Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century john Gerassi intellectual, no writer, no man is more hated by academics and newspeople, by eggheads and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, than Jean-Paul Sartre. Nor is this new: Sartre has been hated by them for half a century. But as long as he was alive, his pen easily de?ected their barbs. In France, where he could take to the podium or even to the streets if they tried to sti?e his counterattacks, the media had no choice but to report his retorts. In England and in the US, however, Sartre was dependent on the fair play of his critics. He got none. They smeared him, distorted him, ridiculed him. When all else failed, they tried to silence him altogether?by ignoring him in the U.S., by attempting to murder him in France. At ?rst, after the war, Sartre was turned into a ?na- tional asset?; in What Is Literature? he even complained that ?it is not pleasant to be treated as a public monument while still alive.? But he was soon damned by the left and the right. In 1948, Britain?s censor banned his play No Exit. In 1947, Pierre Brisson, editor of the right-wing Paris daily Le Figaro, expressed delight that ?the cohorts of Maurice Thorez [longtime head of the French Com- munist party] insult him and proclaim him to be the Todayis ?le?ist intelligentsia,? w/ao inject morality into Yuppie avarice, are lusting for bourgeois respectability. writer of the failures, while the warring faction of the right wing talks of exercising him, of covering him with sulphur and setting him on ?re on the parvis of Notre- Dame, which would be the most charitable way of saving his soul.? In 1946, Pope Pius XII put all of Sartre?s works on the Index (meaning that any Catholic John Gerassi is a professor of political science at Queens College. He is the aut/aor of The Premature Anti-Fascist (Praeger; 1986) andjean?Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, vol. 1 (Chicago University Press, 1989). 62 TIKKUN VOL. 4, N0. 4 reading any part of them was automatically excommuni- cated). That year, too, the Soviet government of?cially objected to a production of Sartre?s play Dirty Hands in Helsinki on the grounds that it was ?hostile propaganda against the The play remained forbidden through- out the Eastern bloc for decades, and when it opened in France it elicited this judgment from the Communist daily L?Humanit?: ?Hermetical philosopher, nauseated writer, sensationalist dramatist, demagogue of the third force," such are the stages of Mr. Sartre?s career.? That year Georg Lukacs, the highly touted Hungarian Marxist philosopher, added: ?Existentialism reflects, on the level of ideology, the spiritual and moral chaos of the current bourgeois intelligence.? Summarized Alexandr Fadeev, head of the Russian Federation of Writers, at the 1948 Wroclaw Peace Conference: Sartre is ?a hyena armed with a fountain pen.? In France, by then, the Communists had already con- demned him. The most ?learned attack? came from Henri Lefebvre, that professional party hatchet man who had smeared his closest friend, the novelist-journalist Paul Nizan, for being a police informer, because Nizan had refused to soften his anti-Nazi stance when Stalin signed the Russo-German pact. Now, in 1945, Lefebvre went after Sartre, defining him as ?the manufacturer of the war machine against Marxism.? (No longer a Communist by the sixties, Lefebvre never apologized to Nizan or Sartre, yet he is still respected as a great intellectual in France?perhaps precisely because of that.) In 1945, meanwhile, the French government had thought enough of Sartre?s wartime resistance activity to offer him the Legion of Honor; Sartre refused. Four years later, Andr? Malraux, onetime Communist sym- pathizer turned Gaullist mouthpiece, denounced Sartre as a collaborator even though he, of all people, knew better. After all, Sartre had tried to entice Malraux into joining his resistance group in 1941 when Malraux was still enjoying the goodlife on the French Riviera. In ""Earlier that year, Sartre had helped launch and was principal spokesperson for the Revolutionary Democratic Assembly, which hoped to keep France divorced from the aggressive policies of both Russia and America. April 1949, Catholic writer Francois Mauriac intimated in print that Sartre was a foreign agent. The very next month he offered Sartre a seat for ?immortals? by having him elected to the most elite forty-member Acad?mie Frangaise; Sartre scoffed at such a chance to ?learn equality? among those who spend their waning years bragging about their ?superiority.? He also turned down an offer to join that other most prestigious bastion of French culture, the College de France. Sartre o?ered the intellectual no peace, n0 self-satzkfaetz'on, n0 contentment, nothing but hard work, and not even the hope of victory. But the worst insults from fellow French intellectuals were provoked by Sartre?s rejection of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964. In private correspondence to the Nobel Committee, Sartre had said that he would turn down, with equal intransigence, the Lenin Prize, were it ever offered to him, and on the same public grounds? that the Lenin and Nobel were equally politically moti- vated. When the Nobel Committee ignored Sartre?s warning and awarded him the prize anyway, and when Sartre published the correspondence, ex-Communist- surrealist Andr? Breton nevertheless denounced Sartre for being part of ?a propaganda operation in favor of the Eastern bloc.? But that sally was nothing compared to the onslaught unleashed by the usually mild-mannered Christian philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Said he, presum- ably with Christian charity: Sartre was an ?inveterate denigrator,? a ?systematic blasphemist? with ?pernicious and poisonous? views, a ?patented corrupter of youth,? the ?grave-digger of the West.? By then, Sartre was used to much more formidable attacks. After Paris?Mate}; had run an editorial entitled ?Sartre: A Civil War Machine,? hundreds of war veterans marched down the Champs Elys?es chanting ?Fusillez Sartre! Fusillez Sartre!? (?Shoot Sartre!?) On July 19, 1961, a bomb went off in Sartre?s apartment at 42 rue Bonaparte (but did little damage). Six months later, on January 7, 1962, a more powerful bomb, detonated on the wrong floor, destroyed much of the apartment and either obliterated various unpublished manuscripts or gave the inrushing ?remen the opportunity to pilfer them. Sartre was not home when the bomb exploded. His mother, who had moved in with him after her husband, Sartre?s stepfather, had died, was in the bath- room where the heavy wooden door protected her. The suspicion about the manuscripts arose when some of the manuscripts from that period turned up at auctions, but Sartre, who was admittedly very careless about his possessions, never kept track of what he no longer worked on. one of these attacks stopped French students from reading Sartre. And, as they did, his reputation and in?uence grew. In the Anglo- Saxon world, however, these attacks had their effect. His plays were rarely performed, his novels hardly read, his philosophy almost totally ignored. Dominated by logical positivists and empiricists, Anglo-Saxon university philosophy departments have long been reluctant to take seriously any epistemology or ontology, much less Sartre?s, that is based on phenomenological descriptions of reality. A. J. Ayer, for example, dismissed all of existentialism as ?an exercise in the art of misusing the verb ?to be.? In a Columbia University philosophy class taught by the eminent Ernest Nagel, I remember spend- ing hours deciding whether Bertrand Russell?s sentence ?Is the present king of France bald?? was a meaningful question (whether the verb ?to be? predicated existence). Similarly, both Iris Murdoch and Mary Warnock put Sartre down for not playing the game the way they do? for using descriptions instead of logic as a philosophic method. Warnock, who dismissed Sartre as ?not an original thinker,? objected to what was a proof for Sartre?namely, ?a description so clear and vivid that, when I think of this description and ?t it to my own case, I cannot fail to see its application.? What bothered these philosophers about Sartre?s approach, indeed about any approach that began with the situated in the world, was that it risked de?ning truth according to its human relevance, which is precisely how Sartre de?ned it. In other words, the approach transformed the so-called dichotomy between object and subject into a dialectic in which each had its own being yet were inseparable?exactly what Sartre hoped to show (not prove) through his phenomenological description. For Anglo-Saxons who want to uphold the purity of ?objectivity,? this method is very dangerous because it may lead to interpreting speeches, events, indeed all of history, according to class interest. The conclusion may well be?and Sartre emphatically thought so?that for all their liberal, even socialist pronouncements, intellec- tuals such as Ayer, Warnock, and the others were part and parcel of the bourgeois state and their work ulti- mately defended that state. But these philosophers were at least respectful. They sometimes even disagreed with one another. Thus while Ms. Warnock claimed that philosophy ?has perhaps always been something of a sideline for Sartre himself,? Denis O?Brien, an expert on Hegel and president of Bucknell University, insisted that, on the contrary, ?Sartre was fundamentally, uncompromisingly, and incessantly a philosopher.? But then, analytic philosophers wouldn?t SARTRE 63 respect O?Brien since they never did like Hegel very much; during my ten-year undergraduate and graduate stint at Columbia, Hegel never once earned the right to his own course. Still, better rejection at Columbia than praise at Berkeley, where Denis Hollier had this to say about Sartre?s trilogy: ?The war puts an end to the clinical narratology of the hypnagogic story.? (That sentence may have put Professor Hollier?s students to sleep, but it sent Professor Alexander Leupin, another high-minded critic, this time down at Louisiana State University, into orgasmic ecstasy?and enticed Yale to print the piece.) In the US. Sartre?s most ef?cient assassin was Ger? maine Br?e, an expert on the contemporary literary scene in France. Infatuated with Albert Camus, Br?e felt that she therefore had to demolish his main critic, Sartre. So, in a popular text, Sartre ?r Camus, which gained immense in?uence in academia, she condemned Sartre for dealing with authority ?callously,? ?pompously, ?typically.? At least Camus, she wrote, never was guilty of making a judgment on the basis ?of class.? On the other hand, ?Sartre?s hatred of bourgeois life,? she went on, ?reveals the streak of irrationality that underlies many of his judgments.? Br?e ridiculed Sartre for his supposed fear of analysis, but she then scoffed at his apparent neuroses when she learned that, on the contrary, Sartre quite welcomed the idea of analysis. She passed off his opposi- tion to General Matthew Bunker Ridgeway as head of SHAPE as ?trite? because in her view no one could seriously have objected to the general?s war-making in Korea, and then she tried her best to discredit Conor Cruise O?Brien for correctly calling Camus a ?colonialist under the skin.? Finally, she damned Sartre because he ?never to my knowledge supported any political candi- date who had the slightest chance of winning nor has he ever supported any action taken by the French naively handing Sartre the best compliment he ever received. The effect of Germaine Br?e was somewhat offset, it is true, by such erudite critics as George Steiner in England and Arthur Danto and Robert Denoon Cumming in America. Cumming, for example, tried to explain why Americans, who want to turn everything, including poverty and exploitation, into a personal, individual problem, are disturbed by Sartre for whom ?nothing is sacred, . . . not even the Freudian theory of the superego.? But such counterattacks could never dislodge Camus from the pinnacle of the literary hierarchy in England or America. There, he was admired mostly because he focused on individual despair and individual hope, never on class con?icts. He disturbed no conscience. On the contrary, he soothed the self-involved and the self-indulgent by generalizing individual problems (whereas Sartre concretized universal problems, forcing 64 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4 each of us to be responsible for all). No wonder, then, that someone like Bobby Kennedy discovered Camus ?in the months of solitude and grief after his brother?s death,? as Jack New?eld reported. ?By 1968, he had read, and reread, all of Camus?s essays, dramas and novels. . .. He memorized him, meditated about him, quoted him, and was changed by him.? Kennedy?s favorite passage (which he underlined) from Camus?s Notebooks was: ?Living with one?s passions amounts to living with one?s sufferings. . . .When a man has learned? and not on paper?how to remain alone with his suffer- ing, how to overcome his longing to ?ee, then he has little left to learn.? The passage eloquently reveals Camus as an Algerian pied-?air (French colonial descendant), as a metaphysical sufferer who never understood the human causes of pain??which is why he never supported the Algerian people?s struggle for independence. got worse after Sartre died. David Caute, a British ?expert? who pretends to be a leftist but spends his time trying to ridicule genuine leftists, cast off Sartre as an ?incestor manqu?.? (Too bad Sartre didn?t have a sister, he wrote.) Concealing the fact that Sartre carefully avoided her because, he said, she was ?an arrogant imperialist witch,? Mary McCarthy told the New York Times that Sartre ?didn?t care for people.? Which elicited this brilliant non sequitut from the New ?Philosopher? Marcel Gauchet: ?We want the Christian West to be on top.? After which, most French reactionary critics felt free to let loose. Perhaps the best attacks were issued by the writer Olivier Rolin, who decided that ?Sartre lacked courage? because he always maintained the unpopular viewpoint, and by Clement Rosset, who bewailed the fact that he could never ?nd in Sartre?s work ?a solid philosophical or clear political position.? Even the editors of Lib?ratz'on, the Parisian daily Sartre had kept alive for years with his own money and scores of exclusive interviews and articles, now turned against him. Reinterpreting his end?of?life musings, they decided that Sartre had abandoned the poor and the powerless, the rebel and the revolutionary, to support the French reactionary left?which, in reality, he had always despised. Or was it that these editors now wanted to court the powerful and established in order to be more politically ?relevant?? And haven?t the New York Review of Books writers preferred similar contortions? Do they really think, as John Weightman claimed, that ?Sartre was entirely wrong? in his feud with Camus, or do they simply like the fact that Camus, by avoiding commitment, never dirtied his hands, thus giving the Review its ?moral? justi?cation to do likewise? Is it true that ?Sartre has not been forgiven for the retrospective embarrassment caused the leftist intelligentsia for his visceral hatred of ?bourgeois? sOciety, an attitude that now seems corrosive of democratic values,? as one New York Times critic concluded? Or is it that today?s ?leftist intelligentsia,? who inject morality into Yuppie avarice, are lusting for bourgeois respectability~and bourgeois honors? Sartre did hate bourgeois society and did reject its honors?from the Legion to the Nobel (which com- pelled Time to snort stupidly: ?reverse snobbery?). To his death he insisted that the job of the intellectual was to criticize the powerful and defend the voiceless. Few famous and no rich ever agreed, then or now. But today ?intellectuals? are not embarrassed to be wealthy and powerful. Thus, in France and in the US, these service folk of the established media must show that ?the ide- ology? of commitment of their immediate forebears is, as the Times put it, ?indeed dead and that for them, private life is worthy of literary celebration.? Sartre knew, as all of as do, tlaat the rte/9 get richer only because the poor get poorer; but unlike tlae rest of us be would never have stopped it at the top of his voice. That celebration of private life, decided David Leitch with acute plebeian depth in the London Sunday Times, is why Sartre had lost touch with the young. He so wrote on the very day that ?fty thousand of those young gathered spontaneously to pay their respects upon Sartre?s burial. As they marched across Paris, they at- tracted another ?fty thousand older mourners? the greatest testimony to the relevance of an intellectual the world has ever seen. ?How is it possible,? asked the philosopher Istvan M?szaros, ?for a solitary individual, whose pen is his only weapon, to be as effective as Sartre is?and he is uniquely so?in an age which tends to render the individual completely powerless?? The answer: his ?passionate commitment to the concerns of the given world.? With Sartre, there were no escapes, no ivory towers, no retreats into false ?objectivity.? Those who had no power knew he fought for them and with them. Those who concealed their responsibility knew they could never say can?t help it.? The job of the intellectual, Sartre said over and over, is to criticize, to oppose, to denounce. And he cheerfully accepted his resulting solitary fate, just as the writer Andr? Chamsom had moaned during the Spanish Civil War that ?the duty of the writer is to be tormented.? Or, as Hemingway put it when he was still an idealist in 1935 writer is like a he owes his allegiance to no government. If he?s a good writer, he will hate the one under which he lives. If the government likes him it means he?s worth nothing.? Sartre offered the intellectual no peace, no self-satis- faction, no contentment, nothing but hard work, and not even the hope of victory. In The Words he wrote: ?For a long time I took my pen for a sword; I now know we?re powerless. No matter. I write and will keep writing.? But he was wrong. He had a lot of power. The proof? All those who hate him. All those who followed him to the cemetery of Montparnasse. All those who love him, like French writer Frangoise Sagan. Listen to an excerpt from her ?Love Letter to Jean-Paul Sartre?: You?ve written the most intelligent and honest books of your generation, you even wrote the most talented book in French literature?The Words. At the same time, you?ve always thrown yourself dog- gedly into the struggle to help the weak and the humiliated; you believed in people, in causes, in universals; you made mistakes at times, like every- body else, but (unlike everybody else) you acknowl- edged them every time. . .. In short, you have loved, written, shared, given all you had to give which was important, while refusing what was offered to you which was of import. You were a man as well as a writer, you never pretended that the talent of the latter justi?ed the weakness of the former. . .. You have been the only man of justice, of honor and of generosity of our epoch. 0 why is Sartre so hated by most academicians, most writers, and all politicians? Simply because, since 1945, Sartre was against. Against power. Against the dehumanizing system, all systems. Against elections, which he insisted ?serialized? and atomized voters while making them believe they were being ?fused? into a group. Sartre, like his hero Hugo in Dirty Hands, was never reconcilable to any establishment. Despite French revisionism, despite current biographies, which try to reintegrate him into France?s great but extinct tradition of bourgeois thinkers and moralists, he remains apart, the irreconcilable enemy of Communist hacks and bourgeois apologists, of Lefebvre and Camus, Althusser and Malraux, Levi?Strauss and Lacan. Sartre bothered everyone when he was alive. He would bother us even more today. He always insisted thai we cannot call ourselves socialists or humanists if we oppose the right to self-determination of any people anywhere. Alive today, he would have agitated for self- determination for Armenians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Cambodians, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, Palauans, Tahi- tians, Caledonians, Irish, Welsh, Corsicans, Basques; SARTRE 65 and he would have condemned us for not doing likewise. He would never have used the crimes of Stalin to justify or just ignore the crimes of Reagan, Thatcher, or Mitterrand. He would have denounced the French murders in the Paci?c, the American murders through- out the Third World. Sartre knew, as all of us do, that the rich get richer only because the poor get poorer; but unlike the rest of us he would never have stopped shouting it at the top of his voice. He would have asked us why we keep count- ing and recounting the murders of Stalin, why we rarely count the dead in Argentina (40,000), in Brazil (30,000), in El Salvador (100,000), in Guatemala (100,000), in Chile (60,000); why we do not denounce our own country which has two million homeless. And he would Covenant have asked the rest of the world?s intellectuals why they praise a country like the United States that offers no health insurance at all to 27 percent of its people, why they remain silent when their country allies itself with a government that distributes more deadly drugs to US. citizens through its official agencies (the CIA, DIA, DEA, NSC, and so forth) than do all the ma?as and gangster governments of the world combined. Why, Sartre would ask us all again and again, do you who, like me, ferociously defended the right of Israel to exist, not today denounce its policies against the Palestinians, whose right to self-determination cannot be questioned? No wonder Jean-Paul Sartre is the most hated con- science of our century. El Sharon Kessler In the desert where old legends conspire, we are making fresh tracks in the sand, carrying our burden to some resting place. Above the black crest of rock, an arc of slow ?re rises. Morning again. We march forward, a tribe of mute warriors, daughters of a race so lost no legend tells of us. We too heard voices in the wilderness but we built no tabernacle to contain them. The sign of the covenant is not incised upon our flesh, but deep in the one heart of our body the everlasting bush burns and is not consumed. 66 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4