Sartre Studies International

The contributions to this issue of Sartre Studies International are comprised of two groups of essays. The first three papers take up ethical and ontological questions about Sartre's early philosophy, while the second group of essays is the published version of The Beauvoir Symposium on Les Mandarins, organized by Mary L. Edwards of Cardiff University, in January of 2024, to commemorate the 70^th anniversary of the novel.

This paper gives an account of Gilles Deleuze's and Jean-Paul Sartre's respective conceptions of “the Other” as this concept evolves in relation to Sartre's earliest insights into self/Other dynamics in his 1937 essay, The Transcendence of the Ego. By reading Deleuze through his early interlocutor—the philosopher and author Michel Tournier—I argue that the account of Otherness presented in Deleuze's early (and later disavowed) “Sartrean” works represents a critique of Sartre's own revisions to the concept of Otherness in his 1943 magnum opus, Being and Nothingness. Thus, we can read Sartre and Deleuze as offering competing views of how (and indeed if it is possible) to inherit Sartre's own early insights into the value of existential phenomenology for a “positive” account of interpersonal relationships.

In this paper, I argue that Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of the imagination emerges out of a position on perception that is similar to modern naïve realism in that he seeks to add elements of what today is called “relationalism” to his phenomenological description of perceptual and imaginative experience. The problem is that it is not clear that relationalism can be added to the phenomenologist's intentional theory of consciousness in the way Sartre recommends. This paper takes an analytic approach to understanding Sartre's theory of perception, traces his motivation in arguing that perception and imagination are sui generis mental activity and identifies the ways in which Sartre's attempt to add elements of relationalism to the Husserlian account of perception runs into trouble with hallucinatory experience.

This article addresses the ‘Indirection Problem’ in Sartrean ethics of authenticity and compares it to the problem of the same name in virtue ethics. Both ethical frameworks encounter a disharmony between core concepts and proper motivation. The article reviews the indirection problem in virtue ethics, highlighting Swanton's solution of defining virtues as promoting specific values. It then explores how Sartrean ethics faces a more profound indirection problem due to the elusive nature of its core concept—authenticity. The motivation for authenticity cannot be its rationale (salvation). Freedom seems to be a more direct value, but the desire for freedom itself risks falling into being yet another pursuit of being. The article advocates a radically negative motivation for authenticity—a resignation from futile, inauthentic projects.

This article advocates reading Les Mandarins taking into account, first of all, that it is a novel, leaving aside the familiar theories that it is a roman-à-clef, a roman-à-thèse, a biographical chronicle, or all three. It considers the novel's setting, point of view, plot and character in relation to political activism, love relationships, the literary vocation, as well as its metaphysical framework. I argue that this approach leads to a more complete understanding of the novel's multi-layered world, avoiding the distracting and misleading nature of those theories. I conclude by stating that Beauvoir's own defence of her work confirms such a reading.

In this essay I shall consider the different perspectives adopted by the characters in Simone de Beauvoir's Les Mandarins on literature, its relation to politics and the role of the writer in society. Far from being outdated, the questions of whether literature should be politically committed and to what extent works of literature can be said to effect social change are still central to our attempts to navigate contemporary culture. Addressing these questions in Les Mandarins, I argue that Beauvoir's work remains topical and offers important insights into the role of the writer and the place of literature in Western culture.

This essay argues that the depiction of two female characters’ situations, friendship, and self-understandings in The Mandarins (Les mandarins, 1954) develops Beauvoir's theorization of feminine complicity in The Second Sex (Le deuxième sexe, 1949). Through its prolonged focus on the concrete situations of two female characters, the novel enables Beauvoir to explore the (hetero)sexual and metaphysical sources of feminine complicity in depth. The result is that The Mandarins illustrates why women who are, to greater or lesser degrees, complicit with the structures of their own oppression can be understood neither as agents of gender-based oppression nor as passive victims of it, but only as human beings forced to invent means to survive the mutilation of their transcendence.

The question of precisely what Simone de Beauvoir means when she asserts in The Second Sex that “[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, woman” continues to be the subject of scholarly debate (TSS, 283). The more traditional view sees Beauvoir referring to a process whereby female human beings are socialized according to, and subsequently internalize and constitute themselves in terms of, prevailing norms of femininity. An alternative perspective asserts that the act of engaging in heterosexual intercourse marks the point at which human females “become” Woman. I see The Second Sex presenting a hybrid of these two theories. On my reading, the initial experience of heterosexual intercourse crystallizes the relation of self-to-self Beauvoir refers to as se faire objet—making oneself into an object generally and into a sexual object for men more specifically. Subsequent experiences of heterosex entrench this distinctively feminine mode of self-relation. I support my reading through analyzing the situations of Paula Mareuil and Anne Dubreuilh, two of the main characters in Beauvoir's novel les Mandarines.

Joe Balay, The Environmental Gaze: Reading Sartre through Guido Van Helten's No Exit Murals (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023), 140 pp., $90 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-66693-980-4

T. Storm Heter and Kris F. Sealey (editors), Creolizing Sartre (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2024), 250 pp., $125 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-5381-6258-3