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Ever wondered what hell might be like?
While most of us have an image of hell similar to that of Dante (torture and physical pain), Jean-Paul Sartre chooses to express his view of hell as being somewhat different.According to one of the three main characters,Garcin, "Hell is others," and Ines and Estelle, the two otherswho join him in the locked room, would surely be in agreement. It gives avery interesting twist to our traditional views of hell, and at the sametime gives us a view into the relationships between people.I woulddefinitely recommend this book to anyone, especially someone who might belearning French.It's not a very difficult work to read, so a student withan intermediate background in French should not have too much difficultywith it.At the same time, a native French speaker would definitely enjoyreading the ideas and concepts that Sartre expresses throughout the novel. ... Read more

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a selection from the beginning of the first section in Book I:?

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Genet as a Living Existential Hero
In this 625-page masterpiece of psychoanalysis of one of our most complex men, the renown Existentialist Philosopher, Play write and French man of letters, Jean Paul Sartre, has turned his erstwhile compatriot, Jean Genet into his own private existential living hero -- built-up from whole cloth through literal allegory.

Jean Genet's biography is as well known, as it is scandalous. To wit: from the age of 10 Genet, a bastard "ward of the French State," became a willing societal tool and incorrigible. He was, at various times in his life: a beggar, thief, homosexual, prostitute, deserter, escapee from both reform schools and prisons, and was eventually declared by the French government as a "habitual criminal." When it was discovered that he was not just a writer, but an extraordinarily good one, Sartre and other members of the French Literati, requested and got him pardoned from an automatically earned life sentence.

Genet, then of course proceeded to continue to live out the life of what he had accepted as his defined role in society, as a vagabond, deadbeat, homosexual and criminal. Even later in life, after he had become both a famous and a wealthy writer, he traveled, continued thieving, defended revolutionary causes and never quite stopped giving "the middle finger" to the society that had previously rejected him. But to this list he could now also added the persona of writer.

As the New York Times reviewer put it so elegantly at the time of the book's release: "of all the forbidden literary fruits, Jean Genet was always the darkest and most dangerous." In this book Sartre echoes that sentiment by describing Genet's books as "an epic of masturbation ... a matchless, unholy trinity of scatology, pornography and the legitimate study of evil."

Yet, it is precisely in his unwillingness to live out the hand dealt to him by French society, that Genet emerges in Sartre's eyes as the ultimate existential hero. Sartre maintains that, only "by [actually] doing evil, could [Genet] discover the evil that [French society] had told him, he possessed. In Sartre's eyes, Genet, born into a meaningless and hostile world, filled with guilt, fear, evil, and vacillation could only be free by eventually learning how to rebel against the society that had so carefully categorized him and then so profoundly rejected him.

Much of Genet's materials were excavations from his prison dreams. In these, the whole world is but one big brothel. Genet's autoerotic visions were always populated with characters right out of central casting from the deepest, darkest and most evil of pornographic movies. Yet it was from the depths of this moral black hole, it was through these characters and dreams, that Genet awoke to an entirely different and new reality: One in which he was no longer just a hapless prop for French society, but one that he could master as a free and independent human being.

He had discovered the reality of words. Genet no longer needed to justify his existence by "treading water" through an assigned persona in a world thrust upon him by French society, he could become a hero in his own reality. And so he did. All of his writings and plays became famous. Genet became a rich man, but he remained, until his death of cancer in 1983, a man of simple counter-cultural taste. Until the bitter end, he mocked the society that had rejected.

Of Sartre, Genet himself said in his 1964 Playboy interview, that "in a world where everyone is trying to be a respectful prostitute, its nice to meet someone who knows he's a bit whorish but doesn't want to be respectable." About this biography, in that same interview, he said that "It filled me with a kind of disgust, because I saw myself stripped naked--by someone other than myself. When I strip myself I manage not to get too damaged as I disguise myself with words, with attitudes, with certain choices, by means of certain magic. My first impulse was to burn the book.I was almost unable to continue writing. Sartre's book created a kind of void which made for [me] a kind of psychological deterioration.

Fifty stars

beauty takes place..
'Grandly conceived and executed' .... 'Magnificent'.... 'Nothing less than masterly' ... critical tributes offered Sartre's Saint Genet that end as mere words. Saint Genet is an unearthly book wrought with the passion of a gospel narrative, explicit and wrenching. It is, finally, an entire act of redemption. The language is apocryphal and never operatic, epic in delivery, even greater than it seems; page upon page of an exceeding pure, andnever vulgarly rich, damask brocade! I'll not critique Sartre's thought --it's privilege enough to be presented it!-- but this seminal work is a miraculous construct of human will and unbearable genius that will live forever, a complex and magisterial book ranking among the great achievments of modern literature because of its erudition, humanity, and fierce literary reach.There is not a page that doesn't honor wisdom, nor is there a single idle component.It is indisputably Sartre's crowning achievment as a genius, and as a man.The evocative humanity of two literary giants of the 20th century plays like a dance, the captured aesthetic of which Sartre reveals; everything is taken to the temple of Genet, everything explained, everything mortified, slain and remade.Reading this book is a revealing experience; be willing to be stolen. Theft happens in broad daylight, perpetrators already known.. My favorite chapteris 'Cain,' in which Sartre makes his most profound arguments about Genet as Other, Genet as the living inverse Liturgy, and presents a stupefying image of his subject: 'Everything is possessed, worked, occupied, from the sky to the subsoil...' Intimidating in its greatness. ... Read more

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He was France's best-known philosopher & chief arbiter of intellectual fashions; she was the most influential forerunner of today's feminist movement. Using newly available documentary evidence from diaries & letters, the authors shed astonishing new light on who the dominant partner was in this relationship. The book provides decisive insights into the lives, literature, & ideas of these major figures on the modern cultural scene & raises profound questions about the psychological needs, sexual politics, & bad faith that led Beauvoir & Sartre to give misleading accounts of the inner workings of their relationship. ... Read more

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Parallel lives
The surprise of this book is the extensive myth-making engaged in by Simone de Beauvoir in regard to the founding of French existentialist theory.It would seem that as school examiners noted, she was the better philosopher of the two, and it was she who devised existentialism in her novel SHE CAME TO STAY.

The cat was out of the bag, so to speak, when the war journals of Sartre were published just after his death.Simone de Beauvoir did some fast jockeying of dates which was not totally convincing to her biographer, these authors write.It would seem that she had gotten so used to the falsities presented to the world she could not bear to have the truth revealed, even when the truth was complimentary to her.

It is necessary to understand how revolutionary she was when she began writing in the 1930's and took the position that for the sake of freedom she must refuse the offer of marriage given to her by Sartre.It turns out that he was a very good at articulating the philosophy the couple devised. False stories did more than cover up de Beauvoir's evident orginality, they also covered up her sexual adventures which could have been misconstrued by the public in general.

The book is a delight.The writers give full praise to previous biographers.It is comforting to learn some truths since the myth-making did strike this reader as far-fetched.Nonetheless, one is left with a nagging sense that surely if philosophers fail to tell the truth, should not this mean that their worksbe taken less seriously.

Fullbrooks' False Claims
"Political correctness" has made it difficult to challenge even that part of the thesis of the Fullbrooks' book, Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend, which relates strictly to the history of philosophy. Nevertheless, challenged it must be, and has been, contrary to the claims of Sharon Wright in her online review. What she calls their "impressive scholarship" has come under serious and precise attack from a number of quarters. What follows is simply the lead-in to an article that I myself published as early as 1995 ("Sartre and Beauvoir: Refining rather than 'Remaking' the Legend", Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 12, 1995, pp. 91-99); the rest of that article goes on to justify my claims in detail.

"The crux of their argument is the assertion that Sartre's reading of the draft of L'Invitée during his leave in Paris between 4 and 16 February 1940 was what provided him with all or most of the crucial ideas that were to form the substance of L'Etre et le Néant. [...]Now, there are least four MAJOR flaws in this line of argument: (i) we do not know with certainty exactly what was in the parts of L'Invitée that Sartre read in February 1940; (ii) the argument ignores completely Beauvoir's acquaintance with drafts of Sartre's L'Age de raison, and also seriously underplays the philosophical content of those of Sartre's Carnets de la drôle de guerre that Beauvoir had read before February 1940; (iii) we DO know that Sartre had been working since the mid-1930s on the ideas that were to be central to L'Etre et le Néant; (iv) the momentous philosophical system that the Fullbrooks ascribe to Beauvoir is simply not to be found in even the final version of L'Invitée."

Since, as Sharon Wright points out, the Fullbrooks were far from the first to argue for the philosophical originality of Beauvoir, those of their claims that are demonstrably false have done nothing to promote this case. Rather, they have tended to obscure, and direct attention away from, many of the complex and fascinating questions concerning the relationship between the thought of Beauvoir and that of Sartre. What is more, some of the sensationalist, journalistic features of the style of the book have served to inflame sensitive issues that require particularly cool, rational treatment.

Seven Years After
No book on Beauvoir or Sartre has led to so much discussion, provoked such consternation or so changed the way we see these cultural icons as has Kate and Edward Fullbrook's "Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: TheRemaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend".The basis of thisrecently republished book (which I had the pleasure of rereading last week)is disarmingly simple.The Fullbrooks checked out Beauvoir's and Sartre'snewly-available letters and diaries and found that the traditional storythat says the Beauvoir constructed her first novel "She Cme toStay" on the basis of philosophical ideas she took from Sartre's essay"Being and Nothingness" is the exact opposite of the truth. Sartre only began, the Fullbrooks carefully document, to compile notes horhis philosophical treatise after studying the second draft of Beauvoir'snovel.The Fullbrooks also, and again drawing on the letters, make thecase that it was Beauvoir's sexual promiscuity, rather than Sartre's thatinitially dictated the famous open terms of their 50-year relationship. All this radical post-patriarchal revisionism, which the Fullbrooksrefused to play down, was too much for many critcs when this book appearedin 1994.Some reviewers were apoplectic, others deeply sceptical, and the"New Yorl Times" twice ran long reviews warning their readersagainst this "feminist claptrap".But in fact theFullbrooks, in claiming philosophical originality for Beauvoir, werethemselves not so original as perhaps they and certainly their criticsimagined.Margaret Simons, Linda Singer and Sonia Kruks had previouslyargued the case for Beauvoir as an innovative philosopher and the source ofsome of Sartre's later ideas.The Fullbrooks' discoveries gave newsignificance to this prior scholarship and inspired Simons to go off insearch of Beauvoir's student diaries.(See Simons 1999)Simons'ssubsequent discoveries and the slow but continuing cultural shift away frompresuming that women are never the source of original ideas has taken awaysome of the shock value of the Fullbrooks' first book.Indeed, seven yearson and their impressive scholarship has never been seriously challanged. By now scores of Sartre scholars much have checked out the letters anddiaries and found, to their dismay, that the Fullbrooks did not make any ofit up. But although "Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: TheRemaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend" through its success no longerenjoys the controversy it once did, it remains, with its compellingnarrative and writerly qualities, one of the best books evr written abouteither Beauvoir or Sartre.Even the "New York Times" had toadmit that it was good read.For capturing the spirit of thesetwentieth-century giants and their extraordinary relationship, this book isyet to be beaten. ... Read more

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Sartre's study of Baudelaire is one of the more brilliant achievements of modern criticism. He turned abstractions like Existence and Being, Freedom and Nature, into a theory of psychoanalysis, grounded in man's creativity and opposed to Freudian determinism. Then he put the theory into practice in this book on Baudelaire. ... Read more

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Familiarity With Baudelaire a Must...
Rather than a biography of Baudelaire or a critical examination of his works, this book (actually more like a lengthy essay) is an exhaustive existential psychoanalysis of the poet by Mr. Sarte, based on images fromhis poems, correspondence with friends and family, his essays on poetry andart... it's kind of a harsh judgement on the guy, actually, stating in nouncertain terms that Baudelaire was an extremely repressed andcontrol-obsessed individual whose greatest creation and greatest failurewas his public persona.While reading this, I couldn't help but wonderwhat the motivation for behind it all was...I can't say I agree with allof his conclusions (even if I did, should it make me enjoy his poetry anymore or less?), but it's thought-provoking in the very least.

You will definately need to really understand his writing be
I thought this book was difficult to get into to but there are sharp questions to hit on throughtout it. ... Read more

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First published in France in 1936 as a journal article, The Transcendence of the Ego was one of Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest philosophical publications. When it appeared, Sartre was still largely unknown, working as a school teacher in provincial France and struggling to find a publisher for his most famous fictional work, Nausea.

The Transcendence of the Ego is the outcome of Sartre's intense engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Here, as in many subsequent writings, Sartre embraces Husserl's vision of phenomenology as the proper method for philosophy. But he argues that Husserl's conception of the self as an inner entity, 'behind' conscious experience is mistaken and phenomenologically unfounded.

The Transcendence of the Ego offers a brilliant diagnosis of where Husserl went wrong, and a radical alternative account of the self as a product of consciousness, situated in the world.

This essay introduces many of the themes central to Sartre's major work, Being and Nothingness: the nature of consciousness, the problem of self-knowledge, other minds, anguish. It demonstrates their presence and importance in Sartre's thinking from the very outset of his career.

This fresh translation makes this classic work available again to students of Sartre, phenomenology, existentialism, and twentieth century philosophy. It includes a thorough and illuminating introduction by Sarah Richmond, placing Sartre's essay in its philosophical and historical context. ... Read more