Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gaudeaux, Jean-François

Titel

Sartre: The Violence of History

Ist Teil von

• Sartre studies international, 2006-06, Vol.12 (1), p.50-58

Ort / Verlag

Berghahn Journals

Erscheinungsjahr

2006

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• There is a sort of natural closeness between Sartre and violence. Many have claimed that Sartre was fascinated by violence. Authors as diverse as Michel-Antoine Burnier and Mohamed Harbi have criticised the violence in Sartre, and even Bernard-Henri Levy sees in Sartre's preface to Fanon's Les Damnes de la Terre a 'Sartre possede'. Unlike these authors, we claim that Sartre was in no way fascinated by violence. In his eyes, violence was an historical fact that was characteristic of his time and which he, personally, discovered at an early age. What is more, Sartre's violence is situational. If he discovered the world in books, it was also in books that he discovered violence. Books and history were the melting pots of a violence that haunts Sartre's work. The historical situations in which he found himself explain the omnipresence of violence in his work. (Author abstract)