Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration (review)

Tom Flynn sets the tone for this collection by using Foucault to 'gain access to a door on Sartre's thought and work that Foucault can be seen to have both closed and later reopened'. Flynn's erudite and exhilarating analysis demonstrates that Sartre's thought 'remains as present and as vital [to our] human condition' today as in his own lifetime. Joseph Catalano offers insights into Saint Genet and L'Idiot de la famille, while Reidar Due makes a brilliant exegesis of the interrelated Sartrean concepts of freedom, nothingness and consciousness. Steve Martinot's delineation of connections 'between Sartre's ontology and Lacan's psychoanalytics' is, frankly, difficult but rewards effort. Ron Santoni propounds the contentious view that 'insofar as he justifies . . . violence, Sartre is justifying . . . bad faith', and David Detmer offers lucid reflexions on how Sartre's theory of freedom implies pointers for teaching, especially of philosophy. John Duncan sketches Sartre's 'realism-all-the-way-down' and 'contrast[s] it with Richard Rorty's pragmatic antiessentialist contextualism'. Hazel Barnes—on consciousness and digestion—innovatively compares Sartre's phenomenological theory of consciousness and Gerald Edelman's neuroscientific theory. Betty Cannon's chapter has useful summaries of Sartre's group theories and fascinating analyses of group therapy. Constance Mui adduces Sartre's ontology to explain the existential fragmentation entailed by rape trauma, while Peter Caws proffers a combination of literary criticism and speculative psychoanalysis, with enlightening intertextualities between Huis clos, Les Mots and Le Scénario Freud. Ann Jefferson contributes a stimulating essay on how the writer 'uses' biography to 'vitalise' literature at their 'interface'. Dennis Gilbert compares 'Sartre's early esthetic of theater' with the 'theater semiotics . . . of the Prague Linguistic Circle', preceding Adrian van den Hoven's discussion of motivation in L'Étranger and Les Mains sales — both novel contributions. Colin Davis's intriguing meditation upon 'the return of the living dead' analyses the moral and metaphysical lessons of Les Jeux sont faits in the light of L'Être et le néant and the cinematic theme of renewed possibilities. John Gillespie's study of Les Mots alleges that belief in the word supplanted conventional religious belief in Sartre, who nevertheless retained its language or 'template'. Opening for politics, Ian Birchall sheds Sartrean light on the 'war on terror' in droll and dry style. Bowman and Stone's take on the 'alter-globalisation movement' asserts that those seeking a world 'dominated by humans instead of things will find extraordinarily rich . . . tools in Sartre's works' — encapsulating this volume's message. Azzedine Haddour reconsiders Sartre's controversial preface to Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre, which legitimized murder in post-colonialist struggle, and Ron Aronson traces Sartre's divergence from Camus on violence, claiming that both were 'in bad faith' inasmuch as each refused to see the other side of the argument. Bill McBride proves the prescience and continuing relevance of Sartre's political thought by exploiting texts (from the pithy 'Élections, piège à cons' to the monolithic Critique) for a coruscating indictment of contemporary American 'liberal democracy'. In sum, this impressive volume is both a fitting tribute to Sartre's multifaceted work, and a state-of-the-art portal into its various facets.