Sartre

In this ground-breaking biography, Bernard-Henri Lévy shows how Sartre cannot be understood without taking into account his relations with the intellectual forebears and contemporaries, the lovers and friends, with whom he conducted a lifelong debate.

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

Auteur

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

Résumé
In this ground--breaking biography, Bernard--Henri Levy shows how Sartre cannot be understood without taking into account his relations with the intellectual forebears and contemporaries, the lovers and friends, with whom he conducted a lifelong debate.

Contenu

Prologue 1

Part I "The Man, a Century" 7

1 Sartre's Fame 9 2 Stendhal and Spinoza 42

3 Taking Leave of Gide 74

4 A "German" Philosopher 102

5 Note on the Heidegger Question 134

Part II Justice for Jean-Paul Sartre 163

1 Existentialism is an Anti-humanism 165

2 What is a Monster? (biographical fragments) 202

3 Anti-fascist from Beginning to End 238

4 Note on the Vichy Question: Sartre in the Resistance 269

5 Sartre, Now 295

Part III The Madness of the Age 321

1 Another Sartre (snapshots) 323

2 On the Workings of Error in the Life of an Intellectual 355

3 The Confession 381

4 Sartre's Failure 412

5 Requiem for literature 445

Epilogue (The Blind Philosopher) 476

Notes 503

Index 527