Sartre: A Life

...Indeed the exchange between Sartre's work and the diverse strands of leftist thought that followed it has been largely composed of silences...

...Nearly everything that Sartre wrote of lasting value had its origins in these years of failure...

...he wrote and traveled at a furious pace on a diet of amphetamines, but left few texts that bear rereading—Saint Genet and the essay "Black Orpheus" being the glittering exceptions...

...IN CELEBRATION OF THE BICENTENNIAL Essays Edited by H. Wayne House Signature (required on MC or Visa order ) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 39 vanish...

...An elitist who detested all elites...

...PART 1: Judicial Restraint and the Nature of the U.S...

...Mobility, an absence of possessions, and sexual freedom—these were the characteristics of a life which, while intended to outline an alternative to bourgeois existence, seems in retrospect to anticipate the shift from a capitalism based on production to one driven by consumption...

...In 1954, eighteen months before the opening of the 20th Congress and the disclosure of Stalin's crimes, Sartre returned from a trip to the USSR and gave a series of unreservedly enthusiastic interviews to the journal Liberation about the scenes of economic progress and political freedom he had witnessed...

...Consider this passage from the War Diaries: "I need to spend not in order to buy anything, but in order to blow up that monetary energy: get rid of it in some way and dispatch it far away from myself like a hand grenade...

...It comes as little surprise, then, that the French, and in particular the French left, have had some difficulty disposing of the corpse of Jean-Paul Sartre, who in addition to writing four novels, half a dozen plays, four major works of philosophy, three progressively excessive biographies, and numberless essays, articles, prefaces, short stories, and statements of support, also defined the very image of the leftist intellectual in the public mind for several decades...

...But the Ecole Normale was also an intellectual hothouse, dedicated to the pursuit of "pure spirit" and to endowing its students with the broad philosophical, literary, and historical sophistication that is the trademark of the French intellectual...

...In Republican Government, The Legislative Authority Necessarily Predominates' (Federalist No...

...and made the cover of Time...

...Finally, Sartre, who resolutely refused to join any political party, who founded the shortlived Resistance group "Socialism and Freedom" as a third way between the Communists and the followers of De Gaulle, and who in his existentialist phase was castigated by the Communist Party for his "bourgeois decadence and morbidity," became in his later life one of the most unabashed apologists for totalitarian barbarism around the world...

...First of all, how to classify him: novelist or philosopher, literary recluse or political activist, iconoclast or dogmatic Marxist...

...Coburn School of Law...

...Cohen-Solal manages to round out the deceptive portrait Sartre painted of these years, uncovering a wealth of new information about the father whose existence Sartre often sought to deny and correcting the faulty chronology and small falsifications that permeate Sartre's more poetic account...

...Constitution "Restoring the Faith of Our Founding Fathers," William A. Stanmeyer, President of the Lincoln Center for Legal Studies and former Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown Law Center...

...Constitutional Interpretation and the Question of Lawful Authority," Jeffrey A. Aman, Attorney at Law, Tampa, Florida, and H. Wayne House, Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology, Dallas Theological Seminary...

...As Aron relentlessly ripped apart Sartre's theories they became stronger, and Sartre's philosophical style increasingly assertive and audacious, as he outlined the preoccupations that would eventually be given form in Nausea...

...Sartre traced the intellectual itinerary of the non-Communist left for the following three decades: an impassioned opposition to anti-Communism, a willingness to overlook Communist "excesses" in the name of shared principle, and a sympathy for all Third World revolutionary movements, no matter what sort of society they envision for the post-colonial future...

...Moreover, the quality of Sartre's writing began to deteriorate as he moved into the 1950s...

...The 1930s [were] both his demise and his apotheosis, the cruelest and luckiest years of his life, the most marginal and the most exciting, the most asocial and the most fertile...

...But the experience instilled in Sartre a nagging desire to integrate himself into a political movement, and inspired, moreover, some of the most powerful theater to emerge from the war, including The Flies, Dirty Hands, and Les Sáquestres X41tona...

...Where Sartre tried to eliminate the poetic qualities of language, they revel in figures, puns, and paradox...

...Indeed the true inheritors of Sartre's political style and literary ethic have been on the right—in particular the fiercely anti-Communist group of thinkers that in the mid-1970s proclaimed themselves "les nouveaux philosophes...

...During these years, what had earlier been personal tics were elevated to the level of philosophical truth...

...His disgust with Le Havre animated the writing of Nausea and the description of the fictional city of Bouville in which the novel is set...

...The Communists attack him...

...His circle of normaliens—Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Nizan, the psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache, and Merleau-Ponty—formed a loosely knit group that would later define the intellectual landscape of the 1940s and fifties...

...He is a dangerous animal who likes flirting with Marxism . . . because he has not read Marx, even though he knows, more or less, what Marxism is...

...In each instance the answer is both, yet neither...

...Sartre, once placed alongside Victor Hugo in the pantheon of French letters, has become a drag on the market...

...RELEASE DATE: September 1987* Please send me copies of Restoring the Constitution at $24.95 Postpaid...

...In the case of the literary biography the difficulty increases with the size of the writer's corpus, his renown, and the breadth of his influence...

...The Judicial Review of John Marshall and Its Subsequent Development in American Jurisprudence," Joseph Secola, Attorney-at-Law, and President, The Rutherford Institute of Connecticut, Inc...

...Date Name Address City State Zip Phone No ( ) 'Texas residents add 5V.% sales tax (11.34* Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery...

...Sartre abandoned himself," notes Cohen-Solal, "to the most incredible Soviet panegyric, to the most emphatic, most extraordinary, the most naive and unexpected declarations...

...In the resulting uproar Gustave Lan-son, the principal of the Ecole Normale and the architect of the orthodox literary canon and methods of the time, was forced to resign...

...PART 2: Perspectives on Constitutional Interpretation "The Constitution and Contemporary Constitutional Theory," Gary L. McDowell, Resident Scholar, Center for Judicial Studies...

...To his dismay Sartre was instead assigned to Le Havre, a gray, provincial port city that to him represented everything he had hoped to leave behind...

...As Sartre, clumsily but persistently, became more involved in political events, the number of actions that arein retrospect so embarrassing, and so out of line with his thoughtful if ineffective positions during the Resistance, began to multiply...

...Cohen-Solal traces the process by which phenomenology was transformed into fashion...

...In the series of essays later published as What Is Literature?, Sartre repudiated many of his earlier ideas about the writer's relationship to politics...

...51)," Thomas Ascik, Attorney Advisor, U.S...

...Annie Cohen-Solal's biography of Sartre begins fittingly enough with the scene of a literary auction where Sartre's manuscripts, published and unpublished, are disappearing into the hands of anonymous buyers...

...Through the lectures on avant-garde literature thathe delivered at the public library, he honed his own novelistic technique, and in his solitary readings of Husserl and Heidegger, he elaborated his philosophical framework...

...The polemical tone, the taste for confrontation and scandal, the essayist's attitude toward philosophical issues—everything except for the political content, which is diametrically opposite to Sartre's...

...Aron later described their relationship thus: "[Sartre] had a new theory every week, every month...

...The New Yorker smiles...

...Ironically, Sartre's "existentialism" reached the height of its fame at a time when he was starting to turn away from his former concerns...

...Both philosophically and personally, the Occupation marked a turning point in Sartre's thought, away from isolation and ontological speculation and toward political activism...

...The champion of a theory of literary engagement, in which every word an author writes must further the cause of human liberation, Sartre was profoundly uninterested in political events during the most productive periods of his life...

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...It was during the thirties that Sartre also developed a distinctive style of life summarized in the credo "travel, polygamy, transparency," with which hesealed the commencement of his relationship with Beauvoir, and which would later scandalize polite society when presented in the series of thinly disguised biographical novels that Beauvoir wrote about their life together...

...U pon leaving the Ecole Normale, and having already established what would be a lifelong literary and amorous relationship with Beauvoir, Sartre had mentally sketched the life of the "Great Man" that awaited him...

...After his military service he would obtain a commission to teach in Japan, where he would write exotic novels, travel, and lead a life of adventure...

...Written especially for lawyers, legal scholars, law students, political science, government, and history instructors and students, or anyone interested in a scholarly discussion of the current tension points in Constitutional theory from both Christian and conservative perspectives...

...And despite the regimentation and poverty, Sartre was undoubtedly happy...

...He was the one who developed the ideas and I was the one who discussed them...

...The undead Sartre presents his would-be gravediggers with a variety of problems...

...While the left is reduced to titillating its textual intelligence, these writers have mastered the techniques of persuasion, intellectual name-dropping, and high drama...

...However disastrous Le Havre was for Sartre, it is difficult to imagine how his work would have developed without this crucial confrontation...

...Resisting Radical Transformation of the Constitution," Gary C. Leedes, Professor of Constitutional Law, T.C...

...At the Ecole Normale, Sartre was known as the class jester—instigating pranks, penning lewd rhymes, performing bitterly satirical plays—all indulged by the Ecole's professors...

...Justice Charles Evans Hughes) Ten Legal Scholars Respond...

...Dust grows under the bed and impregnates our clothes, saturates the air we breathe...

...However, the imprecision of his ideas about politics and economics led him to extravagant sympathies with groups on the left...

...Politically Sartre was still a romantic revolutionary, a vague syndicalist, and a social provocateur...

...In 1946 Sartre visited the U.S...

...The manuscripts, perhaps because of their very number, are selling poorly...

...Part of a civil service he despised, stuck in a cultural backwater whose smugness he found repellent, Sartre plunged into his personal obsessions, knowing himself as a failure and an outcast, instigator of a pathetic and futile social revolt...

...Here he developed his mental powers through intellectual combat with his contemporaries: Nizan in the case of literature, Aron in philosophy...

...These upholders Sartre labeled les salauds...

...Sartre also praised lower forms of literary activity —journalism, polemical essays, topical theater—over the more refined genres...

...Living in hotels, eating in cheap cafes, strolling the docks, and visiting the bordellos that dotted his working-class neighborhood, Sartre was thrown back upon himself, shut off from normal human contact...

...Even when these thinkers have become involved in political events—such as Foucault's work on prison reform, or Derrida's efforts on behalf of Eastern European writers—they have been careful to maintain the distance between these actions and their intellectual activity...

...Department of Justice, Office of Legal Policy...

...Whereas Sartre showed an aversion to linguistics and anthropology and declared that "the unconscious simply doesn't exist," they embrace the authority of the "human sciences" and delight in the unconscious...

...He presented a literary ethic that, while avoiding the formalism and relentless edification of Socialist Realism, makes literature the servant of political struggle...

...Here for the first time we can see the cultural export machine that has carried successive waves of Parisian intellectual fashion to America's shores: Structuralism, Lacanianism, deconstruction, the mechanism is the same...

...During these four years he traveled to China, Cuba, Brazil, and, on nine occasions, to the Soviet Union, all in support of Marxist political causes, while declining invitations to lecture in the U.S...

...The Judeo-Christian Roots of the Constitution," John Eidsmoe, former Professor of Constitutional Law, O.W...

...Cohen-Solal's account evokes the combination of material privation and intellectual overstimulation that characterized life at the most elite of France's Grandes Ecoles...

...The climax of this leftward movement was Sartre's rapprochement with the Parti Communiste Frangaise—the most inflexibly Stalinist party in Western Europe—between 1952 and 1956...

...Two months after denying that he was an existentialist, and "overwhelmed by both the press and the very public that had appropriated the term, Sartre himself used it, giving in to what, by then, had clearly become a new fad...

...Despite the psychological significance of Sartre's childhood, it is at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the twoyears spent in preparation for it as a khágneux that Sartre's intellectual development truly begins...

...In a letter home Sartre describes "conditions of life [that] violate the most elementary hygienic norms...

...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987...

...Sartre began teaching high school philosophy there in March 1931 and remained until 1936...

...Sartre's Crocker Coulson, a former reporter for the New Republic is studying philosophy in West Berlin...

...The Flight From America's Foundations: A Panoramic Perspective on American Law," Virginia C. Armstrong, Professor of Political Science and Public Law, Hardin-Simmons University...

...Jean Kanapa, a former student who wrote a scathing attack on Sartre entitled Existentialism Is Not Humanism, described Sartre's position vis-a-vis Marxism thus...

...Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva—the thinkers that were centered around the journal Tel Quel in the 1960s and seventies and who now constitute the establishment left—have chosen to explore themes quite different from his...

...Sartre, however, escaped the incident untouched...

...It is almost as if he had become a figure in one of his own plays, who, swollen with pride from his conquest of literature and philosophy, is undone by his ignorance of politics and human nature...

...Sartre's complete works have yet to be collected, much less published, and it is possible that they never will be...

...The work of these writers—including Bernard-Henri Levy, Alain Finkielkraut, Andre Glucksmann, and Luc Ferry—bears all the marks of Sartrean engagement...

...In both instances Sartre began at a disadvantage but eventually outstripped his adversaries...

...My play had become a political battlefield, an instrument of political propaganda," Sartre lamely explained...

...his great work on ontology, Being and Nothingness, is a highly technical work illustrated with novelistic anecdotes...

...It is perhaps not going too far to suggest that the essay that assigns Sartre his place in history will be written by one who is on the right...

...Poetry, for example, is banished from the realm of "engaged" writing altogether...

...Predictably, his direct political actions were of minimal relevance: his group "Socialism and Freedom" was of more symbolic than practical importance in the French Resistance and with its collapse he returned to political marginality...

...There is a certain kind of perishability that I like about money: I like to see it flow from my fingers and IS THE CONSTITUTION "WHAT THE JUDGES SAY IT IS...

...Sartre was proud of his position at the top of the final aagation and regarded Albert Camus as an intellectual parvenu...

...These were years filled with small acts of cowardice, such as Sartre's legal efforts to block performances of Dirty Hands in Vienna and New York because of the play's unflattering portrayal of the Communist Party...

...aced with this unpleasant cadaver, F the most common response among leftist intellectuals has been to ignore Sartre's legacy entirely...

...And yet, this mysterious dance of the manuscripts—appearance, disappearance, chance of imminent reappearance—suggested a constant movement around Sartre's oeuvre, a perpetual mobility, an afterlife...

...But the period of seduction had been fatal: Sartre's capacity for political skepticism had been shattered...

...RESTORING THE CONSTITUTION, 1787-1987 Essays in Celebration of the Bicentennial Edited by H. Wayne House, J.D., Th.D...

...Church-State Separation: Restoring the `No-Preference' Doctrine of the First Amendment," Robert L. Cord, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Northeastern University...

...Williams School of Law, University of Richmond...

...most powerful novel, Nausea, was conceived as a "factum on contingency," an exploration of a philosophical problem...

...This is the paradoxical, unnerving reflection that Sartre presents to the unaffiliated, contentious, hyper-intellectual political class that travels in France under the rubric of la gauche...

...This patricidal act captures Sartre's ambiguous relation to the intellectual elite of which he was now a part: at once removed—Sartre never returned to the Ecole Normale, nor did he join its alumni association—and yet willing to assume its prerogatives when it suited him...

...From these years he emerged a monster, and, not incidentally, a great writer...

...W ith the end of the war and the flowering of mass media on both sides of the Atlantic, Sartre and his philosophy—as presented in interviews, plays such as No Exit, and a short pamphlet entitled "Existentialism and Humanism" which sold millions of copies around the world—swiftly achieved a renown previously unheard of for writers of philosophic tomes...

...Avant-garde magazines all over the country," reported the breath-less correspondent for the New York Post, "are beginning to bulge with articles by or about the brilliant French writer Jean-Paul Sartre...

...It must disappear on insubstantial fireworks...

...Far from a socialist ethic, what Sartre is describing here is the pure and unfettered spectacle of consumer capitalism...

...The keen edge of his humor became apparent in 1927 when during a period of increasing bellicosity in French society, Sartre and a cell of pacifist students staged a theatrical revue that ridiculed SARTRE: A LIFE Annie Cohen-Solal/Pantheon Books/$24.95 Crocker Coulson 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 militarist politicians and the armed forces, and maligned patriotic symbols...

...S artre's childhood, with his passion- 1.3 ate love for his widowed mother, his infancy spent among the great works of the nineteenth century in the library of his Alsatian grandfather, and his precocious, insatiable egoism, has long been known through the exquisite piece of mythmaking that Sartre published as an autobiography entitled The Words...

...The anti-Stalinist Partisan Review applauds him...

...The dormitory is practically never aired or swept...

...Later he broke definitively with the PCF...

...And despite the paucity of their philosophic achievement, they have become familiar to a wide public...

...It is a conception of literature that inspired an entire generation of literary functionaries, but that returned to haunt him at the end of his life which Sartre spent composing Flaubert's biography—a work so exhaustive and eccentric, so distant from contemporary concerns, that when it was published in 1973 many journals were unable to find reviewers willing to read it...

...on the grounds that it would be too political...

...The rowdy, greedy Normalien had anticipated everything but failure," writes Cohen-Solal...

...CohenSolal writes: "Since Sartre's death, in April 1980, his work has been going through a period of uncertainty, a strange malaise of which this auction was probably the least painful symptom...

...The fashion magazines begin to record the Sartre 'trend.' " Somehow, one of the ugliest men in literary history had become a pop star...

...Levy in particular, whose flowing hair and thoughtful gaze have graced many magazine covers and who is completely at home on television, embodies Sartre's own ambitions for the political uses of mass media...

...And though Sartre was relatively ignorant of the political issues of the day, he began to develop a political style marked by confrontation, an instinctual anarchism, and a pitiless contempt for the upholders of social convention, moral propriety, and intellectual laxity...

...And the literary contribution of Sartre—whose essays reflecting upon the deaths of Albert Camus, fellow phenomenologist MerleauPonty, Third World revolutionary Franz Fanon, and the writer Paul Nizan served as his subjects' literary tombstones—has yet to be convincingly assessed...