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the blame for the immediate past at the same time that they af–
firmed their willingness to take charge of the immediate future.
The paradox was that this "popularity" was not the kind of
renown that would follow from a genuine awareness of what Sartre
was up to in his writing. Sartre attempted to found a political party
in the late 1940s, the RDR (the Rassemblement Democratique Rev–
olutionnaire), which would have offered an alternative on the left to
the duplicitous communists and the compromising socialists and
Gaullists - that would have offered an alternative, according to Sar–
tre, to Stalinism and capitalism . But the party failed; everyone came
to hear the great thinker speak, yet nobody joined. Nor was he really
read; his novels were popular, but Camus's literary success was
much greater. The plays attracted a significant audience only in the
1940s . And the number of people who made serious inroads into
Being
and Nothingness
was undoubtedly very small indeed. Sartre became a
uniquely French institution, the star intellectual, the figure who
comes to serve as a general "conscience" not for a specific group or
class but for humanity as a whole. What is remarkable is that Sartre
himself came to conform to his role of unread star; he tailored his
philosophy and his entire writing practice to it. Hayman , no doubt
too severely, implies that Sartre's later works cannot be taken
seriously; they were written compulsively, on speed, more as a
public gesture than anything else . One thinks of Sartre's famous
comparison: writing, like the banana, is meant to be consumed "on
the spot," its peel quickly jettisoned. Hayman charts the incoheren–
cies, notes the repetitions, the contradictions . Works like the
Critique
of
Dialectical Reason,
while containing important ideas, were never
even reread by their own author; they were hurriedly written (six
hours a day every day, ten pages) and published uncompleted , only
to be contradicted later by another work (Hayman points out, for ex–
ample, that many of Sartre's positions on psychoanalysis in
Being and
Nothingness
are directly contradicted in his Freud screenplay). Quite
often Sartre misplaced his own manuscripts or abandoned them
after four or five hundred pages.
One gets the impression then, that Sartre, in this later phase ,
was writing not so much to be read as to facilitate or justify his public
positions. He had to write something in order to be a media intellec–
tual. And the content of his writings of course ratified his own public
practice : they denied the possibility of an overarching system with a
transcendental figure or idea, be it God or History. Man was alone,
