Jean-Paul Sartre: Mind and Body, Word and Deed (review)

The catch-all title of this volume provides a foretaste of the heterogeneity of its content. The editors cite the 'astonishing polymathic range' (p. 2) of Sartre, and there is no doubting the challenges presented by a writer who distinguished himself in so many fields. Equally, the volume reflects the diversity of the contributions to the two conferences in London and Japan of which it is, in effect, the selected proceedings. In such circumstances, the reader is well advised to adopt an eclectic approach. The four 'Japanese' contributions do at least have a clear geographical unity. The interview with Michihiko Suzuki provides interesting anecdotal background to Sartre and Beauvoir's trip to Japan in September and October 1966, while Benedict O'Donohoe's chapter usefully reconsiders, among other things, the 'outcome' of that visit: Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels. Masamichi Suzuki contributes a scholarly, if somewhat arid, account of the reception in the Japanese press and television of the couple's visit, and analyses in particular the importance of the political orientation of the organs concerned. The intellectual meat of the volume is to be found in Part I, titled, appropriately enough, 'Sartre and the Body'. Dermot Moran revisits the section(s) of Being and Nothingness on the body and brings Sartre into fruitful dialogue with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (in particular the latter's Le Visible et l'invisible); while Michael Gillan Peckitt takes issue with Sartre over his dismissal of Maine de Biran's notion of the 'sensation of effort', with particular reference to a phenomenological understanding of pain. Naomi Segal covers much of the same primary material as Moran, but reads it alongside the work of Didier Anzieu on the 'moi-peau'. The editors would have done their readers a service here by insisting that authors refer to the same edition of Being and Nothingness; Segal, presumably out of well-placed wariness of Barnes's notoriously poor translation, provides her own translation. As it happens, these variations in translation serve to highlight interesting issues in Sartre's writing on the body, not least the question of the gendering, or not, of the indeterminate 'autrui' in the French original. Other chapters are somewhat uneven; some reinvent the wheel and fail to engage with existing critical readings (Gary Cox, for example, appears to be unaware of the scholarly attention paid, over the years, to facial hair in Sartre's work). That said, the volume is carefully presented and edited, and, all in all, the thoughtful and original contributions outweigh the ballast.