FRENCH PERIODICALS
which already indicate its solution; if he is less perspicacious, he defines
the problem and demands its solution from competent people. . . .
Psychoanalysis is a huge enterprise of social recuperation; its sole aim
is to allow each citizen to take again his place in society. Adjusting
actually means giving up one's personality; being happy means knowing
how to remain energetically blindfolded. Many things would change
among Americans
if
they could bring themselves to admit that there
is unhappiness in the world and that unhappiness is not a priori a crime.
However, the Sartre school of Existentialism, of which Madame de
Beauvoir is an eminent and fighting spokesman, recently has been
threatened in its own camp. Georges Bataille, the critic and essayist–
sometimes called an Existentialist himself--devotes two articles in his
magazine
Critique
(December and February) to an attack against
Sartre and his disciples. He accuses them of having given up the key
Existentialist position according to which "existence precedes essence,"
and of having constructed an elaborate metaphysical system-whereas
Kierkegaard reasoned only from the inner and pressing needs of his
"being in the world," his subjectivity. The true Existentialist should live
before knowing, should test and experience existence, but Sartre and
his school manifest a "hypertrophy of intellectual functions." For them,
knowledge becomes a professorial exercise which takes precedence over
all other activities. It is no longer, as for Kierkegaard, the subjective
life ·of the individual which poses questions, but the exigencies of syn–
thetic thinking.... One has the impression that moral impotence has
been caused by an excess of intellectual power. "Like a child driven
by an urgent need, hopping around uneasily without being able to make
up his mind, this kind of thinking remains ev'asive yet keeps alive-it is
sick of a morose virtuosity.... "
Sartre's own attacks against all previous systems of philosophy
are now turned against him. He who most of all denounced the "thingifi–
cation" of men is being accused now of this very crime: "Existential
philosophy makes us into things in a more profound sense even than
science which at least left the private and intimate being untouched."
If
Existentialism continues to elicit passionate discussion in all French
literary periodicals, Marxism also remains a perennial debate subject.
In the February issue of
Masses,
Michel Collinet, formerly a leading
member of the socialist left and prominent in the Resistance, publishes
some remarkable pages on the anniversary of the Communist Manifesto.
It
is in the interpretation and especially the prediction of Nazism that
Marxism has revealed its Achilles' heel. Having elucidated the progressive
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