Sartre The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century

by Levy, Bernard-Henri

• ISBN13: 9780745630090
• ISBN10: 074563009X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-09-11
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

ls"A whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him.rs" This was how Jean-Paul Sartre characterized himself at the end of his autobiographical study, Words. And Bernard-Henri Leacute;vy shows how Sartre cannot be understood without taking into account his relations with the intellectual forebears and contemporaries, the lovers and friends, with whom he conducted a lifelong debate. His thinking was essentially a tumultuous dialogue with his whole age and himself. He learned from Gide the art of freedom, and how to experiment with inherited fictional forms. He was a fellow-traveller of communism, and yet his relations with the Party were deeply ambiguous. He was fascinated by Freud but trenchantly critical of psychoanalysis. Beneath Sartrers"s complex and ever-mutating political commitments, Leacute;vy detects a polarity between anarchic individualism on the one hand, and a longing for absolute community that brought him close to totalitarianism on the other. Leacute;vy depicts Sartre as a man who could succumb to the twentieth centuryrs"s catastrophic attraction to violence and the false messianism of its total political solutions, while also being one of the fiercest critics of its illusions and shortcomings.

Author Biography

Bernard-Henri Levy is a philosopher and a writer. He is a member of the Selection Committee of the Editions Grasset, and he runs La Regle du Jeu magazine. He writes a weekly column in the magazine, Point and chairs the Conseil de Surveillance of La Sept-Arte.

Table of Contents

Prologue	1	(6)
PART I 'THE MAN, A CENTURY'	7	(156)
1 Sartre's Fame	9	(33)
Sartre and women: a love named Beaver	10	(7)
What is a fashion?	17	(2)
Sartre as a State	19	(3)
The anti-de Gaulle	22	(2)
For Sainte-Beuve	24	(7)
Against the rule of the lachrymose	31	(2)
On hatred	33	(5)
A young Sartre	38	(4)
2 Stendhal and Spinoza	42	(32)
The total intellectual	44	(3)
What is a philosophical novel?	47	(7)
The philosopher-artist	54	(6)
What is literature?	60	(9)
The Mallarmé-Debord axis	69	(5)
3 Taking Leave of Gide	74	(28)
The century of Gide	76	(3)
A Gideon Sartre	79	(6)
Dos Passos, Joyce, Céline	85	(10)
Literature is war	95	(7)
4 A 'German' Philosopher	102	(32)
A philosophical monument: Bergsonism	102	(5)
Bergson, Gide and company	107	(5)
The nature of things	112	(4)
Sartre and Heidegger	116	(11)
A Nietzschean Sartre	127	(7)
5 Note on the Heidegger Question	134	(29)
Exhibits	136	(5)
An Against Sainte-Benve for Heidegger?	141	(8)
How is it possible to be at one and the same time the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century and a Nazi?	149	(14)
PART II JUSTICE FOR JEAN-PAUL SARTRE	163	(158)
1 Existentialism is an Anti-humanism	165	(37)
The nature of things	166	(4)
Jean Cavaillès, Resistance fighter on logical grounds	170	(7)
An Althusserian avant la lettre?	177	(3)
Attached note on the Althusser case	180	(6)
What is a subject?	186	(4)
Sartre and the moderns	190	(5)
The Leibniz-Spinoza-Merleau-Deleuze line against the Descartes-Husserl-Levi nas-Sartre axis	195	(7)
2 What is a Monster? (biographical fragments)	202	(36)
3 Anti-Fascist from Beginning to End	238	(31)
The love of polemics	239	(6)
There is no natural community	245	(7)
The question of evil	252	(6)
A short note on Sartre's ugliness	258	(4)
Theologians, philosophers and despots	262	(7)
4 Note on the Vichy Question: Sartre in the Resistance	269	(26)
His pre-war years	270	(2)
A mysterious escape?	272	(1)
The Banana affair	272	(5)
The flies	277	(3)
Two Rastignacs under the Occupation	280	(4)
An unfair trial	284	(2)
A question of principle	286	(3)
Sartre in the Resistance	289	(6)
5 Sartre, Now	295	(26)
What is an anti-Pétainist?	295	(4)
Sartre versus Foucault	299	(2)
Sartre and the Jews: reflections on the Sartre question	301	(5)
Sartre, a dream ...	306	(2)
The Camus affair	308	(5)
Why we are, all the same, right to be wrong with Sartre rather than right with Camus	313	(8)
PART III THE MADNESS OF THE AGE	321	(155)
1 Another Sartre (snapshots)	323	(32)
Self-hatred	324	(3)
On anti-Americanism	327	(1)
'The freedom to criticize is total in the USSR'	328	(2)
The last Stalinist in France?	330	(1)
After Budapest	331	(3)
When Sartre insulted Solzhenitsyn	334	(2)
The generous man	336	(2)
Imagination	338	(1)
His friend Castro	339	(2)
Violence, a new idea?	341	(1)
In praise of terrorism	342	(2)
Bleed the bosses like pigs!	344	(1)
Mingled waters	345	(3)
The temptation of the adventurer	348	(2)
The love of Italy	350	(2)
Write Flaubert and die?	352	(3)
2 On the Workings of Error in the life of an Intellectual	355	(26)
On the notion of 'situation' in the history of ideas	355	(8)
On the status of the truth in the life of ideas	363	(12)
Note on the importance of grace in politics	375	(6)
3 The Confession	381	(31)
Sartre's 'great turning-point'	382	(3)
Becoming your own Autodidact	385	(4)
A reading of Banona	389	(6)
Aragon, Drieu, Rolland and co.: return to the thirties	395	(3)
The abjuration	398	(6)
Humanist, thus Fascist?	404	(5)
Saved by literature	409	(3)
4 Sartre's Failure	412	(33)
Hegel, Kojéve and the century	413	(4)
'Hegel's Jews': who were they?	417	(7)
Philosophy, again, or how to escape from the magic circle of Hegelianism	424	(6)
They do shoot philosophers, don't they?	430	(9)
A Leftist Kojéve	439	(6)
5 Requiem for Literature	445	(31)
A false autobiography	446	(3)
The real meaning of Words	449	(7)
The farewell to literature: a French tradition	456	(6)
Nizan, Breton, Politzer and various others	462	(6)
Words: a Maoist book	468	(8)
EPILOGUE (THE BLIND PHILOSOPHER)	476	(27)
The encounter with Benny Lévy	479	(4)
Scandal among the Sartreans	483	(3)
A Jewish Sartre?	486	(4)
Jewish like Sartre	490	(4)
Sartre with Levinas	494	(4)
Our young man	498	(5)
Notes	503	(24)
Index	527