The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt

Around 458 B.C.—about forty years before Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (420 B.C.)—Aeschylus wrote his Oresteia.¹ In 1943 a modern rebel, Jean-Paul Sartre, would refashion it as The Flies: “I’m free as air, thank God! My mind’s my own, gloriously aloof. . . . I shall not come back to Nature, . . . in it are a thousand beaten paths all leading up to you—but I must blaze my trail. For I, Zeus, am a man, and every man must find out his own way. Nature abhors man, and you too, god of gods, abhor mankind.”² The speaker is a curious matricidal humanist, a remorseless atheist who represents the absolute stranger, that is, the free man Sartre will ceaselessly champion in an intellectual and political career that proved one of the most turbulent and controversial.

To examine revolt in the contemporary world, in contemporary literature, Sartre’s experience cannot be ignored. I am all the more delighted to present his work here because a sort of weak consensus has reigned for some time that disparages Sartre, unfairly in my opinion. Like that of Barthes, which I will discuss soon, it is impossible to reconstruct Sartre’s experience in the pages at my disposal here, but I hope nevertheless to give you an introduction of some depth in this time of oblivion. I will not tackle the Sartre-Beauvoir question—a scandal to some, a fascination for others—but I bring it up here to mention two things in passing: it has never been easy for a woman to gain recognition in the closely guarded pantheon of letters without a certain conventional complacency and complicity—it is not any easier today; it has even become increasingly impossible—and Beauvoir in her various writings has deftly articulated the effort and struggle this cost her. Nor is it easy for a man to be the companion of a woman of Beauvoir’s intelligence. I will come back some day to this confrontation called “a relationship” precisely in light of what I plan to say about Sartre’s trajectory.

Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905, and died on April 15, 1980. For him as with Aragon and Barthes, though differently for each, the biographer is immediately faced with a question regarding the paternal function. Aragon was illegitimate, as you recall. This was not the case for Sartre, whose father died in 1907, when the child was two years old. He was raised by Karl Schweitzer, his maternal grandfather, the focus of both his adoration and his desire for autonomy. He expresses this in The Words,³ an autobiographical book in which he retraces his childhood and expresses his need to confront his grandfather and put in his place not the authority of the father or even the refusal of this function but what he calls “the mind.” This term sums up the intellectual experience or that of sublimation, the investment in ideas and words that will characterize his entire life. His mother remarried in 1916, and Sartre left the family circle, sent off to a lycée in La Rochelle between 1916 and 1919. As a student, he began to assert his autonomy. Accepted at the Ecole Normale in 1924, he passed the agrégation [exam for teachers] in 1929 and began his military service in the meteorology department in Tours. Later, he became a philosophy teacher in Le Havre, in Laon, and, in 1937, at the lycée Pasteur in Paris. Then war broke out, which he discussed in his Diaries.⁴ He was taken prisoner on June 21, 1940, in Lorraine and led to Stalag 12d in Trier. Freed on April 1, 1941, he returned as a civilian to the lycée Pasteur before teaching at the lycée Condorcet. He went on an unlimited leave of absence in 1945 and would never teach again, devoting himself entirely to the work of writing and philosophy. Around the same time, he took his first trip to the United States.

Among the many events that mark Sartre’s postwar itinerary, I will speak only of those that, in my eyes, sum up what I call the sense and non-sense of revolt. In 1964 Sartre refused the Nobel Prize; in 1966 he participated in the Russell tribunal, which opposed the Vietnam War and “American imperialism”; in 1968 he appeared at the Sorbonne to support the student movement (from this La Cause du peuple was born, which he would head); between 1970 and 1973 came his break with the Communists and in particular with the Soviet Union, following revelations of the existence of the gulag and under the pressure of Solzhenitsyn. Sartre was then a leftist. In 1973, fatigued by intense intellectual work, the use of strong stimulants, and age, Sartre went partially blind. This did not prevent him from pursuing his vocation as a rebel, with the help of his friends. His death, on April 15, 1980, provoked acute emotion among leftists, youth, and a great number of intellectuals, despite the violent reactions that his political activities never failed to incite.

Sartre’s refusal of the Nobel Prize constitutes a good example of the ambiguity of his positions, and the Nobel Prize affair appears to me to be emblematic of the sense and non-sense of revolt.⁵

On October 4, 1964, a rumor circulated that the Nobel Prize jury was planning to award its prize for literature to Sartre; there was even a small mention of it in the October 4, 1964, issue of Le Figaro littéraire. On October 14, Sartre sent the following letter to the Nobel Academy:

Mr. Secretary,

According to certain information I was made aware of today, I have some chance of obtaining the Nobel Prize this year. Although it may be presumptuous to decide a vote before it has taken place, I am taking the liberty to write you now in order to clear up a misunderstanding. I would like to assure you first, Mr. Secretary, of my deep esteem for the Swedish Academy and the prize with which it has honored so many writers. Nevertheless, for reasons that are personal and for others that are more objective, I do not wish to appear on the list of possible prizewinners, and neither can nor wish, either in 1964 or later, to accept this honorific distinction.

Please accept my apologies, Mr. Secretary, and my deepest respect.

Apparently this letter arrived at its destination on a weekend, the secretary misplaced it, and it was lost: Sartre was therefore announced as the recipient of the prize. Afterward, he gave an interview to the Swedish and international press at the Swedish embassy in Paris.

By refusing the Nobel Prize, Sartre refused 250,000 francs, a substantial sum at the time; his refusal, however, cannot be reduced to moral rigor and financial asceticism. He could have accepted the prize—which in his eyes “bought” the work and the writer—and used it for political causes—for example, Vietnam, tortured and starving children, and so on. More profoundly, he explained his refusal as a desire to show that the writer must remain inalienable, rebellious to any allegiance, even an institution as prestigious as the Nobel.⁶ Finally, and this is where ambiguities arise, Sartre felt the writers who had already been honored by the Nobel jury were all part of the capitalist bloc—the bourgeois bloc—and that the prize was only rarely given to writers of the Eastern bloc, which Sartre, despite his circumspection, continued to appreciate. When a Soviet writer was honored, he was sorry it was not the “right one,” in his eyes: the Nobel Prize was awarded to Boris Pasternak and not to Mikhaïl Sholokhov.

Sartre’s arguments would soon be made obsolete at the very least by events that showed the Eastern bloc in all its horror: Solzhenitsyn’s revelations would lead Sartre to move away from Communism and withdraw his critical sympathy; Sholokhov would even be charged with stealing the manuscripts of an unknown writer and publishing them as And Quiet Flows the Don, which cast a lugubrious light on the demand for libertarian rigor that Sartre advanced in preferring him to Pasternak. Of course, Sartre had no reason to suspect Sholokhov, but he did have ways of knowing about the existence of the camps and the manipulations in which the Soviet system indulged.

All this applies much more dramatically to Aragon and his long complicity with the Stalinist reality, which I have not emphasized enough and which is not well-known. As for Sartre, his concern to detach himself from Western conformism had blinded him, and he adhered completely, without the spirit of revolt he demanded elsewhere, to a certain leftist propaganda of the time. Total revolt against some, doubts finally erased concerning others: Sartre’s position at that moment, with its distinct and dogmatic moralism, similar to that of a good many intellectuals and writers, would gradually become more complex and nuanced with the development of global history and his own thought, but it is striking today in its sectarianism. Consider Sartre’s arguments as they were developed in the interview I just mentioned:

I keenly regret that this affair has taken on an appearance of scandal. A prize was awarded and someone refused it. The fact was, I was not informed early enough about what was being planned. When I saw an article in Le Figaro littéraire of October 15 by the paper’s Swedish correspondent saying the choice of the Swedish Academy had not yet been established, I imagined that by writing a letter to the Swedish Academy, which I sent the next day, I could clarify things and no one would talk about it anymore.

I was unaware that the Nobel Prize was awarded without asking the opinion of the party in question and I thought it was important to prevent that. But I understand that when the Swedish Academy has made a choice, it cannot retract it. The reasons for which I renounce the prize concern neither the Swedish Academy nor the Nobel Prize itself, as I explained in my letter to the Academy. In it I invoked two sorts of reasons: personal reasons and objective reasons. My personal reasons are the following: my refusal is not a spontaneous act. I have always refused official distinctions. When, after the war, in 1945, I was offered the Legion of Honor, I refused, even though I had friends in the government. Likewise, I have never wished to enter the Collège de France, as some of my friends have suggested. This attitude is based on my conception of a writer’s work. A writer who takes political, social, and literary stands must act only with the means that are his own, that is, the written word. All the distinctions he may receive expose his readers to a pressure that I do not consider desirable. It is not the same if I sign my name “Jean-Paul Sartre,” or “Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prizewinner.”

The writer who accepts a distinction of this sort also engages the association or institution that has honored him. My sympathy for the Venezuelan underground engages no one but me, whereas if the Nobel Prizewinner Jean-Paul Sartre supported the Venezuelan resistance he would drag the entire Nobel Prize as an institution with him. The writer must therefore refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if this takes place in the most honorable forms, as is the case here.

This attitude is obviously entirely my own: it does not comprise any criticism against those who have already been honored. I have much respect and admiration for several prizewinners whom I have the honor of knowing.

My objective reasons are the following: the sole possible struggle on the cultural front is for the peaceful coexistence of two cultures, that of the East and that of the West. I am not saying we have to embrace each other. I know that the confrontation between these two cultures must necessarily take the form of a conflict. But it must take place between men and between cultures without the intervention of institutions. I feel the contradiction between the two cultures personally, profoundly.

Note the emphasis on the malaise engendered by these contradictions, and the choice nevertheless supported: “I am made of these contradictions. My sympathies lean undeniably toward socialism and what is called the Eastern bloc. But I was born and raised in a bourgeois family. This allows me to collaborate with all those who want to bring the two cultures closer together. Of course, I hope the best one wins.” Since the best one, in Sartre’s eyes, was socialism, his error has been denounced with the greatest virulence. The victors say Sartre was always mistaken, although most of these righteous sorts never ventured any thought or position whatsoever themselves. (I am not talking here about the perspicacious, such as Raymond Aron, who always denounced totalitarianism, even at the price of the subjective reserve that characterizes liberal rationalists, while the writer-intellectual, on the contrary, shares and assumes the anxieties of individuals and the century.)

This is why I cannot accept any distinction distributed by high cultural authorities, either in the East or the West, even if I fully understand their existence. [As an aside, let me remind you that, unlike Aragon, Sartre never accepted an award from the East either.] Although my sympathies lie with the socialists, I would be just as unable to accept the Lenin Prize, for example, if someone wanted to give it to me, which is not the case. I know that the Nobel Prize in itself is not a literary prize from the Western bloc, but it is what we make of it, and events could arise that the Swedish Academy does not determine. This is why, in the current situation, the Nobel Prize presents itself objectively as a distinction reserved for writers of the West or rebels of the East. [As you can see, Sartre refuses the revolt of the rebels of the East; is he therefore accepting a situation where revolt would be limited, prohibited to some?] Neruda, for example, a great South American poet, has not been honored. Louis Aragon has never been talked about seriously though he certainly deserves it. It is regrettable that the prize has been given to Pasternak before Sholokhov, and that the only Soviet work honored should be a work published abroad and prohibited in its country.

As though samizdat and publishing abroad has not always been necessary to publish dissident works! But in 1964, Sartre was oblivious to this. He rebeled against bourgeois “right-thinking” and contrasted it overall to Soviet “socialism.” Consider Michel Contat’s commentary on the subject, the sympathetic tone of which does not in any way diminish its critical pertinence:

You had to be very familiar with Sartre to understand the nastiness beneath the homage to Aragon, who certainly deserved this prize. It only caused laughter in the sixth arrondissement. On the other hand, Sartre quickly noticed that he had committed a serious gaffe by mentioning Sholokhov, a Stalinist writer, and by criticizing the attribution of the prize to Boris Pasternak (who was forced to refuse it, in 1958) without condemning the prohibition of Doctor Zhivago in the USSR. As for asserting that no Communist writer had ever received the prize, he was mistaken, since Salvatore Quasimodo had been given the prize in 1959, precisely as a way to reestablish the balance. Was it to prove Sartre wrong that the Swedish Academy awarded the prize to Mikhaïl Sholokhov in 1965? And should it be seen as punishment that no French writer would receive it until Claude Simon in 1985?”⁷

Sartre immediately returned to the French context and to his role as a spoilsport:

A balance could have established by a similar gesture in the other direction. During the Algerian War, when we signed the “declaration of the 121,” I would have accepted the prize gratefully because it would have honored not only me but also the freedom for which we were fighting. But this did not happen. And it was only when the fighting ended that the prize was awarded to me. In the Swedish Academy’s motivations, they speak of freedom; this is a word that invites numerous interpretations. In the West, we only understand a general freedom; as for me, I understand a more concrete freedom that consists of the right to have more than one pair of shoes and to eat when hungry. It seems less dangerous to me to decline the prize than to accept it. If I accept it, I lend myself to what I will call “an objective takeover.” I read in the Figaro littéraire article that my “controversial political past would not be held against me.” I know that this article does not express the opinion of the Swedish Academy. But it clearly shows how my acceptance would be interpreted in certain circles on the right.

In advocating concrete individual freedom, Sartre worried that his rebellious past might be erased, especially during the Algerian War:

I consider this “controversial political past” still valid, even if I am prepared to recognize certain past errors among my comrades. By this I do not mean to say that the Nobel Prize is a “bourgeois prize,” but that is the bourgeois interpretation the circles I know well would inevitably give it. Finally, I come to the question of money. The Academy places a great weight on the prizewinner’s shoulders by accompanying his homage with an enormous sum. And this problem tormented me. . . . [You can hear Sartre’s rather Protestant and moralistic tone.] Either one accepts the prize and, with the sum received, supports movements or organizations that one considers important—for my part, I think of the Apartheid Committee in London—or one declines the prize based on general principles and deprives this movement of the support it needs. But I think that this is a false problem. I obviously renounce the 250,000 francs because I do not want to be institutionalized either in the West or in the East. But one cannot be asked, for 250,000 francs, to renounce principles that are not solely your own but that all your comrades share. This is what has made both the attribution of the prize and the refusal that I am obliged to give so difficult for me. I want to end my statement with a message of friendship to the Swedish public. . .⁸

Sartre’s position was clear. His honesty led him to refuse the prize for the reasons he mentioned. Nevertheless, given the events that have followed, particularly the revelations about the East and the fall of the Berlin Wall, an ambiguity persists and taints the whole of his rebellious position in that it did not go so far as to challenge what he called “socialism,” a term that cannot be used generically to encompass all of Eastern European Communism, although some have no qualms doing so, in a pejorative sense, tracing totalitarianism back to the Enlightenment! We are presented with a curious symmetry of apparently opposed intellectual parties during the Stalinist era: some (with Sartre) supported “socialism,” which included Communism, in order to positivize it and to rise up against the injustices of bourgeois societies, using it as a weapon; others used the same amalgam to reject the “monster” as a whole in favor of a beatification of liberal democracies. Some—antiauthoritarians, libertarian socialists, indeed, leftists—absolutized revolt without revolting precisely against the revolt itself and limited their critical judgment; others—democratic liberals—obscured the role of the negative and of revolt in psychical and social life. Note, however, that Sartre’s union with what he called “socialism” was an attempt at critical proximity not with the socialist left, whose evasions he did not support, but with the Communist Party, whose anti-Americanism, critique of bourgeois conformism, and impact on the “masses”—the “proletariat”—he appreciated and which so strongly seduced the intellectual, guilty about his scarcely popular refinements. He explained this himself in On a raison de se révolter. Thus, regarding three articles entitled “Les Communistes et la paix” published in Les Temps modernes during the cold war, he said: “When I think about it today, I think I was compelled to write them out of hatred of bourgeois behavior more than the attraction the party exercised over me.”⁹

That said, as a result of positions of which the Nobel Prize affair was but a spectacular emblem, a strong and lasting hatred of Sartre was set into motion that went well beyond the ambiguity of his position and his so-called mistakes. I recommend Jean-Jacques Brochier’s very topical book, which I have already cited, which mentions a number of Sartre’s most virulent detractors—Jacques Laurent and Jean Dutourd, among others—who ceaselessly denounce “the pedantic and barbarous language of this philosopher lost in literature,” this “patent corrupter,” and so on.¹⁰ More surprising are criticisms from people such as Kostas Axelos, philosopher and ex-theoretician of the Greek Communist Party, who found Sartre’s leftist positions unacceptable.

On the other hand, to allow you to persist in the idea that revolt defines free men, I was struck by two voices which Brochier also mentions and which seem to me to be very significant: two great intellectuals and writers who do not join the chorus of detractors, François Mauriac and Gilles Deleuze.

Mauriac’s ironic and critical question published in L’Express remains famous: “O Sartre, why are you so sad?” Fortified by glory and the Catholic resurrection, Mauriac was persuaded to dispense hope beyond Billancourt and to avoid the negative and caustic tone Sartre adopted when he denounced the evils of the era and society. He thus falsely inscribed himself against Sartre’s positions, but in his weekly “Bloc-notes” in Figaro littéraire, he revealed himself to be a man of great decency and underscored Sartre’s moral and human force:

“He only got what he deserved!” Jean-Paul Sartre might have cried when Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize. Camus, if he were still alive, would not be able to respond “Catch!” because Jean-Paul Sartre managed to avoid the golden paving stone that fell on his head and did not in fact catch anything. Let’s give him some credit: he gave his reasons to the city and the world without getting turgid, his tone appropriate, like a well-bred bourgeois. But, above all, Sartre was able to avoid ostentation: that was the danger in his gesture. Think what you like of the philosopher, the essayist, the novelist, the dramatist, but in the last analysis this great writer is a true man, and that is his glory.

I emphasize this, because if you know how sparing Mauriac was with his compliments, you can appreciate the homage! “I hear myself when I give him this praise,” he continued. “A true man doesn’t grow on trees, much less in newspaper rooms or the antechambers of publishing houses. Because he is this true man Sartre reaches those who are the most estranged from his thought and most hostile to his opinions.”¹¹ Even Mauriac, as you see, who counted himself among those “most estranged from his thought and most hostile to his opinions,” nevertheless considered him “a true man,” the likes of which did not “grow on trees.”

Everything a true man says, everything he writes engages him. This goes without saying for him but is surprising in a world where gestures and words no longer engage anyone. . . . To get back to Jean-Paul Sartre, he refused what I myself was very surprised to receive, but just as happy to accept, not in order to give millions to the “apartheid” committee in London or some other pious deed, as Sartre, had he accepted the prize, confides he would have done but to redo the bathroom in my house in Seine-et-Oise and repair the fences. The strange thing is that I don’t read anything by this true man without at some point in my reading throwing down the book and crying: “No! That isn’t true!” Sartre’s engagement [is] so singular, this absurdity must be ventured: a disengaged engagement [I would add: disengaged in the sense that it is constantly critical, except perhaps in a certain umbilical attachment, as I pointed out earlier, to the Eastern bloc. You see, we can be more critical than Mauriac with regard to the existentialist philosopher, without losing sight of the profound sense of his rebellious gesture.] . . . with the proletariat and thus with the Communist Party, but without ever consenting on any point to bring his thought to heel. A true man, for whom to write is to act, and who is entirely in each of his words, a free man . .. I’ll stop here and praise and admire myself for so generously admiring this philosopher who, at the start of his literary life, and right off the bat, sought to wring my neck.¹²

I will leave you to contemplate this critical homage and move on to another, by Gilles Deleuze. I cannot quote the entire text (published the same year as Mauriac’s, 1964, in the review Arts) in spite of my admiration for it, but I strongly encourage you to take a look at it. In it Deleuze says what one would not necessarily expect from the author of Anti-Oedipus: “He was my master,” he declares quite simply. And yet, in retrospect, the resonance between the two thinkers is unquestionable, not only in terms of their anticonformism but also and above all in terms of their examination of freedom and evil.

The sadness of generations without “masters.” Our masters are not only public teachers, though we have a great need for teachers. As we come of age, our masters are those who strike us with a new radicality, those able to invent an artistic or literary technique and find ways to think that correspond to our modernity, that is, to our difficulties as well as our diffuse enthusiasms. We know that there is only one value of art and even truth, that is to say, the “first hand,” the authentic newness of what one is saying, the “little music” with which one says it. Sartre was the one for us, for the generation in their twenties at Liberation. Who then knew how to say something new, if not Sartre? Who taught us new ways to think? As brilliant and profound as it was, the work of Merleau-Ponty was professorial and in many ways depended on Sartre’s. . . . Camus, alas, was at times inflated virtuousness, at times secondhand absurdity. Camus claimed filiation with the penseurs maudits, but his entire philosophy took him back to Lalande and Meyerson, authors familiar to anyone with a high school diploma. The new themes, a certain new style, a new polemical and aggressive way of posing problems came from Sartre. In the disorder and hopes of the Liberation, we discovered, rediscovered, everything: Kafka, the American novel, Husserl and Heidegger, endless clarifications of Marxism, the impulse toward a new novel. All this happened through Sartre, not only because, as a philosopher, he had a genius for totalization, but because he knew how to invent the new. The first productions of The Flies, the publication of Being and Nothingness, the “Is Existentialism Humanism?” lecture, were events. One learned, after long nights, about the identity between thought and freedom.¹³

I would like in turn to demonstrate the correspondences Sartre sought to maintain with “our difficulties” and “enthusiasms.” First off, there was an identity between thought and freedom, particularly in the Sartrean theater as revealed through the libertarian value of the strange characters in his plays. What is striking in Sartre’s theater is the spirit of freedom and revolt, a minor manifestation of which we have just seen, misguided although not without pertinence, in the refusal of the Nobel Prize; this spirit of revolt and freedom that did not retreat from error or even from evil was crystallized in the characters of the criminal, the bastard, the actor, and the intellectual. Following the trajectory from Nausea (1938) to The Flies (1943) and other plays, it composed a sort of faceted deconstruction of the rebellious hero.

“Foreign to Myself. . . I Am Doomed to Have No Other Law But Mine”: The Flies under the Occupation and Vichy

Let’s start with The Flies and move backward chronologically, for the major themes of Sartrean revolt are present here in an imaginary form, and you do not necessarily need the philosophical apparatus of existentialism to access it.

Imagine The Flies during the Occupation and Vichy when Sartre adapted the Greek legend. Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is twenty; he arrives with his tutor at Argos from which he was sent away at the age of three after Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover, murdered Agamemnon. He is excluded, in the position of the tragic hero, but not just any hero: not Oedipus the King but Orestes the Exile, who will be revealed to be the free Man. The identification of the dramatist—and the spectator—with the excluded is already a position of revolt. Orestes wants to enter the city from which he was exiled to incite revolt among the people protecting themselves from death and evil through the complacency of remorse: the flies represent the Furies. Philebus/Orestes directs the violence of his gesture at the homogeneous and the identical, all the more because Aegisthus, the murderer, feels no remorse. While the entire city is invaded by remorse, a diffuse, persecuting, always sickening remorse that takes the form of flies, none is assumed by the sovereign criminal who is the cause of it.

Given that this play was written during the German Occupation, the insinuation is clear: it is an indictment of a fetid state of mind, of a crowd concealing the crime of leaders and condemning itself to abjection in passiveness, guilt-ridden though complicitous and incapable of resistance and freedom. As André Green remarks, the theater offered Sartre “the chance to exhort an audience by means of the spoken word, under the nose of the Germans, these Aegisthuses who slept with a collaborating France.”¹⁴ How will Orestes lead the city of Argos to rebel?

As you recall, he does not succeed, but he commits an act that shows us the difficulty of revolt and the compromise in which the tragic hero and/or rebel engage: another evil must be committed in order to conquer evil. This, at least, is the path Orestes follows, pushed by his sister, Electra, who disowns her brother once the infamy is committed. What is the new evil? Killing not only Aegisthus but also Clytemnestra, his own mother.

Sartre’s mise-en-scène is spectacular and significant: Orestes takes the path of crime, the path that starts on the hill and leads down to the city, there “for the taking” through “an act beyond all remedy.” ¹⁵ Once the double murder is perpetrated, Orestes is not a victor destined to reign supremely; he is forced to flee, for the path he has chosen is unbearable. This obligation is also a choice: a second choice, for Orestes takes the road outside the city, under the sun, of his own will, well before the persecution of the crowd begins. When Electra calls him a “thief,” impugning the horror her brother has committed, Orestes protests that he is free and leaves Argos forever. The path of freedom is an open road that involves temporary implication in evil and crime. Which leads us directly to one of the major themes in existentialism, in Sartre, and above all in his theater, namely, freedom. “I am doomed to freedom,” Sartre asserts through Orestes; freedom is not a grace or a good, we are condemned to it as by a moral obligation to the second degree that challenges the conventional morality of the victors, and we must assume it with all the violence it implies for ourselves and others. Moreover, if freedom is an endless path, it can only be reached through the boundary composed of evil and crime: the crossing of this boundary is intrinsically necessary. Freedom is antigood, antinature, antiphysis: because nature is the mother, the mother must be killed. Man can only attain his free being through the self’s conquest of nature, by wresting himself from it, by denying all nature: this is the meaning of the mother’s murder. We assert ourselves as free subjects only by asserting ourselves as antinatural. We are a long way from the feminine marvelous here, as you can see!

I would like to emphasize the excessiveness of this freedom that integrates evil. This is not just a matter of recourse to a mythological metaphor to justify the violence of the Resistance fighters or terrorism against the conformism of compromises and foundations. It is, in an echo of Nietzsche, about establishing an Antichrist, an antichristic antihero who wrests himself definitively from divine protection as well as from the aspiration to moral purity and consequent divinization. “A man was to come, to announce my decline” (p. 160), Zeus confesses to Orestes, seeing in this son who kills his mother a radical deicide.

Let us compare this Sartrean Oresteia to the oedipal revolt, the foundation of the Freudian discovery.

Although the photo of Jean-Baptiste Sartre still hung above his bed; although his love for Anne-Marie—his mother, imagined as a sister—was as firm as his animosity toward his stepfather, Joseph Mancey; and although his maternal grandfather, Karl Schweitzer, was an undeniable paternal, superegolike figure (especially if you go by The Words), Sartre, who claimed orphan status, often denied the importance of the Oedipus complex for him. Yet this denial in large part explains the choice of Orestes rather than Oedipus as prototype of the free hero: in The Words, the writer pointed out that Orestes was himself as he would have liked to have been. Moreover, we know that while in captivity Sartre reread Sophocles and thus Electra, which remains faithful to Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Even so, the Greek tragedy is greatly modified in The Flies: Orestes does not succumb to destiny; he takes responsibility for his act and liberates himself from divine tutelage while he turns tragedy into mocking; moreover, Sartre’s Orestes amalgamates certain traits of Oedipus (“plague” for Oedipus, “flies” for Orestes; like Oedipus, Orestes is ready “to do himself the greatest harm”).¹⁶

Yet Orestian revolt is far more radical. To kill his mother and cut the ties with the social group by exiling himself of his own free will makes this man “foreign to himself.” He says to Zeus: “Foreign to myself—I know it. Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy except what remedy I find within myself. But I shall not return under your law; I am doomed to have no other law but mine.”¹⁷ What does this total refusal of (mother) nature as well as (paternal, civic, divine) law mean? Is it a denial of the oedipal truth? A desire not to know that love draws him to Clytemnestra and rivalry to Agamemnon/Aegisthus/Zeus? In a clinical framework, such a denial opens onto the fragmentation of the subject, and foreignness to oneself turns into psychosis, when it is not sealed off by perversion. From Hitchcock to A Clockwork Orange, contemporary art has shown modern Orestes, murderers of their mothers and the law, whose latent or claimed homosexuality is dissimulated in addiction to evil. This interpretive path nevertheless avoids the cruel novelty of Orestes in relation to Oedipus.

The very foundation of identity—that of the social group and its legislation, that of the individual—is challenged here. Whether the critical state of Greek legislation, or the critical state of the European states during World War II, or even the internal crisis of a technological and media-driven society, we are differently and conjointly confronted with a demand. When the symbolic link (political law, as in sated Aegisthus, or divine law, as in mocking Zeus) fails, oedipal revolt is impossible and fails in its dialectical function to construct the subject’s autonomy. Condemned henceforth to shatter the most archaic links—those of desire for the mother and even the attachment to natural biological survival—the subject reaches these zones of turbulence that are discord or war: turbulence in oneself, the family, the city, and at the core of being. This radical wretchedness—in counterpoint to Heidegger’s “serenity of being”—is what the speaking subject faces. His freedom depends on it, and he assumes its risks, either by compromising himself in crime and its duller variants, corruption and deceit, or by trying to find polyphonic signs of this fragmentation. (This would be the destiny of modern poetry, where, as you may recall, Georges Bataille sought the emblematic figure of Orestes; in painting, Bacon’s admiration of rotting flesh had the Furies and Orestes in the background). By practicing the “disengaged engagement” (as Mauriac said) that Sartre made a new moral code by calling it “freedom,” he imparted to it the stigmata of error—or why not say evil?—as its inevitable, if not necessary, condition.

We have no choices other than a beatific moralism or this Orestian path whose risks are atheism and psychosis. But is it really a risk or the necessity of lucid men, which Sartre confronted with pioneering force, conjugating the contemplative life of the philosopher and the active existence of the citizen? The evil is not here, for, you must admit, Sartre’s The Flies has the advantage of not banalizing evil, or even resorbing it in the reconciliation of an Oedipus who has realized his enigma and soothes himself in order to die in the light of Colonus. It inscribes it ineluctably at the heart of man if he wishes to follow the paths of freedom.

Consider this, from The War Diaries: “For example, from the outset I undoubtedly had a morality without a God—without sin but not without evil.”¹⁸ This evil is not even the lesser evil one would use against absolute evil. Instead it is the necessity of evil assumed in total lucidity, the latter being the only thing capable of limiting it and engaging it in the violence of freedom. The other evil, on the contrary, is more pernicious: the kind that stops pointing out evil, evil that suspends the evil that it is, the arrest of the negative. That Sartre did not take this rigor, which he nevertheless posited, to the end could be held against him in hindsight. But who is in a position to do so? Who among us has not stopped at some point or another on a certain path, in certain private labyrinths that today recall the voyages of Oedipus and Orestes? Who has gone to the end, and what does “to the end” mean?

Orestes, in any case, is not a psychoanalytical hero. Oedipal subjects, the subjects of psychoanalysis, are dialecticians who displace the negative, but they do so within the boundaries of identities they wish to be independent, of cities whose laws they cite but whose recognition they seek. However, by exploring border states and social crises, psychoanalysis is henceforth solicited by Orestes: by the strangeness of socialized psychosis, by the art that an excessive fragmentation exhibits, and by the new variants of increasingly unusual, polymorphic, and free intersubjective links. And perhaps by not listening to Orestes, psychoanalysis (always attentive to Oedipus) neglects the modern subjects that we are, the freest among us, the most foreign. Orestes is not an anti-Oedipus; Orestes is the culmination of Oedipus, the completion of his rebellious logic and the announcement of an unthinkable foreignness, “gloriously aloof.” I measure my words as I say this, knowing the personal and political risks posed by the destruction of the mind, that is, psychical space: it is not certain that men can develop a civilization of freedom without traversing the danger of this “gloriously aloof mind” that Orestes prefigured, the pinnacles and pitfalls of which Sartre experienced.

Electra is horrified and repudiates her brother, though it was she who suggested the possibility of fighting evil with evil; she feels the same guilt that “the people” feel, while her brother traverses it and opts instead for freedom by loudly claiming responsibility for his act: “I am free, Electra. Freedom has crashed down on me like a thunderbolt. . . . I have done my deed, Electra, and that deed was good. I shall bear it on my shoulders as a carrier at a ferry carries the traveler to the farther bank. And when I have brought it to the farther bank I shall take stock of it. The heavier it is to carry, the better pleased I shall be; for that burden is my freedom.”¹⁹ He later adds: “I am free. Beyond anguish, beyond remorse. Free. And at one with myself” (p. 149). It is this aspect of existentialist morality that will cause scandal, a radical atheism that was too quickly confused with amoralism. On the contrary, it traverses religious and, more specifically, Christian guilt and proclaims itself an accomplice of violence: “I am no criminal, and you have no power to make me atone for an act I don’t regard as a crime” (pp. 150–51). “Suddenly, out of the blue, freedom crashed down on me and swept me off my feet. Nature sprang back. . . . And there was nothing left in heaven, no right or wrong, nor anyone to give me orders” (p. 158), asserts the rebellious hero doomed to freedom. Perhaps now this line from The War Diaries will be clearer; it absolutizes the freedom of language rid of clichés and stereotypes—that is, it praises the freedom of literature—at the price of matricide (unless matricide is the price to pay for literature): “I would condemn someone definitively for a linguistic mannerism, but not because I’d seen him murder his mother.”²⁰

In many of Sartre’s plays we find the theme of freedom that entails evil, an evil that is no longer experienced as an evil and even less as a culpable and culpabilizing evil. And yet it is not the “banalization of evil” that Hannah Arendt deplored when she denounced the Nazis’ inaptitude for judgment and freedom. It is the recognition of the necessity of violence, but, more profoundly still, a recognition of the death drive and the jouissance henceforth called sadistic that Freud taught us to detect at the boundaries of the psyche and that Sartre accords a sociological and moral argument.

In The Respectful Prostitute (1946), Lizzie encourages the black man to kill the white man who is threatening to lynch him for a crime he did not commit. She herself cannot commit, or allow herself to commit, such an disrespectful act; she remains a slave, a slave of conventional morality, while the black man, constrained by necessity, assumes his crime in order to obtain his freedom. In The Devil and the Good Lord, Goetz does evil for evil’s sake and claims to be the devil. To commit evil in its pure state corresponds to the temptation of the absolute and the refusal of the world that does not want him. When Heinrich asks him why he betrayed his brother Conrad, he replies: “Because I like things to be clear-cut. . . . I am a self-made man. I was a bastard by birth, but the fair title of fratricide I owe to no one but myself.”²¹ One might say his illegitimacy situates him naturally among the marginal and the excluded, but it is assuming his fraticidal act, being aware of his antinature, that allows him to assume his freedom.

The theme of the bastard also appears in Sartre’s adaptation of Kean, a play by Alexandre Dumas, named after the English actor born in London in 1787. An illegitimate child, Kean became one of the great actors of the period, the best interpreter of Shakespeare. By reflecting on the copresence of illegitimacy and the condition of the actor, Sartre constructed his conception of the intellectual as one who refuses origins and naturalism and of subjectivity as a permanent conquest of freedom. Thus, for example, through betrayal, deception, and evil, Jean Genet would become “saint” and “martyr.” Illegitimacy, games, and the actor would be markers in the asceticism of the intellectual such as Sartre perceived it. “Do you understand that I want to weigh with my real weight in the world?” Kean asks in a series of monologues that highlight his conception of the actor as a synthesis, a trompe l’oeil virtuality; he thus reveals not his presumed outlaw perversion but the secret and essential character of all consciousness that negativizes facts, acts, and objects and that, by reconstructing them in the imagination, is asserted as fatally free. True revolt—that of Kean the bastard and that other bastard/artist, the writer Genet—does not reside therefore in a particular act targeting a particular object. It lies in the repeated representation of this act, which extracts it from its reality and confers on it the imaginary power of a re-creation. It draws its ultimately political value from its nullity, its impersonal nothingness, the actor’s paradox that thwarts the presentation of identity and opens the way to projections and multiple interpretations.

Do you understand that I want to weigh with my real weight in the world? That I have had enough of being a shadow in a magic lantern? For twenty years I have been acting a part to amuse you all. Can’t you understand that I want to live my own life? . . . But why can I be nothing? . . . Between your admiration and your scorn, you are destroying me. . . . Come, sir, you need not be afraid. It was only Kean the actor, acting the part of Kean the man. . . . There was nobody on stage. No one. Or perhaps an actor playing the part of Kean playing the part of Othello. . . . I am not alive—I only pretend.²²

The possibility of a putting to death (Orestes), here applied to the self (Kean), thus leads to the polyphonic identity of the actor: inessential, it marginalizes perhaps, but it is the only path of freedom that Sartre sees in the face of political and ideological burdens. “You cannot become an actress,” Kean says to Anna. “Do you think you have to act well? Do I act well? Do I look as though I could work hard? You are born an actor as you are born a prince. [Truth is a matter of game playing, not of nature or becoming.] And determination and hard work have nothing to do with that fact. . . . You cannot act to earn your living. You act to lie, to deceive, to deceive yourself, to be what you cannot be, and because you have had enough of being what you are” (p. 199).

Here, in the form of a theatrical dialogue, we have an aspect of Sartre’s debate with Heideggerian philosophy. Being, on the horizon of freedom and in relation to the classical subject? But a being uprooted ceaselessly by its confrontation with nonbeing. The bastard/actor/intellectual continuously betrays being and struggles against it relentlessly, through negativity, in nonbeing. The verb “to lie” that Sartre uses in the passage I have just quoted is not to be taken as a moral term; “to lie” means “to play games” in opposition to the identity of being. Sartre called for permanent disidentification, which constitutes the permanent and necessary crime against identity itself.

“You act because you want to forget yourself. You act the hero because you are a coward at heart, and you play the saint because you are a devil by nature. You act a murderer because you long to poison your best friend. You act because you are a born liar and totally unable to speak the truth.” No single role is possible in itself. The love of truth as well as the hatred of it are traps in which the intellectual/bastard/actor cannot be caught. The actor succeeds best, for he plays them all against each other unremittingly: morality against antimorality, love against hate, truth against the hatred of truth. “You act because you would go mad if you didn’t act. Act! Do I know myself when I am acting? Is there ever a moment when I cease to act? Look at me; do I hate all women or am I acting at hating them? Am I acting to make you afraid?” (pp. 199–200). The thematics of acting will end up replacing that of the criminal, heralded initially, or that of evil, as the optimal way to emerge from the conformism and fixedness of being. In the context of the apotheosis of the game—an unprecedented rehabilitation of the ludic—Sartre would write his impressive Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr in 1952, in which he sanctified the myth of the actor or, if you like, the impostor who takes control of the spectacle in order to thwart it.²³

In these texts, which are insufficiently read today, we find unusual resonances with what history has revealed to us since World War II—Sartre’s crucible and that of his generation—but also resonances with analytical investigation. Via completely different paths from philosophical argumentation on morality and authenticity, psychoanalysis—Lacanian breakthroughs in the clinic of “as if,” “false self,” or “borderline” personalities—has taught us that subjectivity is constructable: that it is formed of projection/identification in mimeticism and “pretending,” that pretense is one path toward truth, not the truth but the necessary accumulation and deflagration on the way to the difficult, impossible truth.

“What about the society of the spectacle?” the well-informed among you will ask, readers of Guy Debord. Sartre was not a man of the spectacle, although the spectacle used him; his thought was concerned with an ideological stage and political choices that the society of the spectacle diminished, when it didn’t sweep them aside. But if you reread his writings on the actor and the bastard in the light of your television screens, you will be surprised to find a contemporary in old Sartre. By thwarting the trap of identity, by praising the inauthenticity of the impostor who asserts himself as such in order to unmask the good and bad faith of pretenders to conventional authenticity, Sartre had already launched a message that continues to incite fear: namely, that there is no possible exit from the spectacle, except by traversing it in full awareness and therefore only by thwarting it, surely not by ignoring it or playing it naively or cynically.

The long line of Sartrean characters who rebel against identity and the fixity of the social link seems to me to find its most political expression in the trilogy of The Roads to Freedom, in the character of Mathieu.²⁴ You remember that, taking refuge in a church, he was surrounded by Germans. Surrendering would be the only way to save himself; instead, he starts shooting with an irrepressible and joyous ferocity. We are no longer in the game but in the double of the game.

I do not want you to get the impression, in what I am saying about semblance and the game, of a facile superficiality, an artificial lightness that would not truly engage the subject. What Sartre teaches us, on the contrary, with The Roads to Freedom, Saint Genet, and Kean is that the experience of the game can be extremely violent, for the stakes are nothing other than the death of the other and of the self as condition of independence and sometimes life. If I am writing about Sartre here, it is precisely to allow you to glimpse the imaginary as revolt, in order to restore this violence underlying the game, which has nothing decorative or “spectacular” about it. What emerges in Sartre’s work is a proximity, a complicity, between Mathieu and Kean, between the actor and the writer Genet, between the impostor and the actor, between the bastard and the resistance fighter or militant: all play roles continuously in order to show that freedom is an imaginary experience that is a violent experience and that one cannot dissociate these two aspects of the rebellious hero: Orestes/Mathieu, on the one hand, and Kean/Genet, on the other.

[Mathieu] approached the parapet and stood there firing. This was revenge on a big scale; each one of his shots wiped out some ancient scruple. One for Lola, whom I dared not rob, one for Marcelle, whom I ought to have ditched, one for Odette, whom I didn’t want to screw. This for the books I never dared to write, this for the journeys I never made. This for everybody in general whom I wanted to hate and tried to understand. He fired, and the tables of the law crashed about him—Thou shalt love thy neighbor as yourself—bang! in that bastard’s face—Thou shalt not kill—bang! at that scarecrow opposite. He was firing on his fellow men, on Virtue, on the whole world: Liberty is Terror. The mairie was ablaze, his head was ablaze; bullets were whining around him, free as the air. The world is going up in smoke, and me with it. He fired; he looked at his watch: fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. Nothing more to ask of fate now except one half-minute, time enough to fire at that smart officer, at all the Beauty of the Earth, at the street, at the flowers, at the gardens, at everything he had loved. Beauty dived downwards obscenely, and Mathieu went on firing. He fired: he was cleansed, he was all-powerful, he was free. Fifteen minutes. (p. 256)

This paroxysmal mise-en-scène, whose pathos might offend good taste, has the advantage of allowing the foundation of the imaginary act to come to the surface, which in my reading of Proust and in more Freudian terms I have called sadomasochism. Here, in existentialist terms, Sartre speaks of revenge against classical values—Virtue, Christian morals, Beauty—but, at the same time, this is not just vengeance against moralism or the constraints others impose on the self but also a putting to death of the self as a unitary or monovalent conscience. Of the liberation of the self—also to be understood this way: how does one liberate oneself from the self?—that is part and parcel of the annihilation of the self. Read Sartre in this perspective, for apart from him and a few rare psychoanalysts, who today will present you with the annihilation that is the condition for all psychical and practical renewal and resurrection? Transpose Mathieu’s scene to Kean and Genet, and you will understand that this game of masks, which is imaginary freedom, is indissociable from violence against the identity of the self and others and that the risk of this violence may certainly be replastered with the cynicism of imposture but it returns to us beyond this risk as a critical requirement without which humanity loses the sense of its adventure.

To return to the complicity among the bastard, actor, and intellectual, the bastard’s temptation, in Sartre’s language, is to conquer his being, which is refused him because he has no identity, but to conquer it in evil; that is, he must continue to do evil to others and to himself in order to rise to the level of this being that is refused him and that he will nevertheless reconquer through the negativity of his consciousness. This leads the subject, who is indissolubly bastard/actor/intellectual, to struggle against the morality of others as well as the plenitude of being. Sartrean negativity is doubly oriented: toward others and toward being. Mathieu shoots the Germans, “self-righteousness,” and, more fundamentally, serenity of being itself. Yet the morality of the other and of being recaptures him relentlessly and mercilessly. It cannot be escaped. And this is where Sartre’s existentialist drama is played out. The Sartrean subject—this antihero—cannot not struggle against the other and being, but neither can he escape them. The other and being always recapture us, in a way. They mystify us as they mystify the Sartrean hero just when he thinks he is free to despise them. Pure being does not exist: no one can identify with being and the other, thinking they can master them. To want to be pure (not a bastard, not an actor, not an intellectual) is a new trap of being and of the other as authentic self, as natural identity, as untouchable entity. There is no serene state or entity in Sartrean thought; negativity itself, if it were accidentally crystallized as such, as being “itself,” would fall into the trap of being. All it can do is criticize itself permanently. If we follow this logic, if we consider that any stopping, any serenity, any stasis in the process of negativity is already a trap, we understand not only that identity is impossible but that love is impossible, because lucidity leads us to see in all love an interminable comedy and to play tricks on love so as not to be caught in the trap of idyllic amorous repose.

The Sartrean universe is split: on the one hand, there are the idiots and cowards who fall into the trap of identity every time, into the trap of the other, the gaze of the other and, symmetrically, of being, of identity itself; on the other hand, there is refusal and, after this refusal, repeated negativity and solitude. The last hero I will discuss here is the absolute representative of this: Roquentin, the narrator of Nausea, an unextraordinary individual who is nevertheless confronted with his own consciousness and with the impossibility of this consciousness. This juxtaposition of the consciousness (insofar as it confers an existence) and the negativization of this consciousness (as permanent and corrosive lucidity) comes up against the sense of existence and by dissolving it in disgust appends to it . . . the beauty of the music shared among the writer, the Negress, and the Jew. Thus the certitude of existing, which might afford some a feeling of grace, happiness, or simply joy, arouses in Roquentin nausea: the Sartrean version of negativized plenitude. Leaving aside any psychoanalytical explication we might obviously attempt (which would take into account Sartre’s childhood, his so-called ugliness, his sexuality), Sartre chooses nausea as an emblem of existence. Nausea and not grace is the metaphor of the unfulfilled and the open, of the negative and the impossible, of being and the other. Nausea inscribes the trace of refusal in existence.

Roquentin starts out as an intellectual preparing a book on the marquis Adhémar de Rollebon. As an author of historical novels, he aspires modestly or ambitiously but always very ethically to preserve someone’s memory. He goes to the library, which allows him to objectivize the other in History, in the past to which he intends to devote his consciousness and, of course, his critical sense. But gradually, as the plot develops, Roquentin gives up ordering the past of the other and becomes more and more interested in what surrounds him: the quotidian and banal present, objects, and his own body—in short, his personal existence. There is also an acerbic and biting critique of the man engaged in humanistic socialism, the Self-Taught Man, this ridiculous man that each of us more or less is. The Self-Taught Man represents this impassable thing that is adherence to values, limited by definition, to which Sartre/ Roquentin will contrast the raw truths of existence: the endless nausea that defies both values and the comprehension of the traditional intellectual, who believed, at the beginning of the novel, that he had to pursue his work as an archaeologist of the past and thought. Instead, it is from the junction between being and negative consciousness that nausea is born, nausea that is impossible to resorb and that Roquentin sees as being man’s sole reality, as the rebellious man in his solitude perceives it and perpetuates it. In his solitude, he comes up against the unshakable feeling of existence by observing that the human body is a residue in the face of being. Having nevertheless become aware to the point of disgust that these residues of tangible thought are the true roots of his isolation, he makes it a rebellious attitude that, from now on, has nothing pathetic or romantic about it but announces itself as a perseverance in strangeness and refusal: “I want to leave, go to some place where I will be really in my own niche, where I will fit in. . . . But my place is nowhere; I am unwanted, de trop,” Roquentin says.²⁵ And starting with this life given to him “for no reason,” he casts a caustic glance at the “idiots” around him, reveals the strangeness of the human comedy, and describes nausea as a feeling that is neither pride nor shame but exile.

To make theater is certainly a political act: it is a question of acting on the public, mobilizing the presence of living bodies, which the book cannot do. But let us not be too quick to say that the theater of an intellectual like Sartre anticipates the desire to establish his party or media popularity, as it would later be known. To such intentions, which are always possible and more or less unconscious, I would add the challenge represented by the very type of representation Sartre brings into play in his theater. Take the characters, these intellectuals/actors/traitors/bastards. What we see here is a philosophical option embodied in a rhetoric of the spokesperson, which is surprising in itself, for the bourgeois and homogeneous theatrical audience did not recognize in this the psychological density of the realistic characters it was used to applauding. In Sartre, the characters are the spokespeople of a situation that is the true subject; it was a small step from this to the accusation that his theater was “too intellectual.” No doubt aware of this criticism, Sartre himself offered if not a justification than at least an explanation in What Is Literature?:

The theater was formerly a theater of “characters.” More or less complex, but complete, figures appeared on the stage, and the situation had no other function but to put these characters into conflict and to show how each of them was modified by the action of the others. I have elsewhere shown how important changes have taken place in this domain; many authors are returning to the theater of situation. [Sartre was not alone in bringing about this change, which was also occurring in modern theater in the works of Pirandello and Brecht.] No more characters; the heroes are freedoms caught in a trap like all of us. [They are disembodied in order to show the inconsistency of the pretension to identity, History, and being.] What are the issues? Each character will be nothing but the choice of an issue and will equal no more than the chosen issue. [Also, the absence of psychological density is itself a revolt against the lie of a global, social, or metaphysical solution.] In a sense, each situation is a trap—there are walls everywhere. [And in this trap a path will emerge, necessarily forced but the only one.] I’ve expressed myself poorly: there are no issues to choose. An issue is invented. And each one, by inventing his own issue, invents himself. Man must be invented each day.²⁶

This forced path and this rage of permanent invention that may appear schematic are signs—within the dramatic construction itself—of the philosophical and political necessity of ceaselessly inventing freedom.

Sartre’s plays come after Nausea chronologically, but I thought it wise to begin with the theater, for it seems to me to introduce more directly—more dramatically and more schematically in the sense I have just mentioned—what is addressed in Nausea, this novel whose thunderous impact has yet to be fully measured in the realm of French literature. Being and Nothingness can only be understood in light of this novelistic, imaginary experience of an analogous problematic that these two books deal with in different ways: the copresence of being and nothingness in the existence of the subject.

Sartre borrows the epigraph of Nausea from Céline, whose work and the importance of abjection in it I have had occasion to comment on.²⁷ The sentence that Sartre takes from the Célinean “opera of the flood” simply emphasizes, instead, the solitude of the individual who no longer has anything in common with any collectivity: “He is a boy without collective importance, barely an individual.” [This epigraph, which does not appear in the U.S. edition of Nausea, reads in French: “C’est un garçon sans importance collective, c’est tout juste un individu.”—Trans.] His links with the collectivity are broken, whether by him or by others is of no importance. The philosopher seized the subject in this state of absolute desolation that is as much a freedom as the mediocrity of anyone at all. I emphasize this vision of the subject that Sartre would later describe as “individuality,” which is the vision of a certain metaphysics of freedom whose limitations nonetheless reveal truths. In this case, it is the truth of depression for psychoanalysis, this copresence of being and nothingness, that Roquentin’s existence unveils. Roquentin sends us back to the depressive solitude of the contemporary individual. It is rooted in the personal experience of the impossible link to the other that is ultimately the maternal object, although the dissolution of all other social links follows from this microuniverse. Naturally, this depressivity may also refer to social history: national crisis, ideological and political conflicts, World War II. It is not surprising that Dürer’s Melancholia was used for the cover of the first edition of the book. Indeed, the author had initially chosen “Melancholia” as the title; it was Gaston Gallimard who proposed the repulsive “Nausea.” The logic of repulsion, which underlies the melancholic appearance, prevailed: the public followed, not at all disgusted to know more about what disgusts it. As for Sartre, he was haunted by this negativity, which he would develop in Being and Nothingness: being inhabited by nothingness is accessible only in nausea.

The novel begins, as I said, with the story of the intellectual Roquentin grappling with his work. He wants to write the history of Rollebon, a marquis involved a number of intrigues and implicated in the “necklace affair,” who disappeared in 1790 before turning up in Russia. There, Sartre explains, he “attempts to assassinate Paul I. . . . In 1813, he returns to Paris. By 1816, he has become all-powerful. . . . In 1820, . . . he is at the height of distinction. . . . Seven months later, accused of treason, . . . he is thrown into a cell, where he dies after five years of imprisonment, without ever being brought to trial.”²⁸

At first, the intellectual tries to apprehend being in the form of the past: a perfectly commendable practice (anyone planning to write a thesis on a personage of the past, a writer, preferably, is in the same situation as Sartre’s narrator; in short, all scholars are Roquentins at their beginnings). In effect, however, Sartre challenged this cliché of the solitary person grappling with being as past. How? By showing that Roquentin’s existential experiences (take “existential” in its simplest sense: his daily existence, his love affairs with women, walking down the street, encounters with nature, and particularly his encounter with the Self-Taught Man) gradually cause him to become detached from his initial objective and give up wanting to write. He will no longer apprehend being in the form of the other or the past but will confront the implication of nothingness in raw existence that nausea reveals to him. Roquentin will start by feeling “unwanted”: “My place is nowhere,” he says, “I am unwanted, de trop.” He will experience the ontological solitude described in Being and Nothingness: no links, nothing in common with others. This will lead him in a grimacing, caricatured way to unveil the dissatisfaction and falsity at the heart of his own adventures as well as in those of others: the falsehood of the amorous link. Moreover, the pathos of the “humanist” reaches its peak in the character of the Self-Taught Man: humble before knowledge, registered with the Socialist Party to spread good in the world, ashamed of his homosexuality, taken to task by the Corsican supervisor for approaching young boys in the library where he works. Faced with this definitive collapse of good intentions, whether political or erotic, Roquentin is confronted with the same nausea that the roots of the chestnut trees summon in him, the roots that revealed to him the inaccessible residue of an existence that is unthinkable and yet felt in its nothingness. Submerged in nausea, he betrays the society of men, withdraws into his solitude, and ends up considering his life, Life, a harsh, unjustifiable phenomenon, “a contingency . . . given for no reason.” If it is true that he is still part of humanity, “he is foreign,” the author writes. When all is said and done, nausea does not quash being but reveals the strangeness of being as well as of the self. Like Roquentin coming up against his radically intransmissible and unjustifiable existence, being is radically foreign: connection and communication are of no help in the face of the unassimilated foreignness of existence, the border state experienced by someone who ultimately frees himself of contingencies. Nausea bears witness not only to the human comedy but also, in the end, to the irremediableness of existence that resists intellection and exchange.

Consider this: “M. de Rollebon was my partner; he needed me in order to exist and I needed him so as not to feel my existence.” By escaping in the other, “I” hide what is unbearable about my existence from myself. But Roquentin resists this flight that would mean occupying himself with Rollebon so as not to be occupied with his own nonexistence or his own difficulty with existence. “I furnished the raw material, this material I had to re-sell, which I didn’t know what to do with: existence, my existence.” He continues to seek the opaque remnant that is not transmitted in communication with the other. “His part was to have an imposing appearance. He stood in front of me, took up my life to lay bare his own to me” (p. 98).

Take your own situation: You are interested in certain matters concerning existence while at the same time occupied here with literary representation. Now, existence is what resists representation, is concealed from it. This remnant that eludes representation persists precisely as existence. But those who have access to it are few, those who are not caught up and taken in by the net of representation. Roquentin, too, is caught up in the artifices of his work as an archivist, enclosed within stories and missing out on existence outside of representation; he is nevertheless plagued by doubt—the negative lies in wait!—which will lead him to nausea. “He [the Marquis] stood in front of me, took up my life to lay bare his own to me. I did not notice that I existed any more, I no longer existed in myself, but in him.” In this mirror game, the “I” of the narrator delegates himself in Rollebon, as a graduate student delegates himself in the author who might be the subject of his thesis: and the graduate student no longer exists; the thesis subject exists in his place. “I ate for him, breathed for him, each of my movements had its sense outside, there, just in front of me, in him; I no longer saw my hand writing letters on the paper, not even the sentence I had written—but behind, beyond the paper, I saw the Marquis, who had claimed this gesture as his own, the gesture which prolonged, consolidated his existence. I was only a means of making him live” (p. 98).

Sartre questions the human being’s becoming a “tool” (a “means”) in action, insofar as all action is based on projection and comprises alienation. As soon you start preparing something, a thesis or anything else, you are instrumentalized, you are only there for this action, for someone or something else, be it an object, a thesis, or an act that may even be very commendable, very humanistic. However extraordinary a good intention may be, an obstacle arises concerning the complexity of the subject and his relation to existence: “I was only a means of making him [Rollebon] live, he was my reason for living, he had delivered me from myself.”

But who does this self think it is? you might ask. Does it take itself for an absolute sovereign by detaching itself from others and from being as if wanting to dominate them? You would be right to express this objection. Yet before becoming negativized in nausea, the rebellious self must posit itself precisely in its excessive sovereignty. In effect, given the state of alienation one arrives at in social exchanges, one might raise the question of the value of the self and restore to it unrepresentable logics that elude representation as well as alienating links with the other. Here is what Roquentin says: “He [Rollebon, the other, the past] had delivered me from myself. What shall I do now? Above all, not move, not move. . . . Ah! I could not prevent this movement of the shoulders. . . . The thing which was waiting was on the alert, it has pounced on me, it flows through me, I am filled with it. It’s nothing.” Thus, all of a sudden, having rejected what he was there for, what he was working on (that is, Rollebon or any other project), Roquentin is filled with another dynamic that at first sweeps away his ego but ultimately liberates it and allows him to attain the “thing” that he is and that is nothing: this plenitude of nausea that cannot be objectified. “It’s nothing: I am the Thing. Existence, liberated, detached, floods over me. I exist.” One could call this negative ecstasy a hollow narcissism, a melancholic jouissance in the withdrawal into the self emptied of objects, as well as a moment of rupture with alienating links. It is, however, simultaneously a moment of revalorization. Based on what? Based on creativity unbound and unalienated: melancholic nausea may start a psychical, physical, and creative rebirth. “I exist. It’s sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you’d think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my mouth. I swallow. It slides down my throat, it caresses me—and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth—lying low—grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me” (p. 98).

In the mouth that tastes but also vomits, Roquentin is—we are—at the borders of valorization/devalorization: “I” has extricated itself from the other, “I” has found “me,” and this “me” is sweet but repulsive; “I” seize it in its very ambiguity.

I see my hand spread out on the table. It lives—it is me. It opens, the fingers open and point. It is lying on its back. It shows me its fat belly. It looks like an animal turned upside down. The fingers are the paws. I amuse myself by moving them, very rapidly, like the claws of a crab which has fallen on its back. The crab is dead [The theme of repulsion becomes clear.]: The claws draw up and close over the belly of my hand. I see the nails—the only part of me that doesn’t live. . . . I draw back my hand and put it in my pocket; but immediately I feel the warmth of my thigh through the stuff. . . . I jump up: it would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. (pp. 98–99)

It is not just the mouth or even the body: thought itself is shaped by these ambiguities and this insipidness that provokes both adhesion and disadhesion, which is nothing other than nausea.

Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there’s no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns: “I have to fi . . . I ex . . . Dead . . . M. de Roll is dead . . . I am not . . . I ex . . .” . . . For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I. The body lives by itself once it has begun. But thought—I am the one who continues it, unrolls it. I exist. . . . If only I could keep myself from thinking! I try, and succeed: my head seems to fill with smoke . . . I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to submerge myself in existence. (p. 99)

Nausea, the border between being and nonbeing, colors the flesh and thought of the speaker but also the cosmos that shelters him: the chestnut trees, their absurdity, and the gratuitousness of existence as a whole.

The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use. . . . I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision. . . . The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green rust covered it half-way up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather. The sound of the water in the Masqueret Fountain sounded in my ears, made a nest there, filled them with sighs; my nostrils overflowed with a green, putrid odour. . . . In the way, the chestnut tree there, opposite me, a little to the left. . . . The word absurdity is coming to life under my pen; a little while ago, in the garden, I couldn’t find it, but neither was I looking for it, I didn’t need it: I thought without words, on things, with things. Absurdity was not an idea in my head, or the sound of a voice, only this long serpent dead at my feet, this wooden serpent. Serpent or claw or root or vulture’s talon, what difference does it make. . . . I made an experiment with the absolute or the absurd. This root—there was nothing in relation to which it was absurd. . . . I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. . . . This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain to repeat: “This is a root”—it didn’t work any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. . . . This moment was extraordinary. I was there, motionless and icy, plunged in a horrible ecstasy. But something fresh had just appeared in the very heart of this ecstasy; I understood the Nausea, I possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries myself. But I think it would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, casual being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins to float, as the other evening at the “Railwaymen’s Rendezvous”: here is Nausea; here there is what those bastards—the ones on the Côteau Vert and others—try to hide from themselves with their idea of their rights. (pp. 126–129, 131)

I will conclude by emphasizing the brilliant return that Sartre makes us undergo at the melancholic state by transforming nausea, which is the “gustatory” perception of it, into a position of revolt. Aristotle diagnosed melancholia as the malady of genius or geniuses. If there is a reason to establish such a link, it is not the spleen of romantic states of mind that demonstrates it but indeed this Sartrean nausea that leads subjectivity to a melancholia in the Freudian sense of the term: that is, to the subject/object, language/affect, sense/non-sense borders.²⁹ To write a novel with that was quite something!

I am not sure we are still capable of reading the masterpiece that is Nausea in all its implications. Because of the minimalism that reigns in the French market, the philosophical novel—which was once a prestigious national tradition—is no longer French: there are no more French philosophical novels. Apart from Sollers, who still writes philosophical novels, and who can read them?

I would now like to take up certain aspects of Being and Nothingness. Let me remind you of the date: 1943. As you might imagine, it is a difficult work for students of literature but indispensable in pinpointing the problematic of revolt that I am trying to explore here. We often come across notions like “being,” “the other,” or “the negative” used wantonly under the pretense of borrowing from Lacan, when a solid genealogy traces them back to Hegel or Heidegger—it is to them that Sartre mainly refers—and the Sartre-Lacan proximity has not yet been thought out in postwar France. Don’t we often have a tendency to psychologize the notion of the other, for example? This even happens to analysts. Now, it is not a matter of placing the psychoanalytical dimension over psychological functioning. It is a matter of salvaging the notions of being and the other in their transmetaphysical dimension in order to situate them later in treatment and also to understand the stakes of writing, which is my primary concern here.

I will therefore present to you Sartre’s definition of being and the negative, in which the relationship to the other is inscribed. But to arrive at Sartrean definitions, one cannot avoid a few encounters with Husserl and Hegel. The voyage through Husserl and Hegel allowed Sartre to establish a difference between the dimension of being and that of knowledge, which is correlative to it but distinct from it. Thus he went back to Descartes’s Cogito, from which and in which knowledge is deployed, but he distinguished being as it appears in ergo sum to say that the being of this “I am” of consciousness is not necessarily that of logical or cognitive knowledge, although all positivist philosophy has been able to articulate “thought” and the “world” in logical formulas (which is also what cognitivism does today). Sartre first pointed out Husserl’s failure, which, he told us, was to take being for knowledge, to telescope the two sides of this fundamental enunciation of philosophical modernity that the Cartesian formula is. Sartre’s reasoning is more radical still in his debate with Hegel. Sartre revealed what he saw as Hegel’s failure, although he recognized that Hegel placed the debate on its true plane, namely, that he was the first to differentiate between “consciousness” and “knowledge” (it is one of his major contributions). “Consciousness is a concrete being sui generis. . . . It is selfness and not the seat of an opaque, useless Ego. The very being of consciousness, since it is independent of knowledge, pre-exists its truth. . . . Consciousness was there before being known.”³⁰

Sartre then becomes interested in conflict, in the famous Hegelian negativity (follow the thread of revolt that I never quite abandon even while leading you down the very abstract paths of this philosophical argumentation!), particularly the equally famous dialectic of the master and the slave. Sartre retains the essential “moment” that Hegel calls being-for-the-Other, which is a fundamental stage of self-consciousness: “The road of interiority passes through the Other,” an other, however, that is an other for me, that is, another Me, subjected to the ego in this dialectic of recognition that links master to slave and vice versa. “The Other appears along with myself since self-consciousness is identical with itself by means of the exclusion of every Other. . . . It is only insofar as each man is opposed to the Other that he is absolutely for himself” (p. 236). I have no representation/knowledge of my interiority except through the other who mirrors it. This supposes that at the end of these reflections we observe a common measure between us. The master is contrasted to the slave, the slave is contrasted to the master, but they are both linked in a pact, the possible comparison between the same and the other; they exist through each other; they are insofar as they are united, a permanent provocation, an insoluble dialectic. We come to the idea that, beyond the apparent opposition between the same and the other, even in the paroxysmal forms of bloody war between master and slave, we are obliged to recognize a common link so that the comparison can occur, a common measure that constitutes the dialectical link between me and him. If being is being for the other, it is a permanent revolt, which Sartre formulates this way: “The very being of self-consciousness is such that in its being, its being is in question.” This “pure interiority” does not cease to question itself; “it is perpetually a reference to a self which it has to be” (p. 241). As for the consciousness of the other, it is opaque to self-consciousness: the Other’s consciousness is that which I can only contemplate. The Other is forged in a “pure given” instead of being “what has to be me.” Because the only consciousness that appears to me in its own temporalization is mine, where it loses objectivity, we will say along with Sartre that “the for-itself as for-itself cannot be known by the Other” (p. 242). Consciousness thus comes up against two major obstacles: the separation of consciousnesses (their plurality) and the conflict of consciousnesses.

Here is the essential solitude that Nausea echoes and that, in the philosophical text, leads to the observation of an ontological solitude of being in the world. I will examine this reasoning a bit more closely.

In order to apprehend the other as subject, “I” must apprehend it in its interiority, while, on the contrary, the “Other-as-a-mirror” never appears to me in its own interiority but only in the Time of the World. The common measure envisaged by Hegel between me and the other is revealed to be an “ontological optimism” and according to Sartre ends in failure: “Between the Other-as-object and Me-as-subject, there is no common measure.” It is not through knowledge but through transcendent consciousness that “this apprehension of myself by myself” occurs. But this “ekstatic self-consciousness” apprehends the other only “as an object pointing to me.” There is no common measure, therefore, but a separation between the “other-as-object” and “me-as-subject.” Sartre concludes: “No universal knowledge can be derived from the relation of consciousnesses. This is what we shall call their ontological separation” (p. 243).

There is a more fundamental optimism in Hegel, however. The identicalness of consciousnesses is established in the Whole: there is a global force that posits a Whole outside consciousnesses, considering them from the point of view of this absolute Whole that has become a “mediator” among consciousnesses but also between consciousnesses and the world. If Hegel can posit this Whole, however, it is because it already is at the outset. It is therefore not in consciousness but in being that I can posit the problem of the other. We are back at the Cogito. The being of the other cannot be found through knowledge but solely as transcendence: “If . . . the being of my consciousness is strictly irreducible to knowledge, then I cannot transcend my being toward a reciprocal and universal relation in which I could see my being and that of others as equivalent. On the contrary, I must establish myself in my being and posit the problem of the Other in terms of my being” (pp. 243–44; emphasis mine). In other words, I can transcend myself toward a Whole, but I cannot establish myself in this Whole; we are henceforth dealing with the multiplicity or separation of consciousnesses: “The separation and conflict of consciousnesses will remain” (p. 244).

From now on, my relationship to the other is not one of knowledge to knowledge but being to being. “My relation to the Other is first and fundamentally a relation of being to being, not of knowledge to knowledge” (p. 244). I ask you to contemplate this: who has drawn the consequences of this? Surely not the cognitivists, who return at best to Husserl and who assault us with strategies of cognition that are refinements of cogitation, not analyses of consciousness. The analysis of consciousness was done by Freud, who exposed in it the veritable negativity that is that of the unconscious and its “other scene,” its heterogeneous logic, including the drive. But Sartre did not want to deal with this, while at the same time being one of the rare writers to refer—obliquely—to psychoanalysis. By the same token, psychoanalysts would do well to reread this Sartrean debate concerning “knowledge,” “consciousness,” and “being” when they try painstakingly to define the other, confining it within strategies of knowledge and knowing intersubjectivity.

If it is true that Sartre stopped to consider the Freudian discovery and the as-yet-unexplored terrain it opened up, we might also say that what he calls the scandal of the plurality of consciousnesses is precisely what leads him to literature, specifically to the novel, whose fabric is constituted of singularities: fragmentation, separation, and the conflict of consciousnesses. Only literature can restore “my hawthorn blossoms,” “my characters” (Mme Verdurin, M. de Charlus, etc.), singularities issued from my own and altered. Being then disperses its generality and, in the pages of Proust, for example, as in Nausea, dissolves in the superimposition of characters and sensory words such as “nausea.”

Let us continue with Sartre but alongside Heidegger this time: a Heidegger who profited from the philosophy of Husserl and Hegel, particularly in Being and Time. In order to remain within the Hegelian problematic of the other, Sartre stopped at the notion of Mit-Sein: “being-with.” Heidegger interests him here insofar as he is thinking about the accessibility or inaccessibility of the other. “Being-with” is the test of my being. Note that it is neither my knowledge nor my consciousness but an “essential being” on which “human realities” depend, insofar as the other “throws me outside of myself” toward structures that, as Sartre pointed out, both escape me and define me and originally reveal the other. It is thus by examining myself in my being, in my singularity, that I find myself originally other, that is, different and irreducible. However, Sartre’s reading of Heidegger, this solitude of being, cast out, does not stop at this observation. Being still looks for a way toward the other. Being-in-the-world is structured on the mode of “being-with.” The structure does not come from outside, in a totalitarian manner, as in Hegel. Although Heidegger does not start from the Cogito, he discovers being-with at the same time that he observes being-in: “I discover the transcendental relation to the Other as constituting my own being, just as I discovered that being-in-the-world measures my human-reality.” And again: “the Other is the test of my being inasmuch he throws me outside of myself toward structures which at once both escape me and define me; it is this test which originally reveals the Other to me” (p. 245; emphasis mine). It is no longer a matter of recognition or conflict between me and the other, as in Hegel. The other is not an object; it is what makes me interdepend. I am not “mired” but “alongside,” “in the world.” “In” can be seen as “with” in the sense of colo and habito and not insum. In other words, being, according to Sartre’s reading of Heidegger, would be to “make oneself be” in the form of the “they”: the inauthentic mode of “they” or the authentic “they” of relations between unique personalities (p. 246). Think of the “anyone,” that in Sartre remains inauthentic but in Giorgio Agamben has the positive values of a modest community, the scrutiny of “theys” essential in their inessentiality, which preserves only the tenuous and random link of being-in-with.³¹ In the “they” of the Heideggerian Mit-Sein, Sartre appreciates the opposite of the conflict that characterizes the Hegelian dialectical link, namely, the connotation of the crew, which does not work for knowledge but works in rhythm (such as the rhythm of rowing). Although being-unto-death abruptly reveals the “common solitude” and the negative in “concern,” it is the coexistence of consciousnesses in the untranslatable Stimmung that seduces Sartre, reader of Heidegger, and suggests a humanity linked in its solitude, pluralities that create connections.

“We attempt somehow regarding the Other what Descartes attempted to do for God with that extraordinary ‘proof by the idea of perfection.’” This is exactly what we do in psychoanalysis, and exactly what we do in literary theory when we decipher the work of a writer, for it is the otherness of the thought of the patient or writer that calls us. Read: we do not know if God exists, but we need the idea of perfection, and we situate it in the place of God; we do not know if the other is approachable, but we strive to apprehend the interiority of our consciousness or the possibility of Mit-Sein through an “intuition of transcendence” concerning others, “the external negation” that reveals the other to the Cogito as “not being me.” This is where the notion of revolt and rejection appears. I can only penetrate the specificity of the other by confronting him in myself: my foreignness, the nausea that surrounds me.

Ultimately, Oedipus says the same thing. In the oedipal revolt of the child, when he contrasts himself to the other in order to posit himself as such, the other is only apprehended through external negation: the other appears to the Cogito as not being me. But this process is accompanied by an internal negation, because the subject only is (I am faced with I think) by investigating the being of this self and finding alterity there. A double interiority is then posited through a double movement of negation: mine and that of the other. I oppose myself to the other, and, by this movement of opposition, I oppose myself to me in split, pluralized being. This infiniteness of negativity is the only way to posit the other and the self. Thus the notions of negation and nothingness are justified as perpetual, as processes. From then on, the totality that we posited at the beginning—the same and the other can only be contemplated, mediatized, within the totality of being—becomes a detotalized totality. The access to existence for the other involves the observation of the impossibility of the other as well as the impossibility of any synthesis. All that I can do to attain the other is to look within myself, negativize myself, and negativize the other, so that we never arrive at a peaceful community, whether mental, social, or ideological.

You will note that this line of thought leads first to a refusal of philosophical totality and to being as totalizing; then to a sociological stand against every totalizing society, whether totalitarian or feebly democratic and unitarian, if it crushes the radicality of the same and the other and erases the right to singularity, if only in the guise of human rights; and finally to the recourse to the imaginary and to the role of the gaze thanks to which the process of nontotalizing totality will inscribe itself in the order of the visible.

I will spare you this voyage into the imaginary and instead look at the Sartrean personal imaginary that is ambiguous to say the least and came to light with What Is Literature? (1948) and The Words (1963).

In The Words, Sartre examines memories in biographical form and shows how literary meaning is constructed with a double focus, words and childhood, the convergence of which is produced by neurosis. “For the last ten years or so I’ve been a man who’s been waking up, cured of a long, bitter-sweet madness.”³² For ten years, since the nineteen fifties, he has been waking up: everything that happened before that date could be taken as a sort of madness, from which he would purge himself through the literary farewell to literature that is The Words.

Henceforth Sartre will relentlessly disparage the imaginary in favor of action, particularly political action, in an approach that seems salutary at the outset, because he denounces with a vigorous and pitiless irony certain psychological errors and political errancies as well as the solipsism of literary brilliance so prized in the French tradition. This flagellation quickly turns into an auto-da-fé, however, because the political activities in which Sartre continued to engage, despite their incisive impact in a France settling into consumerism and the spectacle, seemed to lack the density and polyphony that once accompanied the splendors of the master of Saint-Germain. Deprived of the imaginary, political engagement is fleshless, cut off from its emotional and unconscious substratum, castrated, in a way, of its fateful connotation.

In 1960, in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre replaced the other as past, as memory, and perhaps even as language, by praxis and service rendered to others; this led him to leftism, an admirable physical engagement “here and now” in the city.³³ The philosopher-militant sought at that moment to localize—he himself said “objectalize”—history and intersubjectivity, recollection and intersubjectivity, the same-other relationship, and everything that he contemplated in Nausea, his theater, and Being and Nothingness. He strove to localize them in the search for an agent of history: what agent of history could embody the negative? Thus he renounced negation as a force at work in the imaginary (being-as-other deployed in language through the characters and themes in his plays and novels or in the pages of Being and Nothingness) and aspired instead to embody it.

Although this temptation to “localize” never left him—he was a fellow traveler of the Communists well before the war, and the dramatic beginning of On a raison de se revolter retraces the history of it—it now took place without the imaginary “madness” that opened an infinite abyss in each (necessarily erroneous) position he took, thereby saving it.

Take, for example, What is Literature? (1948). Art as a matter of flesh and emotion (we are almost on Proustian terrain), literature as a fabric of significations beyond words, all these assertions of Sartre’s, of great subtlety and discernment, were received during the formalist years as so many rejections of technique, of signifying materiality. It is true that Sartre often evaded literary formality and did not refrain from scoffing at the linguistic obsessions of future structuralists. But there were also advances here: a call to seize, beyond the text, what I have personally tried to define as experience. I will not elaborate on these points in this book, but if you read Sartre’s text, you will find fascinating pages on the destiny of the writer in the Western world; the secularization of the writer in the eighteenth century, when the notion of “taste” replaced that of “faith”; surrealism and the impasses of the surrealist revolt; and the utopia of socialist literature and the absurdity of socialist realism, which like Barthes, he rejected.

I will limit myself to looking at the conclusion of What is Literature? to bring up two rather interesting points raised there: first, the observation of a situation that is continually worsening, namely, the decrease in the number of readers; second, the observation that some writers write only for movies and television and the world only wants writers as signatories (though we cannot say that Sartre abstained from the role of signatory!).

It is on the basis of this dual observation that Sartre maintained his utopia. The notion of being, the transcendental whole that corrects the rationalism of those who believe in knowledge—and that, in Sartre, ended up seeming like a utopia because he unveiled its perpetual conflict—emerged once again in the form of the old Kantian myth of the City of Ends. In this case, the City of Ends was a utopic society of communication made up of readers. Through its very demands, the readers were included in the concert of good will that “thousands of readers all over the world who do not know each other are, at every moment, helping to maintain.”³⁴ But Sartre, a realist nonetheless, added that it was necessary to correct this utopia: the Kantian City of Ends, reconstructed by readers who had momentarily replaced the proletariat, the third world, women, and other providential agents of History, was not all that obvious. He did not say whether readers would realize this humanitarian ideal; they had to maintain their singularity and historicize themselves, not forget their concrete presence, their physical experience, or the concrete movement of history in which they found themselves.

More importantly, the reader had to be a demystifier. The notion of the negative once again comes into play: reading was a deciphering, a demystification. It is Barthes, and not Sartre, who would develop this capital point in order to envisage semiology as a semioclasm and taste the true pleasure of the text. But the idea is already found in Sartre: the true man was a reader who nevertheless distrusted and demystified the text. And to give some examples of great mystifications accomplished in the recent past by totalitarian communities, those who adhered to socialist ideals (a personal confession?) ceased to be suspect if they managed to remain suspicious. “At any rate, the social order today rests upon the mystification of consciousness, as does disorder as well. Nazism was a mystification; Gaullism is another; Catholicism is a third. At present there can be no doubt that French Communism is a fourth” (p. 211).

What is to be done? “And as our writings would have no meaning if we did not set up as our goal the eventual coming of freedom by means of socialism, it is important in each case to stress the fact that there have been violations of formal and personal liberties or material oppression or both” (p. 211). A vibrant call to rise up against all forms of mystification, no matter where they surface, What Is Literature? concludes with a defense of literature as the last “chance” for Europe, socialism, democracy, and peace, although this chance is threatened: “Of course, all of this is not very important. The world can very well do without literature. But it can do without man better still” (p. 220). By defining literature as the means by which “the collectivity passes to reflection and meditation” and “acquires an unhappy conscience” (p. 220), Sartre already seemed to be preparing a renunciation of the individual act (which prevails in writing before its “collective” aim) and imaginary freedom (Orestes did not have an “unhappy conscience”).

The Sartre of later years thus returned to the cherished Hegelian idea of negativity as demystification, and one cannot help but love the rebel that he did not cease to be, provided that the imaginary experience, this form of demystification that is writing, was abandoned in favor of what he called “social praxis.” The active life—with its variants labor, work, and action, which Hannah Arendt subtly analyzed in The Human Condition—is contrasted in our metaphysical tradition with the contemplative life. The philosophers most concerned with the moral disaster of World War II believed they could reject this “contemplative life”—philosophy, literature—that lent itself to easy compromises in the great thinkers and writers of the century. But by dismissing the arduous task of demystification through writing, doesn’t social praxis, far from avoiding the madness that sustains literature, run the risk of coming up against new dead ends, falling into the old errors of Promethean optimism?

I will conclude with a final remark on Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), which it seems to me can be summed up as devoted to the task of humanizing the world. Sartre, the nonhumanist of long ago, asserted that it was necessary to wrest men from their natural inertia by helping them to totalize their respective praxis and avoid reified totalization and alienation in the inhuman forms of what he called the “practico-inert.”³⁵ To reflect, to demystify and reunite, to totalize at a higher level, to find Mit-Sein on the level of social practice equivalent to a permanent calling into question: the project was grandiose, but Sartre pursued it with the strange suspension of the imaginary experience of which The Words marked both the apogee and the end. It indicated the contraction of the destiny of sense and the sensory that he deciphered from Aeschylus to Heidegger and insufflated into French existentialism.

Technological development would not take long to marginalize political groups that strived for a political praxis free of all imaginary (or so they thought). Soon the political would be cast into the spectacle, and the question of the sense of the imaginary reactualized. It is precisely at this point that the work of Barthes that awaits us.