Frantz Fanon: A democratic philosopher

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

If there’s a philosopher of the moment it is, by some distance, Frantz Fanon. This is not surprising given that Fanon offers compelling accounts of the pathologies of both the colony and the postcolony – spaces that some of the young people at the fore of the new ferment in South Africa feel they must inhabit simultaneously.

Achille Mbembe on Fanon, Violence and Sartre's introduction to Les Damnés de la Terre

Lewis Gordon on Race and Gender from the Standpoint of Sartre’s Philosophical Anthropology.

Lewis Gordon on Sartre (Encyclopedia of Political Theory)

Lewis Gordon On Sartre (Encyclopedia of Political Theory) by TigersEye99

Paige Arthur: Unfinished Projects Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre

Unfinished Projects Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre by Ananyo Mukherjee

Jean-Paul Sartre on the French Communist Party

I was dealing with men who only considered people of their party as comrades, men who were covered with orders and prohibitions, who judged me as a provisional fellow traveler, and who placed themselves in advance in the future moment when I’d disappear from the melee, taken back by the forces of the right. For them I wasn’t a whole man; I was a dead man on reprieve. No kind of reciprocity is possible with men like that; nor any mutual criticism, which would have been something to hope for…. We lived in a poisoned atmosphere of thoughts that didn’t resist examination, but that they avoided examining. It was putrid, and we were never sure that they weren’t in the process of slandering us somewhere.

- Jean-Paul Sartre, A Fellow Traveler of the Communist Party, 1972

Anti-Semite and Jew: A review essay

by Joel Pearson, August 2012

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1906, at the beginning of what would prove to be a century of great turbulence. Two cataclysmic wars would ravage Europe as ‘modernity’ shuddered through society. In a climate of alienation, marginalization and violence, Sartre developed his diagnosis of the human condition. His writings – plays, biographies, novels and notebooks – explored the problems of “existential thought (la contingence) and the vicissitudes of social history through the troubled lives of individual actors” (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). With the smoke of Auschwitz still looming large over a continent in ruin after the Second World War, Sartre’s political work interrogated how the devastations of fascism, racism and inequality had erupted, and what their effects were on the individual psyche (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). In 1944, as the war petered out in Europe and an increasing number of Jews returned home from Nazi Germany, Sartre set out to examine the roots of anti-Semitism in France. Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflections sur la question juive) examined the “interpersonal construction of personal identities” in the dramatic personae of the anti-Semite, the democrat, the inauthentic and the authentic Jew (Walzer, 1995:xxvi). His central claim, perhaps: identity and culture cannot be reduced to timeless essences; they are socially constituted within historical situations; and both individual and group perceptions are intimately tied to the (often hostile) perceptions of the “other/s” (Walzer, 1995:xxiii).

Being & Nothingness

Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre on Frantz Fanon (1961-2011)

By Tamar Shlaim, Verso 06 December 2011 

Anti-colonialist thinker, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon died fifty years ago today, on December 6, 1961

To mark the anniversary, here's an extract from Jean-Paul Sartre's preface to The Wretched of the Earth, published in Fanon's final year:

Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. Between the two there were hired kinglets, overlords and a bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end, which served as go-betweens. In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are loved. The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!' and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open ... thenon! ... therhood!' It was the golden age.

Sartre

Sartre by Neil Levy

The Black Soul of Jean-Paul Sartre

by Pravasan Pillay, Black Radical Congress, 2001

Just over twenty years ago fifty thousand men and women crowded the Champs-Elysees to mourn the death of Jean-Paul Sartre. Many of the ordinary people present in the crowd that day loudly proclaimed the dead philosopher as France's greatest intellectual of the 20th century. Others, perhaps acquaintances from the many Left Bank cafes he frequented, unashamedly extended the scope of his influence to encompass the entire Western world. Still others, perhaps ardent followers of the then popular post-structuralist movement, begrudgingly paid their respect only to follow it up with some derisive salvo or the other. Whatever else was said of Jean-Paul Sartre on that cold Paris day no-one present dared to deny his incredible gift to arouse the passions, of admiration or of anger, of all who encountered him or his monumental body of work. This would have been the way Sartre, ever the egoist, would have wanted it. A reaction of any sort was infinitely more desirable than apathy.

Richard Turner and the Politics of Emancipation

by Duncan Greaves, 1987

Richard Turner died in the early hours of January 8, 1978; he was gunned down, at the age of 37, by an assailant who has yet to be identified. In the decade since then political violence in South Africa has escalated to the point where we now stand on the brink of civil war. Or perhaps I should say anti-political violence; for there is a sharp limit to which the purposes of politics and violence can be reconciled. There is, to be sure, an intimate and complex link between the two; it has often been suggested that war is the prosecution of diplomacy by other means, and, by a logical extension, that civil war is the prosecution of politics by other means. But the link is one of tension, for the one does not simply translate into the other as the need arises. Instead, we typically find that violence tends to drown politics in its own purposes.

Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism

Race After Sartre

edited by Jonathan Judaken, SUNY Press, 2008

Examines Jean-Paul Sartre’s antiracist politics and his contributions to critical race theories, postcolonialism, and Africana existentialism. Race after Sartre is the first book to systematically interrogate Jean-Paul Sartre’s antiracist politics and his largely unrecognized contributions to critical race theories, postcolonialism, and Africana existentialism. The contributors offer an overview of Sartre’s positions on racism as they changed throughout the course of his life, providing a coherent account of the various ways in which he understood how racism could be articulated and opposed.

Critique of Dialectical Reason

by Jean-Paul Sartre
Translated by Quintin Hoare
Foreword by Fredric Jameson
 

At the height of the Algerian war, Jean-Paul Sartre embarked on a fundamental reappraisal of his philosophical and political thought. The result was the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an intellectual masterpiece of the twentieth century, now published as a two-volume set with a major new introduction by Fredric Jameson. In it, Sartre set out the basic categories for the renovated theory of history that he believed was necessary for post-war Marxism.

Sartre's formal aim was to establish the dialectical intelligibility of history itself, as what he called 'a totalisation without a totaliser'. But, at the same time, his substantive concern was the structure of class struggle and the fate of mass movements of popular revolt, from the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century to the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the twentieth: their ascent, stabilisation, petrification and decline, in a world still overwhelmingly dominated by scarcity.

Oppression and the Human Condition: An Introduction to Sartrean Existentialism

Thomas Martin applies Sartre's philosophy to contemporary issues and concerns, and draws on two case studies to make his point. The cases examine modern-day oppressors--in one case an anti-semite, in the other a sexist who objectifies women--in the context of Sartre's "bad faith." The case studies also reinforce Martin's argument that Sartre's early philosophy, especially his concept of "bad faith," provides a framework for discussions of oppressions such as racism and sexism.

"Tom Martin, writing in contexts marked by colonial legacies of racism and economic dependence, offers here one of the clearest statements on Sartre's philosophy and its importance for our continued efforts to forge a humane world. This is, indeed, one of the very best books on the subject for both scholars and lay readers."—Lewis R. Gordon, Brown University

Colonialism and Neocolonialism

Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism is a classic critique of France's policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and inspired much subsequent writing on colonialism, post-colonialism, politics, and literature. It includes Sartre's celebrated preface to Fanon's classic Wretched of the Earth. Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism had a profound impact on French intellectual life, inspiring many other influential French thinkers and critics of colonialism such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida.

Critique of Neo-Colonial Reason: A review of Paige Arthur's 'Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre'

Alexander Zevin, New Left Review

There is no shortage of either scholarly or popular works on Jean-Paul Sartre, or on the intellectuals with whom he sparred in post-war France. [1] Yet if the number of studies continues to expand, the themes they treat tend, at the same time, to narrow: friendships, paramours and quarrels are laced into larger, moralizing narratives of alleged Sartrean backsliding on camps in the Soviet Union and show trials under its client regimes in Eastern Europe. This tradition found its own shrill champion in Tony Judt, whose Past Imperfect (1992) dwelt on the silence or complicity of intellectuals in and outside the pcf who, ‘in the name of the proletarian and the class struggle made a daily contribution to the legitimation of the enslavement of the satellite states.’ A methodological consensus has meanwhile congealed around the work of Anna Boschetti, itself heavily indebted to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which interprets Sartre’s long career through the lens of self-promotion and the accumulation of—and competition for—intellectual capital. 

Jean-Paul Sartre on Intellectuals

Itinerary of a Thought

Jean-Paul Sartre, New Left Review, 1969

How do you envisage the relationship between your early philosophical writings, above all L’Etre et Le Néant, and your present theoretical work, from the Critique de la Raison Dialectique onwards? In the Critique, the typical concepts of L’Etre et Le Néant have disappeared, and a completely new vocabulary has taken their place. Yet when reading the passages of your forthcoming study of Flaubert published in Les Temps Modernes one is struck by the sudden re-emergence of the characteristic idiom of the early work—thetic consciousness, ego, nihilation, being, nothingness. These notions are now juxtaposed in the text with the distinct set of concepts which derive from the Critique—serialization, totalization, practico-inert, collectives. What is the precise relationship between the two in your current thought?

Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness (1943) is the most comprehensive and far-reaching statement of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy. It is subtitled: “An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.”

Phenomenology is the study of how phenomena present or appear in consciousness. Ontology is the study of being. Thus, phenomenological ontology can be defined as the study of the nature of being of phenomena as they present in consciousness.