The Existentialist Moment by Baert Patrick

Author:Baert, Patrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745685434
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Concluding comments

Sartre’s rise in the autumn of 1945 was partly due to a broader, powerful network in which he had managed to occupy a leading role. Sartre’s network consisted of strong ties,50 not just because Sartre had frequent contact with the individuals of his network, but also because these relationships were characterized by emotional intensity and intimacy. Sartre’s relationships were never merely professional and the friendships ran deep. Sartre had known several of the people for a long time, and some were his former university friends at the École normale. Others, like Camus, he had met more recently, but even there the bond was strong. Institutionally, the network centred round Gallimard, and the network included various writers who published with this French publishing house. Among this group of writers, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus were the most visible exponents of what was now known as existentialism, but other connections of Sartre also played a part in his rise. Les Temps modernes drew, inter alia, on the authority and experience of Paulhan, as well as on the emerging talents of Merleau-Ponty and Aron. Few of these connections were devoted to the existentialist cause, but they did subscribe to some broad themes which became the hallmark of Sartre’s project, in particular the notion that literary endeavours should speak to the present constellation. Of all the people who were part of Sartre’s circle, de Beauvoir’s literary products around this time contributed directly to the rising popularity of existentialism and to a growing sense that, as a philosophy, it spoke to recent experiences and current concerns. The case of de Beauvoir shows this network to have many tentacles, using different media to reach its audiences. By the autumn of 1945, she, like Sartre, had written plays, novels and journalistic pieces. Both Sartre and Beauvoir’s novels and plays were visibly connected to the newly emerging philosophy, with the various situations depicted as instantiations of existentialist themes and concepts. The didactic nature of these literary products made the new philosophy easily digestible and helped its diffusion; it also meant that by the end of 1945 Sartre’s existentialism provided a coherent vocabulary through which educated people could see and articulate the trauma of the war and the occupation.

Drawing on the broader intellectual debates around the trials of collaborators, Sartre continued, throughout 1945, to reflect on writers’ responsibility for their writings. In the process, he stretched the notion of responsibility, regarding people as responsible even for the unintended and unanticipated effects of their actions. In the course of 1945, however, Sartre also started to employ the notion of responsibility differently, steering it in the direction of his newly found vocation for the intellectual. The concept of responsibility, then, had become the central core of his new literary agenda, now virtually devoid of the earlier legal connotations of the term. Now referring less to how people retrospectively can be accountable for the negative effects of their past actions, Sartre increasingly saw ‘responsibility’ as a pressing need to use literary interventions as political tools for dealing with contemporary social and political issues.

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