Between Existentialism and Marxism

Always lucid, profound and ever irreverent, this is a delicious collections of reprints and interviews on the "whys" and "why nots" of Sartre's century of intellectual and political ideas. Here is a once in a life time "head session" that covers the waterfront - from Existentialism to Marxism, from Genet and Tintoretto to Flaubert, from politics to the Arts, to Sartre's attitude towards his own writings, and on to Freud and back -- giving those who do not yet know him well an unobstructed window into some of his most valuable intellectual insights. And for those who do know him well, this book becomes a summary of many of Sartre's core ideas and further confirmation of why he will remain one of the towering intellects of our times. In this short collection, Jean Paul Sartre covers so much intellectual ground with so much ease and clarity, and with so much intellectual depth and facility that it literally takes the breath away. As a result, these pages must be read slowly and savored, for there are only a handful of intellectuals in history who can match Sartre's rich and deep insights, or who can shock our minds into complete attention for such a long span of time: For our troubled times, his prodigious intellect, his wit, his literary skills, his clarity and his iconoclastic irreverence, are an iron tonic that is as much an existential and literary, as a political, necessity. Most refreshingly here is the fact that Sartre and the first interviewer, Madam Madeleine Chapsal, engage in a compellingly "scrappy" intellectual repartee designed to draw Sartre into revealing the "motive forces" behind his intellectual insights. Madeleine Chapsal's "in your face" discussion of why some of Sartre's most fundamental views have changed over time makes for interesting repartee. Un-awed by Sartre, and like a hunter who has cornered her prey, Madam Chapsal is relentless in pushing Sartre over the horizon pass "the expected and ordinary" to "the-meat-and bones" of his ideas, all done in a freewheeling, almost didactic dialogue between intellectual equals. Intellectual repartee does not get much better than this. We discover here that there are two formative experiences that drive most European intellectuals: First and foremost, is the trauma of two world wars fought back-to-back on European soil -- the greater being WW-II where Hitler embarrassed and humiliated Europe, and most especially the "uber-proud" French: Hitler's occupation was an abyss from which it seems the French have yet to completely recover, and from which they had nowhere to hide between their choice of the "false experience" of imagined French heroism, and the brutal reality of Nazi power. It is no longer a secret that much too often, this choice was resolved in the cruelest of ways: to die, be imprisoned and tortured, or become a ignominious traitor to France. For Sartre -- captured, imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis, Hitler's occupation ceased to be a theoretical abstraction, but