Jean-Paul Sartre was during the Cold War an ecumenical image of the intellectual. His constant presence in all the discussions and his radicalism as a “lay Pope” of the left helped to build a recognizable image for the majority. French was a committed culture and the visible face of adherence to the problems of his time, of which he was a symbolic winner in the literary arena until the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the figure of Albert Camus was redimensioned in that legendary battle. not only for the primacy of an era, but in pursuit of immortality.
Translation by Laura Claravall. Subsurface Editions. 207 pages. 18 €You can buy it here.
In the 21st century, Sartre, in addition to losing his referential status, has metamorphosed into a T-shirt photograph, a trivialized icon, a shell emptied of content. However, as often happens with myths, a town of irreducible Gauls resists in this fight to maintain the stereotype of their god as if nothing had happened.
The Sartrians are apostles of a canonical and unbreakable biography, a life of a saint for a nostalgic church with no real desire to meet its supposed object of study. In an ever more simplified culture, the 1964 Nobel Prize is a good source of commonplaces. This essay by François Noudelmann (Paris, 1958) goes, in this sense, against the current from the most elementary logic: stories without edges fill with cracks if you dissect them beyond their façade.
The author of A Very Different Sartre intuited an alternative existence to the official version, weaving it through a mountain of documentation of the legacy of the protagonist of its pages, preserved and guarded by Arlette Elkaïm, adoptive daughter of a man who was mostly a victim of his character, condemning himself to death. a role to secure your dreams.
These started from his conception of greatness. If he wanted to reach it, he had to follow the path of the politicized writer and with a voice in his momentum. His began after World War II. The morning of the conflict was his opportunity to jump into the Parisian arena, prevailing for more than two decades marked by his unwavering embrace of communism and the cause of decolonization. His unconditional support for the Kremlin and his satellites symbolized his commitment, lavishing himself on many fronts essential to his world prestige, taxing his desire to focus on much more stimulating fiction. The proverbial whipping of his was a stance and a consequence of his reluctance to let go.
Sometimes we think of Sartre as a fraud, when he only executed an anticipatory melody, inspired by illustrious predecessors, to be hegemonic in his present as a ticketless passport to posterity. His rants in favor of the National Liberation Front in the middle of the Algerian war were the public discourse, much more contradictory in private, Noudelmann attributing it to chronic insecurity.
The intimate Sartre is a mass of small traumas, exaggerated by his personality. His drug use since his twenties had its paroxysm in Corydrane, a combination of amphetamine and pill that he ingested until the early 70s, when it was banned by the health authorities. These artificial paradises were his best ally during work peaks, taking a bottle daily, a fatal habit for his health, affected by that habit of a trail of cerebral infarcts.
One element that this book uncovers is Sartre’s fondness for traveling, especially his devotion to Italy. The writer’s pen expelled the memories directly, forgetting them after a few months. In this way, his writing of travel diaries or postcards takes on a hectic pace as he always bears in mind Stendhal’s warning not only to stick to aesthetic description, but to complete it with a more prosaic and anthropological description.
Another piece of the Sartrian puzzle is women. He kept around four simultaneous lovers, in addition to Simone, during much of her sexual prime, and carefully scheduled her fornication time. None of his mistresses knew if there were more, and when one was unavailable, she paid prostitutes. One more detail of the unexpected portrait of a complex and multiple being that he passionately devoted himself to understanding and defending his ideas, but also to enjoying life and dreaming it to excess.
“Sartre managed to merge life and work in a single act, in a single impulse, until he blew the fuses of his own contradiction,” said Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of the first to question the sacred figure in Sartre’s Century. . “How can you be the champion of freedom and at the same time be an accomplice of the worst totalitarianisms”, asked Lévy, who compared the philosopher with Moby Dick, “both had separate eyes and each saw a different world”.
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