At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails With Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others by Bakewell Sarah

Author:Bakewell, Sarah [Bakewell, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary, Philosophers, Philosophy, Movements, Existentialism
ISBN: 9781590514887
Google: QPNvrgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1590514882
Barnesnoble: 1590514882
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2016-03-01T06:00:00+00:00

Sartre was just as interested as Beauvoir in seeing how existentialism could be applied to particular lives, and in his case it led him to biography. While Beauvoir traced a generic woman’s life from babyhood to maturity, Sartre did the same with a series of individual men (and they are all men): Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet, Flaubert and himself, as well as subjects of shorter essays. In Nausea, he had Roquentin give up his biographical project so as not to impose a conventional narrative form on a life, but there is nothing conventional about Sartre’s biographies. He abandons standard chronology and instead looks for distinctive shapes and key moments on which a life turns — those moments in which a person makes a choice about some situation, and thus changes everything. In these crux points, we catch a person in the very act of turning existence into essence.

The most important such moments tend to occur in childhood. Sartre’s biographies all focus on his subjects’ early years; Words, his own memoir, confines itself to them exclusively. This interest in childhood owes something to Freud, who also wrote psychobiographies unpicking the dramas of a life, often tracing them to a ‘primal scene’. Sartre liked to find primal scenes too, but by contrast with Freud they did not usually have to do with sex. Sartre thought sexual experiences took their power from more basic experiences to do with our very being. He sought out those experiences during which a child in a challenging situation took control and bent that situation his own way. In other words, he interpreted his subjects’ lives in terms of their freedom. This happens above all in his book about the writer Jean Genet, which appeared in 1952 — three years after Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and visibly marked by her influence.

After first meeting Genet in the Café Flore during the war years, Sartre had followed his career with interest as Genet published erotic, poetic novels and memoirs based on his life in reform schools, prisons, and on the road as a thief and prostitute. His most provocative book, Funeral Rites, told of a French teenager who fights on the German side during the last days of the Occupation, even though the Germans are losing — or rather, because they are losing. Genet tended to sympathise with the defeated or despised in any situation; in 1944 that meant Germans and collaborators, not the triumphant résistants. He went on to support traitors, violent revolutionaries, Baader–Meinhof terrorists, Black Panthers and more or less anyone who was an outsider. He backed the student radicals of the 1960s too, but remarked to William Burroughs, ‘If they ever win, I’ll turn against them.’

Sartre loved Genet’s contrariness, as well as his way of poeticising reality. He was pleased when his publisher Gallimard asked him to write a foreword for a collected edition of Genet’s works. But then Sartre’s foreword grew to be 700 pages long. Rather than whacking Sartre over the head with the manuscript in

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