Remembering Sartre

Author: Arthur, Paige

Source: Theory and Society, Volume 36, Number 3, June 2007 , pp. 231-243(13)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

In this article reviewing three books on Sartre written by Ronald Aronson, Bernhard-Henri Lévy, and Ronald Santoni, I note that an enduring interest in Sartre's life and philosophy centers on the justifiability of revolutionary violence and terror. I argue that critics too often, and sometimes obsessively, focus on the same texts and actions, typically related to his support for communism in the 1950s. They thus often reproduce a Cold War narrative of his life and work, wrongly obscuring his other great political engagement on behalf of national liberation and anticolonial resistance movements around the world. When critics do, however, consider his views in relationship to decolonization, they are often reduced to the muckracking pages of his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth - a text that is in fact unrepresentative of positions he took in more sustained works, such as The Critique of Dialectical Reason and the 1964 “Rome Lecture” on ethics. I suggest that this “Cold War lens” ought to be removed, so that a fuller and more nuanced understanding of Sartre's views on political violence might be achieved. Indeed, Aronson's book is the only one among the three that begins to make this move.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9034-0

Affiliations: 1: Email: parthur@ictj.org

Publication date: 2007-06-01