturally discovered that any attempt to present Sartre in a retrospective light also provides a basis for assessing the relevance of his work in the 21st century.
demonstrated statements about God, the soul, or being qua being. There is indeed a philosophical system in his early writings, but it is not a metaphysical one. It is the transcendental phenomenology sketched in Berlin in 1933-34 in The Transcendence of the Ego and “A Fundamental Idea of Husserlian Phenomenology: Intentionality”. Sartre’s metaphysics is composed of uncertain and evolving convictions that can be expressed only by storytelling and not by conceptualisation. If we try to summarize
Structuralism?”, in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (ed. Christina Howells). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 Chafe, Wallace. Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Chomsky, Noam. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Elveton, Roy. “Tolerance, Envoiced Subjectivity and the Lifeworld”, in Interpretando la
postmodern world of the late twentieth century: What with the third world war that can break out at any day, and the wretched mess our planet has become, despair has come back to tempt me with the idea that there is no end to it all, that there is no goal, that there are only small, individual objectives that we fight for. We make small revolutions, but there’s no human end, there’s nothing of concern to human beings, there’s only disorder [...]. In any event, the world seems ugly, evil, 41
these particular so-called crustaceans more advanced than we or, on the contrary, are they homards, degenerate men? For Sartre, who describes his anti-humanist humanism as an optimistic hardness, “une dureté optimiste”,23 and whose judgments are often hard, the answer to these questions is clear: the Crabs reflect Frantz, and Frantz, like Lucien the anti-Semite in “L’Enfance d’un chef”, is a soft man who has tried to fashion an independent personality by making himself hard. He is a mou who has
duration that is his own and that at the same time is not his own, a relation that lasts from the moment he begins the book until he finishes it. This supposes a complex relation between the author and the reader […].11 Sartre goes on to explain that the relationship between the author and reader is one in which the author has to maintain this sense of duration in the reader. Writing literature—at least, if it is to be any good—thus 11 Sartre, in Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux, 211. 162 Chapter