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PARTISAN REVIEW
interest in readers' letters, that he has not been disappointed by
anything in life, that his attitudes toward women have changed even
though he has always considered Simone de Beauvoir his equal , that
the Flaubert study is a generalized attack upon all bourgeois families,
that an intellectual must give everything to the people, that his
political texts do not go far enough since they are not fully undel3tood
by the popular audience....
The political essays in both of these volumes are chronicles. They
recount the injustices of genocide in Vietnam along with the dangers of
American imperialism. They demonstrate despair over the degenera–
tion of Soviet socialism following the Russian invasion of Czechoslo–
vakia. They decry the reactionary features of institutionalized modes of
thought as exhibited by the French Communist party. They argue in
favor of decentralization as the only useful response to a centralized
government which promotes colonization. They justify the threefold
Maoist slogans: "violence, spontaneity, morality." They plead for the
liberation of popular ethics and justice. And they criticize the electoral
process as already a manifestation of seriality and its reduction of
individuals to powerlessness. All these essays describe symptoms of a
contemporary social malaise that remains largely implicit in Western
political life. But Sanre's assessments are highly personalized and for
the most part ancillary to his more general philosophical and intel–
lectual positions. These essays will be read for their contribution to his
thought in general-they stand on their own on ly as historical docu–
ments.
One cannot look to these two volumes for any kind of systematic
philosophical statement. The only possible exception is a 1964 piece
entitled "Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal." But since a transla–
tion of the piece appeared a few years ago in a collection of essays on
Kierkegaard, edited by Josiah Thompson, some readers will already
know it. The appeal to "lived experience" recounts an epistemological
"comprehension" which gives meaning to the paradoxical multiplic–
ity of the singularized universal, i.e., the individual. This is one of
Sartre's most effective short sta tements, but like all of the studies under
review, its significance depends upon some knowledge of Sartre's
thought in general.
Certain readers will find the studies of Mallarme and Tintoretto
intriguing. The latter essay is valuable because it reminds us-lest we
forget his earlier piece on Giacometti-that Sartre is a lso an art critic.
For some reason (which may be found in the 1947
What is Literature?),
Sanre does not write informatively about poets: his
Baudelaire
is a
