IN POSTWAR FRANCE, a repulsion toward strangers would not be attributed to Pavlovian shocks, indoctrination and stereotypes, or hate-driven authoritarians. Rather, the compulsion to discriminate against outsiders would be seen as part of a universal desire to not be strange oneself. With the xénos recast as l’Autre or the Other, new theories shed light on the creation of difference and the forces that helped codify such marginalization. Over the next half century, theories of Otherness inspired penetrating ethical and sociopolitical analyses of those made into strangers, and the hidden violence to which they were subjected.
This widely influential model rather oddly emerged from a nearly unfathomable branch of philosophy. An ancient aspect of metaphysics, ontology is the study of the nature of Being. Inaugurated by German thinkers in the 1920s, a new vision of ontology emerged. It took root in France, where it was put to use exposing false racial and class divisions. It became the rallying cry for decolonization and helped frame the liberationist movements of second-wave feminists and sexual minorities. All this from ideas that in their original manifestation were almost impossible to comprehend.
The great exponent of an ontology of Otherness was a charismatic, pipe-smoking Don Juan, whose inability to edit his own mental flow made his presentation so dense and discombobulated that it seemed to dramatize one of his central claims—that no one could ever fully know another. The lion of the Left Bank, Jean-Paul Sartre, transformed German phenomenology, as derived from the apolitical Edmund Husserl and the Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger, in a manner that made it a basis for radical political action. Sartre’s ideas spread and became fashionable; they helped spark a youth movement—the black turtleneck-wearing, jazz-loving, zazou attitude, which Gabriel Marcel dubbed “existentialism.” And so, along with a fertile community that included Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus, Boris Vian, Juliette Gréco, Richard Wright, Claude Lanzmann, and, most importantly, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre stood at the head of a movement. Their credo included both an abstract philosophy of Being and a political program. So armed, they took sundry innovative positions on an array of problems, all defined in part by the idea of the Other.
Born in 1905, Sartre was a diminutive child, whose father died when he was young. Jean-Paul was happily raised by his grandparents and a doting mother, when to his disgust, his mother remarried a man the boy detested. Distressed by his own “ugly” face and a wandering eye, the often bullied youth retreated into books. Endowed with a rich fantasy life, he was gradually recognized for his talent. By the time he won acceptance to the elite École Normale Supérieure, Sartre’s discomfort with himself was hidden behind an arrogant, domineering sense of his own intellect. Erudite beyond his years, he excelled in class but also harbored contempt for his professors and all their endless scholastic interpretations. Known among his classmates as a bit of a show-off, he harbored dreams of becoming a jazz singer, and at parties was prone to burst out into Al Jolson songs. However, perhaps due to a cocky attempt to argue for an original, still half-baked theory of “contingency,” Sartre failed the agrégation exam in philosophy. Asked to stay at the ENS for an additional year to retake the test, he joined a study group, which included a Sorbonne student named Simone de Beauvoir. Over Leibniz and Spinoza, they fell in love, and for the rest of their lives—despite countless affairs and love triangles—they remained inseparable.
Both passed the test and, as was the rule in France, they were sent out to the provinces to teach. Beauvoir was assigned to Marseilles, Sartre to Le Havre in Normandy. In this port town, the young man became demoralized, fearing he would rot. He wrote Beauvoir that “this terrified contemplation of the wasteland of my future has given me a sort of nervous excitation, which is really in the end, boredom.” “Consciousness diminishes,” he continued, “and the body inert like a swimmer who realizes he is caught in seaweed, lets go and drifts.” Le Havre was just too dull. After eating lunch and napping, he would awaken and feel “ashamed because of my noble calling as a writer—all things considered if you take the word literally, a writer should write. And that is not the case with me.”
He tutored, taught classes, and struggled with a few projects, but seemed to have no message, no direction. That changed when his school chum, Raymond Aron, returned from Germany and, over aperitifs at a café, excitedly spoke of a new philosophy, one that took as its focus actual, concrete experience. Unlike the useless parsing of texts demanded by their teachers, unlike theories of God or Truth, this philosophy took up the mysteries of everyday life. To make his point, Aron pointed to the drink that sat in front of them; this new mode of thought, he added, might take up that beverage right there.
Curious, Sartre applied for and received support to study for a year at the French Institute in Berlin. In the terrible fall of 1933, just as Hitler took office, an oblivious Sartre set down his bags and dove into Edmund Husserl’s “phenomenology.” Phenomenology would take different turns and acquire different meanings, but it began as an attempt to focus on the experiencing consciousness. Philosophy, Husserl argued, should seek to understand consciousness as it encountered the world of things. Therefore, it should examine consciousness as it manifests itself in its intentions, its directed encounters with the Lebenswelt, the Lived-World.
Husserl undercut the problem of knowing other minds. Since individual consciousness could not be separated from the experienced world, consciousness was not individual or atomized. René Descartes with his private theater of consciousness was mistaken; minds were actually nodes in a wide web, all linked by what Husserl called the “inter-subjective” realm. Therefore, it followed that both human identity and difference should be radically rethought from this angle of approach.
Sartre soaked up Husserl then more gradually absorbed the thought of Husserl’s assistant, Martin Heidegger. Enthused and inspired, the Frenchman began a philosophical work that Simone de Beauvoir advised him was actually misconceived. This, she suggested, was a novel, one that could use those hard-boiled techniques from the American crime fiction that they both loved. Sartre agreed. Initially entitled Melancholia, it used the diaries of a protagonist named Antoine Roquentin to tell his story. A biographer, he had traveled to a seaside town to research and write an adventurer’s story, only to fall apart.
As the townspeople pass by, he watches as if from behind glass. “I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing,” the narrator reports. Disgusted by the “contingency,” the meaninglessness of all this, a sickened feeling repeatedly sweeps through him. His senses dislocate and doorknobs turn liquid and gluey. “I dropped to my seat, I no longer knew where I was; I saw the colours spin slowly around me, I wanted to vomit. And since that time,” he confesses, “the Nausea has not left me, it holds me.” Convinced of man’s utter solitude and the crushing weight of routine, Roquentin’s despair only lifts with an epiphany. Sitting before a chestnut tree like some modern Buddha, Roquentin recognizes that he is staring not at a boring object but at a tree in bloom, bursting forth with newness and life. It is Being itself.
Prior to this book, Sartre had struggled to get his work noticed, but the publisher Gaston Gallimard showed interest in the novel and suggested a punchier title. In 1938, Nausea was published and Sartre’s writing career began to take off, when war broke out. Called up as an army meteorologist and stationed in the Alsace, the philosopher spent as much time staring at the skies as filling notebooks with a torrent of ideas. “Anguish at Nothingness, with Heidegger?” he asked himself. Then, in a turn that would prove central: “Freedom establishes a discontinuity … it is the foundation of transcendence.”
Freedom would soon be in short supply. Captured by the Germans on his thirty-fifth birthday, Sartre was transferred to Stalag XII-D in Trier, where he was often hungry, dirty, and lice-ridden. He passed time translating a rousted-up copy of Heidegger’s Being and Time found in a monastery, and he began to make notes for a philosophical work of his own. During Christmastime in 1940, he convinced German authorities to let him direct a play that he wrote for his fellow prisoners. His ideas were jelling, but he had good reason to fear that they would die with him. Then in March of 1941, Sartre and another prisoner made a daring move. They used a pass that a farmer had lazily discarded to sneak away from the camp. Sartre crept back to occupied Paris, reunited with the “Beaver,” as he called Beauvoir, and organized a cell of resistors. He later recalled a feeling of being at one with many, unified by a common enemy in the Lived-World. Still, Paris seemed to have “a hidden hole”; friends and neighbors suddenly fell into it and disappeared. “We looked into each other’s eyes,” he recalled of his time with his comrades underground, “and it was as if we saw the dead.” Under the constant threat of capture, he feverishly cannibalized his army diaries and assembled an homage to consciousness and liberty, which was published in the midst of the world’s worst war.
For the naive reader who picked up Being and Nothingness, it would be hard to imagine it causing revolutions. The 1943 tome was hardly didactic or programmatic. Much of the book was nearly unreadable. As critics pointed out, its abstractions were often messy, dizzying, or contradictory. One reviewer declared that it was a three-hundred-page work buried in a seven-hundred-page tome. However, for Sartre, writing as Nazi victory seemed imminent meant that a careful edit would take a back seat to getting this work out. For nestled inside this gargantuan text, riddled with sentences that twisted around like pretzels, Sartre presented a delineation of human relations that, though not fully original, became immensely important.
In an article written in 1937, Sartre had already challenged one of Husserl’s central assumptions. Pre-reflective consciousness was not a result of Ego, but rather preceded it. Consciousness existed. What we call the Self was a product of reflection, not the other way around. “I” was an object for, created by, consciousness. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre used that as a starting point. Before birth and after death, there was nothingness; in between those black expanses, there was Being, that temporarily lit room. As the basis of Being, consciousness was not just another thing in the world; it was absolute, impersonal, and transcendent.
All this might have seemed esoteric to those huddled around the fireplace at the Café de Flore, watching German soldiers goose-step down the Boulevard Saint-Germain. After all, the world was burning. However, this fugitive had smuggled a critical conclusion into Being and Nothingness. Man was not determined by circumstances, not driven by a Freudian unconscious, Marxist economics, much less reactionary nationalist forces. Man was free. Free to choose meaning. Free to act. Free to rebel. Under German occupation, surrounded by French collaborators, this was perhaps the necessary song for this underground man to sing.
Existence preceded essence, Sartre famously asserted. Existence and a pre-reflective consciousness were utterly free. Everywhere men were born imagining they were in chains, but the chains were chimeras. Actions were always, everywhere, radically unbound. Of course, such wild liberty came at a high cost, and that price was anxiety. If individuals were utterly responsible for their choices, they should be concerned. Thus, to avoid such discomfort, according to Sartre, we often deluded ourselves with “bad faith,” his term for the way we betrayed our own freedom and sought to shield ourselves from the moral responsibility that accompanied it.
With this turn, Sartre’s metaphysics began its descent toward earth. In the alleys and side streets of Being and Nothingness, the French thinker developed a set of thoughts that led him to analyze politics, ethics, and psychology. Alongside “Being-for-itself,” Sartre proposed that there was also “Being-for-others,” a mode built on interpersonal relations and conflict, an encounter between you and me that led—inevitably, necessarily—to a battle. Here, Sartre relied heavily on Georg W. F. Hegel, or at least that thinker as interpreted and revived in interwar France by Alexander Kojève. In Kojève’s popular lectures on the subject, Hegel believed the following: since humankind originated from a unified Spirit, self-consciousness sprang into existence only in relationship with an Other, who “recognized” it. However, the need by both parties for validation turned into a grim struggle. Who would be the Subject and who the Object, who would be Master and who the Slave? Each subject sought to subjugate the other.
Ontologically, then, no one was a stranger. No one was a foreigner or alien in their own Being-in-itself. Subjects had to be made into foreign objects. Both sides of any encounter dreaded that transformation, the loss of recognition of their inner autonomy, their enslavement. And so, in this philosophical Punch and Judy show, the duo struggled against that fate. At some point, though, the battle ended, and the Master’s subjectivity demanded recognition from the Slave. The former’s Being exerted control over the latter’s, which became little more than an objectified tool. The Slave doled out the required acknowledgment of the Master’s desires and needs. One identity reigned. Another disappeared, became a thing.
However, that was not the end. An irony soon emerged, for the Lord, as Hegel called him, was now deeply dependent on his Bondsman, who possessed extraordinary power to provide or withhold recognition. The Slave became ever more aware of the Master’s inner being, understood and possessed it in a manner the unthinking Lord no longer did himself. If the Slave suffered by abdicating his own subjectivity, he secretly triumphed by possessing aspects of his Master’s. The Other held the secrets of the subject.
Even when overt conflict ended, the tension between Master and Slave never ceased. After all, the Master’s desire could never be totally fulfilled; there could never be adequate recognition. Since he was treated as a tool and objectified, the Slave was not fully there. It was as if a nervous lover asked to be told he was loved; the words never quite did the trick. The Master’s power had both created and destroyed the possibility for his own recognition. Meanwhile, the Slave’s consciousness, though outwardly negated, had not been annihilated. Hidden, even from the alienated Slave himself, his subjectivity still held the capacity for freedom. In Hegel, the Slave one day realized his power and, for Kojève at least, was therefore the engine for progress, the motor of history, for he was the one who imagined, hoped for, and built a better world.
Sartre employed much of this conception with one glaring exception. For Hegel, there was a way out of this endless conflict, when the two subjects strove to recognize each other and the contest of wills ceased. Kojève imagined this process of mutual recognition, but Sartre never did. His depiction of the dance between Master and Slave, between what he called the “I” and the “Other,” remained driven by the desire for domination, the anxiety to maintain one’s freedom, and acts of self-creation taken by objectifying the Other. Sartre delineated his theories of everyday sadism as a desire to turn the Other into a thing, and masochism as willingly becoming the Other. Love was harder. While Sartre spoke of hopes for an “us,” he seemed unconvinced. To be a free subject was to pursue the captivity of the Other. “The Other is the one who excluded us by being himself, the one who I exclude by being myself.” Desire itself was the impulse to capture, to steal away the Other’s subjectivity. Fear came from the gaze of the Other, who threatened the “I”’s freedom. In the end, there was little relief from strife.
For Sartre, unity based on equality was a utopian quest. As one looked about, sadism was the rule. Domineering bigotry and the hatred of the Other was an everyday occurrence, common to intersubjective relations. And there seemed to be no end: domination provoked violent urges to go further, to turn the Other into stone, to destroy him, to take him ever more into the self. The flames of the farm I burn down, Sartre wrote, fuse that farm with me forever. “In annihilating it, I am changing it into myself.” Or so the fantasy goes. For, in the end, the fire petered out and all that remained were ashes.
Being and Nothingness appeared under the watchful eye of Vichy censors. It would not offend them, for in all likelihood they could neither get through it nor ferret out any political message. Sartre seemed to be articulating a rather intimate battle between lovers, parents and children, bosses and workers—an eternal matter, not something dangerous. However, in fact, the Fascists were never far from Sartre’s mind. In the dark days of 1941, as Nazi supremacy of Europe loomed, he vowed to make sure they lost the peace, lost a populace that now seemed—outside of Communists and Anarchists—all too willing to go along. General Pétain now castigated his people and claimed that their decadence had forced the Germans to invade. In such a world, Sartre’s ontology, which insisted on absolute freedom, was an act of resistance. Anguish, fear, and bad faith might cloak this, but there was always, only choice. That was a transcendent truth, one that took shape as the Slaves rose up to remind the Masters that they had not yet been turned to ash. That, too, was Sartre’s message: to refuse reification, to refuse allowing shame to paralyze oneself, was also to refuse the belief that one must collaborate with the domineering occupiers. It was never directly spelled out, but it was there.
When the war ended, that coded call to arms seemed to get lost. Being and Nothingness was attacked on all sides. The Catholic right denounced its atheism, its stripping away of holy consolation from a devastated population. Marxists angrily chided Sartre for his emphasis on freedom. Condemned for kicking France when it was down, Sartre fought back. Months before the war’s end, he replied to attacks in a Communist weekly, Action, lucidly explaining how existentialism was not quietist and, despite its German roots, not Nazi. It was a call to “action, effort, combat, and solidarity.” A month after the Liberation, responding to journalists who charged that “not a single person is able to read Being and Nothingness,” Sartre gave a lecture called “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” It was delivered before throngs of cheering fans and it left no doubt about Sartre’s political commitments. Instead of finding a perch in academia, he used his popular success to cofound a journal called Les Temps Modernes, which championed social engagement. For the next twenty years, he reigned as the undisputed leader of a new left, one that sought out all the silenced “Slaves” so as to help them speak.
Sartre and Beauvoir with Boris and Michelle Vian
SARTRE’S PHILOSOPHY OF existential freedom was a life raft for many survivors of Europe’s midcentury. “Existentialism Is a Humanism” allowed one to consider a simplified I/Other dynamic in any relationship. Two subjects encountered each other, and the less powerful became reified, a thing, defined by the other’s needs.
If Sartre’s new conception had advantages, it also had obvious defects. As Simone de Beauvoir immediately realized, in this universal dynamic there was no place for history. As one Being-for-itself wrestled with another, how could one take into account how a Nazi guard and his Jewish victim were not just any Master and Slave? How was that different from a boss and an underling, a woman and her gigolo, a schoolyard bully and his prey? When everyone sought to be Master, where did ethics like equality and justice reside? Sartre’s abstractions risked losing track of these critical factors, a confusion best exemplified by the most famous existential novel, a book that made Sartre and his allies swoon.
Its author was a pied-noir, a descendant of French colonizers in Algeria, and in the spring of 1943, marooned in occupied France, he introduced himself to Sartre at the opening of the older man’s play The Flies. By then, Sartre knew of the younger man’s work; a few months earlier, Sartre had written a long, admiring review of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which was “said to be ‘the best book since the armistice.’” Soon, the ruggedly handsome Camus was taken into Sartre’s circle; he was even asked to direct and star in Sartre’s new play, initially entitled The Others, then later No Exit. It was an allegorical tale based on a miserable love triangle that ensnared Sartre, Beauvoir, and Olga Kosakiewicz. When it premiered in 1944, the play contained the famed line “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” literally, “Hell, it is the others.” By the time that premiere took place, Camus had bowed out, but for the next decade he remained very close to Sartre, even though his absurdist version of existentialism veered greatly away from the older man’s.
As a young journalist in Algiers, Camus had discovered Sartre’s Nausea, penned an excited review, then sat down to write his own novel of alienation. Published in 1942, The Stranger featured stripped-down language, a hard-boiled style that corresponded to its theme: life’s traditional forms of meaning—religion, love, family—were shams. The main character, Meursault, is immune to others; he does not love or hate them, or so he tells himself. Surrounded by immorality and violence—his neighbor brutally beats the dog he loves, and a pimp abuses his unnamed Arab “whore”—Meursault does not think anything of it. Disabused of common lies, numbed, utterly without purpose, he pursues empty sex and insists that one life is the same as any other. Barren existence is all there is, and death is our only fate.
This was quite a statement to make as the Nazis strode forth. The Stranger features no hint of invading armies, no concentration camps, and no allegory of the lingering evil that surrounded France and French Algeria. Meursault is dislocated from any common purpose: he is a man mired in life’s absurdity. After establishing this grim theme, the plot takes an odd twist, one that has long puzzled critics. Meursault tags along with Raymond the pimp, and a series of events leads our anti-hero to stalk and senselessly murder a character named the “Arab.” Like the Arab “whore,” this victim never receives a proper name, nor is he allowed to utter a word. Said to be the angry brother of Raymond’s prostitute, Meursault tracks him, shoots him down, and then pumps four more bullets into the lifeless body.
For students of Sartre’s philosophy, it would be hard not to wonder about the very title of this work. Who was the stranger? Meursault, Camus would have answered, but a persuasive case could be made for another, one so reified and made so invisible that neither Camus nor the French critics could see him. The narrative exerts great effort to explicate the subjective state of Meursault, but the “Arab” remains an utter mystery, an impassive thing. When the protagonist is arrested, his lawyer confidently informs him that the killing won’t be a big deal. Meursault simply needs to tell the right colonial story: after being threatened by an armed Arab, he stood his ground. Case closed.
Then the plot takes another weird turn. As he is interrogated, Meursault’s cold refusal to mourn his mother is discovered. That—not any murder—is his downfall. Damning details about the murder suddenly cannot be so easily explained away. The victim was supine, in no position to threaten anyone. The killer cannot explain why, after the first potentially “accidental” shot, he finished his victim off with four more, taken, as Meursault himself recalls, “calmly, point-blank—thoughtfully as it were.” During the trial, the court tries to fathom the ins and outs of Meursault’s mind, while his unmourned victim is never given a second thought. The novel includes no testimony from the dead man’s family. Who cares?
In his attempt to construct a parable of alienation, Camus fixated on his stranger, but it was arguably, historically, the wrong one. The silenced, dominated Other was the voiceless Algerian; he became the tool by which Meursault expressed himself and lived out his fate. Blinded by colonial verities, Camus seemed blissfully unaware of this irony. However, that invisibility would end a decade later, when the nameless Others revolted.
The Stranger unwittingly demonstrated, as Simone de Beauvoir worried, that the I/Other dynamic might easily become twisted around in history’s complex crosscurrents. After the war ended, some existentialists, following Camus, sought to dramatize the absurdity of modern life. However, history continued to intrude. When the Algerian revolt exploded in 1954, Camus, who as a young journalist had advocated for Algerian rights, got tangled up in the moral dilemmas of his homeland. Upon winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, he was pressed by radicals to explicate his silence on Algeria, where the uprising had descended into a gruesome mix of French army torture, pied-noir militia assassinations, and Algerian rebel bombings. In a heated interview, Camus blurted out that his mother still lived in Algeria, and if forced to choose between justice and the safety of his mother, he would always choose his mother. It was an admission at once so utterly human and so wrong that it only made any fair-minded listener pray that their mother never placed them in such an untenable position.
WRITING UNDER CENSORSHIP, Sartre had been encouraged to use dramatic allegory and philosophical abstraction, but after the war he threw himself directly into politics. To do so, he added a contextual element to his thinking, as Simone de Beauvoir had recommended. The I/Other struggle needed to be placed in a historical context; it had a “Situation.” Every subject lived in a “Situation”—defined by biological, economic, political, and cultural factors that limited and restricted their freedom. This idea made a minor appearance in Being and Nothingness, but it was put to work in a secret tract Sartre wrote during the war and then published afterward as Reflections on the Jewish Question.
Sartre turned his gaze from the defining qualities of the victims to those of their victimizers. The American ex-pat Richard Wright, now part of Sartre’s Parisian circle, insisted that America did not have a Black problem; it had a white one. Sartre similarly asserted that France had no Jewish problem, but rather one generated by Christians. That was due to the “Situation” of the Frenchman and the Jew. Jews differed in numerous ways and were not linked by race so much as being lumped together as France’s Other. “Thus,” Sartre wrote, “the Jew remains the stranger, the intruder, the unassimilated at the very heart of our society.” More centrally, anti-Semites had made hatred of the Other their passion, their faith, and the source of their sadistic pleasure. Inside the bigot’s core, Sartre smelled fear: “He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness.…”
How could anti-Semitic zeal be curbed? Not by universal equality. Sartre derided those who denied the particularity of “Jew, Arab, Negro, Bourgeois or worker.” Instead, he proposed a “concrete liberalism,” in which citizens had rights not only as members of the nation but also as Jews, Negroes, and Arabs. For the Jew, he claimed, freedom and authenticity meant living out one’s full condition as a Jew. This assertion proved controversial and ironical; had the champion of freedom made a concrete essence out of Jewishness? Undeterred, Sartre extended this thinking and called for the end of colonial domination in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, French Sudan, Ivory Coast, Niger, Senegal, French Volta, Togoland, Vietnam … the list went on. Inside France, he believed, rabid discrimination might be softened by education and public awareness, but it would be eradicated only when the bigot’s situation, his economic reality, changed. In a classless society, anti-Semitism would wither. For the philosopher who once denied the possibility of any mutual recognition, this was his leap from never-ending turbulence toward shore.
Over the next decades, as one of the most famed public intellectuals in the West, the co-editor of Les Temps Modernes made constant pronouncements on world events. He believed he had found a critique that cut to the bone and was not afraid to slice and dice struggles in far-off lands. His fame made his opinion an event. His calls for liberation were heard, especially in the French colonies, which began the long, often violent process of decoupling. Sartre’s critique acted like a solvent in those regions; it bulldozed ideological justifications and gave these situations new clarity. Anticolonial thinkers within the colonies embraced Sartre, for he helped them sort through the confusion that came with having their home be, like Camus’s mother, an injustice that was also in part loved.
One such thinker was Albert Memmi, a Jewish Berber born in French Tunisia in 1920. The eldest of eight, Memmi and his family lived in penury. He later wrote of a childhood where, thanks to bigots of many sorts—Sicilians, Arab police, French teachers—humiliation was his daily bread. Anti-Semitism was also rife, but under French rule, a Jew was still a rung above a Muslim. After excelling in French schools, Memmi stumbled into adulthood, a stranger among European Jews as an African, a disliked minority among Arab Muslims as a Jew, and a double outcast among the French as a Tunisian Jew. He came to Paris and took up a pen to sort himself out. However, at the Sorbonne, he grew bitter due to what he recalled as “racist and xenophobic aggression.”
In 1949, Memmi returned to Tunis and began to advocate for independence. His first autobiographical novel, while in manuscript, came to the attention of Camus and Sartre. The Pillar of Salt was serialized in Les Temps Modernes and made the author’s name. In 1955, Memmi published another autobiographical novel, which explored a “mixed” marriage between a French Catholic woman and a North African. As conflict picked up in Tunisia, French readers took in Memmi’s work; he also tried to help support North African writing as the editor of Jeune Afrique. In 1956, Memmi was delighted by the swift liberation of Tunisia. His joy, however, soon soured. For some of his countrymen, he was too Frenchified, for others he was an unwanted Jew. Exiled again, he returned to France and there he remained.
A native of neither here nor there, Memmi sought to reconcile his mixed identities in Portrait of the Colonized, Preceded by a Portrait of the Colonizer. He felt he could speak for both. He took up the ambiguous and reciprocal identities that defined the “situations of the colonized.” As for Marxism and economic causation, he left that to others, a dereliction that Sartre chided him for in an otherwise enthusiastic introduction. Memmi focused on the psychic problems of identity and the social forces that, over decades of mixing, made for hybrid types. He went beyond stereotypes to examine the colonizer who guiltily rejected colonization, the colonizer who went native, and the self-hating, “I wish I were white” colonized. The I/Other paradigm helped him explain how Master and Slave got so entwined. Memmi would continue to write on these issues, struggling to expand the definition of racism to include other forms of discrimination.
After Portrait was published in 1957, Memmi became well known and was summoned to a meeting with Sartre. The great man received the new luminary in what seemed to be a graduate student’s quarters, littered with books and a grimy armchair. Smoking nonstop, the éminence grise peppered the young immigrant with questions and seemed eager to hear his opinions. Memmi immediately fell for the sage but kept him at arm’s length, worried that “God-the-Father-Sartre” would cannibalize his work. In this premonition, he was not all wrong, as became clear from the work of another writer of hybrid identity and no home, one who worshipped Sartre and paid a price.
In one of the last acts of his short life, the revolutionary doctor Frantz Fanon flew to Rome in 1961 for a rendez-vous with his hero. He did not dare fly to France, where he feared what would await him. Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Lanzmann met the physician at the airport and whisked him off to his assignation. Sartre knew of Fanon’s work, for as early as 1952 he had published the psychiatrist in Les Temps Modernes. In Rome, the two men fell into an unremitting conversation that lasted three days. The discussions were so intense that Beauvoir rebuked the young man for straining Sartre’s health. Shockingly, however, it was the thirty-six-year-old who four months later would be dead.
Frantz Fanon was born of Alsatian, Indian, and African heritage and was raised in the French department of Martinique. While training as a doctor and psychiatrist in Lyon, he absorbed the work of Sartre and the politician and poet from Fort-de-France who had been his teacher, Aimé Césaire. Fanon wrote lively absurdist plays with titles like “The Drowning Eye,” in which characters proclaim: “The fire of the sky / this skyful of eyes pounding on the doors of my flesh. / The lips of the world / gashed / ripped / crushed / the sucking of my blood!”
He also wrote a medical thesis on a rare neurologic disorder, a difficulty in walking that seemed to include delusions of possession. After defending his dissertation in 1951, he confessed to a friend: “A win, a rather slight one, but a win all the same.” Fanon had passed, but he ranked thirteenth of twenty-three. Therefore, he was unlikely to get his preferred post either at home in Martinique or in nearby Guadeloupe. Fatefully, the new doctor was sent to work in an Algerian hospital. He spoke no Arabic and discovered that, here, his blackness was a problem. Actually, it was one in a cascading series of problems. “The Frenchman does not like the Jew,” he wrote, “who does not like the Arab, who does not like the Negro.” Around and backwards, so the wheel of hate turned.
Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and revolutionary
By then, Fanon had already published Black Skin, White Masks, a book that was part memoir, part phenomenological analysis, and part psychiatric case history. The author was twenty-seven years old. In the same way that Adorno used Frankfurt sociology to augment psychoanalysis, this young psychiatrist had mixed Sartre with self-regulatory ideas developed by Alfred Adler, one of the Freudian dissidents. Adler had championed the notion of an inferiority complex, a feeling of being less than others that then led to symptoms of “overcompensation.” A French psychoanalyst, Octave Mannoni, dared to hypothesize that the colonized intrinsically possessed inferiority complexes, whether under the boot of colonizers or not. Fanon attacked this as absurd; their inferiority complex was formed by their situation.
While Mannoni served as an exemplar of error, Fanon lavished praise on Sartre’s work on anti-Semitism—“some of the finest pages I have ever read.” Immersing himself in Sartre, he would later say, made him feel understood as never before. The inauthentic Black man, he realized, like Sartre’s Jew, was caught in a vise. Forced to be the white man’s idea of a Black, he was simultaneously urged to be more white. Such contradictory demands led to an inferiority complex and a frustrated search for recognition. To overcompensate for self-hatred, Fanon wrote, Black men might lust after white women, or Black women could “solve” the riddle of their identity by attaching themselves to white men. As for those whites with “Negrophobia,” they created their “inferior” as a way of stabilizing their own self-regard.
Black Skin, White Masks appeared in print before Fanon arrived in Algeria. It was there that he became further radicalized. Writing for newspapers and lecturing throughout Africa, Fanon took up the cause of the colonized Algerians. His missives were not well received by all; Albert Memmi wondered who this doctor from Martinique was speaking of when he wrote of “us” and “our nation.” As the Algerian war became more gruesome, Fanon was forced to flee to Ghana, where he was given the title of Itinerant Ambassador for the provisional revolutionary government. Still, when he could, he worked on a book about the Algerian revolution and the psychic costs of racism and colonization called The Wretched of the Earth.
As the book was nearing completion, under the alias “F. Farés,” the fugitive wrote his publisher, François Maspero, to request a favor. “Ask Sartre to preface me,” he wrote. “Tell him that I think of him each time I sit down at my desk.” So the men met in Rome and solidified Sartre’s commitment to do exactly that. This new work appeared in print as Fanon’s popularity was building, especially in the French colonies. However, the introduction Sartre provided turned out to be deeply troubling, an act of upstaging that marred interpretations of the psychiatrist’s last work for years to come. According to his wife, a sickly, bedridden Fanon was not pleased, but in no shape to do anything.
In this preface, Sartre correctly restated Fanon’s view that indigenous people struggled with a terror of their powerful oppressors and the fear that they would themselves give in to rage. Sartre then infamously went further with his theory of counterviolence. A way to cure the “neurotic” illness that came with colonization, Sartre suggested, was by shooting a European. Hence, the colonized killed both the oppressor and the part of themselves that had been oppressed. As Hannah Arendt would note, this was never Fanon’s position, but Sartre’s powerful preface meant that some never found that out. Fanon had written about the need for violence to oppose the violent rule of the colonizer, but he sought to transcend the dialectic of dominant and dominated, not just reverse roles. Sartre’s was a brutal, ridiculous position, one that deeply misunderstood the nature of psychic occupation, but, delivered with the Frenchman’s soaring rhetoric, it echoed throughout French colonies as freedom fighters dreamed of raising their own flags.