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هكذا تكلم سارتر
يفتح هذا الكتاب الباب للتعرف على فكر رجل وفكر عصر بأكمله
هذه الحوارات التي أجراها جراسي مع سارتر تعتبر غير مسبوقة وليس لها مثيل في ما كتبه سارتر أو ما كتب عنه. ويظهر هذا الحوار سارتر بشخصيته العفوية, إذ قد نسي أن هناك تسجيل صوتي لهذا الحوار. ويمكننا أن نرى من خلاله ما اتصف به سارتر من فضول نهم, وشغف سياسي, وأمانة متبدية, وسخربة من الذات, واعتداد بالذكورة. وتعتبر تعليقات سارتر العابرة التي ألقاها أثناء هذا الحوار من أعظم ما يحتويه, ونستطيع أن نلقي نظرة كاشفة على روحه من خلال ما نستشفه من بين السطور
هذه الحوارات التي أجراها جراسي مع سارتر تعتبر غير مسبوقة وليس لها مثيل في ما كتبه سارتر أو ما كتب عنه. ويظهر هذا الحوار سارتر بشخصيته العفوية, إذ قد نسي أن هناك تسجيل صوتي لهذا الحوار. ويمكننا أن نرى من خلاله ما اتصف به سارتر من فضول نهم, وشغف سياسي, وأمانة متبدية, وسخربة من الذات, واعتداد بالذكورة. وتعتبر تعليقات سارتر العابرة التي ألقاها أثناء هذا الحوار من أعظم ما يحتويه, ونستطيع أن نلقي نظرة كاشفة على روحه من خلال ما نستشفه من بين السطور
346 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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191 people want to read
About the author
John Gerassi
26 books6 followersJohn Gerassi is professor of political science at Queens College, City University of New York, and is the author ofJean-Paul Sartre: HatedConscience of His Century."
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
February 22, 2022
My original review at the Irish Left Review: http://www.irishleftreview.org/2010/0...
Central to Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism is the concept of Bad Faith, the idea that humans avoid taking responsibility for their actions by pretending they have no choice in how they behave. This can manifest itself in a range of behaviours, such as making excuses for misdemeanours by blaming their genes, their upbringing, their parents, their gender, by finding all sorts of extenuating circumstances that shift the cause for their actions away from themselves. What these behaviours all have in common is that each constitutes an attempt to turn subject into object, to deny that the source of the action in question lies in the free choice of the individual by making the individual itself nothing more than an object at the mercy of forces outside of its own control. Sartre spends many many pages of his masterpiece Being and Nothingness trying to explain why humans might want to adopt such a position and drawing out the ontological pre-requisites for such an attitude to even be possible.
Despite the intimidating jargon taken from phenomenology and Hegel, as well as a few neologisms of Sartre’s own thrown into the mix, Being and Nothingness is not an impossible work to understand, and despite the willful misunderstandings that Sartre’s work has received at the hands of certain analytic philosophers (and much lesser lights, such as Clive James’s dismissive ignorance), existentialism is not a difficult philosophy to grasp. If you can understand why an individual’s subjective experience is itself proof of free will, you can fairly quickly disentangle the intricacies of Sartre’s early thought.
Sartre attempted to derive an ethical theory on the basis of the ontology outlined in his book. He argued in a lecture, published in English as Existentialism and Humanism, that to adopt the attitude of Bad Faith was in itself morally wrong since to do so is to deny human freedom, and this is to deny the very essence of what it is to be human. To be human is to be free, and to deny that is to deny our own humanity. In the series of interviews with John Gerassi that make up Talking with Sartre, we see this philosophy in action. Sartre attempted in his own life to be totally transparent, to hide nothing, to deny nothing, to make no excuses for himself. Before this sounds like a bad plot for a movie starring Ricky Gervais, let me add that transparency does not mean being rude or feeling obliged to express every single thought one has regardless of how they affect others. What it does mean is to be honest with oneself and with others about oneself, so that there is no privacy, nothing hidden, no deceit or attempt to create an impression in the minds of others that is different from who you actually are.
In conversation the impact can be quite brutal, particularly if you aren’t ready for it. These are not interviews in which Gerassi comes to his subject with a sense of awe or deference. It helped, no doubt, that Gerassi’s parents were part of Sartre and Beauvoir’s circle (Gerassi’s father, Fernando, was a painter who fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War and who became the character Gomez in Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy; his mother, Stepha, had been one of Beauvoir’s best friends at the Sorbonne and became “Sarah” in the same trilogy) and Gerassi himself later became accepted too. Interviewer and interviewee thus know each other very well and have established a high degree of trust between them, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons why Sartre authorized Gerassi to write his biography, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century. It also helps explain why Sartre does not bridle at the sometimes aggressive tone of the questioning. Gerassi’s own history as an activist and revolutionary in the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s lend the questioning a sense of urgency: Sartre, while not on the defensive, is frequently taken to task by Gerassi for not having done enough or gone far enough for a particular cause. He is taken to task, for instance, for not having followed Gerassi’s father to Spain to fight, instead holding the view that Fernando had betrayed his artistic commitment in deciding to go (Gerassi senior was in fact one of the last generals to leave Barcelona. You can read his story here). Sartre struggles to explain his position on this occasion, and on many others throughout the interviews, but very rarely does he make excuses for himself or try to shift the blame onto circumstances. Each position he adopted seems to have been carefully thought through-cynics might say every desire was given retrospective justification-and only on occasion is he caught out saying, “What else could I do? I’m a Bourgeois, after all.”
The interviews in the book took place between November 1970 and November 1974, with the subject matter in each interview going back and forth from past to present. Thus, at the same time as we learn about Sartre’s childhood (b. 1905) in Paris and La Rochelle, we get Sartre’s opinions on contemporaneous events, such as Mao’s cultural revolution and the Munich Olympics massacre. The language sometimes seems somewhat stilted even though conversational. There’s a good reason for this, I think. Sartre admits that he did not become political or develop any sense of society until the end of the war, having experienced life as a P.O.W. in a German prison camp, the kind of place where there was very little privacy or dignity (in an interview elsewhere I recall him recounting an epiphany when he and Beauvoir decided to go skiing in the mountains one Sunday and were amazed to find that hundreds of other people had also decided, with comparable free will, to engage in the same activity). The turn to Marxism that Sartre’s philosophy subsequently underwent as he tried to reconcile it with existentialism meant that he had to do an awful lot of catching up in terms not just of acquainting himself with the reality of workers’ lives but also of learning the language of Marxist philosophy. Spend long enough working with and thinking in abstractions, and eventually they end up seeming more real than the entities they’re supposed to be referring to. A typical exchange might go something like
Gerassi: Hi, Sartre, I’m early today.
Sartre: Yes. You caught me coming back from the tobacco kiosk.
Gerassi: Really? Did you get a chance to talk to the Masses?
Sartre: Yes, I did. I spoke to them about the need for the Black Panthers to develop a revolutionary strategy that reflected the decomposition of the proletariat.
Gerassi: Very good. Did they seem receptive?
Sartre: Not particularly. The Masses said they had to go home because their cystitis was playing up.
I exaggerate for comic effect, but the absence of self-awareness that usually accompanies similar such exchanges will be familiar to anyone with experience of ultra-leftist organizations, and Sartre and Gerassi’s own apparent ease with the executions of counter-revolutionaries in Cuba suggests the sort of latent sociopathy one often finds in those high up in hierarchical organizations used to pushing people around checkerboards by the thousand.
Josef Stalin is supposed, erroneously, to have said, “the death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is just a statistic.” It isn’t of course. It’s a million tragedies. Sartre freely admits his failure to either reconcile existentialism, his philosophy of the individual par excellence, with Marxism, or to complete his promised Ethics. The first of these he intended to achieve with his massive Critique of Dialectical Reason, a work that attempts to situate the individual within history, as understood by Marxism. Sartre regarded this as an attempt to save the individual, to demonstrate that there is a small margin of freedom, a glint of light, beneath the overwhelming economic forces that carry societies, states, classes, and history along. It is another intimidating work that rewards reading, a Marxist version of Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, if you will. It remained incomplete, as Sartre was overtaken by the force of history himself. His use of speed for 40 years of his life on a routine basis had destroyed his health and ruined his eyesight, making completion of the work impossible. But Sartre had also witnessed the “Events” of 1968, in which many of his cherished Marxist ideas were thrown into doubt by not just the New Left but by the feminist and black power movements that undermined the primacy of class as the principal determinant of social structure, change, and history (when asked by the students occupying the Sorbonne what he was doing there, Sartre received a round of applause for his canny answer: to learn). Unable to bring himself to completely align himself with anarchism while nevertheless cherishing the anarchist implications of his philosophy, he went from being a fellow traveller of the Communists to a defender of Maoism, the form of Marxism that, as he understood it, came closest to a nonhierarchical Marxist organization; the cultural revolution, as he understood it, was a radical casting into doubt of the right of the Communist Party bureaucracy to legislate for the people. Putting lawyers, writers, ballet dancers, and assorted bureaucrats to work in the fields and factories could not but help them gain some empathy for the struggles of the peasants and workers. I wouldn’t mind seeing it myself.
Sartre had also been moving towards a more “situational” ethics, recognizing, at last, the impossibility of legislating for humanity as a whole, as he had once tried to do in Existentialism and Humanism. Rather than espousing a kind of modified Kantian categorical imperative, he increasingly returned to the specificity of each individual event, situation, occasion. To generate an ethics on that basis requires once more that we recognize and value the importance of each individual, a message explicit in Sartre’s early philosophy. Arguably it was necessary for Sartre’s thinking to go through the detour of Marxism to achieve the more sophisticated, socially aware form that it acquired toward the end of his life; ironic, even, that Marxism should be responsible for this dialectical Aufhebung. Sadly, however, that detour also meant that Sartre did not live long enough to see his project through. We can only speculate as to what his third masterpiece might have looked like.
Talking with Sartre offers a warts-and-all profile of Sartre. He is candid about his many love affairs, sometimes, perhaps often, to his detriment. Some readers might reflect that it is easier for some people to be candid than others. In the preface, Gerassi recounts how he turns up for lunch with Sartre and Beauvoir on one occasion after breaking up with a girl and clearly upset:
Even in the most transparent of relationships, some compromises are more painful than others.
In 1976, the three-hour documentary Sartre par lui-même (Sartre by Himself) featured Sartre, Beauvoir, and a number of close friends covering similar ground to that in Gerassi’s book. The text of the documentary was released in English in paperback, but it’s very difficult to find now. The video itself is out there on VHS with English subtitles, I believe, and a special 30th-anniversary 2-disc edition came out on DVD in 2007, if your French is up to it (I had to follow the conversation with English text in hand). If not, then Gerassi’s book is a fine alternative, offering an intimate and representative introduction to Sartre the man, the writer, and the philosopher. And a fascinating read, to boot.
Central to Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism is the concept of Bad Faith, the idea that humans avoid taking responsibility for their actions by pretending they have no choice in how they behave. This can manifest itself in a range of behaviours, such as making excuses for misdemeanours by blaming their genes, their upbringing, their parents, their gender, by finding all sorts of extenuating circumstances that shift the cause for their actions away from themselves. What these behaviours all have in common is that each constitutes an attempt to turn subject into object, to deny that the source of the action in question lies in the free choice of the individual by making the individual itself nothing more than an object at the mercy of forces outside of its own control. Sartre spends many many pages of his masterpiece Being and Nothingness trying to explain why humans might want to adopt such a position and drawing out the ontological pre-requisites for such an attitude to even be possible.
Despite the intimidating jargon taken from phenomenology and Hegel, as well as a few neologisms of Sartre’s own thrown into the mix, Being and Nothingness is not an impossible work to understand, and despite the willful misunderstandings that Sartre’s work has received at the hands of certain analytic philosophers (and much lesser lights, such as Clive James’s dismissive ignorance), existentialism is not a difficult philosophy to grasp. If you can understand why an individual’s subjective experience is itself proof of free will, you can fairly quickly disentangle the intricacies of Sartre’s early thought.
Sartre attempted to derive an ethical theory on the basis of the ontology outlined in his book. He argued in a lecture, published in English as Existentialism and Humanism, that to adopt the attitude of Bad Faith was in itself morally wrong since to do so is to deny human freedom, and this is to deny the very essence of what it is to be human. To be human is to be free, and to deny that is to deny our own humanity. In the series of interviews with John Gerassi that make up Talking with Sartre, we see this philosophy in action. Sartre attempted in his own life to be totally transparent, to hide nothing, to deny nothing, to make no excuses for himself. Before this sounds like a bad plot for a movie starring Ricky Gervais, let me add that transparency does not mean being rude or feeling obliged to express every single thought one has regardless of how they affect others. What it does mean is to be honest with oneself and with others about oneself, so that there is no privacy, nothing hidden, no deceit or attempt to create an impression in the minds of others that is different from who you actually are.
In conversation the impact can be quite brutal, particularly if you aren’t ready for it. These are not interviews in which Gerassi comes to his subject with a sense of awe or deference. It helped, no doubt, that Gerassi’s parents were part of Sartre and Beauvoir’s circle (Gerassi’s father, Fernando, was a painter who fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War and who became the character Gomez in Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy; his mother, Stepha, had been one of Beauvoir’s best friends at the Sorbonne and became “Sarah” in the same trilogy) and Gerassi himself later became accepted too. Interviewer and interviewee thus know each other very well and have established a high degree of trust between them, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons why Sartre authorized Gerassi to write his biography, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century. It also helps explain why Sartre does not bridle at the sometimes aggressive tone of the questioning. Gerassi’s own history as an activist and revolutionary in the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s lend the questioning a sense of urgency: Sartre, while not on the defensive, is frequently taken to task by Gerassi for not having done enough or gone far enough for a particular cause. He is taken to task, for instance, for not having followed Gerassi’s father to Spain to fight, instead holding the view that Fernando had betrayed his artistic commitment in deciding to go (Gerassi senior was in fact one of the last generals to leave Barcelona. You can read his story here). Sartre struggles to explain his position on this occasion, and on many others throughout the interviews, but very rarely does he make excuses for himself or try to shift the blame onto circumstances. Each position he adopted seems to have been carefully thought through-cynics might say every desire was given retrospective justification-and only on occasion is he caught out saying, “What else could I do? I’m a Bourgeois, after all.”
The interviews in the book took place between November 1970 and November 1974, with the subject matter in each interview going back and forth from past to present. Thus, at the same time as we learn about Sartre’s childhood (b. 1905) in Paris and La Rochelle, we get Sartre’s opinions on contemporaneous events, such as Mao’s cultural revolution and the Munich Olympics massacre. The language sometimes seems somewhat stilted even though conversational. There’s a good reason for this, I think. Sartre admits that he did not become political or develop any sense of society until the end of the war, having experienced life as a P.O.W. in a German prison camp, the kind of place where there was very little privacy or dignity (in an interview elsewhere I recall him recounting an epiphany when he and Beauvoir decided to go skiing in the mountains one Sunday and were amazed to find that hundreds of other people had also decided, with comparable free will, to engage in the same activity). The turn to Marxism that Sartre’s philosophy subsequently underwent as he tried to reconcile it with existentialism meant that he had to do an awful lot of catching up in terms not just of acquainting himself with the reality of workers’ lives but also of learning the language of Marxist philosophy. Spend long enough working with and thinking in abstractions, and eventually they end up seeming more real than the entities they’re supposed to be referring to. A typical exchange might go something like
Gerassi: Hi, Sartre, I’m early today.
Sartre: Yes. You caught me coming back from the tobacco kiosk.
Gerassi: Really? Did you get a chance to talk to the Masses?
Sartre: Yes, I did. I spoke to them about the need for the Black Panthers to develop a revolutionary strategy that reflected the decomposition of the proletariat.
Gerassi: Very good. Did they seem receptive?
Sartre: Not particularly. The Masses said they had to go home because their cystitis was playing up.
I exaggerate for comic effect, but the absence of self-awareness that usually accompanies similar such exchanges will be familiar to anyone with experience of ultra-leftist organizations, and Sartre and Gerassi’s own apparent ease with the executions of counter-revolutionaries in Cuba suggests the sort of latent sociopathy one often finds in those high up in hierarchical organizations used to pushing people around checkerboards by the thousand.
Josef Stalin is supposed, erroneously, to have said, “the death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is just a statistic.” It isn’t of course. It’s a million tragedies. Sartre freely admits his failure to either reconcile existentialism, his philosophy of the individual par excellence, with Marxism, or to complete his promised Ethics. The first of these he intended to achieve with his massive Critique of Dialectical Reason, a work that attempts to situate the individual within history, as understood by Marxism. Sartre regarded this as an attempt to save the individual, to demonstrate that there is a small margin of freedom, a glint of light, beneath the overwhelming economic forces that carry societies, states, classes, and history along. It is another intimidating work that rewards reading, a Marxist version of Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, if you will. It remained incomplete, as Sartre was overtaken by the force of history himself. His use of speed for 40 years of his life on a routine basis had destroyed his health and ruined his eyesight, making completion of the work impossible. But Sartre had also witnessed the “Events” of 1968, in which many of his cherished Marxist ideas were thrown into doubt by not just the New Left but by the feminist and black power movements that undermined the primacy of class as the principal determinant of social structure, change, and history (when asked by the students occupying the Sorbonne what he was doing there, Sartre received a round of applause for his canny answer: to learn). Unable to bring himself to completely align himself with anarchism while nevertheless cherishing the anarchist implications of his philosophy, he went from being a fellow traveller of the Communists to a defender of Maoism, the form of Marxism that, as he understood it, came closest to a nonhierarchical Marxist organization; the cultural revolution, as he understood it, was a radical casting into doubt of the right of the Communist Party bureaucracy to legislate for the people. Putting lawyers, writers, ballet dancers, and assorted bureaucrats to work in the fields and factories could not but help them gain some empathy for the struggles of the peasants and workers. I wouldn’t mind seeing it myself.
Sartre had also been moving towards a more “situational” ethics, recognizing, at last, the impossibility of legislating for humanity as a whole, as he had once tried to do in Existentialism and Humanism. Rather than espousing a kind of modified Kantian categorical imperative, he increasingly returned to the specificity of each individual event, situation, occasion. To generate an ethics on that basis requires once more that we recognize and value the importance of each individual, a message explicit in Sartre’s early philosophy. Arguably it was necessary for Sartre’s thinking to go through the detour of Marxism to achieve the more sophisticated, socially aware form that it acquired toward the end of his life; ironic, even, that Marxism should be responsible for this dialectical Aufhebung. Sadly, however, that detour also meant that Sartre did not live long enough to see his project through. We can only speculate as to what his third masterpiece might have looked like.
Talking with Sartre offers a warts-and-all profile of Sartre. He is candid about his many love affairs, sometimes, perhaps often, to his detriment. Some readers might reflect that it is easier for some people to be candid than others. In the preface, Gerassi recounts how he turns up for lunch with Sartre and Beauvoir on one occasion after breaking up with a girl and clearly upset:
Sartre looked hard at my face through his walleyes, then said: “Well, I envy you. I have never cried for a woman in my life.”
Beauvoir was crushed. Sartre sensed it, so he quickly tried to explain. “When Castor [Beauvoir] and I decided to have what you call an open relationship, we realized that passion inevitably leads to possessiveness and jealousies. So, as you know, we decided that our relationship would be ‘necessary’ but that we would be free to have others, which we called ‘contingent.’ That demanded that we eliminate passion, the kind of hard emotions which often manifest themselves with tears. But I now realize . . . well, I envy you-you can cry at forty, and I never have at seventy.”
I could see that Beauvoir was suffering deeply. Obviously, she had often shed a tear for her lover, Sartre or another, and obviously was hurt that he had not.
Even in the most transparent of relationships, some compromises are more painful than others.
In 1976, the three-hour documentary Sartre par lui-même (Sartre by Himself) featured Sartre, Beauvoir, and a number of close friends covering similar ground to that in Gerassi’s book. The text of the documentary was released in English in paperback, but it’s very difficult to find now. The video itself is out there on VHS with English subtitles, I believe, and a special 30th-anniversary 2-disc edition came out on DVD in 2007, if your French is up to it (I had to follow the conversation with English text in hand). If not, then Gerassi’s book is a fine alternative, offering an intimate and representative introduction to Sartre the man, the writer, and the philosopher. And a fascinating read, to boot.
October 7, 2014
I just finished the most enjoyable book I've read in some time. Political scientist John Gerassi's father, Fernando, was one of Jean-Paul Sartre's closest friends, and Gerassi grew up as a member of what Simone de Beauvoir referred to as "the family."
At the end of Sartre's life, Gerassi, by then an American, had an extended series of conversations with Sartre that form the body of this book. It's a wonderful reflection on the intellectual, cultural, and historical issues that were central to the 20th century. Or should I say that were to the left of the center of the 20th century?
In this wide-ranging sequence, Sartre is completely honest in his self-criticism, criticisms of others, and of history itself. Gerassi, who taught at Queens College in New York, displays a range and subtlety of understanding that to me, at least, makes me think he must have held back most of what he knew from his students. He was exceptionally informed and engaged. It's hard to imagine the average undergraduate being able to follow him . . . or, of course, Sartre.
Sartre by now is more or less a name. In his heyday, he was the most famous intellectual in France, Europe and the world. He wrote serious plays, novels, and philosophy. He commented on all the major issues of the day. He wasn't a communist, but he appreciated communism. Toward the end of his life he spurred on what became a kind of fashion in France, anarchistic Maoism. His issue from the beginning was freedom. First man accepts that he is free. Then he must commit to the action that his freedom suggests to him. In a nutshell, that's Sartre's philosophy.
He felt that all of history, to the present day, represented a class struggle that kept the lower class unaware of its freedom, and he also felt that as the prime capitalist nation, the United States bore great responsibility for the persistence of classes in modern society. He was no ingenue. He understood the power of capital. But he was something of a Quixote, dreaming of a spontaneous revolution that would disallow and disobey the controlling regimes of finance, trade, labor, currency values, and the like.
I hesitate to go on about Sartre's thoughts because they are so much more clearly and simply represented in this remarkable book. Sartre rightly held Gerassi as a valid interlocutor, someone with whom he could debate, be frank, laugh, and ask important questions.
Part of the vitality of this book comes from the intellectual vitality of Europe from the 30s through the 70s. We have nothing similar in the U.S. today. The crudeness of sound bite politics here is dreadful. This is why it's so important to be reminded that there are alternatives.
In Europe one can have private conversations on this level, but European politics aren't much better than North American politics. At best we all have begun to focus on one central issue: income inequality. It's a valid and important issue. Why should a CEO make 400 times more than a plant manager or assembly-line worker? Why should five percent of Americans control over twenty-five percent of the wealth (much more)? At a point in time, around 1960, Sartre accepted the fact, philosophically, that everything is politics, and he made his case incessantly on behalf of limitless freedom. He considered himself a realist, but in fact he was more of an idealist. A more realistic critique comes from economists like Paul Krugman, who points out that in America, at least, the less the income inequality, the better the overall economy performs. It literally grows faster for obvious reasons: more people have more money to spend. (The rich don't much like Krugman; even Obama keeps his distance,but like Sartre, Krugman won a Nobel Prize, too.)
Anyone interested in the history of the 20th century, World War II, the Cold War, and/or France will find this an exceptionally engaging book.
At the end of Sartre's life, Gerassi, by then an American, had an extended series of conversations with Sartre that form the body of this book. It's a wonderful reflection on the intellectual, cultural, and historical issues that were central to the 20th century. Or should I say that were to the left of the center of the 20th century?
In this wide-ranging sequence, Sartre is completely honest in his self-criticism, criticisms of others, and of history itself. Gerassi, who taught at Queens College in New York, displays a range and subtlety of understanding that to me, at least, makes me think he must have held back most of what he knew from his students. He was exceptionally informed and engaged. It's hard to imagine the average undergraduate being able to follow him . . . or, of course, Sartre.
Sartre by now is more or less a name. In his heyday, he was the most famous intellectual in France, Europe and the world. He wrote serious plays, novels, and philosophy. He commented on all the major issues of the day. He wasn't a communist, but he appreciated communism. Toward the end of his life he spurred on what became a kind of fashion in France, anarchistic Maoism. His issue from the beginning was freedom. First man accepts that he is free. Then he must commit to the action that his freedom suggests to him. In a nutshell, that's Sartre's philosophy.
He felt that all of history, to the present day, represented a class struggle that kept the lower class unaware of its freedom, and he also felt that as the prime capitalist nation, the United States bore great responsibility for the persistence of classes in modern society. He was no ingenue. He understood the power of capital. But he was something of a Quixote, dreaming of a spontaneous revolution that would disallow and disobey the controlling regimes of finance, trade, labor, currency values, and the like.
I hesitate to go on about Sartre's thoughts because they are so much more clearly and simply represented in this remarkable book. Sartre rightly held Gerassi as a valid interlocutor, someone with whom he could debate, be frank, laugh, and ask important questions.
Part of the vitality of this book comes from the intellectual vitality of Europe from the 30s through the 70s. We have nothing similar in the U.S. today. The crudeness of sound bite politics here is dreadful. This is why it's so important to be reminded that there are alternatives.
In Europe one can have private conversations on this level, but European politics aren't much better than North American politics. At best we all have begun to focus on one central issue: income inequality. It's a valid and important issue. Why should a CEO make 400 times more than a plant manager or assembly-line worker? Why should five percent of Americans control over twenty-five percent of the wealth (much more)? At a point in time, around 1960, Sartre accepted the fact, philosophically, that everything is politics, and he made his case incessantly on behalf of limitless freedom. He considered himself a realist, but in fact he was more of an idealist. A more realistic critique comes from economists like Paul Krugman, who points out that in America, at least, the less the income inequality, the better the overall economy performs. It literally grows faster for obvious reasons: more people have more money to spend. (The rich don't much like Krugman; even Obama keeps his distance,but like Sartre, Krugman won a Nobel Prize, too.)
Anyone interested in the history of the 20th century, World War II, the Cold War, and/or France will find this an exceptionally engaging book.
June 27, 2025
A self-portrait of two exhausted volcanoes. There were two links between Jean-Paul Sartre and his interlocutor John Gerassi that merit discussion before plunging into this fascinating book of interviews. First, Sartre had known Gerassi's father, an American veteran of the Spanish Civil War and later painter of esteem. Second, by the time Gerassi conducted these conversations from 1970-1974 he had grown disenchanted with the Third World revolutions he had once championed (see his anthology, THE COMING OF THE NEW INTERNATIONAL) and so, not coincidentally, had Sartre, one-time publicist for the Cuban Revolution (See SARTRE ON CUBA). Could the projected world socialist revolution have turned out any different? Sartre and Gerassi focus on the 1930s and the consolidation and extension of the Stalinist regime in Russia as the turning point, for the worse, of the Marxist cause. The most chilling exchange in these talks is when Gerassi tells Sartre of his father meeting Soviet officials after World War II and asking them, "Whatever became of...my old friend?" and getting the same response every time, "Stalin, Stalin, and Stalin", meaning disappeared forever. These conversations are wide-ranging, yes, touching on art, philosophy, and racism in United States, but at the center is a defeated and disillusioned left, trying desperately to climb up back into relevancy.
June 22, 2018
Pretty good. For me, it was a very casual introduction to Sartre's philosophy, which I enjoyed greatly. The two also talk quite a bit about their personal lives, which I also found very entertaining to read, as Sartre is quite a unique character.
January 7, 2016
I feel like this book would appeal more to someone seeking clearer answers as to JP Sartre's early communist leanings, as there are frequent mentions of communism, Marx, et al. This is simply not my area of expertise, though it did pique some curiosity for further reading. The book clarifies that Sartre later retracts his communists leanings as the underpinnings of his philosophy long before his death, correcting himself and seeing the "error in his ways."
Though I enjoyed the interview as a whole, the book is replete with political and historical references that to me, either not being well read enough, or not being thoroughly educated in French history, were quite literally over my head. And it pains me to admit this. Not everything was evasive to me, as there were frequent mentions of WWII and America's role therein, though this was presented from the perspective of a wise, distant, resistant European.
My problem with the interview is that a lot of the historical knowledge came up colloquially--as is to be expected in a one-on-one, don't get me wrong--but that made it feel as though the closeness of the author to his interviewee didn't serve so much to aid in the readers' closeness to Sartre as it did to exhibit the camaraderie between the two men; and in fact, the whole feel of the book was one of stepping into or interrupting a conversation meant to be private, having started long ago and with someone else. However, I found every sporadic mention of the French student and youth revolutions of '68 to be truly engaging and fascinating, as I do have some knowledge of the subject--it is that very revolution in which the plot of the Bertolucci film The Dreamers takes place (which has many nods to Godard's Nouvelle Vague film Bande A Part/Band of Outsiders) a dystopian youth revolutionary orgy of sorts. With subjects like that, I will take whatever bits of information, incongruous or not, that I can get.
My favorite part of the book had to be the farewell, where we are reminded of some of Sartre's written word before his passing at the age of seventy-five; it was this that I had hoped most of the book to be, a rehashing of his theory, the ins and outs and whys and hows he came to write what he wrote and not so much debates on his political or personal romantic leanings--but alas! Sartre states:
"By making this whole absurd conglomeration of contingent events known as "life" your very own, by understanding that whatever you do, you posit it as an absolute moral value for all others, by doggedly seizing existence as your own and tenaciously heralding it as valuable, hence as moral, you are truly alive--and free."
Rest in peace, wonderful mind.
Though I enjoyed the interview as a whole, the book is replete with political and historical references that to me, either not being well read enough, or not being thoroughly educated in French history, were quite literally over my head. And it pains me to admit this. Not everything was evasive to me, as there were frequent mentions of WWII and America's role therein, though this was presented from the perspective of a wise, distant, resistant European.
My problem with the interview is that a lot of the historical knowledge came up colloquially--as is to be expected in a one-on-one, don't get me wrong--but that made it feel as though the closeness of the author to his interviewee didn't serve so much to aid in the readers' closeness to Sartre as it did to exhibit the camaraderie between the two men; and in fact, the whole feel of the book was one of stepping into or interrupting a conversation meant to be private, having started long ago and with someone else. However, I found every sporadic mention of the French student and youth revolutions of '68 to be truly engaging and fascinating, as I do have some knowledge of the subject--it is that very revolution in which the plot of the Bertolucci film The Dreamers takes place (which has many nods to Godard's Nouvelle Vague film Bande A Part/Band of Outsiders) a dystopian youth revolutionary orgy of sorts. With subjects like that, I will take whatever bits of information, incongruous or not, that I can get.
My favorite part of the book had to be the farewell, where we are reminded of some of Sartre's written word before his passing at the age of seventy-five; it was this that I had hoped most of the book to be, a rehashing of his theory, the ins and outs and whys and hows he came to write what he wrote and not so much debates on his political or personal romantic leanings--but alas! Sartre states:
"By making this whole absurd conglomeration of contingent events known as "life" your very own, by understanding that whatever you do, you posit it as an absolute moral value for all others, by doggedly seizing existence as your own and tenaciously heralding it as valuable, hence as moral, you are truly alive--and free."
Rest in peace, wonderful mind.
September 3, 2010
A summary. Episodes of personal encounters. Hints and clues of the man and his works. A picture of a flawed hero. Or a heroic flaw?
The following passage is taken from a "farewell" column written on the time of Sartre's death by the same author:
Fail through we may, we try to face our situation and overcome our anxieties by leading authentic lives in committing ourselves to our projects and to our fellow human beings. Understanding that we can never escape our background, our heritage, our time and space in a world that we have neither chosen nor accepted - in a phrase, our human condition - we, nevertheless, continuously try to give meaning to our absurdity through our action, the responsibility for which we reluctantly yet defiantly, painfully yet proudly, proclaim as our own.
...
The world may be a meaningless fact that you cannot control, your pain and your suffering may be the dictates of gods you can never know, your death may be no more rational than your life, yet you are what you do - and you know it.
The following passage is taken from a "farewell" column written on the time of Sartre's death by the same author:
Fail through we may, we try to face our situation and overcome our anxieties by leading authentic lives in committing ourselves to our projects and to our fellow human beings. Understanding that we can never escape our background, our heritage, our time and space in a world that we have neither chosen nor accepted - in a phrase, our human condition - we, nevertheless, continuously try to give meaning to our absurdity through our action, the responsibility for which we reluctantly yet defiantly, painfully yet proudly, proclaim as our own.
...
The world may be a meaningless fact that you cannot control, your pain and your suffering may be the dictates of gods you can never know, your death may be no more rational than your life, yet you are what you do - and you know it.
September 16, 2014
A very interesting longitudinal interview with Sartre - the draw here is not the philosophy (though there is definitely a bit of that), but more so the history involved. Getting a glimpse into not just Sartre's life, but into all of those around him through numerous anecdotes and dialogues (not the mention the occasional yelling match), a back-and-forth tapestry of memories and ideas is gradually woven between two good friends who happen to be a part of many important twentieth-century events.
December 12, 2011
This the book that introduced me to Sartre after being cast in a production of "No Exit". I think it would have illuminated the conversations more had I known more about Sartre's life and relationships. Sartre is an enigmatic figure and after reading these conversations I had more questions than answers, which lead me to Gerassi's biography.
Read
April 22, 2010Much more substantive than I expected. Better than some of the interviews with SdB, certainly better than those with Levy.
March 6, 2014
always finding home within him
August 28, 2011
Reviewed here: http://www.irishleftreview.org/2010/0...
October 31, 2013
Well, why not -- there are more things like this http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/wee...
January 6, 2022
Incredibly insightful and searingly witty. I enjoyed their talks a lot, and am irrevocably affected by their convictions.
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